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Starlink is now on all seven continents, enabled by its space laser network

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Re: Starlink is now on all seven continents, enabled by its space laser network

#121

Post by AtlasBarfed »

dylan604 wrote: post #56
hollander wrote: post #5

How about providing free internet to China and Russia, to give the people there proper information without government oversight?

I mean, they kind of are, right? If the Chinese and Russian people came up with their own gear to receive/send compatible signals with the signal, then they could use it. Of course, authorized accounts would probably be problematic. Getting Starlink branded gear to use will also be hard in those countries.

Um, encryption?

What's the end-to-end level of starlink vis-a-vis encryption? I have to imagine it's pretty good.

Re: Starlink is now on all seven continents, enabled by its space laser network

#122

Post by lsaferite »

count wrote: post #107
minhazm wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive my ignorance but I don't understand why it's an unimaginably difficult task. The satellites are operating in a vacuum with no weather interference or anything and have line of sight to each other. I would think that it should actually be easy to pull off, and actually should get easier at scale since the distances between individual satellites would shrink and would be easier to align the laser links.

They're also moving in different, independent directions on different planes at extremely high speeds...

> at extremely high speeds

Absolute speeds or relative to each other speeds?

Re: Starlink is now on all seven continents, enabled by its space laser network

#124

Post by JumpCrisscross »

cududa wrote: post #11
hollander wrote: post #5

How about providing free internet to China and Russia, to give the people there proper information without government oversight?

You know both Russia and China are perfectly capable of targeting and destroying satellites, yes?

> You know both Russia and China are perfectly capable of targeting and destroying satellites, yes?

This would be an act of war and open their birds to retaliatory strikes. Tracking down the receivers and levying draconian punishments on those caught would do the trick. Moreover, from the example of Chinese students abroad, it's unclear access to information would do much.

Re: Starlink is now on all seven continents, enabled by its space laser network

#125

Post by chucksmash »

Bubble_Pop_22 wrote: post #116
capableweb wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with very little to show for Global internet coverage would be amazing, and definitely something I and many others would consider worth it. Not just for people to browse Twitter/TikTok/social media, but for access to things like Wikipedia and various other knowledge-bases, and communication protocols.

The world's poor are ahead of us in this realm. Lagos will clock 100M people by the end of the century. Megalopolis are only getting bigger. Like luxury EVs , starlink is aimed at the particular preferences of the RV crowd and the yacht crowd. Improving the quality of life of the avg. consumer is never the goal. The goal is to have rich people get excited about some luxury product so that they immediately log on thei…

Your cynicism is uncalled for IMO but also misses the mark factually.

SpaceX is not a publicly traded company so the specific way you've chosen to express your cynicism (this is just for pumping stock prices!) isn't even applicable.

Starlink might eventually be spun off into a separate publicly traded company - some statements to this effect have been made - but that's not what's happening right now.

Re: Starlink is now on all seven continents, enabled by its space laser network

#126

Post by TrainedMonkey »

db48x wrote: post #62
capableweb wrote: post #50

According to their coverage map ( https://www.starlink.com/map ) there is no coverage in Africa nor Asia, unless I'm missing something obvious. Or if there are new continents I'm not aware of.

That map doesn’t distinguish between waiting for enough satellites to be in the sky overhead and waiting for permission from the local government. For better or worse, each country’s government has to approve the use of any particular frequency, as well as things like transmission power.

If you mouseover the countries you can see that some of them are "Pending regulatory approval".

Re: Starlink is now on all seven continents, enabled by its space laser network

#127

Post by jackmott42 »

smoldesu wrote: post #3
_Microft wrote: post #2

According to its Wikipedia entry, McMurdo Station had a 20Mbit/s satellite link so far. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Station#Communications

I'd imagine the latency and per-installation cost is quite high.

Pings would be bad compared to fiber/cable from your location to somewhere close to you. Pings are potentially better than fiber/cable would be to locations far away from you, depending on the routing. Going up to LEO and then lasering around gets you faster signal propagation out of the atmosphere.

Re: Starlink is now on all seven continents, enabled by its space laser network

#128

Post by Bubble_Pop_22 »

chucksmash wrote: post #125
Bubble_Pop_22 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world's poor are ahead of us in this realm. Lagos will clock 100M people by the end of the century. Megalopolis are only getting bigger. Like luxury EVs , starlink is aimed at the particular preferences of the RV crowd and the yacht crowd. Improving the quality of life of the avg. consumer is never the goal. The goal is to have rich people get excited about some luxury product so that they immediately log on thei…

Your cynicism is uncalled for IMO but also misses the mark factually. SpaceX is not a publicly traded company so the specific way you've chosen to express your cynicism (this is just for pumping stock prices!) isn't even applicable. Starlink might eventually be spun off into a separate publicly traded company - some statements to this effect have been made - but that's not what's happening right now.

> SpaceX is not a publicly traded company

I don't think it matters. TikTok isn't traded either but equity price is pumped up anyways.

Likewise Brad Pitt is not publicly traded but the excitement that people have for him prompts Tag Heur to pay him millions for a picture wearing one of their watches.

Finally everybody and their brother knows that Tesla and all the other BS vaporware companies under the same ownership are gonna merge at some point and be listed.

Re: Starlink is now on all seven continents, enabled by its space laser network

#129

Post by gpm »

lsaferite wrote: post #122
count wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're also moving in different, independent directions on different planes at extremely high speeds...

> at extremely high speeds Absolute speeds or relative to each other speeds?

Both, they have two sets of orbital paths at roughly 90 degrees to eachother (I'm just eyeballing it, it's probably not exactly 90). With more sets if you count the satellites in polar orbits.

Though they could, if they needed to, only connect to the satellites flying at low relative speed.

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