The Core

Starlink successfully tested their laser interlink, a key to the Phase 2 rollout

https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-starlink-space-lasers-first-orbital-test/

This is huge - it means you do not need base stations within LOS to the same satellite that you ping as a user.

Real-world test results from end users are showing speeds of 37Mbps to 91Mbps. Starlink tests claim 102-103Mbps download and upload speeds in the 40-something Mbps range. Both sets of numbers show latency of 18ms. 37Mbps probably sounds slow to most of you.

For rural internet users, though, it is a staggering upgrade. For Starlink, it is essential to its business model. They have to offer at least 25/3 service with latency below 100ms in order to qualify for the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund money as I understand it (see page 18, p. 32 (https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-20-5A1.pdf)).

Starlink Starts to Deliver on Its Promise
https://www.zdnet.com/article/starlink-starts-to-deliver-on-its-satellite-internet-promise/

QuoteSo, why aren't we seeing more beta testers or even an early release program? The answer is there aren't enough terminals in the production pipeline. A close reading of the SpaceX FCC request to modify the Starlink satellite constellation orbits reveals SpaceX is "on track to produce thousands of consumer user terminals per month, heading toward high-rate production." If they're on track to produce thousands, that implies they're now only producing hundreds of terminals per month. Put it all together and what I see is that, while Starlink satellites are capable of delivering the broadband goods, it will still be months more before enough SpaceX's CA-based factory can meet the demand for first hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of terminals.

So with 700,000 pre-signups, if they are making 7,000 terminals per month and I'm in the middle of the queue, that's... 50 months. Hopefully they can ramp up to 70,000 per month.

We're definitely not in the first cohort, because

Starlink Impresses Air Force Weapons Buyer In Big Live-Fire Exercise
https://www.investors.com/news/spacex-starlink-impressed-air-force-in-big-live-fire-exercise/

QuoteThe Air Force was impressed with how SpaceX Starlink satellites performed during a live-fire exercise earlier this month, according to the service's top weapons purchaser. The service is using the Starlink satellites in tests of its Advanced Battle Management System that will connect air, sea, land and space assets.

>700,000 pre-signup

About 6 months ago, all I could do was put in my email & zip code for a notification if/when the service might be available in my area.

Uh... yeah, that's what I meant. Sign up to be notified when it's available.

I suspect a huge percentage of those people don't actually want it.

>want

Depends on the price.  The only ISP available in my neighborhood is Spectrum.  I consider them to be an unethical, predatory company and would like to see their monopoly broken.

They have announced that it will be $80/month.

To get federal funds for rural broadband, they will need to keep speeds above 25/3 and latency below 100ms. I am going to guess that at least for the first few years, they will struggle to achieve that.

So I think those are your parameters. I honestly was wishing it would be more in the $150/mo range for early adopters. That would keep the merely curious from signing up.

Starlink puts towns devastated by wildfires online for disaster relief workers
https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/29/starlink-puts-towns-devastated-by-wildfires-online-for-disaster-relief-workers/

We're counting the satellites until they get this far south. As long as it's reliable, I actually don't even care if it's "slow" by the standards of most of the world.

It remains to be seen how reliable it will be. It should be moving at about 5 miles/second. So if it has line of sight for at best a 90-degree view of the sky, that means a given satellite is in view for maybe 100 seconds. More if you're in North Dakota and still more if you're in an observatory perched on a mountain. It gets worse if the satellite isn't passing straight overhead.

Anyway, I'm guessing that at my location, I need a satellite handoff every two minutes at most. So that means I need 700 satellites serving just my latitude. That's discouraging.

Ground stations going in
https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/starlink-ground-stations

Updated pricing
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/27/spacex-starlink-service-priced-at-99-a-month-public-beta-test-begins.html
As I had hoped, there is a bit of a barrier to entry - $99/mo + $499 for the equipment. That will keep the merely curious away


Planning to have service as far south as Texas by early to mid-2021
https://www.cordcuttersnews.com/spacex-will-offer-free-starlink-internet-to-texas-school-district-families/

But our trees are going to be a problem - we will be lucky to have access before the full 22 orbital shells are built out. Next year, when it launches in our area, you'll basically need a view of the sky 25 degrees above the horizon. At max coverage, it will be 40 degrees. All of that means we may never get decent Starlink service.
http://www.circleid.com/posts/20200624-questions-on-the-impact-of-trees-on-spacex-starlink/

Also, contrary to the hype, it looks like you will need a roof mounted or ground-mounted station, which is such a hassle. One of the things we hated about satellite internet was trudging out into the snow every hour to brush off the dish.

Starlink beta testers are impressed with the Internet speeds on the new service
https://www.techspot.com/news/87437-starlink-beta-testers-impressed-internet-speeds-new-service.html

SpaceX: Starlink satellite internet service has over 10,000 users
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/04/spacex-starlink-satellite-internet-service-has-over-10000-users.html

Elon just took $99 from me and my neighbor and promises to send us the gear in mid- to late-2021.

I'm on the list, but doubt I will switch unless my ISP gets even more predatory.  But keep me posted.

The neighbor put in an order too. He has two lots - one with terrible view of the sky, worse than mine, and one with an amazing open view. So we'll see how it does in the three different situations.

I'm expecting to be disappointed at my house, but guessing that his empty lot will work great... if only it had a house or was line of site to either of our lots.

It looks like terrestrial internet might be over for us.

AT&T informs us they will no longer be offering T1 lines as of July 31, and as of March 31 they will boost pricing 400% (so that would make our monthly connection fee $1452, aka $1 for each kbps).

For those of you on fiber at 100Mbps, that would be like paying $100,000/month for your connection.

So, unless our reseller who set it up for us comes through, it looks like we'll be back to Hughes or Wild Blue or some horrid service like that.

Yeow!

How's your cell signal there?

<+>
BTW, I rec'd the "First come, first serve" Starlink email yesterday.

Quote from: rcjordan on February 19, 2021, 12:05:42 AM
How's your cell signal there?

We don't have one. I climbed up 125 feet in a tree with a booster and antenna and still got zero. I could try one of the other trees, but on the ground at the house it's zero. You can't boost zero because the laws of multiplication, sadly, still apply: zero times anything is zero.

So, while the rest of the world gets faster internet, we continue to lose options.

It does look like the monthly quota on the satellite plans are better than they were, but the general consensus is that satellite is bad in good times and horrid in times of congestion. That was our previous experience - worked okay from 9am to 3pm, but once people on the east coast started getting home from work and using their connections, it became unusable.

>east

Yeah, but that wasn't with 10,000 satellites in the network.

No, I'm talking about classic geo-synchronous satellite, which is what we're probably going to have to go with here.

From what I've read, in this phase, Starlink requires a clear view of the sky down to 20 degrees and in the next phase that will steepen to 40 degrees. We *might* pull it off at 40, but not at 20.

But even so, people moving from Viasat to Starlink will help the Viasat customers in the short term... then make things very expensive, which I guess is what has happened to our T1

In any case, I'm waiting for official word to find out if we have another alternative, but it doesn't look good. So we'll need some solution in the near term until there's another option.

We'll see... I'm still hoping that I have misunderstood AT&T's letter :-)

Starlink kit arrived today! 15 minute later I'm up and running, seriously amazed at how easy that was. Uploaded this through starlink here in rural southwest Michigan.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/lmxsnp/starlink_kit_arrived_today_15_minute_later_im_up/

Starlink said mid to late summer for us. By that time we'll probably be stuck in a three year geostationary satellite plan. But we'll definitely pay for both if Starlink works.

Best info I could find on using Starlink with obstructions.


Best info I could find about obstructions in the real world. Some good news (view to south not that important) and some bad (view to the north is very important). Makes it seem like mounting high up in a tree would work with minor to major frustration. Some real-world tests.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jpcu3x/obstruction_testing_from_3_locations_with_photos/

This one is really good and pretty encouraging. I'd love to see what happens with foliage on the trees, but it seems that despite the high number of failed pings in the worst location, he was able to stream video because the overall speed was enough to load the buffers up during the periods it was working and draw on them during the outages.


https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/juatew/do_you_have_significant_tree_obstructions_on_your/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/k5yajo/tips_for_those_dealing_with_obstructions/
Oh, the other thing is that the dish takes 100W, so running power is a must too.
This is more encouraging than not.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jlpu1y/starlink_beta_field_report_drove_into_a_local/


Tree mount
https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/ltckrd/starlink_info_dishy_movement_due_to_wind_tree_or/

Fire marshall does not like people running 110V AC up trees though. But with proper conduit and such, I believe it is legal (neighbor got cited for a power cord without conduit that was running a walkway light). You need to supply 180W.

Dishy McFlatface to become "fully mobile," allowing Starlink use away from home

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/04/dishy-mcflatface-to-become-fully-mobile-allowing-starlink-use-away-from-home/

What's a cell signal? I've heard of this, but am hazy on the idea.

This is when you have a small device you hold in your hand and it allows you to communicate over long distances without wires? Sort of like a radio hooked to a DNS system. Is that right?

Actually, I just dropped $1100 on an amp and antennas to see if we could get a signal from 100 feet up a tree. I've now been up and down that tree about six times and have spent 6-8 hours up there pointing antennas and trying to get a signal.

We will have stretches where we get LTE for a couple days, then not for a week. We have seen speeds of up to 3Mbps down, but commonly it is 500kbps or less down and sometimes, even with a signal, we get something like 0.02Mbps up.

And we've gotten zero for the last two days.

Most of the homes in my subdivision do not get a cell signal when inside. About 10 years ago, I put a (then) mid-size, $200-ish amp/repeater about 40 feet up on the rooftop tv antenna mast and pointed it in the direction of the closest tower about 6 miles away. Worked pretty well. This was before the FCC started certifying.

https://www.signalbooster.com/pages/which-signal-boosters-are-legal-and-which-are-illegal

>tree

Good thing you rock-climb for a hobby.

We seem to get reception about 20% of the time with the new setup. But it's in spurts. A couple days good, then nada

>>hobby

Yeah well... the first time I jugged that line, it took me as long to go 100 feet as it took me to go 1200 feet about 15 years ago. And 80% of that was in the first 10 feet trying to remember how to use the gear.

> 100 feet up a tree

Reception ever improve?

Actually, a bit. A lot of trial and error and I realized that we only get one channel (887.5MHz) on one band (Band 5). So when it loses reception there and starts scanning through 100+ channels on 5 bands, it sometimes gets hung up trying to boost the wrong signal for hours.

It's still pretty erratic, but constrained to a single channel, it works more often than not. Next step is to try to optimize for quality rather than strength.

If you're trying to help your friend decide whether to get an amp or set up an amp, I think the key learnings so far are:

1. Figure out which channels actually work in your area (as discussed above) and, if possible, constrain your amp to that.

2. Optimize for quality, not strength.

When I located the antenna, I went up with a meter (an Android phone with a metering app - link below) and found the spot with the strongest signal. That's the RSRP. Higher is better. So you want a number higher than -120dBm. -120dBm means you may or may not be able to connect depending on your phone and other factors (Androids with Qualcomm chips do better than iPhones with Intel chips - iPhones are using older tech). -80dBm means you're close to the tower. -40dBm probably means you better wear sunscreen.

In my case, I reliably get about -107 to -110dBm RSRP. Meanwhile, my SINR (Sometimes RSSNR) is -2dB to -4dB. This is a signal to noise ratio and the negative number means more noise than signal. The SINR is the most important determinant of speed, packet loss and things like that.

So what my sales guy said is that if rather than RSRP @ -107dBm and SINR @ -2dB, I would be much better off if I had an RSRP of -117 and an SINR of +3dB. So he is suggesting I try locations that are marginal in terms of RSRP and stronger in terms of SINR.

If you're trying to figure out whether or not it's worth it for your friend, download this app (Android only)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wilysis.cellinfolite&hl=en_US

Then you want to find a location where the Serving Cell RSRP is at least -110dBm (and again, might even work as weak as -120). That's the big number on the app. The SINR (labelled RSSNR, down and left from the RSRP nuber on the app) is at least +3dB.

If he meets those criteria, he'll probably be happy with an antenna

"At best, Starlink currently offers reasonably fast access with inconsistent connectivity, huge latency swings, and a significant uptick in time spent considering whether you can just get out the chainsaw and solve the tree problem yourself."

Starlink review: dreams, not reality - The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/22435030/starlink-satellite-internet-spacex-review

QuoteI have my dish 60 feet away from my house with clear views of the sky, and it is still obstructed for two hours a day

QuoteIn my week of testing, Starlink was perfectly fine for anything that buffers — I was able to stream Netflix and Disney Plus in 4K and jump around YouTube videos without significant issues — but doing something faster-paced, like quickly scrolling through TikTok videos, would run into delays. Services that require a sustained, real-time connection, like Slack, Zoom, or gaming, simply weren't usable for me,

>>The Verge

Nilay Patel should take down his Starlink review - He would NEVER allow a phone review that is so poorly done
https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/nd6e2f/nilay_patel_should_take_down_his_starlink_review/

The thing is, for me it is the only journalist review of Starlink worth anything at all - I *want* to know how it behaves with obstructions. It is precisely his "incorrect" setup which has everyone so outraged and is the one redeeming feature and new information from that review.

Starlink dishes go into "thermal shutdown" once they hit 122° Fahrenheit | Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/06/starlink-dish-overheats-in-arizona-sun-knocking-user-offline-for-7-hours/

What is the most viral combination on the web? Starlink + Cats

If you have crappy internet and your friends know it, I guarantee you have gotten this sent to you at least twice. I have. Everyone I sent it to had already seen it. I stopped sending it.

https://twitter.com/Tippen22/status/1476985855981993984?t=ctrq1PRP9H0w9ED-g9QFng&s=19

>Satellite Dish

very remotely related:

At This Armenian Restaurant, the Ovens Are es Satellite Dish
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/solar-energy-cooking-armenia

also remotely related:

I once saw instructions for making a solar oven out of cardboard and aluminum foil by making a parabola shape.

Yes... and part of the promise is filling LE orbit with junk...

QuoteThe satellites from Starlink Internet Services, a division of Musk's SpaceX aerospace company, had two "close encounters" with the Chinese space station on July 1 and Oct. 21, according to a document submitted by China earlier this month to the U.N.'s space agency.

"For safety reasons, the China Space Station implemented preventive collision avoidance control," China said in a document published on the website of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/chinese-citizens-slam-musk-online-space-station-misses-rcna10055

That said, we're back in the queue. People here are having decent success, getting 50 to 58 minutes of connection per hour. I know that sounds horrible, but around here, people are generally thrilled with the coverage.

Geomagnetic storm fries 40 new Starlink sats.

https://www.spacex.com/updates/

Actually, we're not back in the queue.

It seems that there is no way if you have cancelled your order to get back in the queue without opening a new account or something. And, since it is Starlink, there is no email, chat, phone number, postal address or another other means of contact. It's actually, if you can believe it, worse than Google.

Starlink hikes prices for monthly service and starter kit, even if you put down a deposit - The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/22/22991841/spacex-starlink-price-hike-inflation-user-terminal

Yup, we got the email yesterday. The price hike is half as much for people with a deposit. I don't have a problem with this. The deposit is 100% refundable at my choice at any time. It's not like I have a contract for delivery. I have a place in line that I can relinquish if I think the new prices are too high.

SpaceX Starlink has 150,000 daily users in Ukraine 5 weeks after being activated, government official says (businessinsider.com)

Well, they need it more than we do! I'm happy to keep waiting if that's where all the dishes are going.

Starlink has landed! Not only did we get a unit, a week later we got a second one (long story).

Initial impressions - in our highly obstructed situation, it works way better than expected, but then I was expecting it to be unusable.

I often hear people complain about how bad hotel internet is. That is our standard for good internet. Starlink is not as good as hotel internet.

Because of all the obstructions, it's not like we could do a Zoom call on it. Starlink only tracks interruptions of longer than two seconds. We average an interruption in service every 46 seconds. Interruptions range from 2 seconds (again, because that is the shortest tracked) up to about 36 seconds and very very rarely more than that. Zoom seems to hold the connection as long as the interruption is less than 30 seconds. At 30 seconds it kicks you out of the meeting and you have to log back in. Right now it has been 44 minutes since a 30+-second outage.

The app says that in the last 12 hours, I have had 1h15 of outage. Since they average every 46 seconds, that's roughly 960 outages.

For context - the Starlink app shows between 10% and 20% obstruction in our location. It predicted outages roughly every 30 seconds to one minute, which has been correct. For small differences in obstruction, the app is not really accurate and so you have to try locations and let it sit there for 12 hours until you get the report.

For web pages, it's less bothersome than you might think. If you click a link when you have a long obstruction, the page load fails, but in general, loading a web page is tolerant of the shorter outages. So to the eye it feels like high latency rather than an outage. So the low-latency that Starlink offers compared to geosynchronous satellite isn't really apparent because of all the outages appearing as latency.

For video, it's generally much much better. As long as there is not an outage at the moment you click Play, once the video buffers ahead, the outages are not a problem.

For logging into a terminal... that remains to be seen. I use mosh, which is fault-tolerant, so it should be fine. The thing is, you can only use mosh on your own server because you have to install the daemon. So in other cases, where I'm logged in via SSH, I'm assuming longer outages will kick me out of my session. Haven't tried that.

In general, I would say it is an improvement over geosync satellite, but if I could get "hotel" internet, I would still take that.  But since Theresa has quite a few Zoom meetings for her consulting, I think we'll end up keeping a bottom-end Hughesnet plan for that and doing everything else on Starlink. That will still be about $90 cheaper per month than what we pay now ($180/mo vs $270).

Debbie thinks you might be able to use tampermonkey to remove page elements before loading.  Guessing it wouldn't do much for Zoom, but for your frequently visited sites it might improve speeds.

Tampermonkey script run before page load - Stack Overflow
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39346747/tampermonkey-script-run-before-page-load

Caution! Page ripping is *highly* addictive. (Frankly, I don't see how you all put up with current eye-candy, ad-infested layouts.)

That would be useful for Hughesnet and is one of the reasons I run ad blockers. uBlock Origin lets you select page elements and "zap" them.

For Starlink it's more of a binary. If you're not obstructed, it's fast. If you are, it's dead.

About 60% of the time, I get a speedtest over 100mbps, about 20% it's lower, but still very good by our standards (presumably a brief to long outage), and maybe 20% of the time it outright fails because the outage is longer than the speedtest app will allows.

For the "bad" 40% in the middle there, you can watch as it screams along, then just falls precipitously until either the speed test completes and gives you a number like 15-75mbps or just times out entirely and fails.

The other difference with Hughesnet is that speed tests seem completely fictional with HN. It's like (and I suspect it is so) they give you a burst of speed for the length of a typical speed test, then throttle it down. So it often tests at 20mbps, but when you actually go do download anything large, it slows and after less than a minute, you're getting a couple mbps.


But here are my last three tests of SL and two tests of HN thrown in for comparison.

Actually, the bad hughesnet test seems to be a problem with the satellite router. This is the test when connected to the base router. Total fiction though. You get this speed for at most one minute then it throttles way way down.

It looks like we could improve this a lot by using Raspberry Pi + Speedify to create a bonding router. That would in theory stop Zoom connections from getting dropped.

The easy way would be a wired WAN connection connected to Hughesnet, a WAN-side wifi connected to Starlink (which has no WAN port on the router) and then a LAN-side wifi adapter to act as a hotspot.

I don't know whether you can have a WAN-side and LAN-side wifi without major interference. The other option is $40 adapter for Starlink that bypasses the router, but then you lose access to all Starlink diagnostics.

5 Uses for Raspberry Pi Routers to Get Better Internet
https://speedify.com/blog/how-to/5-uses-raspberry-pi-router-better-internet/
Usage #1 is "Raspberry Pi as a Wireless Bonding Router – Sharing Internet via Wi-Fi"

A bit more detail
https://speedify.com/blog/better-streaming/internet-bonding-router-for-streaming/

You can also bond four connections using a RPi + Speedify
https://speedify.com/blog/combining-internet-connections/combine-4-connections-raspberry-pi-simultaneously/

Starlink's current problem is capacity
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/starlinks-current-problem-capacity

QuoteEven with slower speeds, for many customers, it's such an improvement over what they had before, they don't care. This Reddit user is perfectly happy getting 30 Mbps.

Exactly. I'm tired of all these people who whine that they "need" Starlink because they are stuck on sucky 25mbps DSL. If we had 25mbps DSL that was super reliable, we wouldn't have Starlink, with all its interruptions.

A lot of these complaints remind me of Louis CK's famous airplane rant.

I currently have halfway decent internet (and would have decent internet if not for about 10 trees in the way) that let's me download a 1hr TV show in 11 seconds, delivered by *spaceship* in all weather (haven't noticed problems due to smoke and storm) and utterly unaffected by power outages and nearby fires. But now people are complaining because the speed are less than 100mbps???

Starlink Ground Stations Successfully Hacked | Hackaday
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/14/starlink-ground-stations-successfully-hacked/

There is a linguistic confusion that crops up a lot - ground station vs terminal. The "ground station" should refer to the main hub that connects the satellite to the terrestrial internet while, "terminal" is the thing that the end user has at her house that connects the end user to the satellite.

This is a hack of the *terminal* that requires physical access (replacing a chip on the motherboard). The headline makes it sound like someone is remotely hacking into the *ground station* through which the data of thousands (millions?) of users flows, which would be a major hack.

The risk here is that someone can modify their terminal and use that to possibly attack the *satellite* which could, if a proper exploit is found, be a major problem. I don't know what they could do if they succeeded - intercept packets? Crash it into the ISS?

https://www.wired.com/story/starlink-internet-dish-hack/

RVers are also reporting that the non-rv dish works while traveling.

I'm pretty sure it's the exact same dish. I had one of both. There was nothing to indicate a difference.

The big difference is the account and the extra $25/mo and the ability to pause your fee. So if you use your RV mostly in the summer months, you're way better off with an RV account and the ability to pause. If you want to be able to hop in your rig 12 months per year, you pay less with the standard account.

That said, people have also reported that when they move a dish outside the designated service area, Starlink can and sometimes does turn it off, assuming they can tell.

T-Mobile says subscribers will be able to connect to Starlink's second-gen satellites for coverage
https://www.engadget.com/t-mobile-starlink-partnership-012539605.html?src=rss

>>T-Mobile

Someone in the Garmin corporate office just had a major anxiety attack.

In case you don't know why...
https://discover.garmin.com/en-US/inreach/personal/

>Garmin

Can't wait for those subscription fees to drop significantly!

I *think* Garmin runs on the very expensive Iridium network. I'm not sure they have a lot of room to move with fees.

Look for a Garmin/Starlink deal in the future. There are still things a Garmin does that a cell phone doesn't, like last 2 weeks on a charge. Still, most people are carrying the phone anyway, so it makes more sense to carry a phone and a solar panel or phone and a battery than a phone and a Garmin.

More bad news for Garmin

Quote
The tech giant focused on safety features for the iPhone 14 lineup and newest smartwatches, adding sensors that can detect car crashes and alert authorities. The new smartphones will get satellite connectivity for sending emergency messages to use in areas not touched by cellular towers

.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/iphone-14-lineup-apple-event-launch-11662500247

Apple is to portable-device-based companies as Google and Meta are to web-services-based companies. They add one new "free" feature, minor to them, and your business model is obsolete

non-WSJ

Apple picks Globalstar for emergency satellite service on iPhone 14
https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-picks-globalstar-satellite-service-iphone-14-series-2022-09-07/

+
Steve Jobs' Daughter Says New iPhone 14 Is Same As Older Version
https://www.tmz.com/2022/09/07/steve-jobs-daughter-new-iphone-14-same-13/

^{well, except maybe satellite service.}

>Apple
>They add one new "free" feature

I did note that there was a line about satellite SOS coverage being free "for the first 2 years". Still excited to see Garmin get multiple competitors.

Garmin Reacts to Apple Watch Ultra: 'We Measure Battery Life in Months. Not Hours.'
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/09/09/garmin-reacts-to-apple-watch-ultra/

The thing is, I sat by the side of the Pacific Crest Trail for a few hours the other day. The majority of long-distance throughhikers had
- a smartphone
- wired headphones
- a solar panel on top of their backpacks.

So for a short trip, one "needs" one thing - my smartphone

For a long trip, one "needs" two things. Those could be any combo of smartphone + solar panel, smartphone + extra battery, smartphone + Garmin Inreach.

Meanwhile, most of the Garmin units are unusable without a smartphone except to send the pre-composed emergency message. So both people I know who use them, have to have a charged smartphone to make it work effectively.

The big value that Garmin is adding is for professional settings. One of the friends has the unit for work. He has a lot of rangers out in the field, including wilderness rangers, search and rescue and so forth. There is some sort of smart routing that Garmin offers at the professional level that lets calls go through Dispatch and be sent out to one or all or a subset and so forth. He thinks the system is fantastic and envisions still paying Garmin for their software and their service, just not their hardware.

No matter how I parse that, Garmin loses a lot of hardware sales. I still see people hiking with standalone GPS units, so sales don't drop to zero.

Starlink Speeds Drop Significantly in the US Amid Congestion Woes

https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlink-speeds-drop-significantly-in-the-us-amid-congestion-woes

>>Starlink users in the US reached only 62.53Mbps

Perfect! Love these headlines. All those people who *had* to have Starlink because they are on horrible, awful, insane, unlivable 25mpbs connections will be falling back to earth

62.5mbps is, let's see, about 10X faster than a good day on Hughesnet and 100X faster than what you reliably get from Hughesnet in the evening when everyone comes home from work. Let it fall to 25mbps. That will get rid of the riff raff as they go back to their $50/mo DSL.

Starlink Now Selling Pricey High-Performance Dish to Residential Users ($2500)
https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlink-now-selling-pricey-high-performance-dish-to-residential-users

Saw that. Unfortunately, "35% more sky" in my case would likely mean just seeing more obstructions.

I would actually pay the $2500 if it solved the dropouts (or reduced them to a level where we could get rid of Hughesnet for Zoom screenshares), but I think my ultimate solution is fewer trees not a bigger dish :-)

Starlink UK satellites to connect broadband blackspots

https://techmonitor.ai/leadership/digital-transformation/starlink-uk-broadband-spacex