771–780 of 831 posts
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Does the US/China have the capability to shoot down satellites? I mean, Starlink has a lot of satellites; could they really all be destroyed?
China has demonstrated ASAT weapons. They don't have enough in stock to take out the entire Starlink constellation but just the threat would be enough.
If we consider President Javier Milei’s perspectives on monopolies, as articulated in his address at the World Economic Forum [1], we can apply his reasoning to the case of Starlink’s potential dominance in direct-to-phone satellite connectivity. In his statements, Milei challenges the traditional view that monopolies inherently lead to market inefficiencies. Instead, he assumes that monopolistic positions, when achi…
I wish I could pay Starlink directly and have global satellite based LTE instead of having to go through a specific carrier and be limited by other carriers’ reciprocity to specific countries and bands One space based cell plan for the whole world
Direct to Cell has pretty low bandwidth. The total bandwidth is 4Mbps per cell, with each person getting kpbs. If they do offer internet, it will be like 2G or dialup.
I was looking into the bandwidth (apparently most important parameter in cellular service) offered but nobody is mentioning including the Starlink landing page for the service. Sure it mentioned LTE but it can be anything from 1 to 100 Mbps and LTE+ can be well into Gbps.
Here is the previous post last year on Direct to Cell by Starlink and the main complains is about the puny bandwidth [1]. But if you are outside the town in remote places or in the middle of ocean any communication albeit a few bytes is most welcome, beggars cannot choose. For most IoT services it should be adequate but if you're inside tropical jungle or Amazon forest it will not work need to climb tree for the reception to work.
[1] Starlink Direct to Cell:
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Keep in mind that Kuiper satellite is 600kg, while Starlink is 260. So you would have to adjust the math. I am sure it's doable if all the space providers work together and there aren't any showstoppers.
> I am sure it's doable if all the space providers work together and there aren't any showstoppers. Are you living in a different world that me? NO company or Government on Earth outside SpaceX has the capability to launch more than about 15 orbital rockets per year. Most are in the 5-10 per year range. Who the heck is going to launch all these sats?
> NO company or Government on Earth
Not that it's a possibility for Kuiper, but China had 67 launches in 2023.
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And not that remote. Internet provision not all that far out of major Australian cities can be abysmal. I'm only 30 minutes drive from the centre of Perth and my options are currently 5G (operating at about 4Mbit), Wireless Broadband (performance promise - the download speed will reach 25Mbit at least once in any given 24 hour period!) or Starlink, at a pretty stable 120/20. I'd love to not have to pay for it, to use…
It may or may not be relevant to your case, but every time a story like this comes up I will remind people in general that fiber-optic cable is 50 cents per meter (probably $1 per meter Australian), wireless links cost equipment and a regulatory approval fee and are easier in less densely populated areas, and there are tons and tons of stories of people dissatisfied with their ISP creating a better competitor, your n…
TIO membership, the carrier licence fee, telecommunications interception and data retention obligations create recurring costs in the thousands of dollars a year before you serve a single customer.
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Is the reason that Starlink charges so much more for boats is low competition? Or is there something obviously much more complex / expensive about beaming gigs of data from space over the ocean vs land? I don't write this post with any spite; I am genuinely curious.
Starlink is normally a single hop from a home to a satellite and then down to a base station hooked up to fiber. To work over the ocean you pass messages between satellites potentially several hops and then eventually down to a base station, but that’s inherently constrained as with all mess topologies you get far less bandwidth than initially seems possible. So in part it’s overhead to deal with inefficiencies and i…
all mesh topologies
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that solution isn't without issues. specifically, you have to climb trees and run power or do solar, and then if there's a heavy storm you can have issues. those aren't insurmountable problems but being able to get Internet anywhere there's liner of sight to the sky is easier (or harder!) depending on the terrain.
Aren't these the same problems for Starlink?
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I believe by the time Starlink arrived in Ukraine Crimea was already occupied and post "referendum" and providing service there would be like providing service to Russia, no?
No, because the "referendum" was meaningless and had no effect on the peninsula's sovereignty. Which since 1991 has been and remains Ukrainian.
it is nonsense to say it was sovereign and at the same time belongs to ukraine since 1991
what it is, is an occupied territory of ukraine fully controlled by russia with russian military on it
that's whom starlink service in Crimea would benefit
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And not that remote. Internet provision not all that far out of major Australian cities can be abysmal. I'm only 30 minutes drive from the centre of Perth and my options are currently 5G (operating at about 4Mbit), Wireless Broadband (performance promise - the download speed will reach 25Mbit at least once in any given 24 hour period!) or Starlink, at a pretty stable 120/20. I'd love to not have to pay for it, to use…
It may or may not be relevant to your case, but every time a story like this comes up I will remind people in general that fiber-optic cable is 50 cents per meter (probably $1 per meter Australian), wireless links cost equipment and a regulatory approval fee and are easier in less densely populated areas, and there are tons and tons of stories of people dissatisfied with their ISP creating a better competitor, your n…
I know of companies that set up competing wireless infrastructure, and even one suburb around here that is served by a private network rather than the national network, so I guess they did it, but they have (at minimum) hundreds of customers.
At that price I might be looking at $1k-$2k just in fibre-optic cable, before we talk about any of the necessary equipment or the price of actually installing that cable underground. That covers starlink for quite a while.
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I agree with you, yet in a somewhat different way. He is an investor investing in science fiction. This isn't even implied, he comes out and says it again and again. I'm reminded of xerox parc's "The best way to predict the future is to invent it" and I think that's his philosophy. As to "businesses he knows well" I do not agree. He didn't go into electric vehicles, rockets, robots or neural interfaces as "business h…
With Twitter/X he definitely did act like a PE firm with deep cuts and a simplified operating model (eg. no moderation.) Although strangely he destroyed the revenue model at the same time, which is something a PE firm would be careful to avoid.
With hyperloop - he was frustrated by the way high speed rail was being handled in california, and hyperloop came into being as his cost + engineering sort of optimization. But with hyperloop he wasn't forced to buy it.
With twitter he just got in too deep and had to buy it.
(though I probably don't know enough about the details of twitter and could be wrong)