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Starlink offering free internet access for 30 days for Hurricane Helene victims

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Re: Starlink offering free internet access for 30 days for Hurricane Helene victims

#141

Post by dadadad100 »

AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #108
bena wrote: post #81

This might be good for responders, but not so much the victims. But then responders will have their own networks so won't need this. When you've been hit like this, you aren't going to use your power for this. You have bigger issues. You have to dry out your house, demolition, etc. And that's when you get power. You might not get it for weeks. And honestly, once power reaches residences, power to other services has u…

If you check out the people doing this, they are bringing other things and not just starlinks, generators, fuel, dehumidifiers, etc One of the most interesting ones is Shawn Hendrix on X: https://x.com/TheShawnHendrix While I'm sure having internet isn't their focus, a starlink draws a trivial amount of power especially relative to a dehumidifier/fans/etc and you can only work for so many hours a day. Being able to s…

Cell service is down. Wi-Fi calling/ text/ email may be the only thing working in many cases

Re: Starlink offering free internet access for 30 days for Hurricane Helene victims

#142

Post by vel0city »

threeseed wrote: post #138
kortilla wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1gbps to the house doesn’t mean you’re not oversubscribed. An ISP that has a 10,000 homes on 1gbps connections absolutely does not pay for 10 tbps of transit capacity or even internal capacity to carry all that to its peering points. Cheaper fiber to homes definitely made last mile scale better bandwidth-wise, but it didn’t change the fundamental nature of needing to heavily oversubscribe to make it affordable.

Many major services e.g. Youtube, Netflix, Cloudflare have servers colocated with ISPs. So they don't need to have equivalent transit capacity. Which is not a capability Starlink can provide.

It's not just a question of transit capacity. Most residential PONs are still oversubscribed, like the fiber cable running down the street can't handle all clients maxing out their throughput all the time. With PONs you'll have multiple clients all sharing the same physical port, in the same way in coax DOCSIS networks. One single cable goes through multiple passive splitters to branch out to a lot of final clients. They almost always wouldn't be able to support all clients maxing out all their bandwidth even if that traffic never left the local office, because once again its still dozens of clients on a single actual physical port.

Fiber to your home doesn't mean you've got dedicated bandwidth to your ISP. You're still usually on a shared medium. You're likely to get all your speed most of the time though because most residential customers aren't constantly using anywhere near a gigabit of throughput constantly.

That said though, a regular ISP can just run another line out. Starlink can't just will additional useful frequency ranges out of nothing. There's only so much spectrum to be used in the giant shared medium of the sky. Beams are only going to be so tight at those distances (outside of using lasers), only so many useful orbits, etc.

Re: Starlink offering free internet access for 30 days for Hurricane Helene victims

#143

Post by Retric »

CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #132
Retric wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have essentially unlimited satellites the issue is the percentage of time each one spends over high density areas. Design for NYC density and 99% of satellites would be redundant at any given moment. The solution for increasing density is dropping costs so it’s viable for satellites to be idle 95% of the time. At least as a first approximation, there’s some tricks with how you setup orbits after the basic net…

You're still sharing the medium (the sky), so at some point interference is going to be an issue. A quick search tells me the beams a satellite uses is measured in km, so you can only have one satellite serving several square km (you could have more channels of course).

Let’s be pessimistic and say it’s ~25km^2 with current designs. Surface area of the earth is 510,064,472 km² so you estimate limits things to ~20 million satellites X however they can slice up the available spectrum. IE essentially unlimited satellites.

As of September 2024 they have 6,371 operational satellites and ~ 4 million customers globally.

Re: Starlink offering free internet access for 30 days for Hurricane Helene victims

#144

Post by internetblimp »

svnt wrote: post #91
internetblimp wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.domusweb.it/en/sustainable-cities/gallery/2023/1... funny cause sergey is building exactly that - private companies for the win :)

So someone who doesn’t need to make money is building blimps to revolutionize air transport and you are proposing that company is going to then halt business during storms and travel to and float over hurricane recovery areas?

yep exactly. he has stated (as the article does) that delivering humanitarian aid to disaster areas is one of the main goals

Re: Starlink offering free internet access for 30 days for Hurricane Helene victims

#145

Post by marlone93 »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #117
marlone93 wrote: post #61

Why is this advertising-like stuff worth of hackernews?

It's newsworthy as it shows just how quickly Elon can 'gift his tech' compared to say Apple or Amazon. Elon also did this for superchargers a few years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17990007

[flagged]

Re: Starlink offering free internet access for 30 days for Hurricane Helene victims

#146

Post by internetblimp »

svnt wrote: post #91
internetblimp wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.domusweb.it/en/sustainable-cities/gallery/2023/1... funny cause sergey is building exactly that - private companies for the win :)

So someone who doesn’t need to make money is building blimps to revolutionize air transport and you are proposing that company is going to then halt business during storms and travel to and float over hurricane recovery areas?

also read their 1 sentence mission statement ltaresearch.com

Re: Starlink offering free internet access for 30 days for Hurricane Helene victims

#147

Post by LMYahooTFY »

marlone93 wrote: post #145
1970-01-01 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's newsworthy as it shows just how quickly Elon can 'gift his tech' compared to say Apple or Amazon. Elon also did this for superchargers a few years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17990007

[flagged]

Are you talking about when he chose not to violate US sanctions when the Ukrainian government asked him to turn Starlink on for Crimea?

Re: Starlink offering free internet access for 30 days for Hurricane Helene victims

#148

Post by vel0city »

sneak wrote: post #64
willcipriano wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ham radio people are Lawful Good types. Your Chaotic Good idea isn't well recieved by them. No way there is any ability to enforce that law in a disaster zone, they have enough trouble with looting and the like.

There is also a surprising number of stereotypical american self-identified “constitutionalist” types on there, which results in funny conversations when I speak to them (without a license, natch) about the 10th amendment and the FCC/access to spectrum.

Electromagnetic waves transit state lines pretty much constantly. Hardware which creates/receives radio waves pretty much constantly transits state lines as well, I don't know too many radio manufacturers which restrict sale to only the state they operate in. You should probably read the constitution first about things which are interstate and who has permissions to regulate it.

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

Re: Starlink offering free internet access for 30 days for Hurricane Helene victims

#149

Post by CorrectHorseBat »

Retric wrote: post #143
CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're still sharing the medium (the sky), so at some point interference is going to be an issue. A quick search tells me the beams a satellite uses is measured in km, so you can only have one satellite serving several square km (you could have more channels of course).

Let’s be pessimistic and say it’s ~25km^2 with current designs. Surface area of the earth is 510,064,472 km² so you estimate limits things to ~20 million satellites X however they can slice up the available spectrum. IE essentially unlimited satellites. As of September 2024 they have 6,371 operational satellites and ~ 4 million customers globally.

How is that relevant? Adding satellites over the Pacific doesn't improve New York's service. The question is how dense of a population they can serve, not how many satellites Starlink could theoretically have.

Re: Starlink offering free internet access for 30 days for Hurricane Helene victims

#150

Post by mschuster91 »

AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #102
willcipriano wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ham radio people are Lawful Good types. Your Chaotic Good idea isn't well recieved by them. No way there is any ability to enforce that law in a disaster zone, they have enough trouble with looting and the like.

You're correct that most people who get ham licenses are good people, but, the venn diagram of licensed ham operators and people who bought a baofeng off amazon does not have a lot of intersection.

> the venn diagram of licensed ham operators and people who bought a baofeng off amazon does not have a lot of intersection.

There's quite the few young hams going for cheap-ass equipment from Amazon. Not everyone can afford an ICOM station from the get-go, you start with small cheap stuff and work your way up.

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