Starlink - Questions not in FAQ for existing users

Sounds like Starlink would be great for you.

Normally fiber infra follows the highways and power lines.
My cousin is a “manager” (recently moved up) at a company laying fiber infrastructure, he manages 5-10 fiber laying crews, spends a lot of time in a car driving around middles of nowhere.

Sadly, not in Australia - otherwise I’d give you their contact info.

Outside of residential areas 50-100km away from nearest bed, where they don’t do manual digging, like they do in cities, they have teams of 3-4; 2 laborers operating machinery + nearby “supervisor/fiber guy”, doing 4 day / 12h shifts. They, get around 2km per day of conduit with fiber inside.
The company that makes the pipes makes water pipes as well - it’s all just fancy plastics and resin and stuff, comes in segments, they roll it off of a slowly moving truck and leave it lying for a day or two or a week before using it.
With all that effort they only eventually put 4x 96 fiber cables inside, and a pair of mains power cables. Every 2km they dig out a bigger hole for prefabricated concrete access hatch. Splicing “supervisor”, usually it’s one guy, sometimes+trainee and a van, they take half a day to a day to splice and verify ~400 fibers and install everything into the concrete hole/access hatch. Digging equipment doesn’t move over night, it’s like a chain digger kind of a thing, ok with soft or hard soil, not great with big rocks, they skip those areas, and come back for them later with a pneumatic attachment. The splicing guy stays with the van which is the transportation for the digging crew to/from work site, and they carry fuel for the machine and a power generator for the equipment, and the fiber splicing equipment and any tools, water and food for the day. Usually one of the laborers does the driving as well, last thing you want is the fiber guy who was staring at cables doing simple math numbers all day, staring into empty and falling asleep driving. Usually, 2-3 months after the ground has settled and there’s grass and you can’t tell there’s a fiber underneath, unless you know to look for access structures which stick out a bit and are usually unpainted square concrete things.

Just in case you’re considering branching out :slight_smile: mining companies already deal with a lot of local regulatory stuff and logistics. Some aspects of the business are the same, but unlike mining, with local governments, the more local it is the more friendly they are if you’re giving them easier access to internet for small business, schools and homes, as long as someone else is footing the bill. All that back office work usually needs to start 3-6 months before actual dirt moving - sometimes longer.

To recap, 4 people (2 laborers + 1 supervisor + 1 intern), a cheap van, a digger priced thingie for digging, about another cheap van worth of random equipment gets you 2km/day of networking infra through middle of nowhere. It’s also work that computer scientists call “trivially parallelizible”. 5 crews - 40km/week (through nowhere; 4km/week through suburbia on average; that all depends).

One thing I’ve noticed with Starlink on the subreddit is the TOS are no commercial use.

Have tweeted @ elonmusk to see if he has plans for a commercial service…

heh.

Some of these sites have power provided by a regional, mine-site-owned power station. Or no power at all outside of diesel industrial gen-sets.

Often no high-ways, they just build an air-strip for fly-in, fly-out workers.

There’s “remote” and then there’s remote.

We have the latter :smiley:

Apparently they’re loosing money on each of the Dishy antennas, they said they’re costing them $1500 each to make, because they’re phased arrays internally - lots of tiny radios.

Maybe they’ll offset that with commercial service.

I mean this is an example of a “highway” to these places :smiley:

That’s actually better than a lot of them. It is at least graded… and at least google street view car has managed to traverse it (it was the closest I could get on google maps that had street view available.

Many of them are literally no better than 4x4 tracks. Think of the game “SpinTyres” but in the desert.

NASA probably have better comms to the moon. :smiley:

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I’m sure my cousin would love to visit Australia, as long as you promise nothing will eat him while he’s splicing the fiber. :spider:

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Haha no promises.

Not all of Australia is like that pic obviously.

But Australia is BIG. And the mercator projection doesn’t do it justice due to the way it distorts the Southern Hemisphere to look much smaller. Ditto for Africa actually.

On a more serious note, have you looked at “free space optics”? (Putting 1-10G lasers on 20m tall towers every 10km or so). How does economics work out for that approach?

I’m thinking that towers are temporary structures, and if you’re happy with 1Gbps or less perhaps the equipment is not as expensive.

Fundamentally starlink is basically doing the same, you have a tower 340km away in space, that just happens to be bouncing the signal for you.

Possibly starlink could have a ground station in the middle of nowhere to relay the signal between multiple satellites - not sure how much solar powered ground stations cost, I’m guessing more than a solar powered simple non-satellite laser tower.

(Apologies for butchering the topic).

Considered things like that however we’d need tens of them plus solar power (there is no site power out there), batteries, etc. and there’s no security to prevent them simply being taken.

Never mind staff/time to build it out… approvals to put them there, etc.

The mining lease which we don’t have ownership of is often in the middle of a national park…

If I remember correctly it’s like 170 ping, but it’s 170 ping UNIFORMALLY. LTT did a great video on it.

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That’s pretty much what i figured.

i.e., from say USA to AU (or similar one side of the planet to the other trip), it will be ~80ms faster than pretty much the best terrestrial service we can get.

Anything under 250 is pretty good for our applications. Anything under 300 is even usable for tele-remote mine vehicle control. Over 300ms RTT for that for example the remote control simply stops the vehicle for safety reasons.

(300ms sounds terrible for gamers, but for vehicles limited to say 20-30km/h max speed and largely autonomously controlled, its usable).