*pre-ordered (so much confusion about this on Reddit)
The newer dish model pulls closer to 65-70W, fwiw.
One of the things we worked on in the make-wifi-fast project was combined power and rate control.
My guess is that if all you want is 2Mbit service you can cut the power requirements enormously.
Might pull more in snow melt mode
One of my unanswered questions is how long does it take to power up and start transferring data?
I’ve worked on linux fast boot (sub second boot times) - in the past. Most seem to have forgotten how to do that (sigh) and have boot times measured in minutes. One reason why I like openwrt so much is it boots in seconds - totally bound by the pathetically slow NAND or NOR chips other people insist on using still. With some work you can also get rid of the friggin bootloader, also.
My initial model for the marine market and for one of my clients is very different from how most use the internet today as an always on service.
In this case I just need to get on a couple times a day, download my email, grab a few new music files, get the weather report, and get off. So I really don’t need all that much power for very long, except to surf the web briefly and make a ton of videoconference calls. An hour or two a day, tops.
I’ve written a lot about “designing for the disconnect” in the past 4 decades and I really kind of hate the idea of the internet being an always-on drug. Here’s one old talk I gave in australia quite some time back about it.
There’s another always-on marine sub-project we’re on, though, that I *long* to talk about but can’t, unless somehow we can get the starlink folk to do an apollo 13 and fix their !@#!! bufferbloat with something like cake, or we can figure out how to optimize dynamically for it via another router hanging off of the dishy.
tidbit - one time recently I was 10 miles out at sea, in a 25 knot gale and 15+ seas trying to write something down important, and I hit the wrong key and the !@#!@@ new apple M1 laptop asked me:
“do you want to install siri”
"No, damn it, I just want to write stuff. If there’s no friggin internet why on earth do I want to use siri?”
(apologies I’m grumpy today)
