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Starlink Is a Big Deal

sneak.berlin

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Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#281

Post by iso947 »

pmontra wrote: post #273

> SpaceX will be pressured by the governments in the jurisdictions where their staff reside (where their physical threats of enforcement can be carried out) to selectively censor/blackout or otherwise wiretap use of the system, It's easier than that. To provide a low latency service satellites can't just forward the signal to other satellites and beam it down to a base station on the other side of the planet and back…

Latency will be lower for intercontinental distances if its forwarded from satellite to satellite, as the signal propagates at light speed in a direct line rather than 2/3rds in a non direct fibre.

Inmarsat technocrat offsr broadband to North Korea, they aren’t registered there. Some countries won’t let you import a bgan, but if you do you can get access.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#282

Post by dzhiurgis »

pmontra wrote: post #273

> SpaceX will be pressured by the governments in the jurisdictions where their staff reside (where their physical threats of enforcement can be carried out) to selectively censor/blackout or otherwise wiretap use of the system, It's easier than that. To provide a low latency service satellites can't just forward the signal to other satellites and beam it down to a base station on the other side of the planet and back…

On long distances it's faster via Starlink than fiber.

Also, Starlink gonna use p2p, so perhaps your solar roof can make extra $$ by providing internet for the rest of the planet.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#283

Post by alasdair_ »

swiley wrote: post #80
fragmede wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are scant details about what the launched product will look like in practice, but keep in mind that urban and suburban areas are spoiled by high-speed 4G LTE and wired gigabit. The vast majority of the US, by land area, has to chose from dial-up and very expensive pre-Starlink satelite Internet service. Even 1 Mbit is a huge improvement over 56 kbps. I'm haven't looked into the economics of running fiber everyw…

The pre-starlink stuff isn’t just expensive. It’s slow, has crazy high latency, and low transfer caps (the biggest you can get for geosynchronous might be 20GB a month no matter how much you want to pay.) Really anything is better than what’s currently available in the rural US. Having grown up there I’m kind of mad that we give so much spectrum to cell companies who block people from setting up terrestrial radio net…

> the biggest you can get for geosynchronous might be 20GB a month no matter how much you want to pay.

Couldn’t you pay for more than one account and combine them?

Or are you saying the cap for an entire satellite is 20GB per month?

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#284

Post by dzhiurgis »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #208
apatters wrote: post #167

Is the optimism about being able to bypass censorship really valid? SpaceX may be resistant to the censorship demands of some governments, but a lot of other things need to happen to get someone online. To begin with you need to acquire Starlink's receiver, which probably makes it inaccessible to North Koreans for example, and difficult to acquire for citizens of any country that has efficient import controls. Then y…

So, I think you're mostly right, but not for these reasons. People have been sneaking forbidden things past borders for a long time. Think of the drug trade. Every country has a chemical drug trade it seems, even countries where the penalty is death such as Thailand. Then you also have to think that countries like China... Will be the countries making those Starlink receivers, so Chinese people looking to bypass the…

Phased array can sort of beam the waves towards satellite, but leaks still happen.

SpaceX would need a strategy how to import and distribute their gear if they wanna bypass censorships. Satcom existed long before them and is strictly regulated in most dictatorships (you'd be surprised how long the list is).

Sadly, such optimistic posts are probably gonna do more damage to few who's going to be beheaded by regime...

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#285

Post by alasdair_ »

DangitBobby wrote: post #240
shaklee3 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latency part is true, but the cap is not: https://www.satelliteinternet.com/resources/unlimited-satell... We can argue about whether latency matters for most people, but it's not going to go anywhere.

Whew $150/mo for 100 GB of data

That actually doesn’t seem that bad, especially for the middle of nowhere.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#286

Post by sudhirj »

Barrin92 wrote: post #110
sneak wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think California would be prosperous without connectivity? It’s not 100% of it, but it is absolutely an essential prerequisite. Slow or no internet makes places a nonstarter. Having a fallback option to a single national telco lets lots of places start the long process of building an information economy that they cannot begin at all without it.

it's a prerequisite sure I don't disagree. But it's actually funny in how many ways California is mismanaged, from lack of public transport to infrastructure to rent cost and tax burden and silly regulations and still people run there. The human network-effect is insanely substantial. If you were to do napkin math on which cities have the best internet speeds and the lowest cost of doing business, and the best regula…

The human network effect is substantial, but constantly decreasing with increasing connectivity. It’s getting easier and easier to get the same benefits online without much of the downsides.

If people can fall in love online, they can certainly collaborate without having to smell each other.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#287

Post by nickik »

aylmao wrote: post #245
jayd16 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really can't fathom the reasoning behind this much passion about astronomy tied to this much hatred of putting things in space.

I agree with the sentiment of the parent comment. Not because I have a huge passion for astronomy, but because I think we're prioritizing things in a wrong way. We're prioritizing yet another billionare's networking business over the capacity to study our night's sky. Much like other types of pollution, this is something that could stick around for hundreds of years, even after all its utility is gone. Cell towers, l…

This is such an overly dramatic way of looking at it. Even at its most extreme Starlink will not really hurt our capacity to study our night's sky.

We are talking about a extremely tiny part of the sky that will only be visible very infrequently and the position is known at all times.

This does not impact most of astronomy at all.

Cleaning up space is not a technically impossible problem. It just has not yet been done because nobody had a need for it.

The waste majority of these satellites would fall back to earth, they can not stay 100s of years even in the worst case. Those few that do actually break and are to high up to wait out, can be collected once we have the scale of launch and service infrastructure. Until that point they would be on known location and SpaceX could make sure they don't hit anything.

It seems utterly absurd to me to ignore a massive technological leap for humanity because a tiny part of it hurts research (or is assumed to possible hurt research) and the idea that there is not enough space in orbit and that is not convincing at all.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#288

Post by nickik »

coding123 wrote: post #209
dwaltrip wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't the satellites in LEO only visible for a short time after sunset?

Even if astronomy isn't affected. Can you imagine a grid/net of fast moving satellites, 80,000 satellites covering the entire globe that are visible for 2 to 3 hours every night. This is the thing that creates global suicides. Mark those words. It will happen.

You will at most see 2-3 satellites from the whole Starlink constalation and only if you take a lot of care where you look and when.

Most people will never even notice those satellites.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#289

Post by alasdair_ »

SteveGerencser wrote: post #224
midnightclubbed wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is stopping cell providers from adding more towers/capacity to that area? Are there geographic reasons or just a matter of time and economics?

Out here it is purely economics and population density. I live in West TN and the nearest cell phone tower is 7 miles in a straight line from my house. There is one provider that works here, and a good signal is 2 bards, but usually, 1 is normal and things like 4g or LTE rarely work. I offered $1/yr lease to the providers, all of them, to put a tower on my farm and not one of them is even a little interested.

> a good signal is 2 bards

Obviously you meant “bars” but I found myself wondering what kind of throughput a single Bard has, assuming they sing at maximum speed...

Assuming a single (very talented) bard can sing five words per second at maximum speed, and assuming each word is a few bytes, plus some kind of checksum occasionally, we are looking at very roughly 200 bps.

So “two bards” is about 400 bps, or far, far slower than my first modem :)

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#290

Post by nickik »

aylmao wrote: post #253
wahern wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These aren't geostationary satellites. There's no opportunity cost to selling service when flying over poorer countries. Of course, the price has to include the backhaul, and even poor countries have rich residents, but in any event it would be silly to fly over whole landmasses in silence.

> in any event it would be silly to fly over whole landmasses in silence. It wouldn't if the satellite network is operating at capacity, and therefore you can't guarantee service. Satellites communicate with one another to send information around the world. Most servers are not in developing nations— a lot of them are in the US, for example. Satellites from all over the world will all try to reach the ones that are n…

> Satellites communicate with one another to send information around the world.

Initially they wont actually do that.

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