You know capitalism has reached peak efficiency when instead of laying some cables or even build a few more cell towers we decide to litter the atmosphere with satellites instead
Comment on A million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky — for everyone on Earth
CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
LEO satellite internet service is life changing for people who live in underserviced, rural, and remote areas - but it’s a tragedy that it’s controlled by billionaires and the USA. Growth at all costs mindset cannot accept that they should exist only as an ISP of last resort, so they’re servicing urban areas and planning data centres.
grandma@sh.itjust.works 6 hours ago
alsimoneau@lemmy.ca 16 hours ago
Geo could do the job at a fraction of the environmental cost.
Latency would be a bit higher but that doesn’t matter for download.
cole@lemdro.id 8 hours ago
it’s such a game changer when you’re actually using it. night and day, completely different experience.
also, GEO is in many regards more at risk for Kessler syndrome because stuff up there doesn’t deorbit
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
You realize to reach rural / ocean areas and have continuous service, they do typically at some point fly over urban areas.
There are lots of pockets of rural all over the place and if you want to get it all, you’ll end up with a global service where you have bandwidth to serve urban areas.
CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 19 hours ago
The issue with serving urban is that they need more satellites with narrower beams to handle the higher density and resulting load. Yes, they fly over, but they don’t have the capacity.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
I mean I don’t specifically know how much over capacity they are adding specifically so they can serve urban areas, but I do know that they are trying to reach the specifications set out by the FCC so that they can be considered broadband for rural applications. To qualify for that you need 100/20 up/down with plus latency requirements.
What I do know though is that they even with their full network, they aren’t reaching that in all rural areas yet, only some, so it’s not like the existing network is over capacity specifically for urban right now, they still have more work to do on rural.
CorrectAlias@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
It would be better to support public fiber infrastructure (through PUDs) in almost every way. I know not all remote areas can be reached with fiber, but most rural areas can be. My county has done exactly that with the rural portions - they focused on rolling it out to underserved rural areas first (even though it was more expensive to do that up front). Now, those rural areas have gigabit fiber and they didn’t have to pay tens of thousands to wire it up to their homes.
zpiritual@lemmy.ca 11 hours ago
Try dragging fiber to a ship. Starlink is a game changer for the shipping industry and removing it now would be a mess.
CorrectAlias@piefed.blahaj.zone 11 hours ago
Did you miss this part? You’re arguing over something I didn’t claim, and didn’t say.
But since you brought it up, SpaceX received nearly $1 billion in subsidies from the FCC in 2020 to support rural customers. That money is what I’m talking about. It wasn’t for ships. It was to connect rural customers because it would otherwise not be profitable for large ISPs to serve them. This billion should have gone to supporting county PUDs, not a rich nazi fuck’s company. It should have stayed with the public.
Unless you’re saying that the billion from taxpayers should have been given to him to support ships in international waters?
As a bonus, fiber doesn’t lose capacity just because it gets cloudy. Try using Starlink when a cumulonimbus cloud is overhead.
zpiritual@lemmy.ca 6 hours ago
I don’t know what a fcc is but if it helps us having good internet I’m all for it. I work on ships and I’ve used starlink on ships in storms and all kinds of bad weather including finding the antenna covered in ice and snow. It’s fantastic. Our old geostationary communication system fails as soon as a passing bird looks at it.
cole@lemdro.id 8 hours ago
I don’t think you’ve ever used Starlink if you think clouds make it fail.
…you do realize it started in Seattle, right?