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As someone who lives in the mountains of Puerto Rico and has to rely on "unlimited" cell phone coverage that data caps me and satellite internet that also has d
by sontek 6y ago
As someone who lives in the mountains of Puerto Rico and has to rely on "unlimited" cell phone coverage that data caps me and satellite internet that also has data caps.... I can't wait until starlink is up and running and we may have an option for high speed, low latency, internet for us who hate cities and love nature :)
- rhacker 6y agoEspecially useful for web pages that have 6MB rocket takeoff GIFs ;)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- PostThisTooFast 6y agoWhat’s the capacity of the system? For the light-pollution cost, I hope it turns out better than Iridium.
- 52-6F-62 6y agoAbsolutely. Many places in rural Canada don't have great, if any, options for high speed internet and sometimes even reliable cellular. That's great if you want to escape the connected world, but for those of us who would like to at least spend more time away from the city and who don't have the ability to just leave our jobs... it could be a game changer.
- gdubs 6y agoSadly, you don't even need to go very far out of some major metro areas in the United States to find ZERO options besides either, as you say, 'unlimited' cellular data with intermittent service, or capped satellite with latency too great for anything like video conferencing. When I say zero, I mean not even DSL is available. Even options like "Fixed WiFi" don't reach a lot of properties due to hills and forest cover, and even if they did they'd also be capped similar to satellite.
- pier25 6y agoWe lived for a year in some mountains in Mexico in an off-the-grid cabin. We became accustomed to everything (energy starvation, driving 30 mins to the nearest village, 2 hours to the nearest city, etc) except the lack of connectivity. I bought one of those huge Wifi antenna to connect to an open Wifi of a rural school a couple of kilometers away. It was empty after 2pm so we had 4Mbps just for ourselves all afternoon and night (if we had a sunny day and our batteries were full). That lasted about 8 months until someone built a barn or something and installed some electricity poles. We weren't able to connect anymore. After that we drove almost daily to the village and spent a couple of hours in a café with a flaky 2Mbps connection but it became unpractical. We went back to civilization 2 months later or so. If Starlink would have been available back then maybe we'd still be living in the mountains!
- flexvision 6y ago> huge Wifi antenna to connect to an open Wifi of a rural school a couple of kilometers away That's impressive, but how did this work from the school's side? Wouldn't they need a huge wifi antenna too?
- pier25 6y agoThey had regular wifi access points, nothing fancy. The huge antenna [1] was connected to an Alfa R36 hotspot which was fairly powerful. I guess that's why it worked. [1] https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81Zwin2Z-ML._AC_SX466_.jpg https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81Zwin2Z-ML...
- nrki 6y ago"huge" antennas usually have high gain, which increases your signal-to-noise ratio - both Rx and Tx. So one can "hear" signals further away and "speak" softer than would.be normally necessary.
- mehrdadn 6y agoWhere do you buy a WiFi antenna like that? Would you have any example links to what they're like?
- Reedx 6y agoYeah, if it really does deliver ~25ms latency and up to 1GBPS, work from anywhere becomes much more literal. Currently a lot of remote work and things like multiplayer games are limited to areas with reliable broadband. But if you can get that anywhere... it'll be amazing and have a profound effect.
- elif 6y agoIt will work from anywhere after about 90 more launches and thousands of ground relays being installed, and the antenna is the size of a watermelon. So "anywhere" would be limited to vanlife on up, in a place that doesn't have trees, in the markets initially served, which will likely be rural US. But starlink v2? I'll be on a cute Panamanian island :)
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y agoDo you know if being able to use it on a boat in the ocean will be part of v1 or v2? I sail a bit, and I've always wanted to sail the world, but giving up a decent internet connection has always been the main deal-breaker.
- modeless 6y agov2 most likely. The currently launched satellites do not have cross-satellite links so the satellites can only provide service while they are within range of a ground station. The cross satellite links were originally planned for v1 but are behind schedule and nobody outside SpaceX knows what the current schedule is.
- dwaltrip 6y ago> in a place that doesn't have trees What problems do trees cause for starlink?
- elif 6y agoI don't know anything specific a out starlink, but I have hundreds of days of experience trying to hit iridium sattelites while hiking in the wild. You need direct line-of-sight to sky.
- nix23 6y agoIf it becomes available i buy or restore an 18 century cannon-ship, over the day i sail and play captain sparrow, and in the night i play StarTreckCrew-VR in my captain quarter's ;-)
- bitshaker 6y agoHave you looked into Calyx? Might be a good solution for you if you can get Sprint 4G coverage in your area and it’s actually unlimited. https://calyxinstitute.org/membership/internet https://calyxinstitute.org/membership/internet