Not only do you have to deploy them in a constellation, you have to deploy them in a descending constellation. They are constantly burning up all the time and you have to keep launching new ones forever just to maintain current capacity. It’s the perfect business plan to make SpaceX look better on paper.
Comment on SpaceX says states should dump fiber plans, give all grant money to Starlink
yaroto98@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
The tech behind starlink is good. LEO satellites play a purpose. Upsides are they have less latency than GEO satellites. Speeds are the same though.
Downside is you have to deploy them evenly as a constellation or else you get service inturruption. Which means if you look at any population map 90% of your constellation is going to be underutilized, and the other 10% is going to be full.
The real target audience should be mobile broadband. Airplanes, ships, RVs, cars, phones, etc.
But what do you do in the meantime? Fill in the unutilized constillation with rural residential. You can’t compete with fiber tech, so you sue the govt for free money.
captainastronaut@seattlelunarsociety.org 23 hours ago
yaroto98@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Heh yep, in fact they’re not lasting as long as they were supposed to.
cole@lemdro.id 17 hours ago
Starlink is definitely faster than all but the most expensive GEO services (and those require specialized hardware)
yaroto98@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Sorry, I was referring to the underlying tech and bands. The physics behind LEO doesn’t automatically grant it the ability to be faster than GEO. It’s faster because the sattelites are brand new not 10 years old.
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Yeah, I can’t imagine a medium sized town all using Starlink at once without issues.
MangoCats@feddit.it 22 hours ago
Read this quick before the people selling generators get it buried: wtsp.com/…/67-144d70da-bb27-496c-8928-ab7e61a53b0…
The gas company finally figured out how to deflect their responsibility in the matter: they say that the generator owners “didn’t register” their generators, but… now that it has been a year, has the gas company done anything to improve service capacity?
Anyway: the tie-in with Starlink is, anything like this works great until everybody tries to use it all at once at high capacity. When all 53,000 residents of Grand Island Nebraska decide to stream different high definition videos all at once? A good fiber system can handle that, Starlink? I’m curious…
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Keeping the electrical grid balanced with varying loads is so hard I’m amazed it works at all.
Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works 21 hours ago
It’s something that’s only possible because of the scale a grid works on. It also helps to have generation like hydro, which can ramp up and down very fast.
yaroto98@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Companies like Viasat with GEO sattelites have the advantage of one mololithic sattelite with massive coverage. They have a ton of little antennas on each sattelite that they can adjust as demand changes. Need more coverage in an area due to demand? They can task an antenna not doing anything over there.
Latency is a B though. Minimum 500ms each way. Which is minimum 1sec round trip just physics not actual. What’s interesting is the layperson doesn’t notice much. It’s not abnormal for a rando website to take a few seconds to load on my wifi. Or for a netflix stream to take a few seconds before it starts buffering. The biggest problem a company like viasat has is old tech in the sky. They can’t handle the load of everyone watching netflix. So, they have to data cap everyone. It’ll be interesting to see if their new sattelites later this year fix that or if they keep the caps on.