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Monday, March 11, 2024

Can Someone Explain Why a Satellite Service Like Starlink is Not Available?

When I enter my new address in the Starlink website it says,service will be available in 2024.  Aren't the satellites overhead already?

4 comments:

  1. 100% guess, not a Starlink subscriber.

    Because these satellites orbit at a much lower altitude than geosync, each individual satellite has a much smaller service 'footprint.' I suspect that they may not have enough satellites currently covering your latitude to be able to provide good service.

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  2. Someone says: a user’s little Dishy antenna connects to a Starlink satellite as it passes overhead, which in turn links them into the nearest ground-station gateway. Both the user's dish and the the ground station must be within roughly 500 miles of each other, in the same satellite's view. So if a frontline Ukrainian Starlink user is in Donetsk and wants to send email to, or get an image analyzed by, Langley VA, the original data gets fragmented into TCP / IP packets, goes up to orbit, down to (maybe) Kiev, then out over plain 'ol fiber optic/DSL/twisted pair copper links in cables on the ground and under the ocean, and a response comes back the more or less the same way as far as Kiev, then up to space and back down to Donetsk. All in fractions of a second. If Starlink seems miraculous, it's standing on the shoulders of TCP/IP.

    Soon, the ground links, (fiber, twisted copper, damp twine and all) will be upgraded by laser links between Starlink satellites.

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  3. Yes the satellites are there but there is a waiting list for availability and installation of the hardware at your address/neighborhood. Or at least that's what they say down here in Mississippi.

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