 We got a Starlink beta kit. That's right, internet from the stars, baby. Pew, pew, pew, pew, pew. 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 line as tech tips. So obviously we are 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 bulged down and use offer code Linus to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping. 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 US 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. SpaceX 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? A hundred bucks a month with no data cap. No data cap? No data cap. It's pricey. 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 gotta protect your noggin with an LTT beanie, lttstore.com. Next. Oh, there 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 slash 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 2C 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 wanna 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. Call and set up 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. That wasn't bad. Like, we're not just talking text webpages here. We're talking like, look at these pictures loading in. This is rich, rich multimedia. I mean, it's something, it's something. That's freaking cool. I wanna send a tweet. Let's see how long it takes me to send a tweet. Okay, so we can also connect to it because it's got like a wifi hotspot. I can also connect to it with my phone. LTT Starbanger, really? Does that even mean like the Witcher in space? Like, I know what it means. Stop gesturing. I'm sending a tweet. Okay, 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. YouTube.com. Okay. Okay, there's a lot of thumbnails. Not bad. Now that's a little slower than 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's handsome. Nice beard. Nice toot. LTT store, you know? Wow, that ad. And you ever notice ads load a 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'm at 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 mixed CDs for people. I was the cool kid, just kidding about that last part, but everything else up until then was true. Can I put their whole pole as a drop? Yeah, no pole, no drop. And well, that's essentially what the price of the kid is. That's your pole drop. Now, I mean, I gotta push it. I wanna push it. I don't wanna just watch one Linus Tech Tips video. I wanna have the whole Linus Tech Tips experience, you know? One Linus Tech Tips. Ah, ah, ah. Two Linus Tech Tips. Ah, ah, ah. Come on, more Linus Tech Tips. Why is it recommending me anything other than Linus Tech Tips? All right, iJustine. We'll watch iJustine collab with Linus Tech Tips. Big Linus Tech Tips fan, you know? Okay, let's do some scrubbing. Scrub, because we ain't no scrub, but we gotta 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, that 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. Look, wait. Okay, we're not saying it's gonna be like perfect or anything. We actually like, do not have a connection. Hold on a sec. Got a cloud up there. All right, that doesn't happen. Yeah, no, no, that's not actually the thing. You might say we've got cloud strife. If you do run into trouble, and powering it off and powering 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, SpaceX 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. 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 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 leg 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 communication. 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 Sats 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 Leo Labs. 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, so. This is not designed to be disassembled. This clip of Ken Keter's teardown is going to have to do. Check his video out, by the way. We're gonna have it linked below if you wanna 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 antenna 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 gains. I have a simple goal. I wanna get one headshot from space in CSGO. All right, and I'm not gonna settle for a bot. I wanna headshot a real player. I wanna get a headshot from space. I don't wanna watch your stupid video. Watch again? Who would do that? All right, so what's our ping? 64 milliseconds, man. I love how rock solid this ping is. Like, when I was a kid, I would have killed to game at 64 milliseconds. And consistency of ping is in some ways more important to the experience than the actual ping number. Oh, I'm dead. Oh, hi, 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? Oh, hi. Come on, show me your head. No! Damn it! Okay, I'm only gonna try one more time. One more time, I'll try for headshot. 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. This is 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, 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 you need to manage your books, including invoicing, expenses, time tracking, and more. And with its built-in automation, you'll spend less time doing all those things and more time doing what matters most, growing your business. With FreshBooks, whether you're a tradesperson, 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 slash 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 dream hack land over in Europe. It's pretty sweet.