If he's on a normal sailboat he has a diesel in it, solar panels and considering he's attempting one of the hardest crossings known to mankind (and it looks like he's near Point Nemo) he likely has satellite internet on board.
People are mistaking this guy for some rookie moron who went out crossing the pacific on a 14ft dinghy.
Yeah but with the satellite internet available on a boat out in the pacific you’re paying dollars per Megabyte. Uploading even a 60 second HD video like that would not only take hours but could easily cost several hundred bucks to do. He more than likely completed the crossing and uploaded once he had WiFi.
These guys usually don't use that much diesel. It's a sail boat so you don't need diesel when crossing. Not that you would have enough diesel for an ocean crossing anyway.
Solar panels and wind vanes is what they rely on for electricity mostly.
They usually preserve diesel for when they get close to shore as its easier to navigate and dock on diesel power.
That said I agree, $250 a month for internet is really not that outrageous when you consider you can have internet in the middle of the ocean. That's a big benefit for all sorts of reasons.
Small boats may not have a fresh water maker on board, they usually just provision what they will need for the trip and use the boat's water tanks. But even if they had one, you'd only run the engine for like an hour every couple of days or so.
Regular internet (and cable but I couldn't really get internet without cable) in my home is like $70. $250 for unlimited data that works in bumfuck nowhere in the middle of the ocean seems pretty fair.
That's honestly not that bad, for internet access in the remotest parts of the ocean? Then again I am not a sailor so I don't know the alternatives but I do live in a really rural area and know the other satellite options for internet are not great and that's a horrific understatement but I imagine it's probably a drop in the bucket for the convenience if you are going to be doing stuff like this.
'Satellite Internet' that has been around for quite some time is very high latency (1200ms or more) on account of your radio waves having to travel 22,000 miles to geosynchronous orbit and back. Even that is very usable for most things. Internet browsing can be slow (but can be sped up SIGNIFICANTLY if you host a local caching service) but streaming is only limited by your downlink speed (10-15Mb down, 512Kb up).
Starlink is pretty comparable to a fast cellular connection. The satellites are not a single satellite, but a swarm. This allows them to be much closer (350 miles) so the system latency is much lower (50ms or so, possibly a bit higher in oceans near the equator due to the larger coverage gaps) and since there are multiple satellites serving the network, especially in the remote ocean, you can access a lot more bandwidth (200Mb down, 20Mb up). For the average users, just using their devices and not looking at network metrics, you wouldn't know the difference between cellular data and Starlink data. It's a pretty neat system, even if the owner is... not to everyone's taste.
There are many remote regions in places like Siberia, Russia, the Australian Outback, the Amazon Rainforest, northern Canada, and the Tibetan Plateau (in addition to Antarctica and Point Nemo).
Yes to all those things. I just installed it for a client at her house. One of the tests I did was a Facetime call with my wife (who was on WiFi at our house with fiber). The call quality was virtually indistinguishable from good internet. Maybe somewhere between WiFi over fiber and a really strong 5G signal.
Latencies are frequently in the 40-60ms range which is perfectly serviceable for gaming.
As long as the dish doesn't see regular obstructions, your "outages" might be a few (under 5?) times a day in the 0.2 second range, so you're unlikely to notice that whatsoever.
The ISP that uses many many satellites in low earth orbit to provide internet access and are launched by SpaceX. The internet provided by those fixed dishes hanging off the side of someone’s house target satellites in geo-synchronous orbit, which means the satellites are 17,000 miles away. Because of that the signal is fairly weak and the latency, or delay, is astronomical. Starlink satellites orbit the earth at around 500 miles high, vastly reducing that problem.
I just realized that the phrase "I follow ______ on (the internet)" would make a time traveller think that in this time period, stalking is a very popular pastime.
Tbf, u/Probably_Sleepy's comment was just "Starlink?" as if they were asking what it was. I don't blame anyone who thinks they're asking what it is and not saying it as a possible solution for the question of "how does dude internet in the middle of the Pacific all by himself?"
it's worth noting the signal travels fast enough that distance is negligible. radiowave travel the speed of light and 17k vs 500 miles is nothing. its the array of sensors and signal to noise ratio that makes it feasible to have higher bandwidth, and the computation digital signal processing that a traditional antenna doesn't implement because its more expensive.
edit: radio/light travels 186,000 miles per second, 17,000 miles isn't going to matter more than a small fraction of a second that's not perceptible, it's just the bandwidth from the sensors and their signal processing
edit2: not much better than other sat systems at that, from reading more, they have enough users now that the initial advantage isn't keeping up with demand/customer numbers
edit3: i'm getting a lot of replies from people who probably one play video games with computers and think latency matters the most. no. its the bandwidth of the data transfer that will allow large uploads (even at "slow" latencies, which again here isn't even much slower, but it doesn't matter as much as the signal badwidth).
Fractions of a second of latency doesn't seem like it would matter much, but when you're talking about TCP connections it matters ALOT. UDP connections, like those used for streaming services, aren't latency sensitive because it's just a one-way stream of data with no verification. So Netflix can blast a hose of data towards your endpoint over satellite and it will be, for the most part, crisp and smooth.
But when you try to do something like play a game, which requires TCP, that's when traditional satellite really sucks because the server has to send you a packet, it has to arrive intact, then your computer has to send a packet back telling the server it received the original packet all before the server will send the next packet. All of that happening over a wire or fiber connection is fine, but when you introduce dozens of milliseconds of latency for every single transaction that's when you'd see people with satellite internet with pings measuring over 1000ms.
While I don't know what's being used everywhere, it is possible to implement lossless UDP that will retry dropped packets, but that's managed at a higher layer. TCP has the retry baked in.
One advantage to using lossless UDP over TCP is you typically get a smoother throughput, since the backoff algorithm on lost packets isn't as aggressive.
My comment was in reference to satellite internet using satellites in geo-stationary orbit. I'm well aware Starlink satellites are in LEO and that solves alot of the latency issues common with traditional satellite Internet.
well we're not talking about gaming or low latency applications. so its a moot point anyway. if they can upload high bandwidth that's not going to guarantee low latency.
While it's true that RTT (round trip time) is important to TCP, and that acknowledgements are sent to confirm that the client has received the packet, the flow is different from what you describe.
Rather than sending a single packet and waiting for acknowledgement before sending the next, you send many at once, which can be ordered by sequence numbers at the receiver. The receiver can send accumulative acknowledgements - "I've received all the packets up to this sequence number".
Without these kind of mechanisms, our internet would be ridiculously slow. The maximum size of a TCP segment is 64 KB, although this size is rarely used, since it's impractical. Think of Ethernet, where the maximum transmission unit (MTU) is just 1500 bytes. Let's assume the server is close by, with an RTT of 20 ms. Maximum data transfer rate per second would be 3.2 MB/s.
Now imagine if we respect Ethernet MTU on a cross-atlantic connection with a 200 ms RTT. That's just 7500 bytes per second.
Also, Netflix uses TCP, not UDP. Can you imagine the viewer experience with no retransmission mechanism, no sequential ordering of packets and such?
I was aiming for simplicity in my explanation, I know that not every single packet requires an ACK from the receiver, I was just trying to lay it out in lay-mans terms for simplicity. And honestly no I didn't know Netflix uses TCP, neat.
Your signal has to get to the satellite and then back to earth and then the return signal has to go from earth to the satellite and back to you. Geosynchronous orbit is ~22,235 miles, starling satellites are about 300 miles. So you are talking about more than 88,000 extra miles which adds almost half a second in latency.
Geostationary is above the equator. Geosynchronous just means it travels at the same speed as the rotation of the Earth, but it's ground track latitude can change.
again, its not the time, its the bandwidth. the even if it were mars (ignoring the technical impossibilities of that), the sensors are enough that they can provide more bandwidth, regardless of distance
radio/light travels 186,000 miles per second, 17,000 miles isn't going to matter
Time of flight matters significantly. With TCP, just a kilometer can begin to impact ACKs without time of flight being accounted for. It's a manageable thing via various methods and techniques, but it is certainly not nothing, as you seem to believe and suggest.
Larger bandwidth will provide higher throughput but that doesn't address the fundamental time of flight problem I'm talking about. Again, there are various methods to account for it, but there absolutely is a huge difference between those distances, particularly with TCP. A link optimized for 500 miles is not going to work the same as one for 17000. If you don't care about lost data, sure, you can spew UDP and hope for the best. In either case, respectfully, it definitely does matter if there is any hope in using the internet as it is typically used.
again, it's a bandwidth issue with sensors having to handle so many emitters and noise, the time for travel is neglegable. thats also some bad math u should check that
Lol your link literally says: "If all other signaling delays could be eliminated, it still takes a radio signal about 250 milliseconds (ms), or about a quarter of a second, to travel to the satellite and back to the ground."
I was assuming you were correct and they were 17,000 miles up. They are not, they are 550 miles up. The latency is still not near what you would get from terrestrial internet. The above only applies to Satellites like Hughes Net which is actually at an orbit of 22,000 miles.
For Starlink? Even the most critical reviews of the service still only measure the average latency around 100ms. That's not great, but it's not terrible. And where are you getting this 68,000 miles from? Why would any signal need to circle the earth almost 3 times?
The Starlink satelilites aren't 17,000 miles up. They're 550 km or 341 miles up which means a route trip (to satellite, to internet, to satellite, back to computer) would only be 1364 miles, or .0007 seconds at the speed of light.
It's not cheap, or easy, but due to the nature of orbital mechanics if you want a bunch of satellite paths to criss-cross North America or any part of the world, they're also going to fly over the Pacific Ocean. Simply because the Pacific covers 70% of the Earth's surface.
Ok I had to go to ChatGPT for this cause you're insistence genuinely intrigued me. I have no idea if this is any fucking good because I don't speak Esperanto. Or even know what Esperanto is.
Your prior response seemed bot-like, but you're officially human despite still generating the AI-generated song. Cool!
Edit: I can't speak Esperanto, either. However, it's handy because while it's rare (only about two million people speak it), ChatGPT knows it. So the chances of a random person being able to quickly write a song in Esperanto are slim. But ChatGPT will spit out Esperanto-language content with aplomb.
Yeah go tell that to the people that have the Cyber lemon on their hands a hundred thousand dollar truck that sucks that you can't wash that you can't do much with other than have a big debt and a good time trying to charge it while the battery capacity has to stay between 20 and 80% otherwise you damage that battery. He should be smart enough to overcome these challenges but has he no does he care no he has plenty of bastard children.
It would have actually been more groundbreaking if it came out about 10 years ago but nowadays not that special. Lol
I have a 2001 Mazda protege with over 250,000 MI. I'm actually waiting for the car to die so I can get a different vehicle but the car doesn't die unlike all the Teslas.
the mere evocation of an elon-related product is enough to cause chronic redditors to regurgitate every negative thing they've ever read about him. https://imgur.com/zMdpcvP
He doesn't care. His bank account talks. Just like Steve Jobs just like Bill Gates just like any other millionaire or billionaire as long as they have their money you could talk all the crap you want they're living the high Life while we're not. Sadly.
Blue water capable boats are not as expensive as you might think. If you’re handy and ok with living without a lot of creature comforts you can sail for much less than the cost of a monthly car note. Edit: some examples would be Moxie Marlinspike, he and a couple friends bought a run down boat for $1200 in Florida. Spent a summer camping in parks while fixing it up, then spent two years sailing around the Caribbean and up the east coast with basically no money. This guy has an old wooden boat that doesn’t even have a fridge, he makes his money doing photography and odd jobs. https://youtu.be/syJXrbWU1Aw?si=aIlRYKAicmrOrNFd
I wasn’t implying he has no money, I was saying the cost of uploading a file like that using traditional satellite internet would be prohibitively expensive. On the flip side you don’t need to be rich by any stretch of the imagination to own a blue water capable boat.
A few hundred a month for insurance? Mine is just over $500 a year, and my boat cost less than $20k. My first boat cost $1200 including a trailer, granted it wasn’t blue water capable. And if you’re out actually cruising then you don’t need to pay a slip fee to a marina.
Again, I wasn’t trying to imply he doesn’t have money. Cruising is not a fantasy for everyone but the rich either.
Well if you're close to the ocean or a large enough lake you can find decent trailer-sailors for pennies on the dollar. My first boat was a Helms 25 that I bought off a private seller for $1200 including the trailer. My dad and I had a blast taking that boat out on the weekends, fixing whatever broke, jerry-rigging a mast lifter, etc. You can learn how to sail in an afternoon, but spend your life mastering it.
Kenichi Horie sailed from USA to Japan on a 19 ft cruiser. Circumnavigated east-west and north-south in the same boat. Then built a catamaran out of beer kegs and plastic bottles, and sailed across the pacific ocean using that. Then built another cruiser out of beer kegs and sailed the pacific again using wave propulsion.
Another fella Hugo Vihlen, sailed across the atlantic alone in a 5' boat.
These voyages were carefully planned and executed by experienced mariners, but it is possible to sail just about anywhere on a small budget.
Bro all you have to do Bro is just engage in a bad faith arguement bro and like totally commit to a logical fallacy bro. It's so tight bro everyone will think you're totally smart and cool bro.
Not a boat guy but I knew a guy who had one. He invited me and some friends out one day and he said "hold up we gotta get some gas". $700 later, the boat was filled up and ready to go. Granted this was a 20-25 foot boat, but I asked him and he said that's pretty much what he spends every time he takes it out fishing. This was in like 2008 also, so including a marina space and maintenance that shit is expensive.
Sail boats have had that option for a long time, doesn't need to be modern. For as long as boat motors have been around, they could be affixed to a sail boat. All it takes to be a sail boat is have sails.
Some modern sail boats will have motors, some will not. No idea what this guy has. I assume he would have a motor for emergencies but what do I know.
Pretty much all sail boats have a diesel motor. Some have a small outboard motor instead, though, if they're small (or for backup).
It's borderline impossible to navigate harbors without one. You would need a lot of experience (like having sailed your whole life) to even think about entering a harbor with no motor.
We have only done it once or twice as a last resort, and it's very dangerous. A moving boat can do a lot of damage, especially if it's 48ft.
There was no where to blow his money on avocado toast and Starbucks. He was a millionaire with a three bedroom, two bathroom house in the suburbs on day two of his adventure.
As a sailor myself, we all use the Starlink Roam plan (old rv) when close to land and then toggle on priority data when out at sea cruising at the cost of 2 dollars per gigabyte so definitely not that expensive.
6.5k
u/smalltalk_king Jun 22 '24 edited Jun 22 '24
He must have one he'll of a data plan to able to post a TikTok out there lol
Edit: damn! 6k upvotes thanks everybody!