- 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 for our sponsor Ridge Wallet. Ridge Wallet wants to redefine the wallet with its compact frame
and RFID blocking plates. Check out how they can
keep your wallet bulge down and use our offer code Linus to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping. (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. And if you run a business maybe you can even connect to our sponsor. FreshBooks. FreshBooks is easy to use. And it's designed
specifically with you in mind, the small business owner. FreshBooks has everything
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person, creative agency or a YouTuber, you can choose
a plan that's right for you and their award-winning Toronto based support team is always happy
to help you if you need it. So try FreshBooks for
free for 30 days today. No credit card required
at FreshBooks.com/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 lan over in Europe. It's pretty sweet.
For a much deeper dive on the hardware, take a look at TheSignalPath , he did a pretty comprehensive overview of the underlying tech.
https://youtu.be/h6MfM8EFkGg
130Mbps down with 27ms ping to the nearest SpeedTest.com server? Uhhh, that's pretty damn impressive for a "beta".
This would be huge for my grandparents who live way out in the boonies and have dealt with DSL for 20 years... granted not sure if Gram should be on Facebook more than she already is lol
$99/month. Not great for city dwellers, but unreal for country folk
Hopefully my experience is similar, in 2-4 weeks I'll know.
Fuck the entire US & Canada telecom industries.
Having to mention "no data cap" reminds me why this thing is so big deal in some parts of the world. Why does anyone have a data cap in 2021?
I have a gigabit connection (well the actual speed is usually closer to 300Mbps) included in the rent so I'm fine without this world changing thing.
I'm in the UK where getting good internet isn't all that hard. Do you think this will finally make the US ISP's get their act together or will they put all their effort into trying to stop it legislatively? My vote goes on option two.
27ms ping is impressive. If that's stable it would be very usable even for online gaming.
I admittedly skipped around a lot in this video because there seemed to be a lot of faffing about (which I understand is part of the charm of LTT), but $500 upfront and $100 seems a wee bit pricey to me. I understand that a lot of the US is still an ISP corporate dystopia, and that rural areas usually only have shit connections available because dragging cables or whatever is prohibitively expensive, but I'm wondering how many people who live in the rural US are willing to fork over that much for better internet. Then again, I'm unsure how much ISPs on average charge for internet services over there.
/faff
What's the deal with interference of scientific observation for this system? A global network of wi-fi satellites is going to cause issues for radio astronomy.