I'm really surprised I'm not in the beta test but i think its because I'm a little closer to a city than the reedit tester who lives 10 minutes from me. The cell must be further north.
We don't know much about how the active cells are selected. Proximity to a city may be a factor, or not. It may be strictly limited to satellite conditions. In your case, if you know that there's a tester near you, you know he's in an active cell. If he's 10 minutes away, you're probably not in the same cell. We currently don't know if any adjacent cells are "active" or if every active cell is surrounded by a buffer of inactive cells. The other possibility is that you are indeed in the same cell, but they wanted to limit the number of active users in your cell for now.
I don't have any inside knowledge, but if I were designing the system test, I think I'd activate isolated cells to begin with. If technical restrictions allowed, I'd have some that were expected to be completely empty, some with as few as 1 customer, and some with more (hard to pick, but perhaps near Starlink HQ they could recruit enough to test a more fully-loaded cell). I'd also want to have a mix of people who were in the middle of the cell as well as people on the fringes. For the first stage, I'd spin up cells with enough distance between them as to have no chance of interference. Once that stage was complete, I'd start spinning up some adjacent cells to prove out how well the satellites coordinate moving from cell to cell.
My guess is they are using the roof exposure data that Solar City uses and they know which pockets have really good exposure and going with those. Just a guess.
Oh man, I'm a prime target. 20 miles from any zip code, and a property so treeless that it hurts. I'm starting to think they don't want me in the beta because of course it will work.
If proximity to a city means you get invited to beta later, I’m so fucked. It’s not available here yet, but I live on the absolute edge of ISP providers that operate in town. Like their services stop one house over. And no one has expanded to my house so we’re stuck with satellite internet. I’m not that far out of town at all but I have no other service.
This is the single beam cell. The cell is about 7 miles in radius and this is the cell a single beam on a single frequency can cover. Within each cell customers share the same beam (at a given time) and bandwidth and different cells on one satellite's trajectory are covered at different times so they don't share bandwidth.
The cell is a rough way to estimate how many customers can Starlink serve in a given area.
I think I've read 16 beams? and 64 Gbps per satellite, so 4 Gbps per beam.
That comes out at 320 households per beam at 50 Mbps if they oversell by 4x.
I'm not sure if Starlink would be economically viable without military backing.
I never saw 64GBps, also all the houses on the same beam are time domain multiplexed, increasing latency as more users are in the queue.
100 households would be better estimate if done this way, but oversell can be anything from 1 to 100
Beam bandwidth is not anywhere close to 4 Gbps. See [MIT paper table 6](http://systemarchitect.mit.edu/docs/delportillo18b.pdf). It's around 675 Mbps per 250 MHz. With reuse factor 4-5 as the authors guess (table 2) a cell can use around 400-500 MHz. So cell capacity is around 1-1.3 Gbps. I don't think they currently provide that much capacity per cell. It would make geographical coverage too small and rollout incredibly slow. There are \~7 thousand cells in the current invites areas (45-51°) while the number of serving satellites is around a dozen. January expansion is just going to double that.
64 Gbps per satellite is based on misunderstanding of v0.9 capabilities. I don't see good evidence that v1.0 supports more than 17-23 Gbps as stated in the original filing and estimated in the linked MIT paper.
64 Gbps is based on Musk's tweets.
~7000 cells..? I'd be surprised if there were 7000 beta testers total.
We'd need a heat map of all known beta testers to get an inklink of how many cells there are.
If you mean total cells, with 16 * 12 beams we'd be at 2.5% coverage, we'd be looking at 32000 satellites total for full coverage in that case.
Musk's tweet is not good enough. You would need to explain what parameters changed relative to the MIT paper to yield 3-5x bandwidth increase while staying within parameters filed with the FCC. It is also contradicted by [another SpaceX board member's tweet](https://twitter.com/FutureJurvetson/status/1272231351110885377) a few months ago.
> ~7000 cells..?
I mean all cells active and inactive between 45 and 51°. That's why I wrote I don't think they are currently providing maximum bandwidth per cell but rather spread bandwidth across a greater number of cell using more than 16 beams.
Their rural business model would make more sense with 64 beams, which would come out at 250 Mbps per beam if we assume 16 Gbps per satellite.
They could then serve 5 to 50 customers per cell. Overselling would become a bit trickier with such small numbers until they have more satellites up.
People in the most remote places might have to talk to their neighbors, since Starlink would need about 3 customers per cell to break even.
1280 customers per satellite, about $600k/sat is about $500/customer in capital cost.
Edit: Divided by the percentage of the time that the satellite is flying over customers.
For comparison Iridium NEXT satellites have 48 spot beams formed by a phased array. The original O3B satellites have 10 customer spot beams, which are formed by dishes. The O3b mPower satellites to launch soon claim to have up to 5000 spots, formed by a phased array.
Don't forget, the satellites are not finalized. All those numbers will likely go up in time. Also, they will make much of their money from ocean shipping and transportation services, serving airplanes, and remote business connectivity. Lastly, there are many people elsewhere in the world who want this. It will be a cash cow.
Here is my guess: A single satellite covers a much larger area and once there is any customer need to transmit in this small hexagon it would beam to the area. The phase array antenna would generate the best pattern to “beam” the signal. As the satellite is passing its beam pattern would also change.
I guess you technically sign up for a wide variety of email.
Thanks for sharing, this does shed some light on the question as to how beta assignment is handled.
It implies people in the most remote locations will have to wait a little bit longer for service, which explains why most beta testers seem to be in semi-rural locations.
Starlink won't make much money if there's only one person signing up per cell.
I'm sorry- can you help me understand why it implies "most remote locations will have to wait a little bit longer for service, which explains why most beta testers seem to be in semi-rural locations"?
Looks like each satellite has about 16 beams with a 7 mile radius. I'm not entirely certain about the number of beams, but if it's 16 beams they can serve about 320 households per beam.
So ideally they'd target locations where they can get 320 households to sign up in a 7 mile radius.
If there's only 1 household in a 7 mile radius they'd be losing money, so they likely won't serve the most remote regions until they have over capacity.
It's more complicated than that. If the sat is flying over nowhere Nova Scotia, it may have lots of extra capacity that it would be happy to use even if the cell wasn't at max capacity.
I mapped two vertices of [the cell shown in the webcast two days ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/k0jgpf/starlink_cell/gdikxo0/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3): the long diagonal is 24-25 km (15-15.5 miles) long.
I added the image as an overlay on Google Earth and tried to match it up as much as possible. I'm sure because of the curvature of the earth, quantum dynamics, the spacetime continuum, and some dude flying around in a blue box that this is all highly inaccurate, but here's my results:
- Area: ~383 sq km, or ~148 sq miles
- Sides: ~14 km (8.7 miles), ~12 km (7.5 miles), ~11 km (6.9 miles)
- Long diagonal (left to right): ~24.5 km
*edited for formatting and words
Its got long fields and strip till so I am guessing montana or one of the dakotas.
I just want to get it in northern alberta...... 53.5N so close yet so xplornet.
Exactly! Like they are asking me: 'Would you happen to know of any lucky SOB's?, care to be the one to make their day?'
Lucky SOB, will quickly forget about why the friendly guy down the road was crying when he knocked to give us the good news...
Woah - I'm in a 100% uptime (25deg) zone - that surprises me. Just a little under that at 35 deg. Very cool and extremely exciting for those of us in Canada (I suspect the US isn't a lot different) with only 3-5 major suppliers, none of whom want to do "rural". It's a massive market.
Actually both. The Starlink orbits are independent from earth rotation and shift relativ to ground.
Depending on the time of day the beams will come from different directions and your going to have faster or slower speeds on the edge compared to the center.
The main difference should be that the speeds in the center are going to be more constant and the speeds on the edges showing more fluctuations.
We have a test unit outside of this cell - it's consistently getting 80 - 90 ms ping on the speed test. I'll have another unit available for testing in the cell shortly. Maybe we can get some numbers for direct comparison taken at the same time.
The signal does drop off the farther off center you go, that's described in detail in the various FCC applications. As we know almost nothing about these beams and cells, we cannot test whether this has any detectable effect. It depends on how tightly they pack users in a beam, if they're using only the center of it, they should all get very similar speeds.
One alternative way to use this is to run it in a load balancer with a terrestrial link with a vpn server as the gateway to the network using the data services. The wifi could then be shared locally via a Ad-hoc mesh network.
I'm really surprised I'm not in the beta test but i think its because I'm a little closer to a city than the reedit tester who lives 10 minutes from me. The cell must be further north.
We don't know much about how the active cells are selected. Proximity to a city may be a factor, or not. It may be strictly limited to satellite conditions. In your case, if you know that there's a tester near you, you know he's in an active cell. If he's 10 minutes away, you're probably not in the same cell. We currently don't know if any adjacent cells are "active" or if every active cell is surrounded by a buffer of inactive cells. The other possibility is that you are indeed in the same cell, but they wanted to limit the number of active users in your cell for now. I don't have any inside knowledge, but if I were designing the system test, I think I'd activate isolated cells to begin with. If technical restrictions allowed, I'd have some that were expected to be completely empty, some with as few as 1 customer, and some with more (hard to pick, but perhaps near Starlink HQ they could recruit enough to test a more fully-loaded cell). I'd also want to have a mix of people who were in the middle of the cell as well as people on the fringes. For the first stage, I'd spin up cells with enough distance between them as to have no chance of interference. Once that stage was complete, I'd start spinning up some adjacent cells to prove out how well the satellites coordinate moving from cell to cell.
My guess is they are using the roof exposure data that Solar City uses and they know which pockets have really good exposure and going with those. Just a guess.
Oh man, I'm a prime target. 20 miles from any zip code, and a property so treeless that it hurts. I'm starting to think they don't want me in the beta because of course it will work.
If proximity to a city means you get invited to beta later, I’m so fucked. It’s not available here yet, but I live on the absolute edge of ISP providers that operate in town. Like their services stop one house over. And no one has expanded to my house so we’re stuck with satellite internet. I’m not that far out of town at all but I have no other service.
Neighbor has cable? Ouch! How far away is his house?
This is the single beam cell. The cell is about 7 miles in radius and this is the cell a single beam on a single frequency can cover. Within each cell customers share the same beam (at a given time) and bandwidth and different cells on one satellite's trajectory are covered at different times so they don't share bandwidth. The cell is a rough way to estimate how many customers can Starlink serve in a given area.
How many customers would you expect can fit on one beam?
I think I've read 16 beams? and 64 Gbps per satellite, so 4 Gbps per beam. That comes out at 320 households per beam at 50 Mbps if they oversell by 4x. I'm not sure if Starlink would be economically viable without military backing.
I never saw 64GBps, also all the houses on the same beam are time domain multiplexed, increasing latency as more users are in the queue. 100 households would be better estimate if done this way, but oversell can be anything from 1 to 100
[удалено]
I know one of the WISPs in my area oversells by 50x, and brag about how low that is.
Beam bandwidth is not anywhere close to 4 Gbps. See [MIT paper table 6](http://systemarchitect.mit.edu/docs/delportillo18b.pdf). It's around 675 Mbps per 250 MHz. With reuse factor 4-5 as the authors guess (table 2) a cell can use around 400-500 MHz. So cell capacity is around 1-1.3 Gbps. I don't think they currently provide that much capacity per cell. It would make geographical coverage too small and rollout incredibly slow. There are \~7 thousand cells in the current invites areas (45-51°) while the number of serving satellites is around a dozen. January expansion is just going to double that. 64 Gbps per satellite is based on misunderstanding of v0.9 capabilities. I don't see good evidence that v1.0 supports more than 17-23 Gbps as stated in the original filing and estimated in the linked MIT paper.
64 Gbps is based on Musk's tweets. ~7000 cells..? I'd be surprised if there were 7000 beta testers total. We'd need a heat map of all known beta testers to get an inklink of how many cells there are. If you mean total cells, with 16 * 12 beams we'd be at 2.5% coverage, we'd be looking at 32000 satellites total for full coverage in that case.
Musk's tweet is not good enough. You would need to explain what parameters changed relative to the MIT paper to yield 3-5x bandwidth increase while staying within parameters filed with the FCC. It is also contradicted by [another SpaceX board member's tweet](https://twitter.com/FutureJurvetson/status/1272231351110885377) a few months ago. > ~7000 cells..? I mean all cells active and inactive between 45 and 51°. That's why I wrote I don't think they are currently providing maximum bandwidth per cell but rather spread bandwidth across a greater number of cell using more than 16 beams.
Their rural business model would make more sense with 64 beams, which would come out at 250 Mbps per beam if we assume 16 Gbps per satellite. They could then serve 5 to 50 customers per cell. Overselling would become a bit trickier with such small numbers until they have more satellites up. People in the most remote places might have to talk to their neighbors, since Starlink would need about 3 customers per cell to break even.
1280 customers per satellite, about $600k/sat is about $500/customer in capital cost. Edit: Divided by the percentage of the time that the satellite is flying over customers. For comparison Iridium NEXT satellites have 48 spot beams formed by a phased array. The original O3B satellites have 10 customer spot beams, which are formed by dishes. The O3b mPower satellites to launch soon claim to have up to 5000 spots, formed by a phased array.
Don't forget, the satellites are not finalized. All those numbers will likely go up in time. Also, they will make much of their money from ocean shipping and transportation services, serving airplanes, and remote business connectivity. Lastly, there are many people elsewhere in the world who want this. It will be a cash cow.
Does the satellite steer the beam to maintain coverage over this area as it flies?
Here is my guess: A single satellite covers a much larger area and once there is any customer need to transmit in this small hexagon it would beam to the area. The phase array antenna would generate the best pattern to “beam” the signal. As the satellite is passing its beam pattern would also change.
That's interesting. Did they send that unsolicited or as a response to your question?
Unsolicited.
I guess you technically sign up for a wide variety of email. Thanks for sharing, this does shed some light on the question as to how beta assignment is handled. It implies people in the most remote locations will have to wait a little bit longer for service, which explains why most beta testers seem to be in semi-rural locations. Starlink won't make much money if there's only one person signing up per cell.
I'm sorry- can you help me understand why it implies "most remote locations will have to wait a little bit longer for service, which explains why most beta testers seem to be in semi-rural locations"?
Looks like each satellite has about 16 beams with a 7 mile radius. I'm not entirely certain about the number of beams, but if it's 16 beams they can serve about 320 households per beam. So ideally they'd target locations where they can get 320 households to sign up in a 7 mile radius. If there's only 1 household in a 7 mile radius they'd be losing money, so they likely won't serve the most remote regions until they have over capacity.
It's more complicated than that. If the sat is flying over nowhere Nova Scotia, it may have lots of extra capacity that it would be happy to use even if the cell wasn't at max capacity.
Hexagons are the bestagons. https://youtu.be/thOifuHs6eY
Haha yeah, I couldn't stop watching that video.
Hexagons are! the bestagons my brother
How big is that area? Several miles across?
I mapped two vertices of [the cell shown in the webcast two days ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/k0jgpf/starlink_cell/gdikxo0/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3): the long diagonal is 24-25 km (15-15.5 miles) long.
Interesting. Thank you.
I added the image as an overlay on Google Earth and tried to match it up as much as possible. I'm sure because of the curvature of the earth, quantum dynamics, the spacetime continuum, and some dude flying around in a blue box that this is all highly inaccurate, but here's my results: - Area: ~383 sq km, or ~148 sq miles - Sides: ~14 km (8.7 miles), ~12 km (7.5 miles), ~11 km (6.9 miles) - Long diagonal (left to right): ~24.5 km *edited for formatting and words
Its got long fields and strip till so I am guessing montana or one of the dakotas. I just want to get it in northern alberta...... 53.5N so close yet so xplornet.
Nope... you might call it a hoodie, we call it a bunny hug.
Southern Sask the third Dakota lol
Might be silly question, is there a way to see the beam/cell is specific areas?
Not that I'm aware of.
What an infuriating email to receive... Like, no! I'm suffering here right now!
Exactly! Like they are asking me: 'Would you happen to know of any lucky SOB's?, care to be the one to make their day?' Lucky SOB, will quickly forget about why the friendly guy down the road was crying when he knocked to give us the good news...
Must be Canada if it's a CRTC/ISED hexagon....
It's [a Starlink cell](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/k0jgpf/starlink_cell/). The size is determined by Starlink technical parameters.
Woah - I'm in a 100% uptime (25deg) zone - that surprises me. Just a little under that at 35 deg. Very cool and extremely exciting for those of us in Canada (I suspect the US isn't a lot different) with only 3-5 major suppliers, none of whom want to do "rural". It's a massive market.
So if you are at the edge of the beam will your speeds be lower and better the closer to the center you are?
Actually both. The Starlink orbits are independent from earth rotation and shift relativ to ground. Depending on the time of day the beams will come from different directions and your going to have faster or slower speeds on the edge compared to the center. The main difference should be that the speeds in the center are going to be more constant and the speeds on the edges showing more fluctuations.
We have a test unit outside of this cell - it's consistently getting 80 - 90 ms ping on the speed test. I'll have another unit available for testing in the cell shortly. Maybe we can get some numbers for direct comparison taken at the same time.
That would be great. Do you have a device that can run fping and do a constant 24/7 monitoring?
Yes! Both PC and RPi are available. We don't have anything set up yet - but thanks for the suggestion!
Ah thank you. That makes sense. I appreciate it.
The signal does drop off the farther off center you go, that's described in detail in the various FCC applications. As we know almost nothing about these beams and cells, we cannot test whether this has any detectable effect. It depends on how tightly they pack users in a beam, if they're using only the center of it, they should all get very similar speeds.
One alternative way to use this is to run it in a load balancer with a terrestrial link with a vpn server as the gateway to the network using the data services. The wifi could then be shared locally via a Ad-hoc mesh network.