Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly "astronomers" have really started to annoy me, which surprises me because I love space and astronomy and star-gazing and such. I have bought multiple personal telescopes over the years, so I guess I even qualify as an amateur astronomer. But lately it seems I disagree with astronomers on any intersection of astronomy and politics. I put "astronomers" in quotes because of course I realize that "not all astron…
it’s cheaper and more permanent to just lay fibre and copper to provide internet. we don’t need 3000 satellites launched every few years to do so. i think you’re overinflating elon’s importance. (not that he designs and builds starlink, anyway)
A lot of the places served (as in actual customers) by starlink are in truly remote and difficult to reach places.
I know someone who uses it in the middle of private land surrounded by national forest, 5+ miles from the nearest paved road.
It doesn’t get electricity, and the last quote he was able to get was for $250k+ to attempt to run power from the local utility. But now with Solar….
And he’s not the only one in that region.
Using starlink for dense urban environments? Yeah that makes no sense. It also possibly doesn’t make any sense in suburban environments either.
But dispersed or remote areas? Pretty awesome.
LTE is sometimes a competitor in those situations, but there are a lot of people in those environments that don’t have good line of sight to a cell, but do get plenty of open sky, and Starlink is far superior for them than any other solution.
LTE over these remote areas is also a major capex, and involves a lot of environmental impact.
Hughes/Geo satellite sucks in both latency and bandwidth.
Most LTE data plans are also expensive for this type of thing, as any RV’er will tell you.
In many ways, this solves the ‘everyone must live in the big city to make good money’ problem, if coupled with remote work.