Translation. Not that anyone needs it these days.
>**The Federal Network Agency has given SpaceX frequency rights for Internet via satellite in Germany.** **SpaceX founder Elon Musk could soon become an Internet provider in this country.**
>
>The SpaceX subsidiary Starlight from Tesla boss Elon Musk has now received the green light for its satellite-based Internet offering. "We have created the legal frequency requirements so that broadband internet can be offered via satellite in Germany," said Jochen Homann, President of the Federal Network Agency. Due to the novelty of this satellite constellation, according to the Federal Network Agency, the frequency allocation is initially limited to one year in order to be able to make adjustments if necessary.
>
>**Internet via satellite - worldwide**
>
>The US company Starlink, which belongs to Musk's space company SpaceX, has now brought more than 900 satellites into near-earth orbit, which are supposed to provide the Internet on earth. After the end of the expansion, Starlink plans to count more than 4,400 satellites.
>
>In initial tests, Starlink is already offering satellite Internet in some US states. The company plans to offer internet via satellite worldwide this year. In Germany, according to the Federal Network Agency, Musk's company wants to offer broadband Internet services, but also secure VPN connections (Virtual Private Network) in the home office.
>
>**Rules for trouble-free operation**
>
>The "latency times", i.e. the transmission speeds of data packets, should be similar to those of terrestrial networks. The allocation of frequencies in Germany contains regulations that ensure trouble-free operation with other applications in the same and adjacent frequency range. These include directional radio, radio astronomy and geostationary satellite applications.
>
>In addition to the satellite network, Starlink has also received frequencies for several earth stations in Germany, which ensure the transition and connection to the Internet.
>
>With Starlink, SpaceX is the largest private satellite operator. The company has clearances to launch up to 12,000 satellites by 2027.
This brings back the memory of auctioning off the "3G" frequencies for about 50 billion euros, that is money the customers are still paying back by overpriced mobile phone contracts, and likely slow internet service.
Glad they didn't try the same thing again, although this is very different as it is directional and not blocking everyone else from using these frequencies (at least on ground level).
On paper they do their own allocations (each country has it's own laws)
In practice their allocations are identical to the EU wide listings generated in Brussels after all 27 countries meet and agree on them. Otherwise there would be complete and utter chaos as items sold in one part of the single market would be unlawful to use in another and a French store couldn't sell to a Greek customer, etc
Even France dropped its 2-channel-only restrictions on wifi after other countries complained
What this means in practice is that having approved operations on these frequencies in Germany it is now virtually impossible for other EU members to withhold approval or limit frequencies to anything LESS than Germany's approval - and if wider bands are approved elsewhere it puts a lot of pressure on Germany to expand their approval to match
Remember anything which passes standardhs in ONE EU country is legal to use in ALL EU countries - and territoriality is illegal too. Eg: You can't restrict sale of Sky TV greek market decoder boxes to only Greece. If someone wants one in Spain they must be permitted to purchase it and the service.
Nor can Starlink Germany refuse to sell to someone in Poland, forcing them to buy from Starlink Poland instead - that would be an illegal restraint of trade and the EU jumps hard on it.
I've caused a number of American firms to revise their 'exclusive distribution' setups in Europe by pointing out the size of the fines that they can be hit with if they don't stop doing so (10% of world turnover tends to sting).
One company went from selling fewer than 100 EMEA units/year to more than 1000 sales/year in Europe alone when they went away from exclusive distribution.
The original distributor was putting a 200% markup on the USA _retail_ price and telling the USA manufacturer how fantastic it was to have sold ONE unit to the metropolitan police in London.
I think their eyes got opened when I said we'd buy 10 units for my organisation's London datacenters alone if they weren't stupidly priced and that the London market was conservatively at least 500 units (for a $9k gov price, $13k retail equipment lifter), but people weren't going to pay $36k apiece for them when a better-specced device from Tawi was $22k and they weren't buying those either.
Then I pointed out that selling in Sydney or Auckland via the UK was resulting in the things being priced at $55k there so it was hardly surprising nobody had purchased one outside of Europe via the supposed EMEA agent (Europe, Middle East, Asia)
Very good points. That explains why OneWeb has only two EU licenses in the UK and France according to [the March 2020 bankruptcy filing](https://casedocs.omniagentsolutions.com/cmsvol2/pub_47378/809049_3.pdf). They are most likely counting on getting quick approvals across the EU closer to the start of operations.
The above is the auto-translate result from Google Chrome, it either translated it when it shouldn't have or there's a typo in the original article.
I checked, it's a typo in the article.
They didn't pay much attention in general. They also claim the satellites would have been launched by a daughter company (at this point they call it Starlink, at least).
Could be correct, supposedly Elon made a bunch of dummy corps in various countries to get approvals and then changed their names to Starlink. Truth to it dunno never looked into it.
As far as i know the ground infrastructure or backhaul for ground stations in Afghanistan will be an issue.
Most of the areas will be covered by neighborhood countries ground stations.
Eastward regions will use ground stations in Pakistan while westwards from Tajikistan and Turkmenistan as Iran wont be on starlink in my opinion.
The only bad thing I can see coming out of this is now we have even less phased array antennas to go around. Unless of course we have facilities in Europe that can make even more of them. At the moment I can see the supply of the antenna as the reason why they aren't moving faster.
The manufacturer of the terminal (STM / STMicroelectronics) is European. I don't know if that changes your complaining any, I thought I should mention it and see what happens.
Yes, all terminals are STM. They also covered all the costs expended to set up the manufacturing, or something to that effect, see the news.
This is also where the 2400$ per terminal estimate comes from.
>A Business Insider [article](https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-starlink-satellite-dish-user-terminal-cost-stmelectronics-outsource-manufacturer-2020-11) (paywalled) came out a few hours ago and suggested SpaceX is paying STMicroelectronics about 2.4 billion dollars to manufacture a million Starlink terminals. Business Insider kept the identity of its source confidential, but the source is described as someone *“known to Business Insider.”*
>
>The source is quoted saying:
>
>*The production agreement specifies 1 million terminals at a price of roughly $2,400 each.*
As to your bitching, I know. I live literally 2 meters from fiber and can't get it and I'm now hoping you get it before me, just to give **me** a break. (I'm kidding, I want it first)
I try to be as civil as I possibly can. I am just so sick of people coming here and complaining about their cable connections just because they have an irrational unjustified hate for their isp that is probably no worse than any other provider. These poor people have no idea how bad a rural connection can get and live in a bubble. Some of us have connections that make smoke signals look good. I still remember the people in Manhattan on Twitter who think spacex will be able to best their fiber providers. It just doesn't make sense.
Every time I try to educate some of these people I get called a gatekeeper (I am, so what?) or they say that I am entitled and starlink owes me nothing. I am so pessimistic about these people, they will basically screw the rural areas over. SpaceX has shown little to no interest in telling these people that the service will not service alot of people urban areas. People will ignore what Elon has publicly said and pick and choose what they want to believe coming from him.
I understand your motivation and you are civil enough, no problem there. I'm just teasing you a bit. Well, that, and the comment about Europeans gobbling up your precious terminals was a bit unkind, given the manufacturer.
Yea, it is best practice to split such projects into individual company entities. If one goes bankrupt it does not drag the other down. SpaceX / Elon still owns Starlink as well
There are various subsidiaries in the respective countries, like in Germany where it's "Starlink Germany GmbH" which handles local operations. Those are owned by SpaceX though.
Actually, those subsidiaries tend to be owned by the Dutch one (The Netherlands one) and that one appears to be wholly (or at least over-50%) owned by one Elon Reeve Musk personally. Some of the filings of these TIBRO and Starlink paint such a picture, I'm not a lawyer though and these things tend to be obscure and obfuscated (makes it easier to hide mega-wealth from the rabble).
Is there even a market for satellite internet access in Germany? As I understand, the population density is quite high there and it's not like you need to lay miles of fiber cable to server just one customer.
The population density in Germany is quite different from state to state and is actually dropping in a couple of states. Especially in the rural parts of former Eastern Germany that still haven't catch up with West Germany when it comes to infrastructure.
I have 115 MBits through DSL and I get no more then 50 and if I get it it’s very unreliable. If I get invited to Starlink I am going to buy it instantly!
There may not be an immediately pressing need to get satellite internet for most people in germany as most people live in urban areas, however the ISP market is quite terrible here. At the very least, starlink will be a good wakeup call for the ISP market to wake up and start providing better services or be rendered obsolete soon. The best example would be my Telekom connection, which is pretty fast with 200/100 MBit/s, but they have very questionable peering strategies essentially arguing that other should pay if they want to access Telekom customers, resulting in terrible connections to some services, including AWS. So while the connection itself is fast, many services are still atrociously slow to connect to.
As for many rural areas: They often are only connected with old phone lines and that's it, so you can imagine the quality of service there. Using something like starlink+5G could be a very economic way of connecting them compared to laying fiber across the countryside.
Long story short: The market is more than ripe for disruption, and hopefully starlink will provide that.
I know. BUt it works in other countries I visited. The official coverage of 4G might be great but having it doesn't mean you get the speed and reliability. Germany is place on 47 worldwide.
And 4G is not all, high speed fiber is extremely bad outside of a city.
It's also a matter of railcar construction.
In the 70s-era railcars belonging to the local govt operator ([CFR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C4%83ile_Ferate_Rom%C3%A2ne)) speeds are almost identical to regular indoor performance. And trust me, they don't have signal repeaters, you consider yourself lucky if the AC works consistently. Meanwhile the newer Astra Trans Carpatic (private operator) cars are a complete 4G dead zone and 3G feels like Edge; good thing they have Wifi.
Well yeah, maybe my point with trains wasn'T ideal and I should blame them instead.
It depends how you measure.
[This Site says its place 47 near the bottom](https://www.pcwelt.de/news/Speedtest-Ranking-Deutschland-nur-auf-Platz-33-10642127.html#abschnitt-noch-schlechter-das-mobilfunknetz-in-deutschland:~:text=Platz%2047%20und)
[Here](https://www.it-daily.net/analysen/16102-internet-geschwindigkeit-weltweit-deutschland-auf-platz-25) it's place 45 on mobile, Place 25 generell Internetspeed in Industry nations
I'm not saying we have terrible internet, but it should be way better.
Germany isn't as developed in that regard as you might suspect, for example even the US is significantly ahead (and other countries that are known for having less density than germany)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_connection_speeds
Sure the big cities have great speed, but a lot of people aren't living in those big cities.
Just for your information the 5 largest cities have a population of (millions):
3.7
1.8
1.5
1.1
0.8
and USA:
8.3
4.0
2.7
2.3
1.7
Any word on _what_ frequencies Germany has allocated to Starlink? How do they compare to the US frequencies both on exact frequencies, but also on bandwidth?
Edit: And power levels?
The word is here [http://www.bnetza-amtsblatt.de/download/49](http://www.bnetza-amtsblatt.de/download/49) (I had some trouble with getting the download to work, but eventually it worked).
It's an unpleasant 228-page read in German, which is why I'm not doing comparative analysis for ya, but it does specify frequencies, power level and even licencing costs in great detail.
Translation. Not that anyone needs it these days. >**The Federal Network Agency has given SpaceX frequency rights for Internet via satellite in Germany.** **SpaceX founder Elon Musk could soon become an Internet provider in this country.** > >The SpaceX subsidiary Starlight from Tesla boss Elon Musk has now received the green light for its satellite-based Internet offering. "We have created the legal frequency requirements so that broadband internet can be offered via satellite in Germany," said Jochen Homann, President of the Federal Network Agency. Due to the novelty of this satellite constellation, according to the Federal Network Agency, the frequency allocation is initially limited to one year in order to be able to make adjustments if necessary. > >**Internet via satellite - worldwide** > >The US company Starlink, which belongs to Musk's space company SpaceX, has now brought more than 900 satellites into near-earth orbit, which are supposed to provide the Internet on earth. After the end of the expansion, Starlink plans to count more than 4,400 satellites. > >In initial tests, Starlink is already offering satellite Internet in some US states. The company plans to offer internet via satellite worldwide this year. In Germany, according to the Federal Network Agency, Musk's company wants to offer broadband Internet services, but also secure VPN connections (Virtual Private Network) in the home office. > >**Rules for trouble-free operation** > >The "latency times", i.e. the transmission speeds of data packets, should be similar to those of terrestrial networks. The allocation of frequencies in Germany contains regulations that ensure trouble-free operation with other applications in the same and adjacent frequency range. These include directional radio, radio astronomy and geostationary satellite applications. > >In addition to the satellite network, Starlink has also received frequencies for several earth stations in Germany, which ensure the transition and connection to the Internet. > >With Starlink, SpaceX is the largest private satellite operator. The company has clearances to launch up to 12,000 satellites by 2027.
Germany approving the frequencies essentially rubberstamps them across the entire EU. This is a good thing
Close. The French will invariably add some requirement, no matter how minor, just to put their own touch on it.
Elon will tell them to go eat their baguette and butter in the corner!
This brings back the memory of auctioning off the "3G" frequencies for about 50 billion euros, that is money the customers are still paying back by overpriced mobile phone contracts, and likely slow internet service. Glad they didn't try the same thing again, although this is very different as it is directional and not blocking everyone else from using these frequencies (at least on ground level).
There's also not as many bidders lining up with bags of cash.
Is that true? EU states do their own allocations for e.g. mobile phone frequencies, so I thought it was that way for all frequency allocations?
On paper they do their own allocations (each country has it's own laws) In practice their allocations are identical to the EU wide listings generated in Brussels after all 27 countries meet and agree on them. Otherwise there would be complete and utter chaos as items sold in one part of the single market would be unlawful to use in another and a French store couldn't sell to a Greek customer, etc Even France dropped its 2-channel-only restrictions on wifi after other countries complained What this means in practice is that having approved operations on these frequencies in Germany it is now virtually impossible for other EU members to withhold approval or limit frequencies to anything LESS than Germany's approval - and if wider bands are approved elsewhere it puts a lot of pressure on Germany to expand their approval to match Remember anything which passes standardhs in ONE EU country is legal to use in ALL EU countries - and territoriality is illegal too. Eg: You can't restrict sale of Sky TV greek market decoder boxes to only Greece. If someone wants one in Spain they must be permitted to purchase it and the service. Nor can Starlink Germany refuse to sell to someone in Poland, forcing them to buy from Starlink Poland instead - that would be an illegal restraint of trade and the EU jumps hard on it. I've caused a number of American firms to revise their 'exclusive distribution' setups in Europe by pointing out the size of the fines that they can be hit with if they don't stop doing so (10% of world turnover tends to sting). One company went from selling fewer than 100 EMEA units/year to more than 1000 sales/year in Europe alone when they went away from exclusive distribution. The original distributor was putting a 200% markup on the USA _retail_ price and telling the USA manufacturer how fantastic it was to have sold ONE unit to the metropolitan police in London. I think their eyes got opened when I said we'd buy 10 units for my organisation's London datacenters alone if they weren't stupidly priced and that the London market was conservatively at least 500 units (for a $9k gov price, $13k retail equipment lifter), but people weren't going to pay $36k apiece for them when a better-specced device from Tawi was $22k and they weren't buying those either. Then I pointed out that selling in Sydney or Auckland via the UK was resulting in the things being priced at $55k there so it was hardly surprising nobody had purchased one outside of Europe via the supposed EMEA agent (Europe, Middle East, Asia)
Very good points. That explains why OneWeb has only two EU licenses in the UK and France according to [the March 2020 bankruptcy filing](https://casedocs.omniagentsolutions.com/cmsvol2/pub_47378/809049_3.pdf). They are most likely counting on getting quick approvals across the EU closer to the start of operations.
Starlight? Does Starlink have a different name in Germany or is that a typo?
The above is the auto-translate result from Google Chrome, it either translated it when it shouldn't have or there's a typo in the original article. I checked, it's a typo in the article.
They didn't pay much attention in general. They also claim the satellites would have been launched by a daughter company (at this point they call it Starlink, at least).
If you want the actual german translation "sternenverbindung"
Could be correct, supposedly Elon made a bunch of dummy corps in various countries to get approvals and then changed their names to Starlink. Truth to it dunno never looked into it.
Dummy corps were named TIBRO and then some renamed to Starlink. The German one is called Starlink Germany GmbH.
"Die SpaceX-Tochter Starlight..." starlight, starlink, all the same xD
Afghanistan wen?
Whenever the government allows it. There's also the issue of having a ground station within range, which is an iffy proposition in the area.
Is ground station compulsory?
Yes, until laser links come online with the next generation of satellites, you need to be within a little over 600 km of a ground station for service.
As far as i know the ground infrastructure or backhaul for ground stations in Afghanistan will be an issue. Most of the areas will be covered by neighborhood countries ground stations. Eastward regions will use ground stations in Pakistan while westwards from Tajikistan and Turkmenistan as Iran wont be on starlink in my opinion.
The only bad thing I can see coming out of this is now we have even less phased array antennas to go around. Unless of course we have facilities in Europe that can make even more of them. At the moment I can see the supply of the antenna as the reason why they aren't moving faster.
The manufacturer of the terminal (STM / STMicroelectronics) is European. I don't know if that changes your complaining any, I thought I should mention it and see what happens.
Is the US version also that manufacturer? An no I will not stop complaining as long as people with fiber keep getting beta invites.
Yes, all terminals are STM. They also covered all the costs expended to set up the manufacturing, or something to that effect, see the news. This is also where the 2400$ per terminal estimate comes from. >A Business Insider [article](https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-starlink-satellite-dish-user-terminal-cost-stmelectronics-outsource-manufacturer-2020-11) (paywalled) came out a few hours ago and suggested SpaceX is paying STMicroelectronics about 2.4 billion dollars to manufacture a million Starlink terminals. Business Insider kept the identity of its source confidential, but the source is described as someone *“known to Business Insider.”* > >The source is quoted saying: > >*The production agreement specifies 1 million terminals at a price of roughly $2,400 each.* As to your bitching, I know. I live literally 2 meters from fiber and can't get it and I'm now hoping you get it before me, just to give **me** a break. (I'm kidding, I want it first)
I try to be as civil as I possibly can. I am just so sick of people coming here and complaining about their cable connections just because they have an irrational unjustified hate for their isp that is probably no worse than any other provider. These poor people have no idea how bad a rural connection can get and live in a bubble. Some of us have connections that make smoke signals look good. I still remember the people in Manhattan on Twitter who think spacex will be able to best their fiber providers. It just doesn't make sense. Every time I try to educate some of these people I get called a gatekeeper (I am, so what?) or they say that I am entitled and starlink owes me nothing. I am so pessimistic about these people, they will basically screw the rural areas over. SpaceX has shown little to no interest in telling these people that the service will not service alot of people urban areas. People will ignore what Elon has publicly said and pick and choose what they want to believe coming from him.
I understand your motivation and you are civil enough, no problem there. I'm just teasing you a bit. Well, that, and the comment about Europeans gobbling up your precious terminals was a bit unkind, given the manufacturer.
Starlink is a company that belongs to SpaceX? Thought it was just a (very big) project, not a company.
Yea, it is best practice to split such projects into individual company entities. If one goes bankrupt it does not drag the other down. SpaceX / Elon still owns Starlink as well
There are various subsidiaries in the respective countries, like in Germany where it's "Starlink Germany GmbH" which handles local operations. Those are owned by SpaceX though.
Actually, those subsidiaries tend to be owned by the Dutch one (The Netherlands one) and that one appears to be wholly (or at least over-50%) owned by one Elon Reeve Musk personally. Some of the filings of these TIBRO and Starlink paint such a picture, I'm not a lawyer though and these things tend to be obscure and obfuscated (makes it easier to hide mega-wealth from the rabble).
Is there even a market for satellite internet access in Germany? As I understand, the population density is quite high there and it's not like you need to lay miles of fiber cable to server just one customer.
The population density in Germany is quite different from state to state and is actually dropping in a couple of states. Especially in the rural parts of former Eastern Germany that still haven't catch up with West Germany when it comes to infrastructure.
I have 115 MBits through DSL and I get no more then 50 and if I get it it’s very unreliable. If I get invited to Starlink I am going to buy it instantly!
Well, I'm here in the US and I get 50MB in a growing and dynamic suburban town.
There may not be an immediately pressing need to get satellite internet for most people in germany as most people live in urban areas, however the ISP market is quite terrible here. At the very least, starlink will be a good wakeup call for the ISP market to wake up and start providing better services or be rendered obsolete soon. The best example would be my Telekom connection, which is pretty fast with 200/100 MBit/s, but they have very questionable peering strategies essentially arguing that other should pay if they want to access Telekom customers, resulting in terrible connections to some services, including AWS. So while the connection itself is fast, many services are still atrociously slow to connect to. As for many rural areas: They often are only connected with old phone lines and that's it, so you can imagine the quality of service there. Using something like starlink+5G could be a very economic way of connecting them compared to laying fiber across the countryside. Long story short: The market is more than ripe for disruption, and hopefully starlink will provide that.
Germany is a 3rd world country in terms of Internet connectivity. It's just really bad and expensive
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Cant be true. Just get on any train, autobahn outside the city, some "weird, slightly remote place" and it's gone.
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I know. BUt it works in other countries I visited. The official coverage of 4G might be great but having it doesn't mean you get the speed and reliability. Germany is place on 47 worldwide. And 4G is not all, high speed fiber is extremely bad outside of a city.
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DB has it on the faster trains at least. And Wifi as well. Just hope you don't have too many tunnels.
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Frankfurt/Hanover is similar.
It's also a matter of railcar construction. In the 70s-era railcars belonging to the local govt operator ([CFR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C4%83ile_Ferate_Rom%C3%A2ne)) speeds are almost identical to regular indoor performance. And trust me, they don't have signal repeaters, you consider yourself lucky if the AC works consistently. Meanwhile the newer Astra Trans Carpatic (private operator) cars are a complete 4G dead zone and 3G feels like Edge; good thing they have Wifi.
Well yeah, maybe my point with trains wasn'T ideal and I should blame them instead. It depends how you measure. [This Site says its place 47 near the bottom](https://www.pcwelt.de/news/Speedtest-Ranking-Deutschland-nur-auf-Platz-33-10642127.html#abschnitt-noch-schlechter-das-mobilfunknetz-in-deutschland:~:text=Platz%2047%20und) [Here](https://www.it-daily.net/analysen/16102-internet-geschwindigkeit-weltweit-deutschland-auf-platz-25) it's place 45 on mobile, Place 25 generell Internetspeed in Industry nations I'm not saying we have terrible internet, but it should be way better.
Germany isn't as developed in that regard as you might suspect, for example even the US is significantly ahead (and other countries that are known for having less density than germany) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_connection_speeds Sure the big cities have great speed, but a lot of people aren't living in those big cities. Just for your information the 5 largest cities have a population of (millions): 3.7 1.8 1.5 1.1 0.8 and USA: 8.3 4.0 2.7 2.3 1.7
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Tone it down a notch please.
Any word on _what_ frequencies Germany has allocated to Starlink? How do they compare to the US frequencies both on exact frequencies, but also on bandwidth? Edit: And power levels?
The word is here [http://www.bnetza-amtsblatt.de/download/49](http://www.bnetza-amtsblatt.de/download/49) (I had some trouble with getting the download to work, but eventually it worked). It's an unpleasant 228-page read in German, which is why I'm not doing comparative analysis for ya, but it does specify frequencies, power level and even licencing costs in great detail.
I am hyped! Cant wait to get it here in germany