Starlink Is a Big Deal • Hacker News Board

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#191

Post by retrac » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 4:14 AM UTC

gitgud wrote: post #165

> Billions of people, blocked from accessing the Internet due to lack of infrastructure or local greed or fraud related to same, are presently kept from participating in the global knowledge economy. Starlink will remedy this, to some extent. Isn't covering the world in a blanket of satellites from a single company the epitome of a global Monopoly? I'm worried about such a future controlled by SpaceX...

There are multiple competitors with similar plans on the drawing board already. And unlike with geosynchronous orbit, there's no practical limit to the number of satellites in very low-earth-orbit.

If Starlink is profitable, I would fully expect multiple competing networks before long.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#192

Post by bilbo0s » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 4:15 AM UTC

mobilefriendly wrote: post #107

fragmede wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are scant details about what the launched product will look like in practice, but keep in mind that urban and suburban areas are spoiled by high-speed 4G LTE and wired gigabit. The vast majority of the US, by land area, has to chose from dial-up and very expensive pre-Starlink satelite Internet service. Even 1 Mbit is a huge improvement over 56 kbps. I'm haven't looked into the economics of running fiber everyw…

I live in the greater Washington DC metro area (Census-defined) and don't have internet access at my farm. No cable and no DSL available. I connect through a wireless 4G hotspot. This is really inadequate, my kids can't get online and we can't do any connected household stuff like Alexa or Ring. Our entire community is praying for Starlink!!!

>my kids can't get online

Sometimes I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing?

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#193

Post by Dylan16807 » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 4:24 AM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #187

mech1234 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple things: 1. Signals travel faster through the air and vacuum of space than they do fiber optic cables or electrical cables. 2. If there is an HFT trader based in the U.S. looking to trade based on events happening in Spain or Japan, they still want to get data across continents in the fastest way possible. EDIT: Apparently other posters traded on the information arbitrage opportunity of replying to your post…

Traveling twice as fast three times as far isn't a win.

People already gave pretty exact distances in other posts.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#194

Post by modeless » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 4:24 AM UTC

farzy wrote: post #109

modeless wrote: post #16

Just going to plug my Starlink tracker here: https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/?special=starlink It tells you when to go outside and look up to see the satellites as they pass over your house. It's a cool sight to see because there are up to 60 of them crossing the sky at the same time in a line.

leolabs.space - does something similar for tracking low Earth orbit satellites. The great thing with this tool is that you can modify the velocity and filter the data. https://demo.leolabs.space/visualizations/leo

Wow, that's a cool one that I hadn't seen before, thanks!

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#195

Post by Dylan16807 » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 4:27 AM UTC

coding123 wrote: post #170

Honestly I hope someone figures out how to shoot these down. I feel like the planet isn't getting a say. In fact only a few people are getting a say that this network should even exist. Astronomy is dead. A dark sky with just stars, yeah dead.

Ground-based light pollution is a far, far bigger problem than low orbit satellites.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#196

Post by chameleon_world » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 4:34 AM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #10

> "Hundreds of cities and dozens of countries, fine for living but previously entirely unsuitable for a place of business, will blink from red to green on the map once Starlink goes live." this reads like a marketing piece rather than actual analysis. Throughput of a single satellite is 20Gbps. The finished constellation if I recall correctly is supposed to be about 12k satellites. So about ~250.000Gbps. So assuming…

Contrary to what Musk & co's claims it doesn't look like this will help the people/countries who actually need access, at least not with the prices that they are saying they will charge. Someone scatter-plotted the GDP of countries and internet penetration, and it turns out none of the countries who need access can afford starlink internet. (There are many other similar calculations out there on the interwebs).

https://twitter.com/chmn_victor/status/1219721896075366403

Most likely this is mainly to be used by bankers and computer stock traders to buy and sell stocks even faster over the ocean.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#197

Post by raattgift » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 4:48 AM UTC

dwaltrip wrote: post #181

coding123 wrote: post #170

Honestly I hope someone figures out how to shoot these down. I feel like the planet isn't getting a say. In fact only a few people are getting a say that this network should even exist. Astronomy is dead. A dark sky with just stars, yeah dead.

Aren't the satellites in LEO only visible for a short time after sunset?

This landed earlier today. https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10952

tl;dr: starlink and its competitors pose serious Earth-based observation problems across the spectrum (§§4.1-4.2) especially for faint variable objects which require long exposures and for which any missed pixels matter.

The missed-pixels problems run around the clock, not just when the sattelites are visibly flaring, as do non-visible-spectrum noise problems.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#198

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 4:51 AM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #79

Barrin92 wrote: post #10

> "Hundreds of cities and dozens of countries, fine for living but previously entirely unsuitable for a place of business, will blink from red to green on the map once Starlink goes live." this reads like a marketing piece rather than actual analysis. Throughput of a single satellite is 20Gbps. The finished constellation if I recall correctly is supposed to be about 12k satellites. So about ~250.000Gbps. So assuming…

There are scant details about what the launched product will look like in practice, but keep in mind that urban and suburban areas are spoiled by high-speed 4G LTE and wired gigabit. The vast majority of the US, by land area, has to chose from dial-up and very expensive pre-Starlink satelite Internet service. Even 1 Mbit is a huge improvement over 56 kbps. I'm haven't looked into the economics of running fiber everyw…

[deleted]

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#199

Post by allovernow » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 4:53 AM UTC

thefreeman wrote: post #150

allovernow wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this was my immediate thought. Especially if I want to check multiple locations for e.g. family. When I declined to share location I got an exception. ...suddenly I'm shy about listing my finger printable browser details online. I'll tell you I'm using brave. I still can't use the app because the location denial is permanent, so I'll have to clear something in the browser...might be a bug worth addressing. Edit 2…

The address is used to show you a google street view pointing in the exact direction and part of the sky the satellites will cross. It's a super useful feature because it would otherwise be really hard to tell what angle or what part of the sky to watch. And accusing the guy of harvesting PII? Get a grip.

Look I can't edit the comment now but this isn't the kind of information that could be collected without the warning. Especially since an address with an IP can be deanonymizing.

I didn't click the "notify me" button but I imagine it's asking for either a phone number or an email.

If this is truly innocent I'm sorry for my reaction, but you should be asking people first, given the current state of advertisement and surveillance on the net. We both read HN.

It was a nice idea though.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#200

Post by Cogito » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 4:55 AM UTC

fao_ wrote: post #145

fao_ wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share what has led you to believe that you're the average rather than just an outlier?

lol at getting downvoted by asking for evidence that a highly paid technology worker who browses hacker news represents "the average" and isn't just an outlier. Do the people on this site understand that they are not the average? A lot of the hackernewses seem to enjoy the idea of being an outlier in medicine, knowledge, etc. but reject the rather more likely idea that they're an outlier with regards to their usage o…

Unless the comment has been edited, they never claimed they were "the average".

The claimed that most people aren't going to use 100 MB/s 24/7/365 and gave themselves as an example.

Their data point is useful, as the chance of the typical user downloading 263,974 GB a month when they download 4 GB is incredibly low.

Even if they were an outlier, it's far more reasonable to think that they are an outlier by using far more data, not far less data, then typical. Their data point remains useful even if they are an outlier.

To reiterate - they never claimed to be average or an outlier, in fact there is no claim like that at all.

One data point is better than none.