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I personally believe that pervasive high speed internet even in remote locations will do more for humanity than the scientific cost of these satellites. Howeve

• q3k 6y ago
  > I personally believe that pervasive high speed internet even in remote locations will do more for humanity than the scientific cost of these satellites. I've had faster Internet than the average Starlink speedtest says, in rural Romania, at the foot of a mountain, wild bears and all: https://twitter.com/q3k/status/1172621386977861632 https://twitter.com/q3k/status/1172621386977861632 . Internet access in rural areas is pretty much a solved problem, it just now hinges on enough of a societal push to apply this solution where needed. Starlink is yet another SV-style attempt to solve (US) societal problems by blindly applying technology. Except this time, this also affects other countries, and we're furious.
  • reitzensteinm 6y ago
    I've been there, it's beautiful. Although under ten kilometers from a town of tens of thousands wasn't exactly what I had in mind; I was picturing some of the places I've been in Africa that don't have mobile reception and may well never get it if it means laying fiber. A solar powered base station that relayed mobile internet, even if slow, would make a meaningful difference. The point of my comment isn't to defend the satellite launches, quite the opposite. It's saying that even as somebody that would be in favor, not carefully considering the trade offs before giving permission to permanently alter the night sky is not acceptable. This is exactly the kind of thing that bureaucracy should make painfully slow.
    • vanderZwan 6y ago
      > I was picturing some of the places I've been in Africa that don't have mobile reception and may well never get it if it means laying fiber. When was the last time that you were in Africa? And in which country, because it's an entire continent. EDIT: So I guess HN doesn't like being called out on https://africasacountry.com/ https://africasacountry.com/ issues? Well sorry not sorry, but as someone born in Ghana I'm more a little tired of the sentiment on display in the cited part of comment I'm reacting to, which is the implication that Africa as an entire continent is inherently and forever will be a place too poor to have proper infrastructure.
      • reitzensteinm 6y ago
        This isn't about being able to afford infrastructure. It's about population density in rural areas. North America and Australia (where I'm from) have the exact same issue. No country is going to spend a million bucks to lay fiber to ten person towns in the middle of nowhere.
        • NationalPark 6y ago
          The U.S. actually does do this! The FCC alone spends more than $2bn annually subsidizing telecom infrastructure in rural areas. There are a number of other similar programs, and Ajit Pai (current FCC chairman) recently proposed another $20bn of spending on subsidies for rural internet connections: https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-proposes-204-billion-rural-digital-opportunity-fund-0 https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-proposes-204-billion-rural-...
          • jessaustin 6y ago
            If Ajit actually cared he'd unlicense more spectrum. Paying the Daughters Bell our own tax money to encourage them to further victimize us is fascist.
        • vanderZwan 6y ago
          And yet you used Africa as an example, instead of North America and Australia. Why? EDIT: Wow, you guys are really bad at admitting your own blatantly obvious biases, aren't you?
  • Turing_Machine 6y ago
    There isn't anywhere in Europe that's "rural" by the standards of North America. The North Slope Borough in Alaska is nearly the size of Romania, but has only about 9,000 people living there. The state as a whole is larger than all of Western Europe, but has only about 700,000 people. Much of Canada is the same, only more so.
  • BurningFrog 6y ago
    It's not a solved problem in Sudan, Polynesia or on vehicles. Satellites is the solution there.
    • numpad0 6y ago
      *4G
  • kaliszad 6y ago
    I remember being on a tour in Romania in 2019 on a bus and in the middle of a forest in Transylvania and a colleague called that they have some issues at work and if I could please look into it. Then I just tethered my LTE reception (sometimes it dropped to 3G but was still usable) to my laptop, SSHed in and fixed the issues for them. In Germany, even being on a quite populated beach some 500 meters away from the promenade of a popular vacation city (Heringsdorf) is a hit or miss in regards to a usable mobile reception not even talking about LTE (this is on O2 Deutschland, in August 2020). There are many parts of Germany, that are more or less white spots in regards to a usable mobile data connection. I mean, sometimes my phone would just use the polish signal from Świnoujście even though Heringsdorf is about 10 km from the border.
  • kanox 6y ago
    > Internet access in rural areas is pretty much a solved problem. No it isn't. Just because it works for you it doesn't mean the same solutions can apply everywhere.
  • adflux 6y ago
    Romania is ranked 5th in the world broadband internet speeds: https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/romania https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/romania So it's not exactly a good potential userbase for starlink. However, most of South America, Africa and Central Asia could benefit massively from Starlink and start participating in the global digital economy
  • monk_e_boy 6y ago
    I wonder if all the people without internet will join the discussion? Oh .... wait ....
  • oh_sigh 6y ago
    "There's food in my refrigerator. Ergo, world hunger is pretty much a solved problem." If we are just going to completely ignore costs, then I can say that getting great astronomical observations is solved as well, since we can just launch satellites to take the observations instead of doing ground-based observations. So it's not clear what the big deal about these satellites is anyway.
  • stickfigure 6y ago
    Let me summarize what you just said: I've gotten decent internet speeds in one place that looked pretty wild, therefore worldwide internet access is a solved problem.
  • Darmody 6y ago
    Romania is an outlier when it comes to internet speed. But I know people from rich countries like UK, US, Germany with download speeds under 5 mbps paying more than you would pay for the most expensive line on Romania.
  • TeMPOraL 6y ago
    > Starlink is yet another SV-style attempt to solve (US) societal problems by blindly applying technology. Except this time, this also affects other countries, and we're furious. Perhaps you are. I'm from the same country, and I couldn't be happier :). I mean, LEO Internet constellations are awesome for providing access (not just in rural areas, but also in remote areas and at sea). But more than that, we're talking Starlink here in particular. The problem it's solving isn't (just) how to improve Internet access for some people. The main problem it's solving is how to fund SpaceX's R&D on Starship. Which translates to dropping another order of magnitude from the cost of access to orbit. Which will, longer-term, translate to a boon for astronomy.
  • sedgjh23 6y ago
    In the United States it is far from solved.
• DoingIsLearning 6y ago
  On top of the points made by q3k, about this being a US centric issue, being projected as a global issue, why do you believe this implementation will be able to deliver global pervasive internet? The obejective is noble but can you provide any realistic data or estimates of how this infrastructure can scale to more than a few million users and _still_ be high bandwith. Beyond that your bandwith will go down as you add more users. The only use-cases that this serves are high-income people that want to go off-grid but are unwilling to sacrifice high-bandwith, and military deployments (which SpaceX does not hide as an objective).
  • Robotbeat 6y ago
    This (it’s only for rich people) is silly. North Carolina officials are already planning for Starlink terminals to provide rural internet hotspots to help with folks who need good internet due to COVID-19 school closures. Actual rich people can afford to put in fiber or line of site wherever they are. $100,000 or whatever, doesn’t matter. This is for the regular people in rural areas. Seriously, has no one making these claims ever talked to someone whose best internet is geosynchronous satellite? Do they think only the very rich live in rural areas?
  • mdorazio 6y ago
    1) Why do you think people in subsaharan Africa, for example, won't be able to use it? 2) The only limitation on bandwidth (and thus users) is the number of satellites in orbit. If the constellation bandwidth is saturated, launch more satellites and you get more bandwidth. 3) I guess you'll just ignore the use cases for the tens of millions of non-rich people who literally can't get decent internet because it doesn't exist where they live?
    • ranbumo 6y ago
      Is there any expectation that a local in Africa or sea would be able to afford starlink rates? I haven't seen pricing information yet, but I'd be very surprised if that was the case.
    • DoingIsLearning 6y ago
• Aldipower 6y ago
  My personal idea is that Starlink is built for automated high speed stock trading across the oceans, because it reduces round-trip latency by some ten milliseconds. Light is much faster in vacuum, almost lightspeed, then in fiber. In fiber the speed of light is around 68% of light speed in vaccum. Giving "Internet to everybody" is just a marketing trick. People who maybe could need internet for social reasons cannot afford Starlink, that is for sure.
• jeroenhd 6y ago
  > I personally believe that pervasive high speed internet even in remote locations will do more for humanity than the scientific cost of these satellites. Perhaps in the US, but other countries, even poor ones, manage to do rural internet fine without cluttering the night sky. I, for one, am not stoked about the implications of an American ISP forcing worldwide coverage for themselves. Their shady business practices and the questionable reliability of the US government make it very hard for me to see many upsides. Were this to be released only in remote areas and third-world countries, I would agree that there is a large net benefit to Starlink. However, because of the way the system is designed, every country on the planet will now be forced to deal with a solution for the anti-competitive behaviour of the American ISP market. As long as Starlink is managed by a an American company, I have little faith in their intends and purposes. Being able to intercept or duplicate random internet communications worldwide seems like an NSA wet dream come true to me.
  • aga98mtl 6y ago
    >Perhaps in the US, but other countries, even poor ones, manage to do rural internet fine without cluttering the night sky. Most of sub-saharan Africa has slow and expensive internet. I would guess there is 1 billion people who will have access to the internet via mobile tower with starlink & competitors backhaul in a few years. This is enormous.
    • jeroenhd 6y ago
      The same countries also have nationalized internet service providers, often run by friends or family of the government. I doubt it'd be legal to sell StarLink receivers in large parts of the continent. There's nothing in the landscape that prevents Africa from running fiber to every house like Eastern Europe has been proven to be capable of. In fact, a lot of infrastructure is already there. Geopolitical instability, poverty and instability of the power grid makes it very unattractive to build data centers in the continent and that's what's forcing ISPs to use expensive cables to access most websites, driving up the cost and reducing the speed. This problem can be partially mitigated by using StarLink instead of oceanic cables, but I don't imagine their system will be able to replace the fiber optics that carry most large volumes of data between governments. StarLink is fast, but still depends on ground stations for decent speed internet access. Collecting internet traffic for one entire continent on another isn't feasible in the plans I've seen. StarLink will reduce latency and improve coverage for customers already using satellite internet connections. African people can already use those if they have the means to afford it, yet many African cities have dial-up or slower internet access because of the lack of resources.
• xwdv 6y ago
  > I personally believe that pervasive high speed internet even in remote locations will do more for humanity than the scientific cost of these satellites. If the internet was simply a wellspring from which one could obtain knowledge you may be correct. But most likely, the internet will instead be used to proliferate bigoted and intolerant opinions, while spreading lies and misinformation in the form of crude memes. As the last of human populations without high speed internet comes online, they will expand their capacity to inflict harm at speeds never before seen. Weep for the clear skies we have lost. Forever.
  • kanox 6y ago
    So because you don't like the internet other people shouldn't get it?
• emteycz 6y ago
  My grandmother's only option of internet in an european city is 8mb down, 2mb up.
  • verytrivial 6y ago
    If it was dirt cheap, I'd probably jump at it. My Netflix streams the usual pablum using about 5% of the 50mb/s fibre at my house. As for phone plans, electricity and other near "utilities" it doesn't do the vendor any good if consumers actually understand their own needs. And don't get me started on megapixels!
    • emteycz 6y ago
      Of course it's way too expensive. Around the price of Starlink access.
• dr-detroit 6y ago
  Thats what everybody said in the 60s and we got scrambled pornography unscrambled for 19.99/month
• verytrivial 6y ago
  You are might be right (though we could quibble over diminishing returns on speed over a few Mbps). But you seem to be discussing this as a choice. One nation launching thousands of satellites because three companies want to make a pile of money and also because that one country can't get it's act together and do something about its own predatory cable companies seems like a weak argument to make from a moral point of view. But what about third world countries and such? Summary opinion: The people who could afford Starlink already have broadband, and we wouldn't want to subsidize others access, would we? That path leads to socialism and the USPS. Or indeed broadband as a right attached to cable company's license. Impossible! (In that one country.) Let third world countries sort out their own broadband and make their own money. And let them have their own view of the damn stars.