Let’s Talk STARLINK

And now to confuse everything: This just in from our electronics guy-

Now with that being said something else very interesting has come on the radar.

OneWeb is offering $5,000 hardware and data rates of up to 150 MBPS download x 40 MBPS upload.

The advantages include guaranteed bandwidth you don’t get with Starlink, plans down to $100.00 a month depending in your bandwidth order and best thing is no data caps like Starlink limits you to.

We have not done any testing and are just starting to explore this but depending in how fast you wants to upgrade the system onboard.

This is starting to look like a possibly superior product to Starlink due to better administrative policies.

We are going to continue with the SL install

According to a recent article:

OneWeb is only planning to operate 648 satellites at an altitude of 1,200 km versus Starlink's planned 12,000 satellites at 550km altitude. Less birds at a higher distance sounds like less reliability to me... sure, the higher elevation will allow a larger footprint (thus less satellites), but it won't be as vertical as SL (so tracking could be tougher). And as a layman, my logic says higher altitudes may cause greater latency.

I tried to add the link, but it's from a banned yacht publisher. One could google "the lowdown on Elon Musk's Starlink internet system"

Have you ever had free samples given to you? This is about the same- show you what it can do, get you addicted, then shut off the RV service to boats so they can justify the Maritime version.
As I said above, the resellers are able to sell you a lesser data package for less money. We have a captain's group, sharing Starlink info, and the yesterday a fellow YF member posted on the group asking (a very good question) how much data everyone is using per month. Based on a half-dozen responses stating the size boat and number of crew, I made some assumptions of how many guests would be aboard during the month. I estimate that 133GB/mo/person is about what you'll consume.

"One person has STARLINK and the entire group logs in and uses it."

And there is the problem that will likely get sorted with data caps etc.

Your typical home/RV might be 2-4 users, using maybe a few 100 gigs a month, right now I could have 10 crew and 6-8 guests all using my RV plan for $150 a month, how is that fair?

I see this as a moving target and I don't think they know how its all going pan out.

So far for us, the RV has worked out, I have other sources I can use, so it has been an addition to, we are going to install the full Maritime and move it to a primary source for streaming etc.

As Ken said, 40-60M yachts are using anywhere from 2-5 Tb a month, that is a lot of data!

Haven’t they caped data on regular accounts already ? I thought I read that somewhere. Oddly enough I can’t find how much data we use on the app

that would be the solution though, charge more when you exceed certain limits but wonder they seem to have played the unlimited data card to get customers.

Yes high speed data is capped at 1tb after which it's degraded

On the home page of the app you should have a little person icon on the top left. Tap that and you should see your account name/number and below that a graph of usage with a total data used.

Data Caps are for peak hours of 7AM-11PM, so the data usage only shows for those hours.

Data cap for Maritime is 5TB/mo

I checked there… not showing data usage.

Came across this today.
Things are definitely going to change.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-to-offer-a-smaller-starlink-dish-about-the-size-of-a-laptop

For many the size isn’t the issue… smaller is nice obviously. The problem is power as existing systems need AC power. The article doesn’t mention whether the smaller version will have built in batteries, a must for portability

No it doesn't but it does say they are being built for cars, boats and RVs, that to me says 12vdc powered.

I mounted perhaps a foot or 18" above the 12kw open array, and the radar blew me offline. I raised it another 2 feet, and I cleared the radar spray. I was able to use it in every corner of the Bahamas, and no issue in the crossings.

Be generous with your radar clearance.

My vertical spacing, fwiw. Works just fine with both on. I suppose it matters how close the two are, horizontally.


Enjoy!!