What Is Starlink? SpaceX’s Much-Hyped Satellite Internet Service Explained
Are you curious about Starlink and whether Elon Musk’s satellite internet technology is right for you? We answer the most pressing questions about the system that’s currently shaking up the ISP market.
Installing fiber in a city, and bringing Gigabit broadband to million of customers is certainly lucrative, but not so much in a rural area home to only a few hundred people.
The satellite internet system from SpaceX is capable of delivering 150Mbps internet speeds to theoretically any place on the planet. All the customer needs is a clear view of the sky.
Starlink currently costs $99 a month. You’ll also have to pay a one-time $499 fee for the Starlink satellite dish and Wi-Fi router, which the company will ship to your home.
Starlink is currently delivering 80Mbps to 150Mbps in download speeds and about 30Mbps in upload speeds, according to users. Meanwhile, latency comes in at around 30 milliseconds, which is on par with ground-based internet. Later this year, SpaceX plans on bumping up the download speeds to 300Mbps, while bringing down the latency to 20ms.
Researchers are working on a cabling system that could provide data transfer speeds multiple times faster than existing USB connections using an extremely thin polymer cable, in a system that echoes the design path of Thunderbolt.
While the “increasingly bulky and costly” copper could be replaced by fiber optic cables, that introduces its own issues. As silicon chips have difficulty dealing with photons, this makes the interconnection between the cable and the computers more challenging to optimize.
The polymer can also use sub-terahertz electromagnetic signals, which is more energy-efficient than copper at high data loads. It is believed this efficiency brings it close to that of fiber optic systems, but crucially with better compatibility with silicon chips.
It seems plausible that such a system could be employed for a future Thunderbolt-style connection, allowing it to go far beyond the current 40Gbps upper limit.
What the Deck is an exploratory, card-based game that aims to introduce students, faculty and staff of all ages and backgrounds to a wide variety of situations in which established and emerging technologies impact society.
Here’s the full text of the California Internet Consumer Protection and Net Neutrality Act of 2018, also known as SB-822. It contains a list of things that ISPs are not going to be able to do, including paid prioritization, “zero-rating” favorable content so it doesn’t count against your data cap (think of those bundled streaming services!), and failing to tell you fast service actually is and how their network management practices and speeds actually work
Apple’s working on solving this problem, too, according to a report in Nikkei Asia. The newspaper says that Apple is working with TSMC, its primary processor manufacturer, to develop a new kind of augmented reality display that’s printed directly on wafers, or the base layer for chips.
If Apple does eventually reveal a big leap forward in AR display technology — especially if the technology is developed and owned by Apple instead of a supplier — Apple could find itself with multi-year head-start in augmented reality as it did when the iPhone vaulted it to the head of the smartphone industry.
Apple is also adding hardware to its iPhones that hint at a headset-based future. High-end iPhones released in 2020 include advanced Lidar sensors embedded in their camera.
Microsoft has invested heavily in these kind of technologies, purchasing AltspaceVR, a social network for virtual reality, in 2018. Before it launched Hololens, it paid $150 million for intellectual property from a smartglasses pioneer.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks the most in public about his hopes for augmented reality. Last year, he said, “While I expect phones to still be our primary devices through most of this decade, at some point in the 2020s, we will get breakthrough augmented reality glasses that will redefine our relationship with technology.”
Thinking about bundling in home phone, cable TV, home security or smart home controls with your internet plan? Here’s what you should keep in mind. https://t.co/CZFELedS1F
This guide will help you examine the benefits and disadvantages of bundling specific services, so you can decide if bundling services is a smart fit for you.
Acting FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel announced at her first meeting as head of the agency a new task force to improve the FCC’s broadband maps. https://t.co/PCwteKPcCo
The FCC has acknowledged that the maps it uses to figure out how to distribute the billions of dollars in federal funding it offers each year to subsidize the cost of building out infrastructure are flawed.