Starlink.

Ho-hum.

I’ve been watching Starlink build out their satellite constellation over the last few years. I’ve also been hearing plenty of good things about the company and the service. But the hardware price was always a little too much, and the data limits were a little too low. Well, this month that all changed. They dropped the price of the Starlink Mini terminal to $199 and increased the monthly usage limit on the $50 Roam plan to 100GB, a 50% increase. With my life hopefully settling into a little more normal routine compared to the last year (and getting my tax refund) I thought it was time to try them out.

On Saturday April 25 I visited Vega State Park. I went there to make a phone call. Not just any phone call though. I wanted to see if I could make a call using Starlink and Callcentric, my VoIP provider.

Now this is purely a stunt. I was certain the call would go through without issue. I mean, why wouldn’t it? I tried it just because I wanted to create an approximation of a 20th century prediction.

“Early in the next millennium your right and left cuff links or earrings may communicate with each other by low-orbiting satellites and have more computer power than your present PC.” - Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital

Negroponte was wrong of course. We don’t wear cufflinks anymore. But he was right that our devices will communicate across wide areas even though they’re right next to each other. In the case of my two handsets, they were literally on the same LAN but the only way one could reach each other was because Starlink was linking them to Callcentric’s virtual PBX.

Having been born in 1968, I never knew of a time before satellites. I remember going to the great Gaithersburg MD hamfest in the 1970s and seeing a C-band satellite dish on a trailer. The vendor was selling TV from space (and Mexico - I distinctly remember seeing Sesame Street in Spanish). This was when cable’s selling point was bringing in Pittsburgh stations, those same stations we were getting with the big Channelmaster log periodic in the back yard. The vendor usually had a pretty large crowd gathered around the big 25” TV and that VCR sized satellite receiver. The biggest selling point of the C-Band system was “it was free.” That even got dad interested.

Of course we all know what happened next. The cable companies complained, the program suppliers scrambled to scramble their channels and the consumer C-Band dish industry became a smaller niche than high end audiophile stereos.

But C-band and geosynchronous satellites didn’t go away. They’re still here even in the age of metropolitan access networks, long haul fiber optic systems and master headends that are designed to multicast video to hundreds of millions of homes nationwide. Because there’s still a lot of isolated and independent cable operators, hotels and sports bars, and areas where the big fiber networks still don’t reach. There’s still value in having a geostationary satellite overhead. Those satellites are still what makes cable network economics possible, handle backhaul for distant television crews, AM/FM radio, and even credit card transactions at your local gas station. The USGS uses them to transmit stream water flow data. And of course there are still lots of KU-band home satellite viewers using Dish and DirecTV.

So why hasn’t Internet over satellite been as dominant as television? Well, the main reason is due to physics. Radio waves travel at the speed of light in a vacuum and a little slower in clear air. Given that a geostationary satellite is about 22,000 miles above the Earth, it takes ~480ms for the signal to make the round trip from ground to sky to ground again. And a fair amount of transmitter power too. For many applications that ½ second doesn’t matter, your credit card authorization will still feel plenty quick. But for any real-time activity from playing games, making phone calls and even doom scrolling Instagram a ½ second from when you click to the screen updating is an eternity.

Iridium.

Motorola invented the cellular phone. They beat AT&T in the development of AMPS (Advanced Mobile Phone Service), the original technology behind the 1980s phone that Gordon Gekko used on the beach in Wall Street. Before that was the “car phone,” a massive device (it took up a fair amount of space in the spacious trunks of 1960s and 70s cars) that used powerful central transmitters and strategically placed receivers around cities. The old system was in the VHF band, near police and fire radios. They could usually handle about 5 calls in the whole city at a time. The small town I grew up in had a system. It was run by GTE. As you might imagine that system was incredibly expensive -probably about $5,000-$10,000 per year in today’s dollars. Rarified airwaves for the private jet set.

AMPS changed all that. By placing many smaller, lower-powered towers around town, the system could reuse the same frequencies many times. The other change was the amount of bandwidth dedicated to the service. AMPS was assigned a frequency band in the upper end of the UHF television band, specifically channels 70–83. This not only made it easier to reuse frequencies due to the shorter range, but also allowed for many more—on the order of 50 per cell—simultaneous calls.

The amount of available bandwidth correlates inversely with cost, so with far more spectrum than the old low-frequency, narrowband mobile systems, the cost of completing a call plummeted. And because so much bandwidth was allocated, the FCC created a dual-network scheme where the incumbent Bell System operated one network and a competitor, often Craig McCall’s Cellular One, could operate the other.

I’m calling from Mt Everest!

As the 1980s refined cellular technology it led to the idea of a global phone, connected to satellites. Motorola engineers Bary Bertiger, Raymond J. Leopold and Ken Peterson started filing patents around 1987. The concept was simple enough: Take the technology that allows a cell phone to switch from one tower to the next and turn it on its head: The satellites would be in a low orbit, constantly moving. The handsets would be relatively stationary in comparison, just the opposite of cellular networks. Because they determined that 77 satellites¹ would be able to provide global coverage at the altitude proposed, they named the company Iridium, the 77th element on the periodic table.

The service was popular with ships, aircraft, adventurers, and militaries. The handsets were larger than a cell phone, but far more portable than the alternative fixed satellite services like Inmarsat that needed to be set up and positioned before making a call (and suffered from the long geosynchronous round trip delay. However because of the peculiar way the Iridium network handled data and phone calls, it was particularly unpopular with dictators and other government entities.

Without going too far off into the weeds² the reason why some governments didn’t want Iridium in their countries is because civilian calls don’t “touch the ground” anywhere but Chandler, AZ. And calls between two Iridium phones never go off the network. Most wireless phone systems interact with the local networks, including older tech satellite phones. The satellites would receive the call from a handset and repeat it down to the ground again, where it would be routed onto the PSTN. Even if you were calling another Inmarsat customer. That makes it easier for law and order types to listen in.

One feature of Starlink that’s similar to Iridium is that the satellites will route data between themselves before transmitting down to a ground station. I imagine a day where whole communities share data over Starlink without it ever touching the ground.

Iridium had a problem though. It was envisioned in the 1980s and engineered in the 1990s. Unfortunately, the system was set up as a telephone network just at the time when the internet was changing telecommunications to a data (and packet) system. Iridium was severely limited in throughput because that’s not what was anticipated in the design. And by the time it was active, the global cellular networks were built and offering global SIM cards. Not only that but if you were a globetrotting worker your office, hotel and many coffee shops had the same Internet access that was available back home, and with a VPN, just about as secure. With email changing office communication permanently from phone calls to virtual memos suddenly the justification for a global satellite phone network became impossible for everyone but the CEO. Motorola spun out the company and put it into bankruptcy. Everyone still liked the idea of a global satellite communications network like Iridium, but no one could make the business case for keeping it alive. The Pentagon stepped in at the 11th hour and saved Iridium’s satellites from deorbit, and the US military is still a big user of the service.

It did find other customers, some very big ones at that, in military and global shipping. Businesses that didn’t mind spending over a $1/minute to communicate. And then there’s Garmin’s InReach satellite data service. It’s more of a short messaging service, and it does have a number of advantages over other competitors, including lower power consumption and less need to aim the Earth station. But it’s being superseded by Apple’s Globalstar based satellite messaging service and T-Mobile’s partnership with Starlink, which uses some of TMO’s spectrum. I personally have used all three and found that InReach to be the best from a usability standpoint but also the most expensive of the thee. Both Apple and TMO/Starlink still have some catching up to do but I predict in a year TMO customers will be making satellite phone calls with their regular handsets.

The reason why Iridium is still expensive is the same as the old VHF based car phone systems were expensive: scarcity drives price. See, Iridium sits in a goldilocks slice of spectrum called the L-band. This is the same chunk of spectrum where GPS and other satellite (Globalstar) and ground based services live. It’s a crowded neighborhood full of radars, IoT linking, some wide area networks… and there’s just not much spectrum available. The advantage is that a small antenna without much gain can still be effective in a variety of conditions. Starlink uses the much more wide-open Ka Band, along with thousands of satellites instead of the minimum 66 to cover the planet. When the amount of data throughput skyrockets the price/bit drops.

Which brings us back to Starlink. The Starlink Mini terminal isn’t quite pocket sized, but it will easily fit in my laptop bag.

It is also very light. It was obviously designed to be used by hikers and backcountry campers, people who pack with a scale. And probably soldiers too. There are a variety of mounts and mounting options, from automobile roof racks to poles to just laying it on the ground in an open area. For the initial setup I just laid it out in the back yard, stretching Ethernet cables and power cords across the yard. The whole process took about 30 minutes from power on til running speed tests.

I’m Bored.

Satellites used to be the stuff of science fiction (in fact the geosynchronous satellite concept was first proposed by Arthur C Clarke, and because of that the orbit where it takes 24 hours to complete on orbit is called the Clarke Belt). Today we not only take them for granted, we pretty much think they’ve been supplanted by superior, (under)ground based technology like fiber optics. Where the fiber runs it’s great. If you’re at home or work, having fiber is the best communications solution bar none. But if the fiber isn’t available then what? Wireless works but is hard to set up and limited in bandwidth. Starlink works pretty much anywhere with a clear view of the sky.

Your new office, if you like sitting on cold metal park benches

The fact that anyone who does ‘brainwork’ for a living can work pretty much anywhere on the planet is still a game changing event. The idea of cruising through Glenwood Canyon while downloading lossless music or live-streaming 4K dashcam footage (at the same time) is something that we almost expect but is still a little bit magical to those of us who remember the massive gaps in cell service between cities. Bringing a little piece of “the grid” to places where it wasn’t before will level up the rural access gap, lower prices through competition and open up new ideas that weren’t possible in areas that couldn’t get service without an expensive plant extension.

I made a phone call from one hand to the other, through a network of satellites moving overhead at 17,000 miles per hour. It worked exactly as expected. No drama, no delay, no sense of wonder. Just another day in the life. For fifty years we’ve been solving the same problem—how to make a scarce resource feel abundant. The only difference now is that we don’t notice when the problem’s solved.

1. After some refinement of the design it turned out they only needed 66 satellites. But Dysprosium Communications? Nope!

2. A lot of the details about Iridium, the company and the service can be found in John Bloom’s excellent book "Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story”