fun fact: fiber optic wire doesn’t have to dodge anything because it’s buried in the ground
Fun fact: fiber optic cables don’t need customers either because telecos took a shit ton of money in government subsidies to build them but they didn’t bother finishing the job.
Unlike Elon Musk, who has never recieved government subsidies or delivered faulty products
Whatever the case with other stuff, Starlink is a pretty solid offering. I know people who would have been stuck with barely better than dialup, but now have a connection that’s fast and reliable enough to work remotely.
Telcos, meanwhile, have often been given money to improve infrastructure and just… didn’t. Not to mention continually charging customers for services they couldn’t readily offer.
Don’t get me wrong, Elon is a shit in many ways, but Starlink as a product is excellent and a game-charger for many.
Disagree. It’s the Boring Company of ISPs. He’s selling the government on an overengineered solution to a problem they created by not regulating the ISPs. Laying cable would be better for basically anyone in North America as a long term sustainable and efficient solution to delivering internet connections.
Ah yes, North America, because that’s the only place in the world that needs high speed internet.
No worries though, I’m sure those ISP’s will get right on running cables to all those rural locations, aaaaaannny day now (well, actually they might but only because there’s actual competition for their $100+ 2-5MBps when-it-even-works internet packages)
Additional fun fact: Radio towers anchored to ground are also dodge obligation free and are able cover the supplementary mobile and wireless communications needs to complement the wired connections for cases of not being able use wires.
😀
Are they truly able though? I’ll readily admit I’m not very knowledgeable on this, but radio towers have a limited range, right? Satellites have the ability to provide internet and communications to truly remote areas where it may be logistically challenging or impractical to build radio towers.
Well sure there is use cases for satellites like ocean and sea going ships, remote ocean island and antarctic research stations. However “small village in rural, but mainland USA” is not one of those to me. It could be handled by radio towers and wired links. If only the political and resource priority was there. It is far more permanent and sustainable infrastructure choice, than “we have to keep blasting space rocket very 5 years to keep this towns internet going. If they stop blasting the rockets, we lose the internets.”
Same applies to pretty much all mainland and all communities outside of something like deep jungle and deep siberia. I come from Finland. Finnish Lapland is not exactly hive of population density, but still couple hundred people villages and just summer cottages have mobile internet cell coverage. I remember when it wasn’t so. There was time, when dial up and satellite internet via geostationary was a thing in 1990’s and early 2000’s. It all fell out with the spread of cell networks. Who in their right mind would compete with “20€/month, you get 5G/4G internet. Unlimited data, 100Megs speed”, heck 50€ per month as much you can eat and 5G can deliver 1G service mobile cell network with constant satellite launching. putting up towers with microwave links isn’t that expensive. I streamed Netflix at family summer cottage in Lapland.
The “but vast distances” is empty argument. Is USA way vast to Finland… yeah, but there is also 300 million people compared to 5 million to pay for it all. . Problem in say USA isn’t vast distances or small population density. It is that mobile carriers are run as regional monopolies without sufficient monopoly controls of “no you have to serve also that town there, you have to serve that ranch there. You are utility company using the public good of shared radio spectrum slots. Sure you paid license for it, but those are limited resource. Even the paid for radio slots come with obligations. Electric utility has minimum service obligations, now you telecoms are new electricity, here is demands for minimum service obligations. In this county you have sought to have under your coverage, you provide radio coverage for every permanent residence. Including that farm. Don’t like it? You are free to relinquish your temporary license for exploitation of common good resource and we will find someone who will do same business with acceptable to us terms… Oh would you look at that, seems to be like 5 companies in queue there at the door.”
Do the Finnish mobile operators like they have service obligations in certain regions to cover even low density areas as private profit seeking business? Noooo, but ahemmm they are still making profits. Do they like they have to offer roaming under fair terms to competitors to avoid every operator having to put their own mast for every last village? Probably not. They are still making profits. They fullfill their minimum service obligations and play by the roaming and competition rules, government leaves them alone to run their business.
ROFL trying to compare the US to Finland is like comparing a postage stamp to a bill board. Not to mention a vast difference in government. ‘Common good’ is a catch phrase used to sell bullshit to the public, hoping to distract them from the massive theft of public funds that’s about to happen. And it’s never enforced.
Google couldn’t afford to get fast internet to America. Running the wires is barely a rounding error in the cost of getting around the law suits and regulatory requirements.
Well the one thing you are right about is the governments being different.
Cell networks are modular as such those can be compared per capita, not per absolute. USA has population density twice of Finlands. Also since these are cell networks affordability can be talked network wide instead of locally. Sure that one Winston farm is not affordable, but we’ll the local city already makes up for it.
Upon which we come to the reason we can demand they take that hit of providing for Winston Farm and not just picking the cream from the top by sticking to the city.
Common good or public good. Limited shared reasource, that can’t be utilised without affecting others. If one company gets for radio band and is choosing to not provide for Winston Farm, that shuts out company B. Company B was also going to utilise the radio band, but their plan was to serve Winstons also. Company A thus excludes ability of winstons to be served, even if winstons wanted to be served and willing to pay fair price
Same as we don’t allow companies to pollute air endlessly, since it denies the ability to habitate in the polluted air. There is only one atmosphere, there is only one radio space around Earth. It is only feasible to run one water network, one electricity grid in a city. In that case the shared common good is just the space itself. If someone puts up an utility pole on the only strip of land next to the road, someone else can’t.
There is more than one radio band, but only limited amount.
You can’t compare population density with the US because of the large cities. Finland peaks out at far less than half the US, leaving larger areas of the US at a far lower density, making for much larger of a problem given the range limits of cellular towers. On top of that the US has far larger areas that are prohibited or restricted from building towers or the infrastructure to support them.
Yes, cell/radio towers operate on Line of Sight. In flat, no vegetation lands you can see for data towers maybe 5 to 10 miles of range radius from the tower. In more realistic conditions you see 2 to 4 miles at best range. You’d be surprised how many cellular towers there are everywhere hiding in plain sight, since the high frequency bands such as 1900mhz don’t have penetration like 600mhz bands do. Lower frequency tends to not be as fast as higher frequency bands so its usually a tradeoff for speed or range. Before I was running Starlink I used to run 4G internet, and because where I live is rural, hilly, and full of trees, I had no direct line of sight. 1000 dollars in special parabolic radio antennas were required to focus on signal reflections to get data signal and even then I only had 3 bars roughly of signal. The tower is about 3.5mi away as the crow flies.
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100% this. Think of a satellite as a really tall Radio tower able to reach much further away.
So why do you think Starlink needs more than one satellite in orbit?
Aircraft have to dodge them.
That is the aircraft’s problem. Excavators, bulldozers, drilling rigs and tunnel boring machines need to dodge fiber optic cables and so on. :)
And yet, I always have to pay for redundant fiber because they don’t dodge it.
Fun fact, radio towers don’t work for shit. I’ve had 4 cellular routers for the past 5 years, and had a total of maybe 24 hours where they offered better service than Starlink due to weather.
In northern Alaska last month, a buried undersea cable was cut by ice, causing a major internet outage for a number of communities. An exceptional situation, to be sure, but it sprang to my mind immediately. No infrastructure is without hazards.
Unfortunately a fiber optic wire has to dodge lawsuits. Anything you send to space won’t be destroyed or repossessed because it threatens someone’s Monopoly.
Except backhoes.
I had to pay my ISP $25k to run fiber to my house :(
But now I’m the only person in the area with gigabit internet while everyone else has 1mbps DSL?
Yeah, but it’s really hard to pull behind the boat. And my buddies say the installer refuses to drive through the combat zone.
I remember the story about one old lady with a shovel cutting off a part of European country (was it Romania?) from the internet. In that case if fiber optic wire could doge, it would save the day for a lot of people*
*I’m not sure if the story is true and if I remember it correctly.
Complaining about the number of objects in orbit as you persist in putting thousands of additional objects in orbit seems hypocritical
I just hate seeing these stupid things polluting the night sky. Other than Elon Musk, who the fuck wants to see this junk flying around when you look up at the stars?
While I see your point, some people don’t have any other option than this and it is a game changer for rural areas. The only other option would be to run the infrastructure to them and that’s not gonna happen anytime soon unfortunately.
“We have failed as a society to help small communities. Instead of seeing this an choosing to be better, it’s OK to let billionaires fuck up space.”
Seriously. Small towns and rural communities could have high speed network access already if they stopped voting for people that refuse to fund infrastructure spending and that bend over backwards to prevent community-based initiatives to create high speed networks! Elon’s not helping them, he’s exploiting the fact that they’ve backed people who actively keep them in the stone ages.
We already spent taxpayer money trying to get ISPs to build infrastructure out to rural areas. They all pocketed it instead.
Not all, my isp expanded a fiber network to me. I live deep on a dirt road in the middle of the woods in the middle of nowhere. Sure some pocketed but its unfair to say all did.
Just like he admitted the Hyperloop was motivated by a hatred of high-speed rail programs.
As well it’s important to develop this technology on our planet for when we become an interplanetary species. Being able to quickly surround a habitable planet with infrastructure that can beam network, position, even power directly down to the surface without interference is hyper critical. EMS will also love this for when natural disasters strike and communication via ground based systems is knocked out. This is ultimately the direction we will be heading in for future points, but making satellites that encompass multiple things. However it’s important that any company, or even government, operating in space should have to pay into some sort of UN fund for cleaning space junk as it is becoming a problem and it’s so easy for companies to launch stuff in space and avoid any consequences when it turns to junk.
I like your optimism. I think we monkeys all die on this rock.
I dare to believe we can exile at least a couple of billionaires to Mars before that happens.
The only other option would be to run the infrastructure to them and that’s not gonna happen anytime soon unfortunately.
So we should cause a global sky pollution problem to solve local political problem. How about… No. We don’t pollute global shared good and instead USA just has to pull it by it’s boots straps and solve it’s political administration problems.
Africa, North Europe and so on doesn’t have problem with setting up cell networks even for rural areas. Point to point microwave links have been invented to even avoid having to run ground fibre to each cell tower. We have the tech. Thus it isn’t a absolutely necessary problem. It is local political problem.
Fix it… or well suffer lack of internet. USA doesn’t get to ignore the external global costs just to make things politically more convenient locally.
Exactly. Oh, Bumfuck, Nebraska doesn’t have 1GB fiber speeds because of a shitty city council!? There’s only one solution: we blot out the entire planet’s sky.
It could if the will was there. We’re able to run water & electricity - but we can’t figure out how to run a strand of glass or 1 new piece of copper? It’s called greed, laziness, ineptitude & creative companies & their lawyers which took tax payer money without delivering the services they promised year over year.
Most of the rural areas that the universl coverage concept is intended to serve don’t have water lines running from a central location and may not even be connected to a large grid. Satellite internet serves remote homes and scientific outposts in a way that cannot be met with physical lines and depending on terrain it may not be possible through towers.
When you are living in mountain vallleys or working in the middle of a desert having the same access to the internet through a non-physical connection is crucial.
That said, the current implementation has some serious downsides and we should learn from that in a future iteration that requires fewer physical objects that are far less reflective than the current models.
The only other option would be to run the infrastructure to them and that’s not gonna happen anytime soon unfortunately
Not because it can’t happen though, but because it isn’t profitable or beneficial to the right people.
I’m no expert, but I would think running cables (or using existing ones which undoubtedly exist) or whatever other terrestrial solution, would be infinitely easier and cheaper (and less destructive) than networking the entire sky with satellites.Seems like yet another instance where capitalism has created a problem (not connecting remote places despite being able to because it doesn’t make them enough money) only so it can sell us convoluted, overcomplicated and overpriced “solutions” that do make them money (as well as other forms of power and control). E: alternatively (more like and and/or), they needed the military application and used the side effects of it benefiting civilian as a front and a justification. And it’s working, people are defending it without question.
A reminder that in the 90s there was federal funding to major companies to help expand broadband into rural areas and try to get closer to 100% connected. The money was taken.
Oh, I’m sure it was, never to be seen again.
Yeah, before Starlink I was paying $150/month for 15 Mbps down, usually getting half of that or less, and it was transmitted via radio so it always stopped working when it rained. It was barely usable, but too important to stop paying for.
Now I pay a little less and get 100-150 Mbps down, and the rain usually doesn’t affect it. Latency is better too.
And I’m just 20 minutes from a fairly large city in the US. There are a lot of areas with less service than I had.
Musk can eat shit, and I hate giving him money, but Starlink has made a really big difference.
I get what you’re saying but… it’s just so hard to accept that we’re going with satellites rather than running a fiber optic cable over to your house.
So we’re defiling the night sky to… help bored Republicans get on Facebook, Twitter, and 4chan?
Well now I’m really sold on the idea!
The people who require network access in under served, rural areas?
I think temporarily Starlink should be reducing their constellation ambitions, spread out the dishes and reduce throughput. The accessibility Starlink offers is a 11/10 win for the world. But the bandwidth and size should come after we have better mitigation for Kessler Syndrome and inference with observing the universe.
Don’t worry, it’ll only be 20 years after the chain reaction accident that all these satellites will burn up in orbit. Surely 20 years of no low earth orbit satellites will be fine, right?
I personally consider 100mbit to be the minimum internet people should have. And everyone should have at least that.
I got my parents Starlink because they live a few miles outside the capitol of Texas and have zero unlimited cellular options and no terrestrial options. They get about 120mb/sec and I would hate for that number to go down. It’s over 110 dollars a month versus Gigabit bidirectional for Google fiber that I have just 6 miles from them that is only 45 a month.
100megabit is not the minimum, that’s about what I’m on and have the fastest internet out of anyone I know, downloading games in a couple hours and stuff.
People can absolutely live with +16megabits, I did at my parents house for years. 100 would be nice, but in no way necessary.
I only have 22mbit where I live and no available fiber. There’s no faster service either. We get by with it, but in a full household, it can certainly cause lots of buffering and bandwidth restrictions. When we worked from home, it could be a problem on occasions. I live in a decently sized community in the southeastern US. There’s no excuse for this.
It’s called being a satellite
The only reason for starlink to exist is because telcos were allowed to ignore building out infrastructure to serve more areas. I don’t know if incentives were ever provided to get them the capital to be willing to build out the infrastructure in less populates/rural areas.
Realizing that we have turned earth orbit into a garbage pile simply because we refused to step up and do right by our citizens instead of maximizing capitalism certainly stings.
I mean, most satellites correct their course and dodge stuff every once in a while. There’s just a lot of starlink ones, so you get more dodges. But it’s kinda inevitable.
Would be way worse if they didn’t dodge anything.
The problem is he eventually wants 42,000 of them in orbit.
Instant Kessler syndrome!
Bezos has a plan to do the same, but I think his calls for 100,000. Those two will be the destruction of this planet with their stupid one-upmanship.
While I think Musk is an idiot, Starlink before I had fiber ran to me for some ungodly reason was a godsend. Also, space is big. 42000 satellites is still super insignificant in spaceborne objects over the planet. Also their design is so they burn up relatively quickly, and do not hang out in orbit for long, iirc only a couple years and constantly need to burn to maintain altitude. Sure they look like shit in the sky, but having the network like this is great for rural areas where there is no cell phone or internet service. But, the whole thing isn’t very sustainable
The fucking moron just want big number, consequences be damn.
1)Aim thruster retrograde 2)fire! 3)Enjoy starlink meteor shower!
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is anyone even using that starlink internet? ive seen prices go from 100$/mo which is a lot, but maybe not for sattelite net idk… Is there anything else he gets from sattelites or just internet?
People in rural areas use it.
I use it. I live in the middle of nowhere and it has been a total game changer. I now want for nothing.
I use it. My option before was $240/mo for microwave internet. Starlink is both faster and significantly cheaper for me. It’s just internet though, same as my other options.
I use it, it’s my only serious option where I live and works surprisingly well. as for my other options - the literal garbage tier DSL is unusable, the line-of-sight wireless providers would require removal of a bunch of trees and likely still wouldn’t work well, and 1 bar of cellular is a joke.
I live in a van and I use Starlink daily when I’m somewhere without cell service.
They just started testing it when I left a previous job. Having fast, reliable Internet access would be a game-changer for remote temporary/mobile sites. And when I say remote, I mean remote.
My options are $65 a month for 10Mb download / 768 kbit upload and 120ms ping to gaming servers, and about 1 in 10 packet loss. Or… $120 a month for starlink which gives me 100-200 MB download and 50-100 MB upload and 40-60ms ping to gaming servers and about 1 in 100 packet loss.
Why couldn’t a piece of space detritus hit Elon Musk? 😜
