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<p>Right now, Starlink have reached capacity in quite a number of
places. <br>
</p>
<p>The availability map on Starlink's home page shows that Starlink
is "sold out" in many places, including London, Manila, Rio de
Janeiro, Seattle, Portland, Sacramento (California), Edmonton, San
Diego, Austin (Texas), Mexico City, Guadalajara, Brisbane, Accra,
Lagos, Nairobi, Lusaka, Harare,
and many more:</p>
<p><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.starlink.com/us/map">https://www.starlink.com/us/map</a></p>
<p>This isn't surprising given the fact that Dishys to date only use
Ku-band, there's only 2 GHz of it for user downlink, and you can't
use the same beam frequency in adjacent cells. </p>
<p>SpaceX have a modification application before the FCC that, if
successful, would allow them to:</p>
<ul>
<li>Up power flux density on the ground. This'd allow satellites
to transmit with higher power. Note that none of the current
beam transmitters on the satellites have sufficient EIRP to hit
the current PFD limits across the entire Ku-band. But the Gen. 2
ones are supposedly only by a factor of about 2.7 off, so with
Starship able to carry heavier sats, there might be room for a
bit of growth. <br>
</li>
<li>Use satellites down to 20 deg above the horizon instead of the
current 25 deg (this mightn't look like much, but if my
calculations aren't wrong, means that they'd see about 43% more
of the orbital sphere with that increase alone).</li>
</ul>
<p>SpaceX have tried for a long time to get into lower orbital
height shells. This makes sense from their perspective: Each
satellite's beam footprint becomes smaller, which makes frequency
re-use easier. Path loss decreases, and a ground station sees a
smaller fraction of satellites in that shell, so they can argue
that since the ground now sees transmissions from fewer
satellites, EPFD limits are less critical, which allows them to up
power. Makes for a couple of bits more per symbol perhaps. Latency
goes down a little, too, and they now have the numbers in terms of
satellites, so it doesn't matter so much that these shells need a
larger number of sats to work.</p>
<p>Now there are drawbacks also: The lower the orbits go, the more
residual atmospheric drag there will be, and this expresses itself
in either shorter sat lifespan or the need to carry more fuel,
which either means they'll need to launch at a faster rate or with
fewer sats per launch. It's also a bit more crowded in lower
space, as this is where a lot of earth observation spacecraft sit
(if you want to take detailed pics of the Earth's surface, you
want it to be as close to your camera lens as you can have it),
and some of those aren't there for open source public good
science. <br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 23/11/2024 11:33 am, Dave Taht via
Starlink wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:CAA93jw5=+eJj+zis1fb9H_tr5UeBYC3LcC3K9y2XvCvsdB1i6w@mail.gmail.com">
<pre wrap="" class="moz-quote-pre">To me, the additional speeds don't matter all that much.
I am presently in gale force winds, my boat rocking, and my latency
stable, and only about 50mbit down:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat?test-id=a14b4467-16d7-4b6e-8736-1593813d6eda">https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat?test-id=a14b4467-16d7-4b6e-8736-1593813d6eda</a>
Maybe a little less packet loss would help, as my last (hour long)
videoconference broke up twice, and bbr is seriously outperforming
cubic. In addition for aiming for higher speeds, improving density and
reliability would be nice, but otherwise I am a pretty happy camper
with the service I have, compared to 5g.
On Fri, Nov 22, 2024 at 2:16 PM Hesham ElBakoury via Starlink
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net"><starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net></a> wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="" class="moz-quote-pre">
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://cordcuttersnews.com/starlink-internet-speeds-could-skyrocket-to-2-gigabits-per-second-spacex-president-says/">https://cordcuttersnews.com/starlink-internet-speeds-could-skyrocket-to-2-gigabits-per-second-spacex-president-says/</a>
_______________________________________________
Starlink mailing list
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:Starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net">Starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink">https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink</a>
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="" class="moz-quote-pre">
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
****************************************************************
Dr. Ulrich Speidel
School of Computer Science
Room 303S.594 (City Campus)
The University of Auckland
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz">u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/">http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/</a>
****************************************************************
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