This is
Starlink deployed at the bach over the weekend.
Performance is so good, I was able to videoconference with my folks from here in Auckland and they gave me a guided tour of the gardens. This might not sound too impressive but being able to realtime videoconference over a satellite link via a groundstation in Sydney is astonishing bandwidth and latency.
Two other Tesla initiatives are interesting. The first is the purchase of
Swarm, who make available LoraWAN from satellites for the princely sum of $5/month. Tesla intends to
deploy this tech onto their Starlink satellites, so IoT devices can connect directly to them.
I already have a private LoRaWAN solution in place so this is less interesting for me personally, but professionally the ramifications of IoT sensors and actuators in remote locations are exciting.
The second initiative is the rumoured launch of the
Tesla Model Pi smartphone which works with Starlink i.e., a satellite phone.
The potential for this tech to disrupt the local telecommunications market is massive. You will have seen those cheesy advertisements from Vodafone and Spark that say stuff like "coverage of 90% of where Kiwis live, work and play" which is marketing-speak for "about 60% coverage of the geographical area."
SpaceX's Starlink network already has 100% coverage of NZ. Adding a cellular capability is going to be extremely attractive to rural communities, and organisations requiring applications such as "man down" in remote locations.
I consider Elon Musk a bit of a charlatan, pushing vapourware, vastly exaggerating capability and time-to-delivery. It's fair to say most of the stuff he tries ends up on the scrapheap. Starlink is very much the exception. For a $NZ900 investment in hardware and a $NZ159/month service charge, we're pretty bloody ecstatic with the quality of the Starlink service and the potential of these ancillary IoT and cellular functions.
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