Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map • Hacker News Board

Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map

#121

Post by ben_w » Sat, Apr 29, 2023, 10:22 AM UTC

charcircuit wrote: post #120

ben_w wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPv6 is 24.5 years old. When there's enough time for you to conceive a new child, send them through school, then university, then most of a PhD program… If your network equipment supplier doesn't support the tech, demand better of them rather than blaming the ISP that's specifically intended for people who weren't being properly served until now anyway.

>IPv6 is 24.5 years old. And Chinese is hundreds of years old and I still don't know it. People don't invest into supporting things the instant they release. >If your network equipment supplier... In this hypothetical my network supplier would, but someone who is trying to connect isn't. IPv6 isn't even at 50% support in the US. That means if you want your friend group to all connect to your server there is a very go…

> People don't invest into supporting things the instant they release.

Virtually every other aspect of the tech world, including networking, has managed to update multiple times in the intervening years.

We don't (mostly) use dialup; we switched from 2G to 3G to 4G and now to 5G mobile telephony since then; HTTP has been mostly deprecated for HTTPS and the cryptography standards for the latter have changed; etc.

> What are you supposed to tell them? That they should complain to their ISP?

Yes.

I mean, what, is their ISP also using Windows 98 on a 486 chip running at 75 MHz with 8 meg of RAM and a 500 meg hard drive, and software patches being passed around on floppy disks? Because that's what the tech world looked like when we should've started refusing to buy products and services that were IPv4-only.

Today?

Today, this kind of nonsense has gone on far too long. It was obvious even during my degree ~20 years ago that IPv4-to-6 transition should have already been finished by the time I even learned about it. As there are now far more devices on the internet than IPv4 addresses, I would go further and say that normal ISPs should be banned by law from using IPv4 — if we're going to do that for which type of USB connector personal electronics use, why not this?

Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map

#122

Post by jen729w » Sat, Apr 29, 2023, 10:31 AM UTC

lionkor wrote: post #106

hungryforcodes wrote: post #99

No one in Asia or Africa or India seem to be using it. Are we just polluting LEO for the sake of a handful of Americans? I feel like in the US it's not even widely used...

I believe so - its a very small niche. If I understand correctly, the target audience is: - remote places, with - people who need internet but dont have a wire or fiber running to them, and - who can afford a super expensive starlink (have disposable income), and - for who 3G/4G isnt good enough Thats not a lot of people outside the US

It’s a lot of geographical Australia.

Which isn’t a lot of people. A million, perhaps. Two at most.

Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map

#123

Post by wkat4242 » Sat, Apr 29, 2023, 10:37 AM UTC

crispinb wrote: post #74

tenpies wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does seem like we need a term for a civilisation that decides that serving internet is more important than its ability to observe the universe. Then, in that pursuit, they completely miss an otherwise easily detectable near earth object and become extinct, but the satellites will continue happily beaming internet to a user base that no longer exists. Then again, it's probably a non-issue. Not because the satellite…

> a civilisation that decides that serving internet is more important than its ability to observe the universe It's slightly worse than that. Starlink is only viable because of huge gaps in planned provision of what is now a basic utility (even government services in many parts of the world are hard to access without the internet). We're actually giving up our inalienable and multimillenial rights to a real night sky…

Starlink sats don't stick around for multiple millennia. Their orbit degrades quite fast. You need much higher orbits for such longevity.

Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map

#124

Post by crispinb » Sat, Apr 29, 2023, 10:51 AM UTC

wkat4242 wrote: post #123

crispinb wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a civilisation that decides that serving internet is more important than its ability to observe the universe It's slightly worse than that. Starlink is only viable because of huge gaps in planned provision of what is now a basic utility (even government services in many parts of the world are hard to access without the internet). We're actually giving up our inalienable and multimillenial rights to a real night sky…

Starlink sats don't stick around for multiple millennia. Their orbit degrades quite fast. You need much higher orbits for such longevity.

No wasn't suspecting nuisance-satellite of being near-eternal!

I mean we have had a real night sky for millenia, and now a handful of men are being permitted, with hardly any communal discussion or decision, to expunge it. Many won't notice, of course, having been denatured by suburbia.

Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map

#125

Post by danw1979 » Sat, Apr 29, 2023, 10:52 AM UTC

crote wrote: post #36

numbol wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Geostationary orbit wouldn't work for a GNSS: all satellites would be in the same plane, so it would be impossible to distinguish between the northern and southern hemisphere. This would render it inconvenient in most countries and unusable anywhere near the equator.

Related: an inclined geosynchronous orbit uses similar altitudes to GEO, allowing focussed coverage on specific longitudes, as seen with QZSS - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-Zenith_Satellite_Syste...

(albeit these are slightly elliptical)

Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map

#126

Post by ghaff » Sat, Apr 29, 2023, 10:53 AM UTC

lionkor wrote: post #106

hungryforcodes wrote: post #99

No one in Asia or Africa or India seem to be using it. Are we just polluting LEO for the sake of a handful of Americans? I feel like in the US it's not even widely used...

I believe so - its a very small niche. If I understand correctly, the target audience is: - remote places, with - people who need internet but dont have a wire or fiber running to them, and - who can afford a super expensive starlink (have disposable income), and - for who 3G/4G isnt good enough Thats not a lot of people outside the US

You don't need to be in "remote" places for Starlink to be a big benefit. My brother lives about a 10 minute drive from about a 10K person city in coastal Maine and he could not get wired Internet at all and the other wireless options are poor and data limited. There are a ton of places like that. You could argue that there should be a program at the national level to get wired Internet to anywhere that gets electricity but, given the existence of Starlink, I'm not sure a many many billions of dollars program to do that makes a lot of sense and would have at least some people here throwing a fit about subsidizing rural residents.

Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map

#127

Post by LightBug1 » Sat, Apr 29, 2023, 10:57 AM UTC

Like a planetary rash ... over the long term, the fever will get rid of this.

Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map

#128

Post by ghaff » Sat, Apr 29, 2023, 10:58 AM UTC

0xffff2 wrote: post #29

2h wrote: post #23

> $120/mo for service and $599 for hardware Noope. no thank you. https://www.starlink.com/

This service is not for you if that is your reaction. Until recently I lived in a location where there is literally no other option capable of supporting Teams calls. Before Starlink I rented a second house in a "nearby" (49 minutes each way) town to use as an office. Comparatively, Starlink is a phenomenal deal.

Frankly, Starlink seems underpriced for the people whose alternative is long latency, limited data, and itself expensive options.

Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map

#129

Post by throwaway2037 » Sat, Apr 29, 2023, 11:01 AM UTC

disillusioned wrote: post #92

101008 wrote: post #6

Wow, this is incredible. Why the GPS satellites are far away from the planet, compared to the other ones?

No better explanation on the planet than Bartosz Chiechanowski's: https://ciechanow.ski/gps/

This guy! Nerd sniped again.

Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map

#130

Post by Retric » Sat, Apr 29, 2023, 11:03 AM UTC

godelski wrote: post #68

Veedrac wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Space is not really 3d in the intuitive sense from a packing perspective, because satellites take up orbits rather than stationary points and orbits don't pack densely. It's more like an embedded 2d space, the intuition for that being that a ring, think Saturn's, is 2d and intersects any orbit.

Bullshit. Space is definitely 3D and has 3D packing. Starlink is at about 550km. That has an orbital period of 1.5917hrs. Satellites are 7m (as suggested above, but this sounds large). So let's space the next group by 10km. Now the orbital period is 1.5952hrs. We have to go to 580km (+30km) to get to 1.6hrs, which is a difference of 37 seconds. So you got 60km (520km-580km) where you have an error rate of under 1% (0…

The problem with your model is all orbits at a given altitude intersect. You can orbit at the equator, or orbit above and below the equator thus crossing the equator. There’s nothing special about the equator here. All polar orbits meet at the poles, and any non polar obit is forced to cross all polar orbits etc.

In practice this is not be a significant problem because you can pack a great deal of satellites at a given altitude and moving to a slightly lower or higher orbit works just fine.