I was living in the eastern Caribbean ten years ago (a place that is not particularly poor), and the number of web services that could not handle a slow or unreliable connection was kind of shocking. Netflix was actually pretty impressive, they were fine to about 500kb/s with a lot of dropped packets. Below that, they were slow, but by no means unreliable. Most other sites would shit the bed on a similar connection.
Starlink has been an absolute godsend for my friends that are still down there.
I have such a love hate relationship with the tech. On one hand, I live on the edge of the mountains and can get away while on-call, set up my starlink and still be within SLAs if I got paged while out of service (weekend pages are fairly rare). On the other hand, I'm an amateur astronomer, for visual astro, it's not a huge deal, but I see how it could be for astrophotography (streaks) and obviously it's a problem for radio.
Most of Starlink’s customers are simply rural people who want Internet access at decent speeds. There are wide swathes of the US where Starlink’s best competition is measured in kilobytes per second.
Pretty sure we achieved that level of coverage here in the US a decade or more earlier than that. A lot of those same rural customers still rely on the telephone system for Internet access. They might be able to get DSL now, but the speeds are going to be low; often just a few hundred kilobits per second.
No, I mean globally most of their customers are rural. Starlink is limited primarily by customer density rather than by absolute numbers. They can provide service to just so many people per square mile before the speed drops below the customer’s tolerance. Most of the square miles in the world are rural, therefore most of the customers are as well.
Plus cities have Starlink’s best competition. Starlink is amazing but FTTH is even better. If you can get FTTH at all then you probably won’t even consider Starlink. Nor should you.
Because there's entire continents of people who think it's the most ridiculous statement they've ever read on this site (which they can only access because of Starlink).
“Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.” --https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I’m a human that just so happens to disagree with you. I don’t like Elon either, but what I dislike more is that it’s impossible to talk about any of his companies without people like you assuming my motives.
The umpteenth example of Musk companies behaving poorly and here you come to suggest that we can’t let pesky things like science stand in the way of “the internet”. As if Starlink services is synonymous with the internet itself. The implication is clear, to me at least.
Precise motives? I don’t know, I don’t think I have any. I don’t use starlink myself or have a Tesla or invest in any of his companies. Feels silly to disclaim that, but there you go.
Having used starlink before on a plane and on land, it’s fast and seems far superior to previous generations of satellite internet. I’m earnestly asking if creating problems for astronomers is outweighed by giving more people access to the internet. Not just giving them “access”, but giving them very fast and low latency access.
We had that before Starlink flooded the radio quiet zones with leakage.
Were that the case, there would have been nobody buying Starlink.
As they are, I think you are wrong.
My neighborhood has both cable and fiber, both >= 1Gbps, fairly cheap
My neighbor has starlink. I assume because they are MAGA.
Not everyone lives within a metro that has good infrastructure. This is even more true in developing countries.
More tech people need to go places.
I was living in the eastern Caribbean ten years ago (a place that is not particularly poor), and the number of web services that could not handle a slow or unreliable connection was kind of shocking. Netflix was actually pretty impressive, they were fine to about 500kb/s with a lot of dropped packets. Below that, they were slow, but by no means unreliable. Most other sites would shit the bed on a similar connection.
Starlink has been an absolute godsend for my friends that are still down there.
These are either incidental or unauthorized transmissions. Not the Ku band downlink to terminals.
I have such a love hate relationship with the tech. On one hand, I live on the edge of the mountains and can get away while on-call, set up my starlink and still be within SLAs if I got paged while out of service (weekend pages are fairly rare). On the other hand, I'm an amateur astronomer, for visual astro, it's not a huge deal, but I see how it could be for astrophotography (streaks) and obviously it's a problem for radio.
That might be dispositive if we didn't already have almost everybody on Earth wired up without using satellites.
The fact that so many people are paying for starlink suggests that it is adding something important that was missing before.
Streaming video on airplane flights?
Most of Starlink’s customers are simply rural people who want Internet access at decent speeds. There are wide swathes of the US where Starlink’s best competition is measured in kilobytes per second.
Seems like a case for the US having better fibre deployment than it does for leaking interference from unshielded poorly made tin cans.
Fibre rolls in a dense city have different economics from somewhere with just a few people per square mile.
and yet Western Australia, 3x size of Texas with less than a million people in 1980 had a telephone network that covered the population.
The "sums are different for rural V urban" doesn't make leaky tin cans a better solution over fibre to population, particularly given the downsides.
Pretty sure we achieved that level of coverage here in the US a decade or more earlier than that. A lot of those same rural customers still rely on the telephone system for Internet access. They might be able to get DSL now, but the speeds are going to be low; often just a few hundred kilobits per second.
~80% of Starlink customers are not in the US.
That'd be a point to make to the GP db48x
No, I mean globally most of their customers are rural. Starlink is limited primarily by customer density rather than by absolute numbers. They can provide service to just so many people per square mile before the speed drops below the customer’s tolerance. Most of the square miles in the world are rural, therefore most of the customers are as well.
Plus cities have Starlink’s best competition. Starlink is amazing but FTTH is even better. If you can get FTTH at all then you probably won’t even consider Starlink. Nor should you.
Got a source for that?
Because there's entire continents of people who think it's the most ridiculous statement they've ever read on this site (which they can only access because of Starlink).
[flagged]
“Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.” --https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
“Assume good faith” is no longer feasible. There are so many people/probably bots commenting here with obvious agendas.
Everyone complains about Reddit and twitter and whatever else being heavily astroturfed, but we’re supposed to think HN is somehow immune?
I’m a human that just so happens to disagree with you. I don’t like Elon either, but what I dislike more is that it’s impossible to talk about any of his companies without people like you assuming my motives.
What precisely are your motives, then?
The umpteenth example of Musk companies behaving poorly and here you come to suggest that we can’t let pesky things like science stand in the way of “the internet”. As if Starlink services is synonymous with the internet itself. The implication is clear, to me at least.
Precise motives? I don’t know, I don’t think I have any. I don’t use starlink myself or have a Tesla or invest in any of his companies. Feels silly to disclaim that, but there you go.
Having used starlink before on a plane and on land, it’s fast and seems far superior to previous generations of satellite internet. I’m earnestly asking if creating problems for astronomers is outweighed by giving more people access to the internet. Not just giving them “access”, but giving them very fast and low latency access.