When Starlink first became available here in poor-ish Central-EU, I was excited. Then, only months later, but after years of planning: EU funding brought fiber to my farm area, at ~$25/900mbps 10ms. While my story is just n=1, I don't understand the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India, where they have However, I am dumb, and very open to be convinced.
It works on planes, ships, and in remote areas with no coverage. I live in Canada where the whole of Europe would fit many times over, nothing else would work in the remote areas at that scale. My parents live in Panama and use starlink to get reliable high speed internet at the beach. Even when the power goes out, their solar panels keep the internet online.
SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth
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Re: SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sucks for regular astronomy then, where long exposures are the norm. Equally sucks for radio astronomy where the bloody things leak into spectrums they (Starlink) pinky promised to keep clean. And successive generations have worsened the problem, again despite promises to improve.
If you have evidence of them causing interference on a spectrum they shouldn’t be on, report it to the FCC. They take that very seriously
But sure, the FCC might take it seriously.
Re: SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
When COVID hit, I knew a lot of engineers who decided to move to rural areas / small farms because they could leverage Starlink to work remotely. Last year, when I asked whether they still liked Starlink, all of them said it is amazing, but they had gotten fiber coverage in their area from a local provider, so they don't use it anymore, or just use it as a backup. I think Starlink was a huge demand signal that there…
Meanwhile, as one of those engineers, they ran fiber down the highway a mile from my house circa 2021, but they did not do any upgrades at all to the last mile infrastructure so I still only have a ~10Mbps DSL option for wired internet at that house, which is a big step up from literally no wired option before, but still vastly inferior to Starlink. (The terrain makes terrestrial wireless a nonstarter in the area). I…
The economics of laying fiber to the premises are heavily driven by density of potential customers * probability that a potential customer will sign up if you run fiber down their street. You can get reasonable intuition by focusing on the density alone & ignoring the competition / pricing side of things.
I'm not familiar with current US construction costs to install fiber but have some intuition from Australia.
With Australia's national broadband network project from a decade or so ago, it'd cost in the ballpark of $100 AUD per meter to run fiber down the street in an underground trench - most of the capex is digging the holes in the ground etc, the cost of the cable itself is essentially free. The construction budget for a suburb would be something like $2000 / premises. To give a ballpark estimate, suppose 25% of your budget is the premises-specific work to connect the house to the cable running down the street, if they choose to sign up for your broadband plan. That leaves at most $1500 / premises for the rest of your capex budget, so the economics only work if you've got a neighbourhood with a density of least one house every 15 meters. Those numbers aren't exact but they'd be in the ballpark.
There's a bit of variability in the cost per meter to install, if you can reuse existing poles & run the cable aerially that might be only 30%-40% of the cost of digging holes, so you might be able to support a lower density suburb that way & still stick to your construction budget.
In Australia for the lower density rural / semi-rural areas they'd use fixed wireless, & finally satellite for the remote extremely low density areas where it didn't even make sense to build a wireless tower.
Re: SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth
#254Will this be the last generation to remember the night sky?
Satellites only reflect sunlight when in sunlight . This only happens near sunrise and sunset. The night sky will be unaffected by satellites for the foreseeable future.
Re: SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
You forgot about the radio spectrum pollution which affects the night and day sky right now .. and for the foreseeable future given the lack of progress in addressing that leakage.
The topic is seeing the night sky.
Re: SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth
#256Will this be the last generation to remember the night sky?
light pollution already means the night sky is largely invisible outside of remote areas
Re: SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth
#257Re: SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth
#258Will this be the last generation to remember the night sky?
Re: SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth
#259When Starlink first became available here in poor-ish Central-EU, I was excited. Then, only months later, but after years of planning: EU funding brought fiber to my farm area, at ~$25/900mbps 10ms. While my story is just n=1, I don't understand the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India, where they have However, I am dumb, and very open to be convinced.
Here along the BC Coast, the organization I work for has an expansive sensor network. Weather stations, CTDs, custom equipment in watersheds, research facilities with all kinds of equipment to monitor, and so on. There is no broadband or fiber on remote islands along the coast. We used to use satellite internet, and getting data off of our main hubs (everything is relayed to the hubs by radio) was very slow and preca…
Re: SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth
#260When Starlink first became available here in poor-ish Central-EU, I was excited. Then, only months later, but after years of planning: EU funding brought fiber to my farm area, at ~$25/900mbps 10ms. While my story is just n=1, I don't understand the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India, where they have However, I am dumb, and very open to be convinced.