- We got a Starlink Beta kit.
That's right, internet from the stars baby.
(imitates gun firing)
Now we already did an unboxing on Short Circuit,
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're gonna pull up a gaming rig
and pwn some noobs from space
and we even left space in the video
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(upbeat music)
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 likely have a variety of speed
and service options to pick from.
But as of 2017, 50 million U.S. homes
only had a single ISP option
for 25 megabit service or none at all,
with 5 million unable to get anything faster
than three 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, 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.
Space X 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?
- [Colin] A 100 bucks a month with no data cap.
- No data cap?
- [Colin] Yep, no data cap.
- That's pricey.
- [Colin] 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 got to protect your noggin
with an LTT beanie.
LTTstore.com.
Next,
oh, here 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, wifi 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 two C 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
while 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 wanted to make sure people know,
there's no smoke,
no mirrors.
Oh God, this cable is,
well, whatever the people trust me.
It's Starlinked.
This is it.
Colin set everything up till now.
This is my first space internet,
my first space webpage.
And I think we all know where I'm going.
That wasn't bad.
(upbeat music)
That wasn't bad.
We're not just talking text webpages here.
We're talking like, look at these pictures loading in.
This is rich, rich multimedia.
Well I mean, 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,
cause it's got like a wifi hotspot.
I can also connect to it with my phone.
LTT Star Banger.
Really? What's that even mean?
Like the Witcher in space?
I know what it means.
Stop gesturing.
I'm sending a tweet.
Here we go.
So 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?
2005.
Okay.
We're going video here.
(Linus mumbling)
There's a lot of thumbnails.
Not bad.
Now that's a little slower then your hard linked
broadband internet connection
if you got like a hundred, 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.
This guy is handsome.
Nice beard, nice toque, LTT Store, you know.
Now that ad.
Have you ever noticed ads load a little 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 have 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 pole
at the street because that's how much it meant to me.
I was like 14.
And it was a game changer.
I got a CD burner.
I made mix CDs for people.
I was the cool kid.
Just kidding about that last part.
But everything else up until then was true.
- [Colin] Imagine there weren't poles to drop from.
- Yeah. No pole. No drop.
I'm well, that's essentially what the price of the kit is.
That's your pole drop.
Now, I mean, I got to push it.
I want to push it.
I don't want to just watch one Linus Tech Tips video.
I want to have the whole Linus Tech Tips experience,
you know.
One Linus Tech Tips.
Ah, ah, ah, two Linus Tech Tips.
Common more Linus Tech Tips.
Why is it recommended me anything other
than Linus Tech Tips?
All right.
iJustine.
We'll watch iJustine collab with Linus Tech Tips.
Big Linus Tech Tips fan.
Okay.
Let's do some scrubbing, scrub.
We ain't no scrub
but we got a scrub around, you know what I'm saying?
Okay. Give it a sec.
Remember, we're 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.
But 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.
I'm gonna talk about that.
Okay. We're not saying it's going to be like perfect
or anything.
No, we actually like do not have a connection.
Hold on a sec.
Got a cloud up there.
- [Colin] Nope, that doesn't happen.
- That's not actually a thing.
You might say we've got cloud strife.
If you do run into trouble and powering it off
and pairing 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.
Space X 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 are 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 12,000 then,
will live in orbit
at three different shells of altitudes.
340, 550 and 1,150 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 communications.
So if a ground station isn't in the ideal spot
data can be passed along
through other better oriented SATs.
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 onboard thrusters
that the SATs use 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.
- [Ken Keiter] This is not designed to be disassembled.
- This clip of Ken Keiter'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 Starlink 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 antennae 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 games.
I have a simple goal.
I want to get one headshot from space in CS: GO, all right.
And I'm not going to settle for a bot.
I want to headshot a real player.
I want to get a headshot from space.
I don't want to watch your stupid video.
Watch again. Who would do that?
All right.
So what's our ping?
64 ms, man.
I love how rock solid this ping is.
Like when I was a kid,
I would've killed to game at 64 milliseconds
and consistency of paying is in some ways more important
to the experience than the actual ping number.
Oh, I'm dead.
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 headshot.
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?
Hi, come on, show me your head.
No, dammit.
Okay, I'm only going to try one more time.
One more time.
I'll try for head shot.
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's 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, 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 and YouTube and video games.
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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 lan over in Europe.
It's pretty sweet.