[Starlink] other fcc services at sea

[Dave Taht]

On Thu, Dec 14, 2023 at 10:51 AM Nathan Simington via Nnagain
<nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

> If we can provide good service to people without the huge lift of a universal fiber to the home build, then the United States is headed in the wrong direction and will be wasting a lot of public money.

I tend to think that a modern phone is enough for most people. It
would be nice if buying more bandwidth on demand was easier.

/me hides

>And, unlike StarLink, we still won't have connected Dave's boat :-)

A couple notes. I enjoy being colorful but boat life is not for
everyone, and in particular I am finding coping with small finicky
things increasingly difficult as I get older. My boat has been for
sale for a while. I would, absolutely, get another in a warmer,
cheaper location, smaller, and wider, with a bit more automation and a
motor easier to work on, perhaps electric! The new regen electric
motors are quite the thing and a heck of an improvement over finicky
diesels. You only need enough stored power to get you a few hundred
feet if the winds are willing and you do not need to get anywhere
fast. Two $800 lithium batteries can get a 35 foot boat like mine
about 20 miles. My plan a few years back was to essentially commute
between SF and Half Moon Bay with enough solar and battery on board to
run a phone and laptop.

Starlink is a really bad choice for most small boating applications.
The power requirements (50+ watts) dwarf that of all the other gear on
the boat, combined, and the need for high speed internet at sea rather
limited for a sailboat. Many marinas, including this one, provide free
WiFi, and  there is actually comcast out to any boat that wants it,
although it doesn't work very well. Richer marinas than mine actually
have FTTB (fiber to the boat). Starlink is a pretty good choice at
more remote marinas than mine to service the whole marina and
increasingly indispensable for bigger boats on longer trips, but for
boating recreation I think most users prefer to be offline and at
most, stream music.  I have an enormous flac collection and a kindle,
and otherwise do not much want from the internet at sea anything more
than weather,  email and the occasional call.

I got a starlink because my godson (and first mate) was annoyed about
his, and planning a trip where it might have been nice to have it
thoroughly de-bufferbloated. Fun story here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9gLo6Xrwgw

Otherwise I would just have stuck with a lte/wifi box up on the mast.
It has been fun watching the service evolve, but it is really small
potatoes cmpared to trying to improve 5g and wifi as I otherwise do.

Far more amazing to me, is watching VHF radio get so rapidly displaced
by coastal cellular services over the last decade. You can get
astoundingly good bandwidth on a phone 5+ miles out at sea along much
of the California coastline, at a cost of 1Watt charged up at shore or
a half hours charging off of the motor. Yo can do even better than
that with a box up the mast. While some VHF is still used if you know
someone else is out there, you tend to try and call them, first. There
was a study recently about how at sea cellular access transformed the
fishing market for a small country.

There are many other simple, robust services "out there" that few know
about, "AIS" for example, identifies boats to each other, and how the
EPIRB rescue system works is pretty amazing. How these work are
covered by succinct and adequate FCC regulations. Recent example:

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-372824A1.pdf

Busy ports can still get pretty hairy but it is nothing like air
traffic control, and it is really rare that any boat ends up as a
supertanker hood ornament.