-- coverage is literally perfect for anywhere I take my (imaginary) yacht! - south of france? check! italian riviera? check! miami? Check! LA? Check! $5k a month? In YachtLand $5/mth is pocket change --

Exactly. The customers who will buy this will add it alongside their existing Iridium setup, for faster speeds when able.

And for us actual realistic ones - a lot of anchorages around Europe have pretty decent LTE to work with. You won't be able to work while on passage anyway.

We did a month of boat touring around Italy/ex-Yugoslavia last year and mobile coverage in anchorages is very much hit or miss. Generally ok for browsing but video calls worked ok may be 30% time. Essentially you can't count that you can take work call and have decent experience. Huge inconvenience. I had a few "can't miss" calls and essentially I had to get to city 1-2 hours beforehand and then look for hotel/coffeeshop with decent wifi .

It's true that sometimes $5k is pocket change when owning a boat :(

They don't need any new development or that kind of stuff for wide coverage, just the intersatellite links, and they have launched 15 groups of them in the first 6 months of this year.

"just" the intersatellite links, which is research-level technology given the speeds, distances and precision required.

Tesla Autopot also requires "just" a few software updates.

Iridium launched with inter-satellite links in 1997.

Swapping radios out for lasers isn't that much harder, there is some difficulty in tracking/alignment but it's space - things tend to stay where you put them, with whatever momentum you left them with.

Completely different ballgame to Autopilot which basically requires advancing the field of AI by another quantum leap before it's ready.

I think they've already launched the new satellites with laser links.

They've launched satellites that have lasers, but I don't think they've actually demonstrated they have the ability to aim those lasers precisely enough to actually communicate between satellites in orbit.

Lasers require a lot of power. I doubt this is going to work.

"Lasers require a lot of power."

This statement is meaningless as written. You can emit as much or as little with a laser as you like. You could say "a lot of power is required for a reliable inter-satellite optical link", to which I would say "citation needed".

Iridium has been doing inter-satellite links since the late 90s and moving from RF to optical doesn't change the game that much.

iridium rates compared to SpaceX are not comparable and not the same technology

The data rate has very little to do with the complexity of the satellite-to-satellite links, and steering RF and optics isn't as different as you might think.

that's partially true. the data rates have a lot to do with frequency reuse, which means more complicated designs. starlink is complicated in the dynamic conditions, but the beamforming is relatively simple.

Power budgeting is basic engineering. They wouldn't install lasers on satellites if they couldn't power them.

Solid state Lasers can be very low power. Think of a tiny laser pointer, albeit with better optics. And path loss will be very low in a vacuum.

Do you think running Starlink is cheap? Something seems to have struck a nerve.

It’s only five boat units a month and ten boat units for setup. It’s no where near worth it for me because normal phone/wireless data works well where I sail (in addition to iridium network fwiw) - the prices would need to be at least an order (orders) of magnitude cheaper for me to even consider it. Not sure about parent comment though.

Boat ~~ bust out another thousand

Edit: I took parent comment as a joke but ya never know

Right. I'm going to get a go I guess for passage making. Oh well!

No. I just think that their other products and their talk around this was out of touch. They were responding to people who are average cruisers saying it was coming soon. It ended up being a joke.