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IRIS²: The EU’s Response to Musk’s Starlink

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Re: IRIS²: The EU’s Response to Musk’s Starlink

#151

Post by oarsinsync »

inglor_cz wrote: post #115
touisteur wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And even there, if you look at the sheer amount of R&D projects funded by the EU... Anyone serious can't say the EU doesn't invest massively in R&D. Interestingly enough, most of what I see funded and successfully becoming products are incremental development (increasing wireless bandwidth for specific apps or constraints, improving industrial productivity or getting to next gen for any tech) and few moonshots. I wor…

This kind of incremental development has been criticized a lot, precisely because it discourages scientists from trying anything audacious. Developing a slightly more efficient telegraph line every year still does not beat inventing e-mail. Whenever you introduce large bureaucracy into any process, risk mitigation becomes the main goal of the most important actors, at the cost of all the previous goals.

> This kind of incremental development has been criticized a lot, precisely because it discourages scientists from trying anything audacious. Developing a slightly more efficient telegraph line every year still does not beat inventing e-mail.

I’d be surprised to learn that it would have been possible to run packet data on the original telephone system.

I’d be less surprised to learn that decades of incremental improvements ultimately enabled packet data to run on top of telephone lines.

Re: IRIS²: The EU’s Response to Musk’s Starlink

#152

Post by inglor_cz »

Ambolia wrote: post #137
inglor_cz wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but we were speaking about Germany's ability to pull economic growth specifically. Italy won't be saving European economic growth anytime soon, possibly ever, even though I actually love Italy.

Italian economy wasn't so bad until they joined the euro. The northern part still has decent industry even now.

I know, I have been visiting Italy since the 1990s and the change is heart-wrenching. It used to be a much more dynamic and optimistic country. Now it feels ... drained and exhausted.

Re: IRIS²: The EU’s Response to Musk’s Starlink

#153

Post by lispm »

peterfirefly wrote: post #147
lispm wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But there were times when German companies actually were world leaders in the big things as well We have the world leader in civil aerospace in France/Germany, Many high-speed trains in the world are coming from France or Germany. There are many large high-tech sectors. It's nice that Estonia is successful, but it's not where the next big chip manufacturing sites will be build. Intel and TSMC are in talks to move t…

I love trains -- but planes are usually a better solution than high-speed trains. They will be an even better solution when we have small electric jets, especially for inter-European flights. Do you think the first practical electric jet will come from a subsidized EU development plan -- or from a VP funded US company?

> but planes are usually a better solution than high-speed trains

I was traveling this week with both, an Airbus from Lufthansa and high-speed trains from Siemens.

Re: IRIS²: The EU’s Response to Musk’s Starlink

#154

Post by microtonal »

luckylion wrote: post #24
gizmo wrote: post #4

> This future satellite constellation infrastructure will allow for synergies with private sector to develop commercial services and provide with high-speed internet and communication in all EU territory. Satellite internet isn’t great for speed. Europe is also so densely populated that full 4g coverage is totally doable. I think satellite internet is cool, but it doesn’t serve a real need and I expect this project t…

> Europe is also so densely populated that full 4g coverage is totally doable. Broadband via fiber (fine, let's save money and use VDSL for the last mile) is totally doable for the population centers. But we can't even manage that reliably at scale. In Germany, mobile internet of any speed gets spotty once you're outside of the cities. It's just a sad state of affairs.

Broadband via fiber (fine, let's save money and use VDSL for the last mile) is totally doable for the population centers.

Why VDSL and why only population centers? 50% of the households in The Netherlands have access to fiber internet. My parents live in a small village and have fiber (their village is about as remote as a remote German village). Heck, they are even hooking up farms out in the fields to fiber. It just takes some subsidies from the government, but it'll last for decades, so it is well worth it.

In Germany, mobile internet of any speed gets spotty once you're outside of the cities. It's just a sad state of affairs.

Internet is just hopelessly behind in Germany. We have lived in an economically strong area in Southern Germany. But wired broadband was deplorable (slow on paper, even slower and less reliable in practice). And mobile internet is not only spotty, the pricing is insane. E.g. unlimited 5G was 90 Euro per month last time I looked (I pay 25 per month).

Re: IRIS²: The EU’s Response to Musk’s Starlink

#155

Post by inglor_cz »

hef19898 wrote: post #148
inglor_cz wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of incremental development has been criticized a lot, precisely because it discourages scientists from trying anything audacious. Developing a slightly more efficient telegraph line every year still does not beat inventing e-mail. Whenever you introduce large bureaucracy into any process, risk mitigation becomes the main goal of the most important actors, at the cost of all the previous goals.

Who again came up with the first mRNA Covid vaccine?

You are playing into my hand.

Most of the groundlaying work on mRNA has been done by Katalin Karikó, a Hungarian scientist who moved to the US to continue her research in better conditions.

The history of mRNA research is pretty tangled, but its majority took place at the American side of the pond. Unless you want to cherry-pick one particular moment and disregard all others, then no, mRNA technology is not a European, or even majority-European invention.

Re: IRIS²: The EU’s Response to Musk’s Starlink

#156

Post by viraptor »

amm wrote: post #121

Too little, too expensive, too late? Once again the EU is playing catch up with last gen tech. Starlink is almost 10 years old - conceptually even older. Iridium has been around for over 25 years. If the EU was serious, it should have invested proactively in next gen satellite direct to device tech that is around the corner in the US. AST SpaceMobile is close to starting commercial activity for satellite based 5G tha…

> too expensive

What's your source for good cost of launching satellite communication networks? Would you like to show us the reasoning here?

> it should have invested proactively in next gen satellite direct to device tech

If the current one works - why would they? For defence usage, reliable is better than next gen usually. (Something something next gen F35 still not usable)

> I wonder where cost competitive launch capability is going to come from

French Guiana and other places like most previous launches? https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Pr...

Re: IRIS²: The EU’s Response to Musk’s Starlink

#157

Post by vidarh »

inglor_cz wrote: post #2

[flagged]

> In practice, there will be a flow of taxpayer money into something highly subsidized that no one will ever use.

Given that despite the comparison to Starlink, the article focuses on defence and crisis response considerations after Ukraine, I don't think the people behind this proposal are really that concerned about widespread peace time use.

> Entire huge countries such as France and Italy produce basically nothing of value when it comes to tech

A small subset of well-funded companies started in Paris and immediate surroundings alone in the last 20 years (most of them much more recent). Most of these have raised between $100m-$500m, and several are unicorns:

Ledger, Deezer, Shift Solutions, Malt, Agicap, Back Market, Ankorstore, Vesitaire Collective, Virtuo, Sendinblue, HiFiBio, Aircall, Mirakl, EcoVadis, Criteo, DoctoLib, Voodoo, Qonto, BlaBlaCar, LumApps, Lydia, OpenClassrooms, Shift Technology, PayFit, Meero, Ynsect, Scality, Ornicar, Wynd, HR Path

Paris has similar levels of (some estimate more) tech startups than London, and overall France is at a similar level to the UK and Germany in terms of tech startups.

Europe ( haven't looked at numbers for just EU) is lagging in terms of VC funding relative to the US, sure - according to McKinsey, in 2019 Europe accounted for 36% of VC backed companies that raised funding in the preceding decade globally (vs. 45% for the US), and just 14% of unicorns (vs. 50% for the US), but from working in the VC field for the last 5 years, what we saw was also that capital inflows in Europe were growing rapidly as attitudes to risk have been changing, and more founders achieving exits are turning around and feeding capital back into VC funds.

Re: IRIS²: The EU’s Response to Musk’s Starlink

#158

Post by vidarh »

inglor_cz wrote: post #109
justeleblanc wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A company is a success only if its market is the whole world, or at the very least covers the USA where most of HN's users live? That's an interesting take.

And a pretty mainstream one. One of the niceties of software is that it scales quite easily and that if it really solves an important problem, it can grow explosively all over the world, where people do have the same problem that needs solving. Specializing in a niche corner of the market can be called a success, but a cunning dwarf is still a dwarf. For one, it lacks the necessary capital to invest into something mo…

A whole lot of US unicorns haven't even tried to crack markets outside the US.

That the US by itself forms an easily accessible largely single-language market is one of the reasons they do disproportionately well.

Re: IRIS²: The EU’s Response to Musk’s Starlink

#159

Post by threeseed »

peterfirefly wrote: post #134
threeseed wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really a moonshot project ? ESA has plenty of experience in delivering projects like this e.g. Copernicus, Sentinel, EDRS.

The Sentinel satellites ARE the Copernicus program(me). Why are the EU spy sats, sorry, totally-not-spy-sats, so poor and so few compared to what the US has?

a) Copernicus program is bigger than just the satellites themselves.

b) What does a meaningless comparison with the US have to do with whether launching a bunch of extra satellites is considered a moonshot or not ?

Re: IRIS²: The EU’s Response to Musk’s Starlink

#160

Post by alright_scowl »

Deukhoofd wrote: post #62
kensai wrote: post #28

There is always bashing if there is something about the EU and its national projects, not always deserved. However sometimes I wished HN showed more of local projects. For example: has there been a post about the European AI? https://www.aleph-alpha.com/

It's honestly got to the point where I barely open comments related to EU projects any more. While most of the time there's somewhat nuanced discussions in comments, once the EU gets mentioned for some reason most of the comments basically boil down to "EU bad, US better", and "Big government bad", completely ignoring the actual contents of what the post it about.

The odd part is that these bad takes seem to typically come from people that don't even live the EU, and don't understand how it works.

They just don't like that it exists.

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