261–270 of 526 posts
Once upon a time, all plane transmissions were pretty much air to ground. As inconsequential as it may seem, the positioning of antennas above the plane are a bit metaphoric for flipping things up side down. Looking out into space instead of back to earth. Also notable that SpaceX keeps finding these cool (revenue generating) use cases to further cheapen the cost of sending things up to space. Pretty much dogfooding…
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> flex, not a tool Suppose that a plane has 250 seats and makes 50 trans-con flights a month. Airline A decides to advertise having fast internet access in their flight, and raises ticket prices by $2 a seat to fund it. (250)(50)(2) = 25000 Airline B stays with slow barely usable internet. Which ticket do you book?
Alas, the market has repeatedly shown that people will choose the cheapest ticket above all other considerations. Unless somebody else is paying the bill, and those business travelers are also the ones most likely to fork out $20/flight for Internet connectivity.
Once upon a time, all plane transmissions were pretty much air to ground. As inconsequential as it may seem, the positioning of antennas above the plane are a bit metaphoric for flipping things up side down. Looking out into space instead of back to earth. Also notable that SpaceX keeps finding these cool (revenue generating) use cases to further cheapen the cost of sending things up to space. Pretty much dogfooding…
There are two major problems here:
1. when you reach a major transit hub, such as NY airspace the bandwidth is very limited due to the sheer amount of traffic
2. Inmarsats network structure was(is?) like a honeycomb. So the further away you are from the center of each section the worse the transmission characteristics are.
One problem that is rarely looked at is atmospheric interference between satellite and base station.
Anyway, at least problem number two may be addressed by Starlinks vast array of satellites.
It's been a while since I looked at these things though.
Once upon a time, all plane transmissions were pretty much air to ground. As inconsequential as it may seem, the positioning of antennas above the plane are a bit metaphoric for flipping things up side down. Looking out into space instead of back to earth. Also notable that SpaceX keeps finding these cool (revenue generating) use cases to further cheapen the cost of sending things up to space. Pretty much dogfooding…
Quoted post unavailable.
Would this be good for remote pilots flying fighter jets, or has that been adequately serviced by military tech?
Won't this require spectrum licensed from every country the plane fly's over? Easy in North America... But all other regions of the world a typical flight might go over 20 countries. If you can't secure a license for just one, you're gonna have a 5 hour flight with 20 minutes of no internet... Not great. And I don't think they're getting a license for Russia, Iran, China, half of Africa, etc any time soon.
No planes are flying over Russia anyway
Slightly unrelated but makes me wonder how different would be the airline industry nowadays if Musk had launched a airline company at the same time he launched SpaceX. How different would it be to take a plane and travel across the world.
If someone could solve that for me affordably, I can handle the sitting on an airplane in economy class for 15 hours bit.
Although yes: having high speed, low latency internet for those 15 hours would make it much more pleasant.
Would this be good for remote pilots flying fighter jets, or has that been adequately serviced by military tech?
Presumably it could be useful in that context. I don't know what the alternative is; probably direct radio links to other planes and/or ground stations. It might be a problem for SpaceX if their satellite network were to be deemed a military asset -- a foreign government might consider them a legitimate military target and destroy the satellites if they have the means to do so.
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> a problem left to etiquette I fly regularly, and it will absolutely become a problem on day 1.
This seems so backwards to me, why would you want other people to behave the way you want them to when you can just put in earplugs, noise cancelling headphones, have self control and not get annoyed, etc etc. It seems crazy to me that people consider something so minor to be uncouth or whatever. I think in general the onus to take care of something should be on the person getting annoyed and only until you've exhaus…
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Most of the time a plane is over farm fields or water. Highest demand for normal starlink is in cities. Not gonna be flying over NYC w this. Kind of a good fit I would think in terms of utilization.
> Highest demand for normal starlink is in cities. ?? cities have fiber, who wants starlink in a city?