One of the biggest problems in the Lahaina wildfire disaster was the inability to communicate that cut the whole west side of Maui off from the rest of the island and the rest of the world after the recent wildfire disaster. A disaster relief team from the Mainland brought in STARLINK units which saved the day for many. How does it work?
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Usually satellite internet works off of geostationary satellites 35,785 km high. They can each see nearly half of the planet so they get good coverage, but signal reception is ass that far out and latency is horrible over 70,000km round trips even at lightspeed.
Starlink is thousands of tiny satellites in low earth orbit. They can’t connect to much of an area due to being that low (the horizon blocks their signal), but they can see their neighbours so they can pass along messages to one of their friends that can see a ground station to connect to the wider internet, and they can get pretty fast low latency connection down to the area right below them.
Result: fast low latency internet, but high maintenance and needs thousands of satellites that only have a couple years of service life.
Traditional satellite internet has two major problems
The first is latency
The satellite must be in Geosynchronous orbit which is very high up. Even though radio moves at the speed of light that’s 640ms of latency or more.
That’s a delay of half a second when you click on something which for surfing the web is annoying, for gaming or remote work is basically unusable.
The second is bandwidth
The satellites only have so much bandwidth and its shared by all the subscribers. Internet satellites have upwards of 25 times more users than they were designed to handle… and Even if you use a different ISP they all share the same satellites so you have the same problem. So the download speeds you get are appalling by cable standards.
There’s two ways around this
1 run a cable
Contrary to popular belief the internet and phones don’t run on satellites unless they absolutely have to. Undersea fiber optic cables do most of the long distance heavy lifting.
2 Launch smaller satellites that are closer to the Earth.
This is what Starlink does. They deliver large numbers of smaller low-orbit satellites that communicate with each other.
This allows for faster internet with lower latency than traditional satellites.
Since you don’t need cables you can access the internet almost anywhere on earth and as they launch more satellites the service gets better and better.
Running a cable is still preferred, but the difference between them is shrinking.
Starlink is a satellite based internet system.
Whereas traditionally you would have a cable running out of your house that routes through telephone lines or underground conduits all the way back to your ISP, Starlink operates by having a network of satellites that can communicate wirelessly with each other, as well as with users satellite dishes, and with ground stations that have that physical link back to an ISP.
While systems like this have existed for things like TV broadcast for years, Starlink uses fast-orbiting satellites that are only about 500km up. This means that the dishes need to track multiple satellites and hand-off from one to another.
As long as you can see *a* satellite, the signal can eventually route to a satellite with ground station access, even if it’s hundreds of kilometers away. This provides internet connectivity, even in very disconnected regions (either due to remoteness or due to natural disasters)
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