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Between Elon's "Private beta begins in ~3 months, public beta in ~6 months, starting with high latitudes"
https://twitter.com/i/status/1253113227095007233
and the FCC's ratification of WIFI6 ..
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/the-fcc-ratified-wi-fi-6e-this-morning/
.. the nerd is me is kind of getting excited.
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@Wedgy sort of. The Starlink system isn't designed to communicate directly with handsets like the ground-based cellphone/tower system, or Iridium, or some of the others are. Starlink needs a ground terminal "about the size of a pizza box". Said pizza box has a phased array antenna system* to communicate with the satellites via Ku and Ka bands. Presumably however this box will also have some sort of standard, consumer-friendly output like an Ethernet port and/or WiFi connectivity.
The WiFi 6 connection is purely in my mind at this point but it makes sense. WiFi 6 is theoretically able to cover an entire house with up to 1.2Ghz bandwidth. Most urban locations will likely have interference that limits that to something somewhat less, but it should still be able to handle the full bandwidth of a Starlink connection, which is (again theoretically) in the ~600Mb range. The overall idea (in my mind anyway) being that you could put a Starlink pizza box with built-in wifi on your house's roof and get a ~500Mb connection to the internet, wherever your house is in the world. Even if your "house" is actually a plane, a boat, or an RV it still works, since the "pizza box's" antenna and electronics are designed to be mobile. As long as it has visibility to the sky and power you should be good.
(*basically a flat panel of electronically-controlled elements that together behave like a steerable dish antenna only with no moving parts.)
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