121–130 of 208 posts
Is there a way to make a Starlink dish that is viable for backpacking (i.e. 5kg at most, but preferably 0.5-2kg, including the solar panel and battery needed to power it) or is the satellite LTE service the only possibility?
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Have you ever actually had the night sky spoiled by a Starlink?
I've seen a chain of satellites flare with the naked eye once, but as I'm not much into astronomy it was just a curiosity I looked up after the fact. I suspect astronomers don't care for Starlink "photo bombing" their observations.
Quite the opposite:
- A call for scientists to halt the spoiling of the night sky with artificial light and satellites(https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01864-z)
- Let there be (natural) light(https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-023-01935-9)
- Bright satellites are disrupting astronomy research worldwide(https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03610-5)
- Satellite swarms are threatening the night sky—and creating a new zone of environmental conflict(https://www.science.org/content/article/satellite-swarms-are...)
- ‘Unsustainable’ how satellite swarms pose a rising threat to astronomy(https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01420-9)
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Well Starlink here in Spain costs 40€ per month. That's a lot less than the unlimited Garmin inreach plan (74,99€!!) that only allows you to send short messages! And that's the regular plan. Deprioritised Starlink costs €29/month! Still way way more useful service than inreach. I have inreach and for €19,99 I get 10 SMS per month (i don't subscribe every month) and I also have to pay a €39,99 yearly fee. Starlink is…
WTF? Entry price for starlink is £75/month in UK! ADSL is typically ~£25-30 for unlimited 80/20 for comparison
VDSL is being phased out.
I think a great use case for this would be as a backup for when the regular ISP goes out in a rural area. But I don't think they have any subscription plans priced for that? And there might be issues after a storm if everyone started using it at once.
The Garmin inReach (and others like it) is probably the nearest readily-available solution for that use case. Not broadband internet obviously, but it provides access to basic, essential communication methods. It does so at a much, much lower price point than Starlink/HughesNet/etc can offer, making it more palatable as an "emergency backup" product.
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"For internet backup I have a 4G modem right now, connected to my unifi router with auto failover and a script that adds credit to my prepay card over SMS. It serves me ok. But I'd love to have a starlink mini for backup. Just the regular one is a bit big so I didn't get it yet." Is 4G a good backup? I am also in Spain and in my neighborhood we often suffer from power failure under heavy rain, I guess a local transfo…
It sounds more like a building material or geography issue. I've used LTE upwards of 10km off shore. In areas where there isn't good line of sight or if buildings tend to interfere with signal, the access points need to be positioned more densely
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Mesh is a mess because meshes do not, in fact, work very well. You set up a mesh network to provide community internet access to an underserved community? 99.9% of traffic will be going to or from the node that connects to the internet at large. That means that although notionally adding a node to the network adds more bandwidth to the network, in practice that's only true if the new node happens to add extra bandwid…
Yeah, with current consumption being "everyone wants a global DNS and global network access" it's semi-pointless. But that's just a chicken and egg problem. All of Wikipedia, libgen, thingiverse, open source packages, etc. can be locally cached somewhat trivially. Most oldschool games will run P2P fine over arbitrary networks. That's quite powerful indeed. Now we just need some localtalk apps (reinvent 'talk' and BBS…
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WTF? Entry price for starlink is £75/month in UK! ADSL is typically ~£25-30 for unlimited 80/20 for comparison
€50 in Ireland, down from €65 in the last year, down from €99 in 2022. Because they know where you are, and how much money your average target customer in a country has, and how saturated their satellites in that country are, they can be very specific about pricing.
Could be saturation indeed, as Ireland is very sparse in rural areas. And so is Spain, outside the few urban centres.
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There was a standard a few years ago IIRC, EasyMesh. I even bought a kit that supported it. https://www.netgear.com/au/home/wifi/mesh/mk62/ I was most pissed off when I bought another (orbi?) kit from the same vendor a couple of years later and it didn't support easymesh, and wasn't compatible at all. Does seem to be a mess!
Mesh is a mess because the government, mobile device manufacturers and cellular carriers all want you on a centralized cellular system. Money is made selling cellular plans, cellular data, cellular carrier based device distribution (especially in the US, where most devices are carrier-acquired IIRC). Google in particular don't want to encourage non-centralized models, because their whole Android-shall-prevent-Apple-f…
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This much more likely to be something that had been in the long term plan for many years. Amazon is announcing stuff because they are spending 10e of billions and have nothing to show for it, and wont have anything for years. They need to show progress to the quarter to quarter investor. Frankly the idea that Starlink is passivly reacting to Amazon annoucments is a bit silly. The difficult part is to actually produce…
They have at least three Kuiper launches booked in mid-2025, that’s not far off! It’s awesome that they have the flexibility to choose different launch partners and can use the most reliable and flight proven technology. https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/innovation-at-amazon/amazon...
Heh, Amazon was going to forgo that for petty/corrupt reasons, but were sued by their shareholders.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/12/a-bitter-pill-amazon-c...
I think a great use case for this would be as a backup for when the regular ISP goes out in a rural area. But I don't think they have any subscription plans priced for that? And there might be issues after a storm if everyone started using it at once.
As a former owner of a WISP, this idea of a "backup service" doesn't really work (read: I make no money from you).