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Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

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Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#341

Post by samus »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #142
scubbo wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People can't afford to live in cities? Well, they should simply choose to live elsewhere. People choose to live outside cities, but want access to basic utilities of modern life? Well, fuck 'em.

Small towns exist, and ones far away from major metro areas are usually quite affordable. Small towns are or can be made to be efficient in terms of basic infrastructure/services, whereas truly rural areas where everyone is very spread out, it's somewhere between difficult and impossible to do that.

Small town are usually quite affordable because they offer fewer high-paying jobs. Remote work is by far not yet common enough.

Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#342

Post by samus »

jjmarr wrote: post #179
iknowstuff wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in the United States can choose to live in very rural and sparsely populated areas, far more remote than most OECD countries. It’s not clear to me that we should necessarily massively subsidize their choice to live in the sticks these days. Starlink and 5G are great for this, as is solar energy and batteries. We already subsidize sprawl’s expensive-per-person infrastructure with tax revenue from dense cities.…

Countries subsidize rural living because it enforces their control over the frontier. The United States is difficult to invade because of the oceans surrounding it and the many people with guns in the interior that'll take shots at armies. If you put everyone in a few cities on the coast, the USA becomes easier to invade.

Quite the contrary: an empty countryside would make invasions harder because there would be no infrastructure: no roads, no bridges, no tunnels, no electricity, no water supply, no opportunities for shelter. Everything would have to be shipped from outside or built by combat engineers, putting an immense strain on logistics and slowing operations to a crawl.

Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#343

Post by robrain »

sunshinekitty wrote: post #211
modeless wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have it exactly backwards. It is far less complex and expensive and resource intensive to build Starlink than to run a new copper or fiber line with associated telecom equipment on both sides to every rural residence in the US, let alone worldwide. Yes, despite the large cost of launching satellites. And it's especially good that we don't have to force everyone to subsidize inefficient monopoly utilities with our…

The HN groupthink is to hate on anything Elon adjacent, satellite internet included.

And yet this discussion seems to be driven by a load of TSLA maximalists.

Elon is a busted flush. He promises the world, delivers somewhat less, somewhat late, if at all. And then layers it with deeply unpleasant politics.

Not groupthink, a sane reaction. Belated, but sane.

Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#344

Post by libria »

martin_ wrote: post #297

I built something similar[0] a while back, Stardrift looks 100x better - nice work! [0] unitedstarlinktracker.com

This is the 1st link posted in /r/unitedairlines anytime someone mentions "starlink". One use-case better covered by https://unitedstarlinktracker.com/ is the upfront log that shows a quick swath of airports that might receive and depart starlink equipped planes. I can CTRL-F -> "RDU" and know immediately my chance of checking this out (not much).

Would it be hard to produce a pie chart showing top 10 airports with most starlink planes arriving/departing?

Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#345

Post by buckle8017 »

modo_mario wrote: post #337
modeless wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have it exactly backwards. It is far less complex and expensive and resource intensive to build Starlink than to run a new copper or fiber line with associated telecom equipment on both sides to every rural residence in the US, let alone worldwide. Yes, despite the large cost of launching satellites. And it's especially good that we don't have to force everyone to subsidize inefficient monopoly utilities with our…

Isn't this even more of a monopoly utility? In theory you could have multiple providers but it just doesn't happen much due to market dynamics and incentives. In this case if I understood it well there's a limit to the amount of satellites we can send into space at those heights and that space is essentially privatized for free uncontested and ESA and China's CNSA already complained about near collision events. So no…

ESA and CNSA were always going to complain, real problems or not.

Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#346

Post by buckle8017 »

devin wrote: post #126

I've written it elsewhere, but: it is such a shame that the United States saw fit to run electricity _everywhere_, no matter how rural your location, but instead of do the same for rural internet we had to wait for... a private company to launch a global network of satellites. Yes, this post is about internet access while traveling 500mph, which is a different problem, but it is so messed up that people fall over the…

Matter of fact the feds have been spending billions of dollars onbrural internet projects for decades.

Those have just resulted in ya know... almost nothing.

Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#348

Post by philipwhiuk »

ValentineC wrote: post #291

As someone who's really not a fan of fElon (he made Twitter steal my OG username), it's nice to see people misuse the Starlink term, and I hope it would eventually be genericised [1]. ;) The proper term should be Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites, and there are other providers like Amazon [2] and Panasonic Avionics [3] that I hope other airlines would do business with. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_tradema…

But this isn't genericising it. It's specifically for Starlink.

Neither Panasonic nor Amazon Leo (yuck) are operational.

Eutelsat OneWeb is.

Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#349

Post by lavezzi »

Hansenq wrote: post #10

I've definitely thought about substituting a nonstop flight for a 1-stop flight on UA regional jets just to get Starlink on the entire route. The annoying this is I live by a UA hub and UA doesn't fly regional planes between UA hubs. So the best I've been able to do is a regional flight to a UA hub near me, and then a non-regional flight back to my home airport. Which is honestly probably not worth it. And it's defin…

Interesting, because I’d choose not to fly with an entire carrier because they have chosen to implement Starlink and support a Nazi pedophile, but horses for courses.

Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#350

Post by vablings »

ale42 wrote: post #332
JonChesterfield wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

_Lots_ of traffic. It's going to end up being the global Internet backbone.

Internet traffic today is estimated to be a few tens of exabytes per day. Even if you assume 100000 Starlink satellites (we're far from that), each satellite would have to handle hundreds of terabytes per day. That's tens of gigabits per second per satellite, assuming traffic is split evenly among them (will never happen in real situations).

Starlink V3 can pump out some seriously impressive speeds and handle thousands of clients. Starlink is both a great leap forward in rocketry and radio technology. I do still think funny how we are going back to the pre war technology tree for a re-visit
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