Comment on SpaceX says states should dump fiber plans, give all grant money to Starlink
ubergeek@lemmy.today 1 day agoAre satellite links easier to take down than a fiber link? No
Depends on what we’re talking about.
Is it easy, in any conceivable scenario, to take out an entire nation’s web of cabled infra? No, not at all, and would require the same state actor level threat it would to take out a satellite train. It’s just cheaper to do it in space, and less prone to failing than it would be to try a land-based infra attack.
Do Starlink satellite need to be replaced at extreme cost? Yes, but so does terresrrial network infrastructure.
We do not need to replace all the fiber, and all the coax, and all the transceivers every 5 years, at a cost of 10s of billions. At most? You need to replace stuff in a DC/DSLAM/termination point and the client side. All the fiber and coax in between is still usable for 20 years, even. And the endpoints don’t need to be upgraded physically, most times, it’s a software update pushed.
Ever wonder why Ukraine was using Starlink for network connections in the first place?
Because Russia bombed their power plants, all the cabling, and it was a literal war zone. And relied on infrastructure that was terrestrial outside of the war zone. And to replace all the infra (Outside of the power plants) will still be cheaper than a couple of trains being launched for StarLink.
Your points, that satellites based networks are more vulnerable and prohibitively expensive is simply not compatible with reality.
You do know StarLink can be taken down by targeting their ground stations, right?
Bytemeister@lemmy.world 1 day ago
To put into scale how wrong you are about taking out a satellite, the last satellite the US shot down was in 2008, and it took a specially modified 9 million dollar missile to shoot it down. A Starlink satellite with launch costs included is just under 2 million dollars. Not only is it technologically difficult to take out a satellite, but it’s much more costly to shoot them down than it is to put them up.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Burnt_Frost
It’s not a trivial thing to take out a single satellite, let along a whole constellation of satellites.
You literally could not be more wrong about this.
Here you are acknowledge that ground-based systems are very vulnerable to attack. Guess what still works in Ukraine right now (or at least when Elon allows it to work). You got it. Starlink.
How about another comparison. Starlink has a full project estimated cost of ~10 billion dollars, that’a with launches and satellites. The estimated cost to rebuild Ukraine’s telecom network is 4.7 billion dollars. Starlink has already generated 72 million in profit (not revenue, but profit!)
We gave telecom providers 200 billion in tax breaks to build a fiber network in the US, and they didn’t even finish the job. 20x what Starlink’s estimated cost is.
Serioualy, the scale of how wrong you are about all of this is staggering.
ubergeek@lemmy.today 1 day ago
Which includes the ground stations that Starlink uses.
Bytemeister@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Still works over Ukraine somehow… Maybe that fancy satellite network just carries it to the next available ground station?
ubergeek@lemmy.today 1 day ago
It works, only if Elon wants it to work. Did you forget he shut it off during the war, several times?