Comment on SpaceX Might Have Lost 200+ Starlink Satellites In Just 2 Months Shows Data
echo64@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Every time I read anything about starlink, it all just seems so quintessentially American.
You’ve got effective monopolies of communication infrastructure, which causes everyone to be underserved, and instead of just fixing the monopoly problem, you fire off infinite rockets full of cell towers that burn up in a year
As much as this is true, this is also a solution that’s doesn’t have a lot of alternatives for very isolated areas. You can technically run undersea cables to everywhere, but it’s actually faster and easier to have LEO satellites serve places like Antarctica. Some smaller island nations, the middle of Africa, etc.
There are problems with every solution, but this was always an inevitable solution for worldwide communication.
We’ve had communications satellites for this function for decades without needing starlink and blotting out the sky with garbage
Yeah and they suck with 500kbps links and ping times measured in seconds.
Geosynchronous sats are just fine! Only 22,236 miles high vs. Starlink’s 342 miles.
Want me to do the math on speed-of-light delay? .119 seconds is hella slower than .002.
Yup, that’s why the Antarctic Event Horizon telescope needed to wait 6 months to send its data back…
There is a reason that StarLink is better than the previous options.
I wouldn’t say I’m underserved (I live in a tech hub). Overcharged? Definitely.
Rural folks do have a hard time without satellite though.
Even as someone living on the east coast of the US, I’m always surprised when I visit the Midwest and Central US to see just how much “nothing” there is. At least compared to the relative density of driving up and down the northeast corridor
I kinda wish the Capitalism dev team would patch out the ExternalitiesAreHardToTrack cheat code. It’s been abused for centuries and yeah, it’s hard to fix, but there are quite a lot of upvotes on its bug tracker, and only a few billionaire downvotes.
atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I’m angry at you because I’m about to defend an Elon Musk project… But Starlink is used in many countries. (in)Famously in Ukraine. The idea has merit for anyone living in remote areas (northern Canada, war-torn areas, etc.).
echo64@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Ukraine is a fantastic example of how bad the whole thing is playing out. Remote areas are always better served by actual infrastructure investment however.
atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
It doesn’t help to have infrastructure if it’s destroyed by war.
Kichae@kbin.social 1 year ago
I will grant you war torn areas, and remote islands, but rural continental communities are better served with terrestrial infrastructure. Just because someone's willing to fill the sky with space junk as a means of masturbation doesn't mean it's the best solution for public infrastructure.
aBundleOfFerrets@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Laying 200km of fiber for a town of ~1000 will always be more expensive than it is worth (for an ISP) and that math only gets worse when you look at last-leg hookups for people spread out ~5km apart around the area and not living directly in the town.
Sekoia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
… which is maybe why things that are essentially critical to a developed country’s lifestyle probably shouldn’t simply be companies. If we go off of “it’s not profitable”, public transport wouldn’t be any good, postal services would suck, etc.
The internet should be a public service like mail.
Also, in the US they paid the ISPs to hook everyone up to fiber, and then they just… didn’t.
geosoco@kbin.social 1 year ago
Terrestrial includes wireless solutions, which are better suited for many last-leg hookups in situations like these.
Sure, there's a lot of places where these won't work (eg. mountainous areas), but there are also questions about whether people living that remotely even want broadband or wireless.
virr@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Over a long enough term it will be worth it. But as a said elsewhere neither electricity nor phone being run to rural US homes was cost effective for companies. So the US decided that was shit and paid for it to get done. Started to do the same for internet access. Phone companies refused, used the money for other purposes, inflated prices faster the inflation, etc. and yet neither FTC nor congress held them accountable. Other countries have done the same thing for power and phone, there is nothing fundamentally different about physical internet access stopping anyone from doing the same thing.
Telodzrum@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It will never be commercially viable to run a cable into the extreme rural reaches of North America. People just don’t understand the scale of the expanse.
virr@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Neither was running phone lines or electricity in the rural US, but we did it anyway because it was better for the country.
CoderKat@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I agree for many definitions of rural, but I don’t know if you have an idea on just how remote rural can mean. Try looking around northern Ontario in Google maps if you’ve never done it before. It’s fascinating. So many tiny towns that are only reachable by boat or plane. They’re not islands, but they might as well be, with how isolated they are.
Abnorc@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Satellite internet has existed for some time now for those areas. I wonder if star link is really worse than those alternatives, or if people just love to hate Musk.
PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Building rural infrastructure is incredibly expensive. I grew up about 25 miles from the nearest city, and to this day there are still no cell towers or broadband in the area. Just dial up internet that maxes out at 28.8 baud.
My parents inquired with the local telco, and for 7 miles of fiber I believe they wanted to charge somewhere around $13 million for their rural neighborhood - just for the trenching. For like 20 farms.
AtHeartEngineer@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I lived in a semi-rural area that had fiber access 1 mile away on the same road and they refused to run it unless i paid them $20k. The area was separated by a railroad track, which required permits and they didn’t want to deal with it.
atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Money is no object? Sure. Running fiber to every cabin in the woods though? That’s going to run up a cost…
virr@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yes it will. Just like doing the exact same thing for power and phone lines to every single place in the entire US ran prices up. Difference is we paid for it and enforced companies do to it. For internet access we just paid for it and then never made them provide the internet access to everyone everywhere.