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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.
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> In-flight wifi (and otherwise all other transmissions) have pretty much always been air to ground This has not been the case for several years. Most in flight Wifi is now being provided by Viasat which, as the name suggests, is air to space. Even Gogo started rolling out satellite service in 2015. Very few services are now air-to-ground. Random pictures: https://i.stack.imgur.com/I7Yfd.jpg https://cdn.arstechnica.n…
They are air to geo stationary, and that’s a long way. 50,000 km instead of Starlink’s 300 km, iirc.
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There's a new air-to-ground provider though: https://smartskynetworks.com/connectivity/ (I worked on this technology)
Interesting. Is it based on 4G/5G or something ad-hoc?
It's basically LTE in the 2.4 GHz band, with a load of extra bits for beam forming, coping with speed and distance etc. Using the 2.4 GHz band allows them to build a network covering the US without spending billions on spectrum.
Yes, it's the same 2.4GHz ISM band that wifi uses, with the same power limits. And yes, it works well enough that you can do video calls hundreds of kilometres from the base station. That's how shit wifi is, and how well this stuff works.
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> Also notable that SpaceX keeps finding these cool (revenue generating) use cases to further cheapen the cost of sending things up to space. Like sending Ukraine "free" base stations and charging them $4,500 a month for service.
> Like sending Ukraine "free" base stations and charging them $4,500 a month for service. Are there any alternatives? Nope. Also, let's not talk about how SpaceX "should" sponge up the costs, because you would not ask Lockheed Martin or Raytheon Technologies to do that. Compared to regular prices of military hardware, Starlink costs nothing.
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That is still your choice. On transatlantic flights a WIFI connection would be a godsend.
The Gogo 2Ku service that Delta offers on TATL flights works very well.
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A friend lives in a city with a lot of startups, a lot of technology companies and a research university that's been on the internet since before the DNS. He's on the waiting list for Starlink because the fastest residential connection he can get is 3Mbps. There's much fiber there, but also many streets where no fiber is available. AFAICT that kind of spottiness is the most common case and few cities have uniformly g…
You'd think there would be investors popping up left and right to improve it, because offering 500 Mbps in an area where you can only get 3 Mbps is sure to sell. Is this where the weird dichotomy between the US being on the one side very liberal for businesses yet on the other very restrictive? (the restrictive being protectionist practices from the established companies in this case)
For normal consumer pricing laying down new lines will likely never turn a profit in the U.S. in any established neighbourhood, especially in municipalities that like to extract every dollar out of unsympathetic companies as another comment mentioned.
They really missed an opportunity to cash in and call it Skynet.
Slightly off-topic. I hate that internet is becoming more common on flights. One of my favorite things about flying is that it's a good chunk of time where you disconnect and don't worry about emails or messages. Just sit back and watch a movie or listen to music. Or catch up on sleep.
To be fair you can always choose to disconnect for a period of time. I understand if your job expects you to be online when possible but if you have difficulty disconnecting without an external pressure to be online you could consider talking to a therapist to help you manage your reliance, especially if it's bothering you significantly.