Welcome:
Login
|
Sign Up
|
About CircleID
Follow:
|
|
|
The blue dot circled is our dish in the center of Vermont. Volunteers run software that collects statistics every 15 minutes and uploads them to update the tables and the map at https://starlinkstatus.space. You can see below that we have been averaging download speeds of 143Mbps, upload around 12Mbps, and ping times of 43ms. Below, you can see our most recent updates, including the percentage of time our dish was obstructed (0% happily). There are also tables with country and region-wide averages. more
Following the devastating impact of Hurricane Helene on North Carolina, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has approved SpaceX's Starlink to provide direct-to-cell coverage in affected regions. more
At 4:04 AM on February 26 Mykhailo Fedorov, Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine requested Starlink service from Elon Musk and at 2:45 PM on the 26th, Elon Musk tweeted "Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route." On February 28 at 12:29 PM Fedorov posted a photo of a truck load of terminals. (Kyiv is 10 hours ahead of California). more
Elon Musk's quest to expand his Starlink satellite broadband service into India faces significant pushback from Mukesh Ambani, Asia's wealthiest individual and head of Indian telecom giant Reliance Jio. more
The Chilean Undersecretary of Telecommunications (SUBTEL) has begun a year-long pilot study of SpaceX's Starlink satellite Internet service. I don't know how many test locations they are planning, but the first two have been selected. Last week I discussed the first, the John F. Kennedy school in Sotomó, an isolated town at 41.6° South on a fjord in Chile's Lake Region, and the second will be in Caleta Sierra on the coast about 1,200 miles north of Sotomó. SpaceX is also considering a European pilot study in Georgia and perhaps (hopefully) others. more
Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites are still in their infancy, but according to one analysis, the technology could save American households more than $30 billion per year by intensifying broadband competition more
SES's first multi-orbit partnership was Cruise mPOWERED + Starlink, providing a managed blend of SES MEO and Starlink LEO service for maritime operators, and we can expect similar bundled services in aviation and enterprise markets. more
A lot of rural America continues to hope that low orbit satellite (LEO) service will provide a broadband alternative. It's been a while since I've covered the status of the companies proposing to deploy constellations of satellites for providing broadband. In March, OneWeb filed for Chapter 11 restructuring when it was clear that the company could not raise enough cash to continue the research and development of the satellite product. more
OneWeb has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. OneWeb CEO Adrian Steckel stated that they were "close to obtaining financing" but failed as a "consequence of the economic impact of the COVID-19 crisis." That is plausible, but they were also far behind SpaceX Starlink in launch cost and capacity. (SpaceX, remains open as an essential industry working on defense contracts, but two employees have tested positive for COVID-19) and financial analyst Tim Farrar said SpaceX faced a "near-term cash problem" even before the pandemic). more
SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet service has been seen as a great hope for connecting people in hard-to-reach areas, but it has also raised fears about the potential for weaponization and other abuse. According to COO Gwynne Shotwell, the company is pleased to help Ukraine in its "fight for freedom," but Starlink was "never intended to be weaponized." more
The European Space Agency (ESA) reported that as of January 2019 there were about 5,000 satellites in space and 1,950 of them are still functioning. Hopefully, those functioning satellites have fuel and thrusters that will enable them to de-orbit and (mostly) burn up in the atmosphere when their useful life is finished. The remaining 3,050 are slowly drifting, along with a lot of debris. The ESA estimates that there have been over 500 break-ups, explosions, collisions, or anomalous events... more
In January of 2017, Doug Madory of Dyn Research reported on Cuban traffic, noting that C&W's share had increased. Later in December Madory reported that ETECSA had activated a new internet transit provider, medium-Earth orbit (MEO) satellite-connectivity provider O3b Networks (Other 3 billion), replacing geostationary satellite provider Intelsat. (They have also added Telecom Italia, which, until 2011, owned 11% of ETECSA, but I will save that for another post). more
zoomready is open-source shareware I wrote to measure the suitability of an internet connection for teleconferencing. As you can see above, Starlink had an average zoomready rating of 2.66 out of a possible 3.0 over the four measured days. The problem is NOT bandwidth, which has fluctuated but stayed above the minimums needed for good teleconferencing. The problems are failures (most of them short), latency, and jitter. more
Word has leaked out that Apple is working on a satellite project. The company is at the beginning of the research project, so there is no way to know exactly what they have in mind. For example, is the company considering launching satellites, or would they lease capacity from one of the other planned satellite networks? The fact that Apple is working on the concept is a good segue to discuss the many ways that satellite connectivity could be useful to Apple or other companies. more
In an earlier post, I asked whether electronically steered antennas (ESAs) would replace parabolic antennas in satellite ground stations. I did some research and concluded that it is likely that they will. Next, I discussed the same question with ChatGPT and, while it made several false statements, it made a relevant point that I had overlooked. The relevant addition was positive, but the errors were troublesome, so I decided to try ChatGPT's competitor Google Bard. more
A World-Renowned Source for Internet Developments. Serving Since 2002.