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SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users

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Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users

#121

Post by legolas2412 »

hnarn wrote: post #111
tonyarkles wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...jungles of Cambodia, trekked across Myanmar, stayed in villages of central Iran, driven across the deserts North Africa. Never have I felt deprived on good connectivity, even in the deserts of Iran. That makes me even more grouchy about my current situation :D You don't have to get too far off a major highway in rural Saskatchewan to have miserable connectivity. You can generally connect to an LTE tower, but bet…

> It's just really really uneconomical to build out wireline service. Presumably these people are hooked up to the electrical grid, and if that is the case why isn't that equally uneconomical? Do they have phone lines? Having people hooked up to fiber or at least DSL is in my experience often mostly a political issue.

Yeah, I never understood this either. If electrical lines, or phone lines offering dial-ups can be laid down, and the major cost is digging, then why can ADSL or Fiber be laid down too?

Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users

#122

Post by Johnythree »

zizee wrote: post #102
ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our Wireless NBN install in rural(ish, 1 hour from a capital city) Australia went from 25mbps to 0.1-0.5mbps and has sat there for 2 years until we gave up calling them monthly to complain, and switched to a 4G booster and just tethered to our phones. Due to blatant corruption there’s zero competition for broadband here, just resellers of the same system. If Starlink can even sustain 20mbps+ and rolls out to rural Au…

> Due to blatant corruption there’s zero competition for broadband here, just resellers of the same system. Can you tell us more about this blatent corruption? Are you saying corruption has stopped multiple players entering into the highly profitable internet market of the sparsely populated rural Australia?

In 2009 a Labor government planned an Australian "National Broadband Network" (NBN) which was to serve 93% of Australians with direct fiber connections, the remainder to be covered by Wireless and Satellite.

Unfortunately in 2013 the coalition government won power and immediately set about to destroy the NBN.

It has since has been widely reported that this was at the behest of Rupert Murdoch who saw that his Cable network would be threatened by a high-speed broadband network.

Whatever, do your own research. There have been thousands of words written on this.

Here's just one: https://theqlder.com/2019/05/11/how-the-liberals-sabotaged-t...

And here's the very detailed Wikipedia version:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_National_Broadb...

Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users

#123

Post by rkangel »

seniorivn wrote: post #117
rkangel wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Exactly. We've already seen Russian authorities say that people will be arrested for using Starlink. All of a sudden, governments have lost the ability to shut off the internet without some serious jamming. I'm not sure that's the case. I believe you have to licence spectrum in the same way that you would if you were offering a terrestrial based service, and if you don't have a licence then you'd have to turn off t…

And what happens when you(the owner of satellites) don't turn it off? legally you are out of reach, so it becomes politics

All international law is effectively diplomacy (politics) that has been pre-agreed.

The current status quo (as I understand it) is that the US Gov is unlikely to allow a private company to breach international law by making unauthorised transmissions into another country. It would be a brave foreign policy decision for the US Gov to decide to permit that.

A logical response from Russia or China (or any other nation with the capability) would be to start shooting down satellites. They would have reasonable grounds to do so, and I think it very unlikely that anyone wants to start a space war.

Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users

#124

Post by [deleted] »

mschuster91 wrote: post #71
ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our Wireless NBN install in rural(ish, 1 hour from a capital city) Australia went from 25mbps to 0.1-0.5mbps and has sat there for 2 years until we gave up calling them monthly to complain, and switched to a 4G booster and just tethered to our phones. Due to blatant corruption there’s zero competition for broadband here, just resellers of the same system. If Starlink can even sustain 20mbps+ and rolls out to rural Au…

> Considering it doesn’t require any infrastructure, I can’t see how our tech-illiterate decrepit government can stop it. Just sell the modems online and ship directly worldwide. Make unlicensed operation of the dishes illegal, detect violators using an AWACS plane if detector vans are not sensitive enough to detect beams formed directly to the sky. Even if a country's government can't touch SpaceX directly, the user…

[deleted]

Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users

#125

Post by ixfo »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #108
clon wrote: post #51

As an amateur astronomer and astrophotographer, I'm biased against the massive cost of the StarLink pollution fleet to our ability to gaze at the wonders above. I think the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a much higher priority project for humanity, than StarLink. That said, I think Elon needs to travel the world a little more. Several of his attempts to solve purported world-relevant issues may be founded in limitation…

As an amateur astronomer you should be cheering for Starlink. Yes, the first Starlink satellites were horrible for light pollution, especially during orbit raising. However Starlink has taken measures to mitigate this. They've added an shade to darken the satellites and they've modified their orbit raising path to avoid reflecting as much sunlight back to earth. Starlink's goal is to be invisible to the naked eye whe…

Your shadowing comment depends heavily on location. In large portions (and heavily populated bits at that) of the world they'll be visible all night for 1/3 to 1/2 of the year.

Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users

#126

Post by Johnythree »

ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #43
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Verizon 4G first launched I had a 45mbps connection all over silicon valley. Then adoption spread and my data rates on the same device dropped to 5mbps. Loading matters!

Our Wireless NBN install in rural(ish, 1 hour from a capital city) Australia went from 25mbps to 0.1-0.5mbps and has sat there for 2 years until we gave up calling them monthly to complain, and switched to a 4G booster and just tethered to our phones. Due to blatant corruption there’s zero competition for broadband here, just resellers of the same system. If Starlink can even sustain 20mbps+ and rolls out to rural Au…

The catch is that international law prevents satellite to satellite links to bypass any country.

To be issued frequency allocations within each country, the satellite communications must be routed via multiple ground stations within that country.

Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users

#127

Post by jcims »

tuatoru wrote: post #104
jcims wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not ready yet. They don’t have enough satellites in operation yet and as a result it goes offline for short spells throughout the day. They are also estimated to be losing about $1900 per dish sold. I’m sure they want to get that number down before they really go into mass production. Lastly, there’s going to be regulatory hurdles in every country they release in.

There's a youtube of a teardown of a Starlink dish.[1] A nicely patterned printed circuit board, two servomotors, plastic housing parts and an aluminium foil back shield. There's not even an ethernet jack on the PCB, just a JST connector for the ethernet cable. First time I've seen that level of cost cutting. Those'd have to be some seriously expensive ICs on that PCB for the bill of materials to come to $1000, let a…

There's been quite a bit of chatter about a $2.4B contract with STM for 1 million terminals. Maybe that includes dev costs, I don't know.

Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users

#128

Post by Johnythree »

tpmx wrote: post #72
mrauha wrote: post #3

I'm in the (slow) process of acquiring and fitting a sailboat for living at remote places. While I acknowledge that the cheapening of satellite internet will be nice, practical, and make my plans more realizable money-wise, I'm also a bit sad on what this implies to the taking a real distance to the information overloaded society.

A practical concern with Starlink in this scenario is that the dish consumes ~100 watts. Bring 2 square meters of solar panel, an inverter and some batteries and hope for sun.

You can turn it off when not in use.

Whatever, your present PC, Monitor, printer, Router, and Internet wireless will already be using more than 100W.

Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users

#129

Post by ppf »

MrLeap wrote: post #76

A lot of these comments read kind of like the ones when dropbox did a ShowHN. "Why not just use rsync?" I suspect starlink will change the course of human history in substantial ways. It already stands to be the most positive technological development for my life since I've been living. At the very least, until the market adjusts, it will provide a verdant field of lifestyle arbitrage.

The counterpoint to that is that Starlink is just the latest in a series of massively government-funded projects attempting to bring global comms coverage using LEO satellites (Iridum, Inmarsat, OneWeb).

Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users

#130

Post by MrLeap »

ginko wrote: post #83
MrLeap wrote: post #76

A lot of these comments read kind of like the ones when dropbox did a ShowHN. "Why not just use rsync?" I suspect starlink will change the course of human history in substantial ways. It already stands to be the most positive technological development for my life since I've been living. At the very least, until the market adjusts, it will provide a verdant field of lifestyle arbitrage.

>It already stands to be the most positive technological development for my life since I've been living. Video streaming? Smartphones? Wikipedia? Google maps? CRISPR? mRNA vaccines?

Some things about me are probably pretty atypical, but I'll say starlink beats every one of those (for me specifically!) handily. Wikipedia comes closer. Maybe I live long enough to benefit from CRISPR, but I suspect that's for other -- wealthier people. If I end up being able to afford any CRISPR treatments it'll be because of Starlink.

Starlink is going to enable me to own a home without a mortgage. It will allow me to make good money while living in one of the cheapest places in the country. This lets me move the goalposts on success so I have to do significantly less just to feed myself and my family. Suddenly retiring by 35 seems conceivable. I can do work I want instead of what's available. Nothing else on that list comes close for me.

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