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SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth

zdnet.com

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Re: SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth

#61

soooo good that they'll burn up one day and this nonsense can finally end. investors provide infinite capital to nonsense projects so that the showman can create an endless show that will attract new nonsense capital. sorry but already in rural morocco they have 200 mbit internet for 20 bucks a month. Yes there are some 6 wheeled vehicles roaming the planet that might really benefit from these 100k satellites. but fo…

[flagged]

Re: SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth

#62
post #36

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.

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've since moved back to civilization, but I still own the house. As far as I know, there are no plans at all to improve the last mile infrastructure.

Separately, from SpaceX's own prospectus, Starlink is only a tiny fraction of the overall conglomerate that went public recently. It "only" needs to support double digit billions of valuation to pull its weight inside of the company.

Re: SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth

#63
post #59

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's very popular in rural US where running wired broadband is cost prohibitive. There are many parts of the US that are very spread out, and thus running wires to every home is expensive without subsidies.

Right the areas that companies took money to roll out high speed internet to, then just kept the money and called DSL high speed or just did nothing. The government should keep giving companies money and investing in them. It's brilliant.

Re: SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth

#64

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.

I have fiber (I can get up to 300 Gbps at my home in the Seattle area, but I got opted for the 2Gbps) and I have Starlink as backup/failover. I previously used my mobile service for that but learned the hard way that when there's a large internet outage in the area, as it did when we had a bad storm, so does mobile service, either power loss or it can't support the influx of everyone using their phone internet. So no…

That was my thinking as well here in EU farmland. I would use it as a backup. I really wanted to have an excuse to use the cool af Starlink tech. However, after half a decade the fiber has gone down 3 times, and I just shared my iPhone's LTE as a hotspot in 2 cases, and in the third I did yard work for 20 minutes.

Re: SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth

#65

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.

There's a lot of places without fiber, e.g. all the ships/jets etc. there's a lot of low-density areas, there's islands with no internet or VERY expensive internet

Re: SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But there are a few places that will need Starlink, like planes, cruise ships, and islands. I'm just not sure if that will justify that $1T valuation. There's also drones and front-line trenches, but your point still stands.

And for that reason the EU, India, China and Russia will build their own Starlink alternatives. To offset costs they'll then provide it for civilian use, competing with Starlink in the above areas.

India is super super poor still I cannot imagine they would build out domestic Starlink for hypothetical wars before other actual critical infrastructure.

Re: SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth

#67
post #62
post #36

Earlier 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…

I was only trying to talk about Starlink here, as that is what TFA is about. Starlink is AMAZING in-flight, out at sea, etc.. But since you brought it up:

> Separately, from SpaceX's own prospectus, Starlink is only a tiny fraction of the overall conglomerate that went public recently. It "only" needs to support double digit billions of valuation to pull its weight inside of the company.

So, where does the rest of the valuation come from?

It feels like it comes from the alien simulation-theory overlords.

Re: SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth

#68
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was only trying to talk about Starlink here, as that is what TFA is about. Starlink is AMAZING in-flight, out at sea, etc.. But since you brought it up: > Separately, from SpaceX's own prospectus, Starlink is only a tiny fraction of the overall conglomerate that went public recently. It "only" needs to support double digit billions of valuation to pull its weight inside of the company. So, where does the rest of th…

According to SpaceX itself 93% of the company's value is in AI IIRC.

Re: SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth

#69
post #57
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently I flew on a long-distance (so at least a dozen hours of flight time) low-budget airline that had 60 Mbps download/12 Mbps upload and it specifically called out SpaceX Starlink for being able to provide this for free. A video call went smoothly. There was connectivity from takeoff to landing with no interruption in between. This was the best airline experience I've had yet.

I flew Delta about 6 months ago and they had something similar, also for free, but they use Viasat. I think most of the big airlines were moving this way anyway to be honest, Starlink just has a good opportunity for advertising.

I believe Viasat internet satellites are placed in geostationary orbit, whereas SpaceX Starlink is not, so the service Viasat provides is already blown out.

Re: SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth

#70
post #17

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.

I have a really good friend who used Starlink for his cottage in Canada and as soon as there was broadband he switched away. Starlink was unreliable and slow compared to what he has now. In my country today the people who use it the most are in northern cities that don't even have roads going to them.

I have it, I live in a very rural place.

I've had to reset the router 3 or 4 times in two years. I don't suffer outages even in thunderstorms.

It may be slow compared to fiber or something, but it's the fastest steam game downloads I've ever had personally (no big city life).

But reliability has been almost 100%

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