we got a starlink beta kit that's right
internet from the stars baby
now we already did an unboxing on ShortCircuit but this thing is quite
literally going to change the world so we felt like it merited a deeper dive
into how starlink works what we can expect from global broadband satellite
internet i mean that is some wicked heavy serious stuff
and hey we're still Linus tech tips so
obviously we are gonna pull up a gaming
rig and pawn some noobs from space
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i think the majority of you would agree that your life would be very different
if your internet access disappeared or became cripplingly unreliable or
expensive if you live near a metropolitan center
you'll likely have a variety of speed and service options to pick from but as
of 2017 50 million us homes only had a
single isp option for 25 megabit service
or none at all with 5 million unable to
get anything faster than 3 megabit per second which no
isn't enough unless the year is 2005. i mean i get it
building and maintaining a massive network of cables and switches and fiber
isn't a small or cheap task but legal
hurdles and other roadblocks like exclusivity agreements for telephone
pole usage make what should in theory be a competitive free market not
competitive or free at all i'm looking at you delta cable so no competition
means the prices go up and as for the service well
you bend over and take it because well something is better than nothing oh wait
we're it aren't we dang it i guess you have to deal with
our packages enter starlink i'm not always a fan of elon
musk's hyperbolic marketing but what starlink is doing is exactly as cool and
important as he says it is this is about bringing the next billion users online
people that don't have the same access to a robust and unrestricted data
infrastructure of course satellite internet isn't a new idea the
problem is that previous services relied on smaller constellations of larger more
cumbersome satellites with very limited capacity so speeds were low and prices
were very high spacex and competitors
like amazon's project kuiper and the uk's oneweb are taking a different
approach deploying multitudes of much smaller more advanced satellites
this should allow for much faster speeds greater coverage and
how much are we paying for this 100 a month with no data no data cap that's no
data cap it's pricey it's not horrible it's less than what i pay for my
workshop that's fair all right let's get it set up first you
gotta protect your noggin with an LTT beanie LTT Store.com next
holy there it is you unpack your 500
starter kit and while this enormous box might look a little
daunting there actually isn't much in here
dish mast assembly tripod base wi-fi router
modem and a PoE injector to power it all that's it
oh and by the way this is really important guys this power supply over
here this is not your grandpa's 30 watt
PoE injector if you have an existing power over
Ethernet switch it wouldn't deliver nearly the 90 watts that the dish
requires and if for whatever reason you were to plug this adapter into other PoE
equipment you already own you would have a very bad time the 2c thickness of this
cable should be all you need to know about it
finally you'll need to set up your receiver somewhere with a clear view of
the sky to do that get comfortable
wait for someone on your staff to haul it to the roof of your office by
climbing up and down the access ladder half a dozen times well you have a
little nap then have him or her plug it in for you
when that's done it'll boot up search for satellites and orient itself toward
the best one a little hand shaky shake takes place
then the satellite you connect to will in turn connect to one of dozens of
starlink ground stations giving you a high speed low latency link with no
contractors required but is it any good just want to make sure people know
there's no smoke no mirrors oh god this cable is well
whatever the people trust me it's it's starlinked this is it call and set up
everything up till now this is my first space internet my first space
web page and i think we all know where i'm going
that wasn't bad
that wasn't bad like we're not just talking text web pages
here we're talking like
look at these pictures loading in it says rich
rich multimedia well i mean it's something it's something that's freaking
cool i want to send a tweet let's see how long it takes me to send a tweet okay so
we can also connect to it because it's got like a wi-fi hotspot i can also
connect to it with my phone LTT starbanger really does that even mean
like the witcher in space like i know what it means stop gesturing i'm
sending a tweet okay here we go so you guys you guys are gonna know how
long the delay is on our videos now sending this
from space to space and back
that's right that's where i went thanks elon daddy
elon obviously we're going pretty easy on it so far i mean pictures
i mean what the rich web what is this
okay we're going we're going video here youtube.com okay
okay there's a lot of thumbnails not bad now
that's a little slower than your hard linked broadband internet connection if
you got like 100 150 megabit down
but like it's usable you know
this is not impeding my experience yeah
i can tell i can tell the images are coming down a little slower but like
okay let's click on what looks like a really good video okay uh this guy's
handsome nice beard nice tube LTT Store you know
wow that ad have you ever noticed ads load a lot faster than the actual video
wow that was instant not only was playback
instant but we are actually getting you can actually see the video chunks loading
i'm at 4k imagine for a second
going from barely broadband or not even having broadband
to this kind of internet experience unreal i mean i remember this i lived
out on the boondocks and like i had friends that went to my high school that
had broadband and could go on napster
and download music or whatever and for me it was like yeah we only have one
phone line so i can use the internet like maybe half an hour a day and like i
can't even get anything done in that time when we got broadband i used up my
own allowance money for the drop from the poll at the street because that's
how much it meant to me i was like 14
and it it was a game changer i got a cd burner i made mixed cds for people i was
the cool kid just kidding about that last part but everything else up until then was true
yeah no pull no drop and well that's essentially what the price of the kit is
that's your pull draw now i i mean i got to push it
i want to push it i don't want to just watch one line of tech tips video i want
to have the whole Linus tech tips experience you know
one Linus tech tips
two Linus tech tips
come on more Linus tech tips why is it recommending me anything other than
Linus tech tips all right ijustine we'll watch ijustine collab with Linus tech
tips big lineus tech tips fan you know okay let's do some scrubbing scrub
because we ain't no scrub but we got to scrub around you know what i'm saying
okay give it a sec remember we're just hitting it pretty hard
that one's going that one's going that one's going this one needs a second
these are all running at 4k now you
might think if our internet is so fast we can do four 4k streams simultaneously
like that's the same as if we were watching 8k video
that it's weird that those thumbnails loaded in so slowly or that if we scroll
down there's this delay when we're loading the comments
let's do a quick speed test here and i'm gonna talk about that look wait okay
we're not saying it's gonna be like perfect or anything wow we actually like do not have a
connection hold on a sec got a cloud up there right that doesn't
happen yeah no no that's that's not actually the thing
you might say we've got cloud strife if you do run into trouble
and powering it off and powering it back on doesn't immediately kick it back in there is a companion app and colin's
actually running a speed test on it now so maybe it's kicked back in let's go
have a look and we're back there we go spacex
starlink that's correct that's what we expect
let's see what we get wow 138 megabit per second down and 23 up
wow i mean i shouldn't be surprised or anything we were playing back four 4k
streams at once but 27 milliseconds for ping
let's talk about that i mean it's not bad it's way better than dial-up but
compared to even adsl and especially
fiber you're going to notice that difference in latency because remember
guys it's not 27 milliseconds for like
every complete transaction it's 27 milliseconds on every transaction and
once you have a whole bunch of them queued up it can add up so that's why
loading a video no problem loading thumbnails pretty good loading something
like a whole page of comments you might start to run into a little bit of
degraded experience still though come on
over the air or in some cases there's no air but
don't worry about that to make that work spacex needs not hundreds not thousands
but even tens of thousands of satellites
currently they're approved to put 12 000 up there with an additional 30 000 in
discussion but with a catch the fcc has mandated that spacex get at
least half of their constellation in orbit within six years with full
deployment inside of nine else they risk losing their dedicated radio bands
this first deployment of twelve thousand then will live in orbit at three
different shells of altitudes
340 550 and
1150 kilometers above the earth's surface with each serving a different
purpose the farther away the satellite is from the earth the wider the area it can
serve but it comes at a cost of increased latency you know speed of
light and all that starlink will fly more sats at a lower
orbit then to increase bandwidth and reduce lag in areas that need it the
most while the high orbit sats can also act as backhaul links sending data
between satellites the most recent launch of 10 of a new version of the
starlink satellite on a rideshare mission also included laser links for
inter-satellite communication so if a ground station isn't in the ideal
spot data can be passed along through other better oriented sets the lower the
orbit the more atmospheric drag a satellite will experience though that
slows it down and reduces its altitude
this can be corrected with the same on-board thrusters that the sats used to
avoid collisions with other objects in space but there's a limit to that so when the
sat finally reaches the end of its lifetime in four to five years it'll use
any remaining fuel to push itself out of orbit to
a fiery death burning itself up completely in the earth's atmosphere
that last part is really key to avoiding a kessler syndrome event a theoretical
scenario where the amount of space pollution crap in low earth orbit is so
high that collisions between objects could create a cascading effect where
one satellite smashes into another which smashes into another and then everyone's
having a real bad time until the entire orbital plane is too dangerous to
continue to use as for how likely that is take a look at this visualization
courtesy of leolabs these are all the satellites currently orbiting the earth
if we turn on the debris layer however it becomes pretty clear that we need to
be very careful what we leave in orbit any one of those pieces of junk could
take out a critical piece of orbital infrastructure as of writing this video
there are a little over a thousand starlink sats flying around up there and
they aren't in a geostationary orbit so you can actually spot them moving across
the sky at night you'll see them as a little train of lights flying across the
sky which raises the question how can
the dish on your roof stay stationary
like we saw and still acquire the satellite even as it moves at seven and
a half kilometers per second using the motors on the dish
is a possibility but that would require much finer motor control as well as have
a higher chance of failure so instead starlink uses what's called a phased
array antenna instead of one big antenna there's an
array of hundreds of tiny antennas across the whole surface of the dish we
would show you ourselves but revealing them destroys the dish so
this is not designed to be disassembled
this clip of ken keter's tear down is going to have to do check his video out
by the way we're going to have it linked below if you want to see some more starling gore the point is that by
shifting the phase of each individual antenna just right the direction of the
stacked up radio wave can be changed which is essentially electronic antenna
steering this sort of tech is normally reserved for military applications or
companies with deep pockets due to the high development cost i mean the fact
that they are producing something so technologically advanced at a mass
market scale and price is nothing short of astounding
now thank you so much for your patience with all these technical details let's
see how it gains i have a simple goal
i want to get one headshot from space
in cs go alright and
i'm not going to settle for bot i want to headshot a real player
i want to get a head shot from space i don't want to watch your stupid
video watch again who would do that
all right so what's our ping sixty-four million man i love how rock
solid this ping is like when i was a kid i would have i would have killed to game
at 64 milliseconds and consistency of
ping is in some ways more important to the experience than the actual ping
number one oh hi i see you
no come on i got killed by tim hortons
are you serious right now are they just shooting through the door
okay so we're just oh okay oh it wasn't a head shot how could i miss that
that was a bad time to reload i really am genuinely not very good at this game
anybody over here oh hi come on show me your head no
damn it okay i'm only going to try one more time one more time i'll try for headshot okay
they got like markers in this game what does that even mean
i don't even know oh come on
you know what though it doesn't matter it is only game
what matters is starlink and overall i
am really impressed like yeah there's
more latency than a terrestrial connection but it's manageable
it's manageable and the idea of being able to get these
sorts of speeds anywhere on the planet someday
it's incredible and it's not just about
youtube netflix and video games it's about access to education unrestricted
uncensored communication and even remote medical services
and for those that live say on a sailboat or off the grid all of a
sudden you can do these things and still be connected to the world at a rate
that's actually usable for today's workloads like well yes netflix youtube
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Linus thanks for watching guys if you enjoy this kind of crazy next-gen
internet connectivity stuff maybe check out our terabit internet connection
video that was at this like crazy dreamhack land over in europe it's
pretty sweet