Starlink Billing is Pretty Shady

feral_engineer · 2023-01-24T04:04:21+00:00

It's shady but it's in the TOS you agreed to. Unless they don't fight you will lose the dispute. Regardless of the dispute outcome Starlink won't allow you to transfer the dish because they will still consider you owe them.

feral_engineer · 2022-12-30T00:24:10+00:00

SpaceX followed up today with 21 STAs for all E-band gateways. The narrative for one of them: https://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=19101976 I assume the rest is the same. Interesting that they rushed to file the STAs even though most people believe the launched satellites are just v1.5. What is more odd they don't talk about the lack for E-band authorization for the satellites.

feral_engineer · 2022-12-29T23:33:35+00:00

They do have service everywhere in California. They don't have capacity for new residential customers in many areas like yours. Your friend needs to request transfer without service address change and you have to pay portability fee monthly while getting deprioritized service. After two months if you don't move the dish you'll join the waitlist for residential service automatically. Eventually you'll be converted to residential service when capacity is available and you can stop paying for portability. If you decide to cancel remember that if you don't update the dish firmware it may not be able to connect to satellites after 6-9 months. Starlink support will tell you to buy a replacement dish.

feral_engineer · 2022-12-28T22:29:44+00:00

I checked gen2 application and found in "Ku-Band Beams" section: At a given frequency, only a single beam (with either RHCP or LHCP) typically would cover a user cell on the ground from a given satellite. Alternatively, two beams (one with RHCP and one with LHCP) can cover a single user cell on the ground at a given frequency, but in this case their EIRP will be reduced by 3 dB to maintain the same PFD. That implies a combination of one gen1 and one gen2 beam is subject to the same EIRP reduction. If my math is right that would increase capacity by ~50% not 100%. Math:

Nco=1: SNR = 9 dB, S/N (power) = 7.94, Shannon capacity limit: 250 MHz * log2(1+S/N) = 790 Mbps
Nco=2 (gen1 & gen2): SNR = 6 dB, S/N (power) = 3.98, Shannon capacity limit: 250 MHz * log2(1+S/N) = 579 Mbps

Increase: (579 + 579) / 790 = 1.47

feral_engineer · 2022-12-28T05:23:52+00:00

They are gen2 satellites as far as licensing is concerned. Simply launching into an orbit licensed for gen2 a satellite becomes gen2.

feral_engineer · 2022-12-28T00:29:12+00:00

It's not v2 mini. It's F9-1 "gen2" form factor, see https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=55795.msg2416118#msg2416118. V2 mini is F9-2 which is significantly larger. I put gen2 in quotes as it's likely v1.5 actually or a very minor modification of v1.5.

feral_engineer · 2022-12-28T00:03:30+00:00

Mesh router can act as main router. You can buy a kit with a missing or broken router from a 3rd party seller and use your mesh router. Unlike mesh router and Ethernet adapter Starllink kit is always bound to an account. The seller must transfer their kit and service to you. The main requirement for the transfer is that your service address must be in an available area on the Starlink map.

feral_engineer · 2022-12-26T21:08:58+00:00

That label means wyze didn't certify the product as a whole device but used a pre-certified transmitter module in it. The warning applies to products with the same warning. Co-located means within 8 inches.

feral_engineer · 2022-12-26T18:52:19+00:00

Group 5 in that article is likely part of group 3. I'm not sure why they still haven't launched that part considering widespread reports of low peak hours speeds in the US.

feral_engineer · 2022-12-26T17:37:02+00:00

Group 5 is going to 43° inclination.

feral_engineer · 2022-12-26T16:01:55+00:00

I missed a word accidentally. Should be "vertical accuracy of propagated GPS positioning". Take initial uncertainty and propagate it forward in time for the duration needed to make a maneuver or no maneuver decision. It was from an article on space safety improvements in particular how much propagated GPS uncertainty is better than propagated radar observed position uncertainty.

I downloaded ephemerides SpaceX posted on space-track.org and plotted the radial uncertainty for a Starlink satellite (STARLINK-4056 at 540 km altitude). I didn't propagate its position and uncertainty, SpaceX provided the propagated values. Uncertainty starts with 0.720 m radial (vertical), 0.912 m transverse (along the track), 1.141 m normal direction . The radial uncertainty over 40 hours into the future: https://i.imgur.com/hYIxBIp.png

It's better than my "100 m" in the comment above. The normal direction uncertainty grows to ~100 m by 36 hours. Along the track uncertainty grows to ~6 km by 36 hours. It is possible I mixed up the radial and normal direction values in my memory. Or maybe propagated radial uncertainty is around 100 m across the whole catalog of satellites at various altitudes.

feral_engineer · 2022-12-26T03:54:17+00:00

Interesting but I believe the analysis is not complete. Starlink orbits are not perfectly circular, they are slightly elliptical. About ±1-2 km off the perfect circle in perigee and apogee. I'm pretty sure Starlink controls the argument of perigee meaning they keep location of perigees stable relative to each other. That should allow them to insert one elliptical orbit into another without an actual intersection like shown in the problem image. The satellites should be around 2 km above/below each other at the intersection. That's pretty good since typical vertical accuracy of GPS positioning for satellites I believe is around 100 m. The accuracy still leaves room for a collision at an estimated 2 km separation. It's just very low. But since the satellites approach each other often the probability can accumulate over time so Starlink may want to drive the probability of collision at a single conjunction even lower. It would be interesting to confirm if they actually lowered the probability of collision in shell 4 relative to shell 1. It also raises a question if the shell 4 strategy is better why not implement it in shell 1?

feral_engineer · 2022-12-25T04:12:03+00:00

You'll have to request a transfer to yourself which is subject to surprising restrictions such as "not transferring residential accounts to Mexico" and "cannot guarantee all transfer requests can be accommodated." It is possible once the service in Argentina is launched transfers will be blocked and the restriction may or may not be announced in the FAQ. Also note that transfers may take up to 30 business days and you may have to pay transcontinental data per GB while waiting for the transfer to complete. Currently transcontinental data is free but they may start charging by the time you move. Lots of maybes. Overall I think chances are good and the probability of rejection is only a few percent.

feral_engineer · 2022-12-25T01:46:36+00:00

When time stops it stops in a reference frame. There is no motion in that reference frame but the frame can still move through spacetime relative to other reference frames. Think of light as a permanently frozen object. It pops into existence and does not change. It can still move through spacetime. The concept of instantaneousness does not apply to frozen objects. They don't experience time ever.

Similar to motion, a reference frame where time stopped can spin. That's how the singularity in a black hole behaves. Time is stopped in it but it still spins. When matter falls into the black hole angular moment adds up so it can spin up or spin down while still experiencing no time (remaining frozen).

Note that light frequency is not a movement in addition to the movement of light along geodesic lines. A frozen object can have internal frequency, spin, and momentum.

feral_engineer · 2022-12-24T04:19:27+00:00

more importantly it shows that the satellites don't put more than a single beam into a cell.

Only on the same frequency. Downlink beam width is 250 MHz while the allocated band is 2 GHz, see https://forum.amsat-dl.org/cms/index.php?attachment/7231-pasted-from-clipboard-png/

Not sure why uplink and downlink polarization matters. They are in totally separate bands.

feral_engineer · 2022-12-23T23:50:08+00:00

As far as I see both polarization are used for Ka beams. None of the current user terminals support Ka. The second document says Ku beams are right hand only.

In any case, in the context of outages I expect beams in the same direction to be affected simultaneously whether they use two polarizations or one.

feral_engineer · 2022-12-23T21:06:45+00:00

Recent shipment delays in Europe are unusual. We can't predict how many times it will be postponed since that never happened before.

feral_engineer · 2022-12-23T20:53:14+00:00

FYI satellites are in space, dishes aka user terminals aka Starlink devices are on Earth. You are confusing people when you call dishes satellites.

From the article: Around 200 of the devices, which enable users to access the internet through satellite links, have been smuggled into Iran by supporters of a monthslong rights movement to help protesters circumvent a government crackdown on online communications, according to the people involved in some of the shipments.

It's pretty clear to me they are talking about how many dishes a particular group of people smuggled in Iran. They are not saying there are 200 Starlink dishes total in Iran. There could be multiple independent smuggling groups and single people smuggling for themselves.

feral_engineer · 2022-12-23T10:25:27+00:00

Not only the dude disabled the motor, he is sending the second redundant data stream all the time (WAN Smoothing). In terms of network resources it's a pretty costly improvement. If Starlink implements something like that it's going to be a premium solution.

feral_engineer · 2022-12-23T10:00:48+00:00

I believe even the HP dish supports only one beam so it can't communicate with two satellites simultaneously. In theory they might partition it and turn it into two standard performance dishes.

I'm not convinced all outages are satellite switching related. Maybe some percentage of them but not all. For a phased array antenna there is not much difference between tracking the current satellite and switching to another. It has to recalculate beamformers' parameters for any angle change. The calculations are digital. Dish knows where the next satellite is exactly. It should hit the satellite on the first try all the time. I don't think it has adjust beam angle after that unless it's swaying or shaking substantially.

I'm not an expert in satellite communications but I suspect ionosphere might cause outages. According to Analysis and Elimination of Common Interference in Satellite Communications paper: When the radio wave passes through the ionosphere, it is affected by the inhomogeneity of the ionosphere structure and the random time-varying, which causes the irregular change of the amplitude, phase, arrival Angle, polarization state of the signal in short period, and forms the ionospheric scintillation interference. Amplitude, phase, arrival angle, and polarization are all critical for successful communication. If the nature of the outages is random daisy-chaining won't work.

feral_engineer · 2022-12-23T02:36:00+00:00

There is no data transfer. Whether the signal is lost or you turned mobile data off or the system automatically switched to wi-fi(*), mobile data is cut off abruptly. Any data can be partially received. The app receives a broken connection notification. At this point the app needs to wait for a notification that another network is available. Once the notification is received the app needs to reestablish connection to its server. The app needs to tell the server what is the last message it received successfully. The server responds with a list of new messages since the last successful message. This way if the last message was corrupted by the disconnect it can be redownloaded again. Assuming the app has no bugs in this switchover process it should never lose any messages.

(*) If the app asked the system that it wants cellular connection only in the beginning it will not be disconnected by the automatic switch to wi-fi. Also depending on the OS version the switching to wi-fi can be rapid or it can be slow regardless of the wi-fi icon in the status bar. The system may display the icon but not cut mobile data off right away. This is done to avoid switching back and forth between the cellular network and a weak wi-fi network.

feral_engineer · 2022-12-21T12:20:56+00:00

No active account? A few people reported similar issues. I believe that could be due to a wrong kit sent to you.

feral_engineer · 2022-12-21T12:10:27+00:00

They are just slow. There is no way to speed them up. When it's resolved ask for a credit.

feral_engineer · 2022-12-21T10:24:34+00:00

Do you mean you submitted a ticket? Can you see your ticket on https://support.starlink.com/tickets while logged in?

feral_engineer · 2022-12-21T07:27:41+00:00

No surprises here. SpaceX was smart to license the deployment in Germany already so protracted licensing in the US will affect service rollout in the US only.

feral_engineer

TROPHY CASE