27 ms·

IRIS²: The EU’s Response to Musk’s Starlink

238 points by thm 4y ago

inglor_cz 4y ago
[flagged]
- kybernetyk 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    This is due to massive, shaping French influence on the EU. There are many relatively market-friendly nations in the EU, especially in the eastern half, but the EU is mostly an extension of the French model and without the British, it really started leaning heavily into the protectionist bureaucratic model. The UK acted as a brake of sorts on those tendencies and its influence is sorely missed, at least by people like me. (Certainly the bureaucrats rejoice.)
    - scrlk 4y ago
      To quote "Yes Minister" (British political satire from the 1980s): "You know what they say about the average Common Market official. He has the organising ability of the Italians, the flexibility of the Germans, and the modesty of the French. And that's topped up by the imagination of the Belgians, the generosity of the Dutch and the intelligence of the Irish." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvYuoWyk8iU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvYuoWyk8iU
    - throw009 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - inglor_cz 4y ago
        Nope, there wouldn't be a chronic debt crisis in the Eurozone if the Germans really held so much sway.
        throw009 4y ago
        Germany wants that crisis because it's the only way it's moribund industries can be competitive in the global market. Well not any more after their dependence on Russian gas exploded in their face, but for the past 20 years.
    - gizmo 4y ago
      Britain after Thatcher got a rich financial center while the countryside impoverished. The market-friendly changes didn’t produce the promised tide that would lift all boats. I recognize that the UK produces more market-friendly rhetoric, but outside the handful of wealthy city centers the UK is shockingly poor.
    - peterfirefly 4y ago
      > This is due to massive, shaping French influence on the EU. True. I still think Thierry Breton does a really good job, though, despite being French. Sylvie Goulard would have been a disaster -- she couldn't even speak English! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvie_Goulard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvie_Goulard (The wiki page lies and says she speaks English -- no, she really doesn't. Her German is pretty good, though.) I think a modest proposal for curb stomping the bad French influence in the EU is to have all EU civil servants retake their entrance exams in another language if they originally took it in French. We should also form an alliance to automatically reject Commissioner candidates who 1) don't speak English and 2) speak French at the confirmation hearings in the European Parliament.
    - sofixa 4y ago
      If you have to compare the UK and France on free market vs "protectionist and bureacratic" (i disagree, there are but notes of protectionism sometimes - e.g. Alsthom power was sold to GE without the most important bits, but it was sold nonetheless), which is better for the everyday humans? A couple of examples spring to mind, all of which are extremely disfavourable towards the UK, so please help me have a more nuanced argument: * The privatisation of UK railways has been an unmitigated disaster * The privatisation and selling off of various UK heavy industries (like steel, automobiles, trains, aeroplanes, shipbuilding) has been somewhat of a disaster with the majority of it closing, and the rest being foreign owned. Where the UK were a leader in many areas, they no longer are, with a drastic impact on the people who used to work there. As a counterpoint, France has managed to maintain shipbuilding, airplane, train construction at a pretty good level. * Where the UK is "better" is financial services - IMO in part due to the English language, in part due to money laundering with the help of the various crown tax havens; and the startup scene - again the English language surely helped, but so did less rigorous labour laws (and that has been slightly relaxed in France). Anything else come to mind?
  - baq 4y ago
    Everybody has seen what Starlink does in Ukraine. Expect similar initiatives from China, India and Russia (once the shitshow is over.) Heck the Pentagon probably has a plan B in the drawer for a Starlink-like constellation dated fall 2022 should Musk go more unhinged that he already is. LEO constellations went from ‘interesting’ to ‘paradigm shift’ overnight, nothing to be surprised about.
    - inglor_cz 4y ago
      I certainly do believe that there will be initiatives, but I am really curious about their results. One of the necessities is cheap access to the orbit, and I just cannot see the national behemoth space agencies developing economic, reusable rockets. The traditional rocket industry in the US was unable to do that either.
      - PartiallyTyped 4y ago
        I think it's similar to the sub-5 minute mile in the sense that once something is shown as possible, others will achieve it as well.
        inglor_cz 4y ago
        It is also possible to land on the Moon, we know that. But no one else tried for more than 50 years. The barriers to becoming an agile space company are formidable. When looking at SpaceX, we forget how many space startups from that period are now defunct and forgotten. John Carmack founded one, too; it is gone.
        peterfirefly 4y ago
        Carmack's was very much a part-time venture. It was interesting to read their blog and watch their videos. It was clear that they were very good at certain things (code + welding) and not very good at others (electronics, fire-proofing, planning, testing, finite element analysis, any kind of simulation that Carmack didn't write). An interesting fact is that they did very well as long as they could conduct cheap tests very often. As their rockets got bigger, they could no longer do that and then they floundered.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    > The EU is a religion based around big state What is religious is the outright aversion to state intervention without good reason. No, it's coordination between aligned states to do what is needed to improve things in general. GDPR wouldn't have been possible if it were a Danish or Estonian thing only. Same goes for DMA and DSA, the rail packages, anti-competitive rulings, normalisation in standards (like Micro USB and now Type C) and a million other things.
  - pavlov 4y ago
    It’s funny that the leftists simultaneously believe EU is based on a religion of liberal capitalism and big corporations. Maybe the reality of a 27-nation collaboration is richer and more complicated than either of these extremes.
- k__ 4y ago
  I hope it gets a bit better now that Germany got rid of it's conservative government.
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    The SPD is every as bit as psychologically conservative as the CDU/CSU, a party of the 65+ electorate and 65+ membership. The FDP and the Greens are the more modern ones, but there is an anti-tech undercurrent in the Green party that distrusts anything industrial. The space industry has a nontrivial carbon trace; its development in Germany would be, at the very least, pretty controversial.
    - k__ 4y ago
      Baby steps.
- wewxjfq 4y ago
  Europe bashing on HN is so lame. A German start-up developed a working mRNA vaccine the same time an American start-up developed a stupid blood test fraud. You wouldn't hear the end of it if it was the other way round. What big tech came out of the US the past decade? The juicer? If it's about Europe, every quibble is used for sweeping blows, when it's about the US, the failures are all swept under the rug.
  - tifadg1 4y ago
    Lets think what came out of the US - social media, big data, adtech, EVs, cloud computing, XaaS, machine learning, military advances.
    - RobotToaster 4y ago
      I'm honestly not sure if this is supposed to be pro or anti USA
      - inglor_cz 4y ago
        Depends on whether you are facing a disinformation campaign on a social network or whether you need to crush Russian armor rolling over the border. Technology is notoriously two-faced. Or zero-faced if you can't produce it. The medieval people didn't have to worry about Facebook memes influencing the clergy and triggering heresies.
      - tifadg1 4y ago
        Neither, but every one of those impacted all of us.
  - bigDinosaur 4y ago
    All the recent major advances in generative AI appear to have come from the US. The US is an extremely innovative country, no matter its faults.
    - justeleblanc 4y ago
- tifadg1 4y ago
  There is no country called EU and there is no single market in that a startup could scale seamlessly in all 27 members - it'll still have to follow local laws. So it's mostly a matter of scale - if you can't outscale US/China/India, you can't compete with those that can.
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    That is somewhat of an indictment of the "single market" idea, or, more precisely, of its implementation. We still have shocking differences not just in tech, but in food quality across the EU. Whatever sells in Czechia, Croatia or Bulgaria tends to be a) more expensive than in Germany and b) less good. I can't imagine the same happening in the US; Mississippians wouldn't tolerate being fed with worse cheese than Newyorkers only because their different economic power. To some degree, this is caused by the babel of languages and resulting cultural barriers. I am not parochial, and yet I am totally ignorant about who is a popular singer in Hungary or a popular writer in Belgium. The same barrier influences businesses and consumers.
    - peterfirefly 4y ago
      > Whatever sells in Czechia, Croatia or Bulgaria tends to be a) more expensive than in Germany and b) less good. I'm shocked that that is still the case. I remember recurrent news stories years ago on German TV about that exact thing, except with Poland. Poles who lived close to the border shopped food in Germany for that very reason. I don't understand why food would be more expensive in countries with lower wages. The VAT rates are not that different. https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2021-06/vat_rates_en.pdf https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2021-06/v...
      - voytec 4y ago
        There's a similar situation between Czechia and Poland currently. Folks from .cz travel to .pl to buy food, cigarettes, medicine and even coal. I have no comparison of goods quality, but Poland is cheaper for Czechs.
- ChemSpider 4y ago
  > and if it wasn't for a few outliers in Scandinavia and the Baltics, it would be negligible I agree that Estonia is doing great and a role model in many ways, but the by far biggest EU software company is still German: SAP Also, have a look at the very successful ELISE AI initiative: https://www.elise-ai.eu/ https://www.elise-ai.eu/
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    SAP is also 51 years old. There is no shortage of big, old companies in Germany. There is a visible shortage of successful young companies. In my comment edit, I mentioned the 20 year limit specifically, because the ossification in last decades is real. The US generates a lot more startups, even the London scene is livelier than the rest of Europe taken together.
    - _19qg 4y ago
      There are roughly 1500 mid-sized companies in Germany which are among the world-leaders in their tech sector. You may never have heard it, but Elon Musk runs his factories with process automation from Germany (he bought a company) and robots from Kuka/Germany. Germany alone has roughly half of all so-called hidden-champions world-wide. Many of them are in High-tech. Europe lacks the large internet and software companies. Though T-Mobile is German and known in the US. SAP provides the software which runs large enterprises. But high-tech is much more, it's factory automation, it's aerospace (think Airbus), it's biotech (think Biontech), ... Soft- and hardware are a crucial factor for those.
      - inglor_cz 4y ago
        The Mittelstand is pretty much the only reason why Germany's prosperity is still a thing. Countries like Italy and Spain, which lack this backbone of mid-sized companies, are in deep trouble and unlikely to get out of it. But there were times when German companies actually were world leaders in the big things as well, not just reliable suppliers to foreign big players. Don't you count this as a regression?
- hypertele-Xii 4y ago
  My latest smartphone is mostly EU with Taiwanese manufacturing. It's the best phone I've used yet. The only thing Google adds is branding. True enough about search engines though.
  - fooker 4y ago
    >The only thing Google adds is branding. Which phone is this?
    - 0xDEF 4y ago
      Probably some kind of privacy phone. Seems like every EU country now has privacy-focused smartphone startups.
    - hypertele-Xii 4y ago
      Nokia 7.1
- sofixa 4y ago
  > Meh, the EU (where I live) is an ossified behemoth whose VIPs (Germany and France) don't really understand or appreciate tech and cannot innovate their way out of a paper bag. It's telling that you're lumping France and Germany together that you don't know what you're talking about. France has come an extremely long way in the past few years, with pretty good mobile and fibre coverage (there are villages with hundreds of people with proud signs "Commune fibrée"), and vast government digital services. The last time i had to interact with a government office physically was to file the (online prepared) form for ID and passport, where it's purely done for verification purposes. There's a government SSO which gives access to all government services online, for free. There's also a very healthy startup culture and scene (check the FrenchTech's Next40). > Entire huge countries such as France and Italy produce basically nothing of value when it comes to tech Insulting to companies such as Doctolib (revolutionised health appointments, a single platform to book one, send your documents if needed, have ones online, etc.), Back Market, fintechs such as Qonto and Swile, Ornikar, etc. etc. Real world companies solving actual problems and widely used in France and starting to export (Back Market have an EU wide presence, Ornikar are in a couple of Western EU markets, etc.).
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    "Insulting to companies such as Doctolib (revolutionised health appointments, a single platform to book one, send your documents if needed, have ones online, etc.), Back Market, fintechs such as Qonto and Swile, Ornikar, etc. etc." Do you realize that even here on HN, the percentage of people who know at least one of those names is likely to be in low single digits? Compared to Google or Meta or Apple or Microsoft, these are not successes. And yet, France with its relatively big population and relatively good schools, should theoretically produce at least one or two comparable companies.
    - sofixa 4y ago
      > Do you realize that even here on HN, the percentage of people who know at least one of those names is likely to be in low single digits? And that's fine because those companies are serving the French market first? I don't expect French people to know about Zelle or Konbini payments.
- lispm 4y ago
  > downvotes without rebuttals you are trolling. Estonia has high-tech exports of 2.6 billion USD. Germany has high-tech exports of around 200 billion USD, which makes it world-wide number three, with the US being number four. Data from the World Bank. The city I live in has roughly four times the GDP of Estonia. We have for example one of the largest civil airplane manufacturing sites here. 40000 people are employed in aerospace in the larger region -> more revenue than estonia has GDP. There is literally two orders of magnitude of high-tech you are ignoring.
  - petterparker 4y ago
    Also ignoring that estonia has a population of only about 1.3 million, let alone the geographic size. It's a tiny country, which makes it easier to build infrastructure. Estonia has received heavy subsidies from the EU which went towards infrastructure projects. Germany on the other hand is the largest financial contributor to the EU by far. [1] The plan has worked, to share the success of the big economic powers within the EU with the lesser fortunate so that they could be competitive in the future and even the grounds. It's not a surprise that coming out like the original commenter isn't exactly well received. [1] https://statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/38139/umfrage/nettozahler-und-nettoempfaengerlaender-in-der-eu/ https://statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/38139/umfrage/ne...
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      Funny that Germany managed to provide good internet infrastructure for new EU countries but in their own country Deutsche Telekom has managed it that Germany is now behind those countries.
    - lispm 4y ago
      It's great to see those countries making good progress. Investment is important, but the countries need to make it work, which Estonia is a positive example.
- nip 4y ago
  Strongly agree. Estonia is miles ahead of other EU countries when it comes to software culture and hygiene: other countries (such as France) still mostly see IT as a center of costs / necessary evil. Estonians think from first principle and bring software early in any new endeavors. Add to that the “show don’t tell” culture necessary in a world where Estonia is (still) an underdog
- sschueller 4y ago
  That is just not the case. Look at companies like AMSL which no one comes even close. It is likely that every device you own has a microchip made with a machine by AMSL. Is it sexy? Is there a narcissistic tweeting CEO? No, but there is inovasion at the highest level. The mRNA vaccine also came out of the "EU". What the EU has little off and what you are probably complaining about it throwing money at a hundred things to see what sticks. Those methods cause things like Theranos to spawn. Rampent capitalism causes people to suffer and die. You may get a few unicorns with some inovation but you can get there without the suffering as well.
  - touisteur 4y ago
    And even there, if you look at the sheer amount of R&D projects funded by the EU... Anyone serious can't say the EU doesn't invest massively in R&D. Interestingly enough, most of what I see funded and successfully becoming products are incremental development (increasing wireless bandwidth for specific apps or constraints, improving industrial productivity or getting to next gen for any tech) and few moonshots. I work with a lot of tech SMEs and most consider these projects key to their survival, as they get put in touch with (international) customers to work on hard but specific use cases and they get funded for R&D, improve their portfolio... But as you said, it's not very sexy, there's a little bit (not that much really) of management/bureaucracy (and most actually understand that state of things as the european equilibrium between corruption and too-much-red-tape) and it's not that hard to get funded on small to medium projects.
    - inglor_cz 4y ago
      This kind of incremental development has been criticized a lot, precisely because it discourages scientists from trying anything audacious. Developing a slightly more efficient telegraph line every year still does not beat inventing e-mail. Whenever you introduce large bureaucracy into any process, risk mitigation becomes the main goal of the most important actors, at the cost of all the previous goals.
      - hef19898 4y ago
- csydas 4y ago
  I'm from the US originally and emigrated about 10 years ago; I think you're conflating different aspects of technology. The boom of US tech isn't superior infrastructure, it's that tech is a very lucrative investment vehicle so it gets a ton of attention. (Well, it was anyways, not sure what 2023 is going to do to this) While I understand what you're saying, I think what you're observing and commenting on is the huge amount of money that is thrown at technologies developed in the US compared to similar technologies developed by an EU nation which don't get the same attention. US tech infrastructure is by no means exceptional. It's good in many places, don't get me wrong, but it's an extremely similar or lesser experience compared to many EU nations (including the ones you mentioned), and a lot more costly for end users. Even when I lived in Russia for a time, the infrastructure/costs were amazingly better in Russian cities (outside of Moscow and Saint Petersburg even) than in many US cities. This is not to say everything US == bad everything EU == good; far from it. Instead just try to understand that the main difference between the tech you read about in US that gets millions or billions and the tech in the EU which just stumbles on like any other business is simply the high attention from investors looking for investment vehicles. Beat for beat, the day to day technology that I used in the US has either an acceptable or better EU-accessible version, and the EU version is often even a bit cheaper. The big projects like Starlink are extremely subsidized by the US government; it's the US residents paying person like Elon Musk to let him sell them something right back, without having any real control or input over the way that money is spent by Musk and other similar corporations, or even ensuring that everyone has a chance to use the stuff that billions of dollars of their tax dollars are going to. It's an oligarchy that's been fully legalized and approved. I really don't think that's the direction we want any nation to be taking, as it does _not_ provide good results long term for the people. US broadband is a perfect example for this with the incumbent providers doing everything in their power to offer as little as possible while still technically qualifying for the subsidies so they can pocket the remainder after the bare minimum requirements are met. Don't misunderstand the high investor attention that US tech companies get as always being great innovation; investors want a good investment vehicle, and that doesn't always mean the vehicle is a worthy and innovative product. It just means it's something that has a way of providing good returns on investments, including short term fads.
  - TMWNN 4y ago
- seszett 4y ago
  > Entire huge countries such as France and Italy produce basically nothing of value when it comes to tech, while small nations like Estonia and Finland punch well above their weight. I'm still waiting for the Estonian space rockets and Finnish airplanes and high speed rail. Seriously your rant is a bit misplaced.
  - arlort 4y ago
    Tech is only tech if it runs on javascript
    - runlaszlorun 4y ago
      totally random but had me laughing my ass off…
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      Yeah like a Tesla.
  - nip 4y ago
    OP words are dramatic, but he does have a point – bigger players in Europe could (and should) do better. You are on the other hand setting unrealistic expectations for Estonia / Finland. Hardware is obviously a lot more costly than software, hence why you hear more about software tech from Estonia (Skype, Transferwise, Pipedrive, Veriff to name a few) than hardware (Milrem robotics, Co-Module, Woola...) as the latter are of much smaller scale (respective to the size of Estonia) than the former: software scales a lot better.
- vidarh 4y ago
  > In practice, there will be a flow of taxpayer money into something highly subsidized that no one will ever use. Given that despite the comparison to Starlink, the article focuses on defence and crisis response considerations after Ukraine, I don't think the people behind this proposal are really that concerned about widespread peace time use. > Entire huge countries such as France and Italy produce basically nothing of value when it comes to tech A small subset of well-funded companies started in Paris and immediate surroundings alone in the last 20 years (most of them much more recent). Most of these have raised between $100m-$500m, and several are unicorns: Ledger, Deezer, Shift Solutions, Malt, Agicap, Back Market, Ankorstore, Vesitaire Collective, Virtuo, Sendinblue, HiFiBio, Aircall, Mirakl, EcoVadis, Criteo, DoctoLib, Voodoo, Qonto, BlaBlaCar, LumApps, Lydia, OpenClassrooms, Shift Technology, PayFit, Meero, Ynsect, Scality, Ornicar, Wynd, HR Path Paris has similar levels of (some estimate more) tech startups than London, and overall France is at a similar level to the UK and Germany in terms of tech startups. Europe ( haven't looked at numbers for just EU) is lagging in terms of VC funding relative to the US, sure - according to McKinsey, in 2019 Europe accounted for 36% of VC backed companies that raised funding in the preceding decade globally (vs. 45% for the US), and just 14% of unicorns (vs. 50% for the US), but from working in the VC field for the last 5 years, what we saw was also that capital inflows in Europe were growing rapidly as attitudes to risk have been changing, and more founders achieving exits are turning around and feeding capital back into VC funds.
- troad 4y ago
  You are right, though I’d add that the EU correctly reflects Europeans’ policy preferences here. European voters, more often than not, seem to believe they can have their cake and eat it too: free public services that remain competitive and cutting edge, somehow efficiently run by the government and delivered on time and on budget. Ask those same people about how <insert any existing government service> is run, and they’ll have a litany of complaints.
  - t43562 4y ago
    The flip side of it is exploitative large commercial almost-monopolies which do their best to make you spend money you shouldn't on things you don't need. Markets full of almost exactly the same deal dressed up so many different ways that you don't realise you're going to be stiffed any way you go. Cheap initial prices hide very expensive prices later on etc etc. The amount of effort to evaluate everything and work out where the "catch" is ..... it's just understandable that we might look for our governments to shoulder a bit of that burden in the critical areas. At least our healthcare systems usually help us that way.
    - troad 4y ago
      > The flip side of it is exploitative large commercial almost-monopolies which do their best to make you spend money you shouldn't on things you don't need. Markets full of almost exactly the same deal dressed up so many different ways that you don't realise you're going to be stiffed any way you go. Cheap initial prices hide very expensive prices later on etc etc. Yes, Europeans are fond of telling scary tall tales about these kinds of strawmen. "Our economic growth may be sclerotic, our regulatory environment may be completely uncompetitive, and every third company may be relocating operations elsewhere, but the real win is that we don't have too many kinds of products to be confused choosing between!" It's a coping mechanism for decline.
      - t43562 4y ago
        California has a bill right now to do with preventing hidden pricing so you cannot argue that its' not an issue. We also have those problems so we don't need to "be scared by stories in the US" as we experience them. As for decline....look in the mirror. Everyone experiences it.
- malermeister 4y ago
  Spotify? Stable Diffusion? Elastic? Mastodon?
Havoc 4y ago
2027 seems quite ambitious. Curious what launch vehicles they're planning to use.
- tpmx 4y ago
  Perhaps eventually Ariane Next/SALTO, with an architecture very similar to Falcon 9? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_Next https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_Next
  - microtonal 4y ago
    If the timeframe is 2027, why not Ariane 5 or 6? Ariane 6 is supposed to have its maiden flight in 2023. Ariane 5 is already in use.
    - T-A 4y ago
      Ariane 5 is EOL. There are only two left, to be launched sometime this year.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      Ariane 5 is done. Ariane 6 will launch maybe once this year. And then its already massively overbooked. So much so that many of its launches will likely fly on Falcon 9. And on top of that Amazon has bought a huge amount of launches. Flying these will take many years. Its unlikely that they have capacity. Realistically this is a ~2030 at best, not 2027.
  - usrusr 4y ago
    Nice, good to see them acknowledge that a slightly better "pre-f9" rocket won't cut it. Doesn't say anything about their chance to succeed, but better than trying something that's essentially worthless even in the best case.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    No, Ariane Next is not even being seriously worked on. For this rocket to exists there will be at least 3-5 years of political discussions. The Ariane 6 has not even flown yet and Ariane 6 was already very decisive. If Ariane 6 first flies this year, don't expect funding for a new rocket for at least 5-10 years and then at least 5 years of development. Any Ariane Next will not exist before 2030 and likely not before 2035. The only viable European rocket is the Ariane 6. And that has already been booked by Amazon. So unless they want to kick out Amazon, there is no way this will launch before 2027.
gizmo 4y ago
> This future satellite constellation infrastructure will allow for synergies with private sector to develop commercial services and provide with high-speed internet and communication in all EU territory. Satellite internet isn’t great for speed. Europe is also so densely populated that full 4g coverage is totally doable. I think satellite internet is cool, but it doesn’t serve a real need and I expect this project to flounder. Also, notice that an entire continent has less ambitious goals and merely tries to keep up with one guy.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > satellite internet is cool, but it doesn’t serve a real need Starlink’s 100 Mbps [1] is faster than many European countries fixed averages and most’s mobile medians [2]. Also, the second sentence of this article cites the need: “critical scenarios where terrestrial networks are absent or disrupted, as observed, for instance, in the unfolding war in Ukraine.” [1] https://bigtechquestion.com/2022/01/10/broadband/how-fast-is-starlink-uk/ https://bigtechquestion.com/2022/01/10/broadband/how-fast-is... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_Internet_connection_speeds https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...
  - the_mitsuhiko 4y ago
    > Starlink’s 100 Mbps [1] is faster than many European countries fixed averages and most’s mobile medians [2]. But Starlink also doesn’t deliver those 100 Mbps reliably. Starlink is an awesome choice if you are in an underserved region but in most EU countries most people have better alternatives. The capacity of Starlink is very low for many countries in the EU. If people were to actually use it at scale it wouldn’t work.
  - microtonal 4y ago
    I am not sure how fair that comparison is. E.g., in my country most people can get 1GiB downstream/50 MiB upstream through cable internet (even in small villages), more than 50% of the households can get fiber with 1GiB downstream/1GiB upstream. Yet the average fixed download/upload speed is 123/40 MiB. Why? Most people just want enough bandwidth for Netflix (TV is reserved separately), Youtube, and basic surfing. So, they'll go with the cheapest subscription, which is usually 100MiB downstream (except on budget providers), pulling down the averages. Starlink-like bandwidth is really cheap on cable/fiber. Heck, I have unlimited 5G and I think it's only 25 Euro per month, less than a third of a Starlink subscription and the bandwidth is usually much better. Even in the small village my parents live I get 100-200MiB downstream. At any rate, it is no problem at all to get 1GiB downstream in most of the country and much cheaper than Starlink (we currently pay 35 Euro p/m for 1GBit up/down). For European countries that can't offer this yet, it makes more sense to invest in 5G and wired broadband. That said, I think the EU should also do this. Satellite internet is good for remote areas and in the case of calamities (war, disaster, etc.) and crucial infrastructure should be in European hands.
sys42590 4y ago
Sounds fantastic, but if we look at the history of the EU's Galileo GNSS [0], massive delays can be expected. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)
- 0xDEF 4y ago
  There was little demand for non-GPS satnav. There is plenty of demand for non-Musk satcom.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    There is demand for good satellite internet. There is no demand for something more expensive than starlink, aside from government stuff and you need consumers to support it and not be money pit
    - usrusr 4y ago
      Exactly: any constellation built with pre-falcon9 rockets might be non-Musk, but it won't even be remotely starlink-like. They'd inevitably aim for orbits higher than "throwaway-LEO" and the much sparser constellations those orbits enable (lines of sight less constrained by horizon) will cause considerably more latency (far from geostationary-bad, but a meaningful quality difference) even if the inherent SNR drawbacks were somehow solved. It seems quite rational for governments to desire a fallback, but it won't ever be more than that and as long as starlink is on the market any hope for significant customer contribution seems unwarranted. Without rocket parity to f9, it's just hopeless to get meaningful customer contribution as long as starlink exists. At least as long as they don't find some miracle tech to massively extend VLEO lifetimes (solar powered VLEO Bussard jet or something similarly far out), but even with that the numbers required would be virtually unachievable without an f9 equivalent (it's a somewhat crazy project even with the f9!). They should absolutely go for it, if they consider having a starlink fallback worth the investment, but they should really not base that decision on illusionary hopes for customer contribution.
      - 4y ago
kensai 4y ago
There is always bashing if there is something about the EU and its national projects, not always deserved. However sometimes I wished HN showed more of local projects. For example: has there been a post about the European AI? https://www.aleph-alpha.com/ https://www.aleph-alpha.com/
- js4ever 4y ago
  Maybe because it's always in response to, and generally a failed copy costing billions to Europeans because of bureaucrats?
  - jevgeni 4y ago
    Or maybe it's because HN crowd parrot the same groupthink like reddit? /s
  - eastbound 4y ago
    or we need a European chip manufacturer, so we take the most pathetic legacy brand around, and give it billions to build chips from the old generation. Oh, hi Intel!
  - justeleblanc 4y ago
    Any examples you'd care to elaborate about?
    - CamperBob2 4y ago
      Galileo might be a good example to discuss in this context.
      - justeleblanc 4y ago
        Are you talking about the satellite navigation system that's been usable and widely used for about a decade? The one that gives location data ten times more precise than GPS (1m vs 10m)? That's a "failed copy costing billions to Europeans"? Really?
RedShift1 4y ago
I don't like putting more junk into LEO than we absolutely have to because it disrupts our space telescopes (which the EU has also invested over 1 billion euro in). I much rather have the funding go to improving land based internet infrastructure.
- 0xDEF 4y ago
  Putting more junk in LEO is a serious problem but SpaceX started this and now others will also enter the market. Why should Starlink have monopolistic control over the high bandwidth SATCOM market?
  - RedShift1 4y ago
    > Why should Starlink have monopolistic control over the high bandwidth SATCOM market? I agree, but those satellites shouldn't have been there to begin with in my opinion. But it's too late now.
    - baq 4y ago
      Genie is out of the bottle. DOD has seen Starlink in a real hot war and they love it. The constellation has become a national security asset. If it disappears, Pentagon will pay for another one.
      - runlaszlorun 4y ago
        Is there serious talk about launching one? They honestly should.
        panick21_ 4y ago
        There are many. Lots of other large constellations being planned. Some from former GEO companies. Amazon. DoD is doing its own as well.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      Why should the not be there? They are in an orbit that has essentially 0 practical chance at causing long term harm. They provide a service that is clearly very useful.
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
2.4 billions is not enough for such a project given the EU overhead in cost. Espacially since the deadline is 2027, so 2030 with delays really, that means 350 millions a year for paying satellite design, build them, send them to space.
concordDance 4y ago
Does it annoy anyone else that the title says "Musk's Starlink"? Yes, it was his idea and he is the main driving force and owns half of the company, but any project like this is a collaborative effort between tens of thousands of people.
- Ambolia 4y ago
  Those thousands won't get blamed personally if it fails. But Musk will be.
  - karaterobot 4y ago
    Well okay, that's true, but they would lose their jobs and not have billions of dollars to fall back on. So there is a strong personal element for them. In the classic pigs/chickens formulation, Elon is closer to the chicken side — he's got other companies to devote time to.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    What are you talking about, CEOs take no responsebility. Look at any recent disasters caused by companies, such as recent train crash with a toxic spill, boeing Max scandal, BP oil spill, 2008, anything. Where has the CEO been personally punished? Or does your idea of 'blamed' mean people will write something mean on twitter? the press announce ment where CEO of Boeing took full responsebility for Boeing Max failure, CEOs of major banks took reaponsebility for 2008,
    - concordDance 4y ago
      Being blamed has nothing to do with taking responsibility. In this case, being blamed means that everyone will attribute the failure to him personally and say more nasty things about him and people will stop investing in his companies. It would probably also quarter his net worth.
  - palata 4y ago
    Sure. I guess just like Musk got blamed personally for his screw up with Twitter employees all over the world? He did a whole bunch of illegal stuff there, I'm still waiting to see consequences.
nbevans 4y ago
They still haven't finished Galileo yet; with the project seemingly going backwards ever since the British were forced out. How will they deliver yet another moonshot project like this? They don't even possess reusable rocket technology yet to make such a LEO project economically viable.
- bionade24 4y ago
  > going backwards ever since the British were forced out. It was already going badly for years before UK left. Galileo was scheduled to be finished in 2021, shortly after Brexit and around the same time UK parted from the project.
- boudin 4y ago
  It's up and running, and like any project like this it's then constantly updated and maintained so "finished" makes no sense
- threeseed 4y ago
  Is it really a moonshot project ? ESA has plenty of experience in delivering projects like this e.g. Copernicus, Sentinel, EDRS.
  - peterfirefly 4y ago
    The Sentinel satellites ARE the Copernicus program(me). Why are the EU spy sats, sorry, totally-not-spy-sats, so poor and so few compared to what the US has?
    - threeseed 4y ago
      a) Copernicus program is bigger than just the satellites themselves. b) What does a meaningless comparison with the US have to do with whether launching a bunch of extra satellites is considered a moonshot or not ?
- arlcode 4y ago
  Galileo has been operational for a few years. Even customer mobile devices Support and use it. Further more the British had a referendum and decided to leave on their own. Quite hard to call that force out. In fact it's impossible to expell a member state.
fweimer 4y ago
I think IRIS² is actually an extension of the EU's GOVSATCOM initiative: https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/eu-space-policy/eu-space-programme/iriss_en https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/eu-space-policy/... This means it's for government use, and is not really comparable to commercial end user services.
- culturestate 4y ago
  The release specifically addresses commercial use: > This future satellite constellation infrastructure will allow for synergies with private sector to develop commercial services and provide with high-speed internet and communication in all EU territory, including over isolated regions where terrestrial and broadband connection remain scarce. As does the page you linked: > The system will also allow mass-market applications including mobile and fixed broadband satellite access, satellite trunking for B2B services, satellite access for transportation, reinforced networks by satellite and satellite broadband and cloud-based services.
  - arlort 4y ago
    All official releases only mention government use, I think the idea might be to use a government contract to help the industry develop know-how for private use later on
    - culturestate 4y ago
      > All official releases only mention government use... The second quote I pulled above is from an official source[1]. It seems pretty clear to me that it's intended as a dual-use constellation, with government services coming online first and an allotment for commercial services later. One of the two key objectives in the downloadable fact sheet[2] is: > Allow for the provision of commercial services by the private sector, to enable the availability of high-speed broadband and seamless connectivity throughout Europe, removing dead zones. 1. https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/eu-space-policy/eu-space-programme/iriss_en https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/eu-space-policy/... 2. https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2023-02/IRIS²_Factsheet%20%28EN%29.pdf https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/system/files/202...
amm 4y ago
Too little, too expensive, too late? Once again the EU is playing catch up with last gen tech. Starlink is almost 10 years old - conceptually even older. Iridium has been around for over 25 years. If the EU was serious, it should have invested proactively in next gen satellite direct to device tech that is around the corner in the US. AST SpaceMobile is close to starting commercial activity for satellite based 5G that is supposed to work with any smart phone. Starlink is working on something similar with T-Mobile. G-Sat already has minimal D2D capability working with the latest iPhone generation. Also, I wonder where cost competitive launch capability is going to come from for launching hundreds of satellites. Russia? China?
- viraptor 4y ago
  > too expensive What's your source for good cost of launching satellite communication networks? Would you like to show us the reasoning here? > it should have invested proactively in next gen satellite direct to device tech If the current one works - why would they? For defence usage, reliable is better than next gen usually. (Something something next gen F35 still not usable) > I wonder where cost competitive launch capability is going to come from French Guiana and other places like most previous launches? https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Previous_launches https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Pr...
  - amm 4y ago
    > What's your source for good cost of launching satellite communication networks? - falcon 9 - $2700/kg - falcon heavy - $1400/kg - ariane 5 - $9000/kg > If the current one works - why would they? This is just low quality flame bait. If any of the before-mentioned (US) companies succeed commercially long-term, they will transform world-wide internet access especially in less developed countries. For clarification: as a European citizen, I want the EU to stay competitive in the space tech sector.
    - usrusr 4y ago
      ...and that's probably with a considerable profit margin for SpaceX and at least some amount of "we're happy for any launch that keeps the wheels spinning" subsidy for ESA.
KarlKemp 4y ago
Since it seems to be taken as fact that such projects are doomed to fail, let me give an example of the opposite: Airbus.
karmakaze 4y ago
So it seems that each group of nations needs/wants physical networks because it's not enough to use encrypted communication on others'. How many is enough, 3, 4, more? Is this solvable with a single network? e.g. Is there a way of anonymizing users of a network preventing discrimination, analogous to cryptocurrency?
- zamadatix 4y ago
  I'm not sure encryption really solves the root issue that is autonomy.
- playingalong 4y ago
  Confidentiality is not enough to claim Security. You also need Availability.
  - karmakaze 4y ago
    The point is if users are truly anonymous, you can't be selectively available as you can't discriminate. It's either entirely available or unavailable.
    - cryptonector 4y ago
      Except that you will have to authenticate to use any one such network. They're not going to provide free service, and they're not going to allow parties they don't want to allow or which they are told not to allow.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  You might anonymize users, but for this tech you can't anonymize location, so blocking communications for certain locations is possible and governments really, really want to ensure that they have a system where nobody else can deny them ability to talk to a certain place.
  - karmakaze 4y ago
mlindner 4y ago
There's many organizations that have proposed Starlink competitors, but it turns out this kind of thing is hard. Starlink isn't the first to try this either, but they're the first to succeed. There's very little hope of this getting funded or even if funded, getting developed sufficiently.
runlaszlorun 4y ago
This is probably something that the US (or other major powers) should really think about doing too. Military tactics and capabilities have generally been driven by communications capabilities. For example, radio communication technology was at least as important as the tank in for the German blitzkrieg. This becomes all the more important with drones, etc. I just punched up some quick numbers to make sure I’m not talking out of my ass and it looks like getting to the 12,000 satellites Starlink initially stated is approx $3.6 billion in total over the years. This is in comparison to the nearly $2 trillion annual defense budget. Or in comparison, I believe the military spent $15 billion on a software defined radio project that I believe never produced a single product. Sure, I get it that big government isn’t synonymous with innovation. But relying on the whims of these increasingly questionable billionaires for something like global internet prob isn’t a great idea.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  The US is already doing this, and not just once. They are already working with multiple of next gen network providers. And they are also doing their own. The DoD will have access to multiple such constellations and use all of them.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  Doesn't the US already have strong contracts with SpaceX? ... of course one can question how safe they are given Musk's condition.
  - taejavu 4y ago
    Genuine question, what do you mean by “Musk’s condition”?
    - anon291 4y ago
      They mean he disagrees with them politically. By American standards, musk is still left wing and just doing what many Americans are either indifferent to (setting Twitter prices) or broadly agree with (his distaste for 'woke'ism).
mensetmanusman 4y ago
Good luck, not sure $2B is enough though…
Dowwie 4y ago
Good luck to the engineers working on the project. Is this a job for Erlang?
adolph 4y ago
With the war, Ukraine needed satellite telecommunications, but the EU didn’t have something to offer. Ukraine should not have to rely on the whims of Elon Musk to defend their people. What a weird reason to undertake such a project. Ukraine isn’t an EU member.
- ssnistfajen 4y ago
  I guess this is the near term reason, but the main motive for the EU to set up their own satellite positioning system Gallileo was because GPS is under the whims of US military and may not be available to even US allies under emergency circumstances. They want critical infrastructure without relying on an external entity be it the US military or Elon Musk.
- scotty79 4y ago
  But providing support to Ukraine is EU business. And who knows what will be the member and buisnesses of EU in 4 years. Better to be ready.
GeertB 4y ago
The new satellites will orbit the EU.
scotty79 4y ago
Why this infatuation with low Earth orbit? Why not put just few satelites further out, like every other satellite internet provide does except starlink? EDIT: To people bringing up latency. Far away satellite has them far enough that they cover large area so the signal goes to satellite and back and that's it. Distance introduces latency. But in case of constallation packet must bounce through multiple satellites and/or ground stations to arrive at the target so that introduces latency too. So it's usually not great either. EDIT 2: Never mind. Apparently Starlink manages to get pretty decent latency so far: https://blinqblinq.com/starlink-latency-and-ping-times/ https://blinqblinq.com/starlink-latency-and-ping-times/ The question reamins, if the goal is for the Europe to have a backup system for disasters such as armed conflict is the ping really key factor?
- 58028641 4y ago
  Doesn’t that have higher latency (further distance) and lower speeds (more users per satellite)?
- forrestthewoods 4y ago
  Latency
- renewedrebecca 4y ago
  latency.
- drewg123 4y ago
  According to https://frankrayal.com/2021/07/07/latency-in-leo-satellites-vs-terrestrial-fiber/ https://frankrayal.com/2021/07/07/latency-in-leo-satellites-..., GEO has about 20x the latency of LEO. I think this is why starlink is so much more usable than traditional satellite internet.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- mhandley 4y ago
  Starlink originally planned to put their first shell at 1100 km altitude. They changed to 550km for several reasons. First, because it offered slightly reduced latency. Second, so long as you launch enough satellites, the reduced coverage region for each satellite is offset by having more satellites and hence (other things being equal) more bandwidth per area of land. Third, satellites at 550 km will naturally deorbit in a few years if something fails. So although they plan to actively deorbit the first satellites after 6 or 7 years to replace them with newer ones, if they get something wrong and have a lot of satellite failures, they really won't cause a long term problem. At 1100 km the orbit won't decay for centuries. If you have satellites fail, the rest of the constellation will be doing avoidance maneouvers for a very long time. Thus if your launch costs are low enough and you can mass-produce satellites cheap enough, you want them as low as possible. Somewhere around 500 km is about as low as you want to go, before too much of the satellite mass ends up being fuel to maintain orbit.
kortilla 4y ago
Starlink is available to consumers. This is not and will not be. Flagged for being super misleading. I would love some actual Starlink competition. My parents live a 15 min drive into the mountains and due to the topography there is no cell phone service nor incentive to provide it. Starlink is the only realistic option they have for usable internet. They had viasat before and the latency is so high it was garbage to use.

238 points by thm 4y ago

inglor_cz 4y ago

[flagged]

kybernetyk 4y ago
[flagged]
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  This is due to massive, shaping French influence on the EU. There are many relatively market-friendly nations in the EU, especially in the eastern half, but the EU is mostly an extension of the French model and without the British, it really started leaning heavily into the protectionist bureaucratic model. The UK acted as a brake of sorts on those tendencies and its influence is sorely missed, at least by people like me. (Certainly the bureaucrats rejoice.)
  - scrlk 4y ago
    To quote "Yes Minister" (British political satire from the 1980s): "You know what they say about the average Common Market official. He has the organising ability of the Italians, the flexibility of the Germans, and the modesty of the French. And that's topped up by the imagination of the Belgians, the generosity of the Dutch and the intelligence of the Irish." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvYuoWyk8iU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvYuoWyk8iU
  - throw009 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - inglor_cz 4y ago
      Nope, there wouldn't be a chronic debt crisis in the Eurozone if the Germans really held so much sway.
      - throw009 4y ago
        Germany wants that crisis because it's the only way it's moribund industries can be competitive in the global market. Well not any more after their dependence on Russian gas exploded in their face, but for the past 20 years.
  - gizmo 4y ago
    Britain after Thatcher got a rich financial center while the countryside impoverished. The market-friendly changes didn’t produce the promised tide that would lift all boats. I recognize that the UK produces more market-friendly rhetoric, but outside the handful of wealthy city centers the UK is shockingly poor.
  - peterfirefly 4y ago
    > This is due to massive, shaping French influence on the EU. True. I still think Thierry Breton does a really good job, though, despite being French. Sylvie Goulard would have been a disaster -- she couldn't even speak English! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvie_Goulard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvie_Goulard (The wiki page lies and says she speaks English -- no, she really doesn't. Her German is pretty good, though.) I think a modest proposal for curb stomping the bad French influence in the EU is to have all EU civil servants retake their entrance exams in another language if they originally took it in French. We should also form an alliance to automatically reject Commissioner candidates who 1) don't speak English and 2) speak French at the confirmation hearings in the European Parliament.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    If you have to compare the UK and France on free market vs "protectionist and bureacratic" (i disagree, there are but notes of protectionism sometimes - e.g. Alsthom power was sold to GE without the most important bits, but it was sold nonetheless), which is better for the everyday humans? A couple of examples spring to mind, all of which are extremely disfavourable towards the UK, so please help me have a more nuanced argument: * The privatisation of UK railways has been an unmitigated disaster * The privatisation and selling off of various UK heavy industries (like steel, automobiles, trains, aeroplanes, shipbuilding) has been somewhat of a disaster with the majority of it closing, and the rest being foreign owned. Where the UK were a leader in many areas, they no longer are, with a drastic impact on the people who used to work there. As a counterpoint, France has managed to maintain shipbuilding, airplane, train construction at a pretty good level. * Where the UK is "better" is financial services - IMO in part due to the English language, in part due to money laundering with the help of the various crown tax havens; and the startup scene - again the English language surely helped, but so did less rigorous labour laws (and that has been slightly relaxed in France). Anything else come to mind?
- baq 4y ago
  Everybody has seen what Starlink does in Ukraine. Expect similar initiatives from China, India and Russia (once the shitshow is over.) Heck the Pentagon probably has a plan B in the drawer for a Starlink-like constellation dated fall 2022 should Musk go more unhinged that he already is. LEO constellations went from ‘interesting’ to ‘paradigm shift’ overnight, nothing to be surprised about.
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    I certainly do believe that there will be initiatives, but I am really curious about their results. One of the necessities is cheap access to the orbit, and I just cannot see the national behemoth space agencies developing economic, reusable rockets. The traditional rocket industry in the US was unable to do that either.
    - PartiallyTyped 4y ago
      I think it's similar to the sub-5 minute mile in the sense that once something is shown as possible, others will achieve it as well.
      - inglor_cz 4y ago
        It is also possible to land on the Moon, we know that. But no one else tried for more than 50 years. The barriers to becoming an agile space company are formidable. When looking at SpaceX, we forget how many space startups from that period are now defunct and forgotten. John Carmack founded one, too; it is gone.
        peterfirefly 4y ago
        Carmack's was very much a part-time venture. It was interesting to read their blog and watch their videos. It was clear that they were very good at certain things (code + welding) and not very good at others (electronics, fire-proofing, planning, testing, finite element analysis, any kind of simulation that Carmack didn't write). An interesting fact is that they did very well as long as they could conduct cheap tests very often. As their rockets got bigger, they could no longer do that and then they floundered.
- sofixa 4y ago
  > The EU is a religion based around big state What is religious is the outright aversion to state intervention without good reason. No, it's coordination between aligned states to do what is needed to improve things in general. GDPR wouldn't have been possible if it were a Danish or Estonian thing only. Same goes for DMA and DSA, the rail packages, anti-competitive rulings, normalisation in standards (like Micro USB and now Type C) and a million other things.
- pavlov 4y ago
  It’s funny that the leftists simultaneously believe EU is based on a religion of liberal capitalism and big corporations. Maybe the reality of a 27-nation collaboration is richer and more complicated than either of these extremes.
k__ 4y ago
I hope it gets a bit better now that Germany got rid of it's conservative government.
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  The SPD is every as bit as psychologically conservative as the CDU/CSU, a party of the 65+ electorate and 65+ membership. The FDP and the Greens are the more modern ones, but there is an anti-tech undercurrent in the Green party that distrusts anything industrial. The space industry has a nontrivial carbon trace; its development in Germany would be, at the very least, pretty controversial.
  - k__ 4y ago
    Baby steps.
wewxjfq 4y ago
Europe bashing on HN is so lame. A German start-up developed a working mRNA vaccine the same time an American start-up developed a stupid blood test fraud. You wouldn't hear the end of it if it was the other way round. What big tech came out of the US the past decade? The juicer? If it's about Europe, every quibble is used for sweeping blows, when it's about the US, the failures are all swept under the rug.
- tifadg1 4y ago
  Lets think what came out of the US - social media, big data, adtech, EVs, cloud computing, XaaS, machine learning, military advances.
  - RobotToaster 4y ago
    I'm honestly not sure if this is supposed to be pro or anti USA
    - inglor_cz 4y ago
      Depends on whether you are facing a disinformation campaign on a social network or whether you need to crush Russian armor rolling over the border. Technology is notoriously two-faced. Or zero-faced if you can't produce it. The medieval people didn't have to worry about Facebook memes influencing the clergy and triggering heresies.
    - tifadg1 4y ago
      Neither, but every one of those impacted all of us.
- bigDinosaur 4y ago
  All the recent major advances in generative AI appear to have come from the US. The US is an extremely innovative country, no matter its faults.
  - justeleblanc 4y ago
tifadg1 4y ago
There is no country called EU and there is no single market in that a startup could scale seamlessly in all 27 members - it'll still have to follow local laws. So it's mostly a matter of scale - if you can't outscale US/China/India, you can't compete with those that can.
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  That is somewhat of an indictment of the "single market" idea, or, more precisely, of its implementation. We still have shocking differences not just in tech, but in food quality across the EU. Whatever sells in Czechia, Croatia or Bulgaria tends to be a) more expensive than in Germany and b) less good. I can't imagine the same happening in the US; Mississippians wouldn't tolerate being fed with worse cheese than Newyorkers only because their different economic power. To some degree, this is caused by the babel of languages and resulting cultural barriers. I am not parochial, and yet I am totally ignorant about who is a popular singer in Hungary or a popular writer in Belgium. The same barrier influences businesses and consumers.
  - peterfirefly 4y ago
    > Whatever sells in Czechia, Croatia or Bulgaria tends to be a) more expensive than in Germany and b) less good. I'm shocked that that is still the case. I remember recurrent news stories years ago on German TV about that exact thing, except with Poland. Poles who lived close to the border shopped food in Germany for that very reason. I don't understand why food would be more expensive in countries with lower wages. The VAT rates are not that different. https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2021-06/vat_rates_en.pdf https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2021-06/v...
    - voytec 4y ago
      There's a similar situation between Czechia and Poland currently. Folks from .cz travel to .pl to buy food, cigarettes, medicine and even coal. I have no comparison of goods quality, but Poland is cheaper for Czechs.
ChemSpider 4y ago
> and if it wasn't for a few outliers in Scandinavia and the Baltics, it would be negligible I agree that Estonia is doing great and a role model in many ways, but the by far biggest EU software company is still German: SAP Also, have a look at the very successful ELISE AI initiative: https://www.elise-ai.eu/ https://www.elise-ai.eu/
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  SAP is also 51 years old. There is no shortage of big, old companies in Germany. There is a visible shortage of successful young companies. In my comment edit, I mentioned the 20 year limit specifically, because the ossification in last decades is real. The US generates a lot more startups, even the London scene is livelier than the rest of Europe taken together.
  - _19qg 4y ago
    There are roughly 1500 mid-sized companies in Germany which are among the world-leaders in their tech sector. You may never have heard it, but Elon Musk runs his factories with process automation from Germany (he bought a company) and robots from Kuka/Germany. Germany alone has roughly half of all so-called hidden-champions world-wide. Many of them are in High-tech. Europe lacks the large internet and software companies. Though T-Mobile is German and known in the US. SAP provides the software which runs large enterprises. But high-tech is much more, it's factory automation, it's aerospace (think Airbus), it's biotech (think Biontech), ... Soft- and hardware are a crucial factor for those.
    - inglor_cz 4y ago
      The Mittelstand is pretty much the only reason why Germany's prosperity is still a thing. Countries like Italy and Spain, which lack this backbone of mid-sized companies, are in deep trouble and unlikely to get out of it. But there were times when German companies actually were world leaders in the big things as well, not just reliable suppliers to foreign big players. Don't you count this as a regression?
hypertele-Xii 4y ago
My latest smartphone is mostly EU with Taiwanese manufacturing. It's the best phone I've used yet. The only thing Google adds is branding. True enough about search engines though.
- fooker 4y ago
  >The only thing Google adds is branding. Which phone is this?
  - 0xDEF 4y ago
    Probably some kind of privacy phone. Seems like every EU country now has privacy-focused smartphone startups.
  - hypertele-Xii 4y ago
    Nokia 7.1
sofixa 4y ago
> Meh, the EU (where I live) is an ossified behemoth whose VIPs (Germany and France) don't really understand or appreciate tech and cannot innovate their way out of a paper bag. It's telling that you're lumping France and Germany together that you don't know what you're talking about. France has come an extremely long way in the past few years, with pretty good mobile and fibre coverage (there are villages with hundreds of people with proud signs "Commune fibrée"), and vast government digital services. The last time i had to interact with a government office physically was to file the (online prepared) form for ID and passport, where it's purely done for verification purposes. There's a government SSO which gives access to all government services online, for free. There's also a very healthy startup culture and scene (check the FrenchTech's Next40). > Entire huge countries such as France and Italy produce basically nothing of value when it comes to tech Insulting to companies such as Doctolib (revolutionised health appointments, a single platform to book one, send your documents if needed, have ones online, etc.), Back Market, fintechs such as Qonto and Swile, Ornikar, etc. etc. Real world companies solving actual problems and widely used in France and starting to export (Back Market have an EU wide presence, Ornikar are in a couple of Western EU markets, etc.).
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  "Insulting to companies such as Doctolib (revolutionised health appointments, a single platform to book one, send your documents if needed, have ones online, etc.), Back Market, fintechs such as Qonto and Swile, Ornikar, etc. etc." Do you realize that even here on HN, the percentage of people who know at least one of those names is likely to be in low single digits? Compared to Google or Meta or Apple or Microsoft, these are not successes. And yet, France with its relatively big population and relatively good schools, should theoretically produce at least one or two comparable companies.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    > Do you realize that even here on HN, the percentage of people who know at least one of those names is likely to be in low single digits? And that's fine because those companies are serving the French market first? I don't expect French people to know about Zelle or Konbini payments.
lispm 4y ago
> downvotes without rebuttals you are trolling. Estonia has high-tech exports of 2.6 billion USD. Germany has high-tech exports of around 200 billion USD, which makes it world-wide number three, with the US being number four. Data from the World Bank. The city I live in has roughly four times the GDP of Estonia. We have for example one of the largest civil airplane manufacturing sites here. 40000 people are employed in aerospace in the larger region -> more revenue than estonia has GDP. There is literally two orders of magnitude of high-tech you are ignoring.
- petterparker 4y ago
  Also ignoring that estonia has a population of only about 1.3 million, let alone the geographic size. It's a tiny country, which makes it easier to build infrastructure. Estonia has received heavy subsidies from the EU which went towards infrastructure projects. Germany on the other hand is the largest financial contributor to the EU by far. [1] The plan has worked, to share the success of the big economic powers within the EU with the lesser fortunate so that they could be competitive in the future and even the grounds. It's not a surprise that coming out like the original commenter isn't exactly well received. [1] https://statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/38139/umfrage/nettozahler-und-nettoempfaengerlaender-in-der-eu/ https://statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/38139/umfrage/ne...
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    Funny that Germany managed to provide good internet infrastructure for new EU countries but in their own country Deutsche Telekom has managed it that Germany is now behind those countries.
  - lispm 4y ago
    It's great to see those countries making good progress. Investment is important, but the countries need to make it work, which Estonia is a positive example.
nip 4y ago
Strongly agree. Estonia is miles ahead of other EU countries when it comes to software culture and hygiene: other countries (such as France) still mostly see IT as a center of costs / necessary evil. Estonians think from first principle and bring software early in any new endeavors. Add to that the “show don’t tell” culture necessary in a world where Estonia is (still) an underdog
sschueller 4y ago
That is just not the case. Look at companies like AMSL which no one comes even close. It is likely that every device you own has a microchip made with a machine by AMSL. Is it sexy? Is there a narcissistic tweeting CEO? No, but there is inovasion at the highest level. The mRNA vaccine also came out of the "EU". What the EU has little off and what you are probably complaining about it throwing money at a hundred things to see what sticks. Those methods cause things like Theranos to spawn. Rampent capitalism causes people to suffer and die. You may get a few unicorns with some inovation but you can get there without the suffering as well.
- touisteur 4y ago
  And even there, if you look at the sheer amount of R&D projects funded by the EU... Anyone serious can't say the EU doesn't invest massively in R&D. Interestingly enough, most of what I see funded and successfully becoming products are incremental development (increasing wireless bandwidth for specific apps or constraints, improving industrial productivity or getting to next gen for any tech) and few moonshots. I work with a lot of tech SMEs and most consider these projects key to their survival, as they get put in touch with (international) customers to work on hard but specific use cases and they get funded for R&D, improve their portfolio... But as you said, it's not very sexy, there's a little bit (not that much really) of management/bureaucracy (and most actually understand that state of things as the european equilibrium between corruption and too-much-red-tape) and it's not that hard to get funded on small to medium projects.
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    This kind of incremental development has been criticized a lot, precisely because it discourages scientists from trying anything audacious. Developing a slightly more efficient telegraph line every year still does not beat inventing e-mail. Whenever you introduce large bureaucracy into any process, risk mitigation becomes the main goal of the most important actors, at the cost of all the previous goals.
    - hef19898 4y ago
csydas 4y ago
I'm from the US originally and emigrated about 10 years ago; I think you're conflating different aspects of technology. The boom of US tech isn't superior infrastructure, it's that tech is a very lucrative investment vehicle so it gets a ton of attention. (Well, it was anyways, not sure what 2023 is going to do to this) While I understand what you're saying, I think what you're observing and commenting on is the huge amount of money that is thrown at technologies developed in the US compared to similar technologies developed by an EU nation which don't get the same attention. US tech infrastructure is by no means exceptional. It's good in many places, don't get me wrong, but it's an extremely similar or lesser experience compared to many EU nations (including the ones you mentioned), and a lot more costly for end users. Even when I lived in Russia for a time, the infrastructure/costs were amazingly better in Russian cities (outside of Moscow and Saint Petersburg even) than in many US cities. This is not to say everything US == bad everything EU == good; far from it. Instead just try to understand that the main difference between the tech you read about in US that gets millions or billions and the tech in the EU which just stumbles on like any other business is simply the high attention from investors looking for investment vehicles. Beat for beat, the day to day technology that I used in the US has either an acceptable or better EU-accessible version, and the EU version is often even a bit cheaper. The big projects like Starlink are extremely subsidized by the US government; it's the US residents paying person like Elon Musk to let him sell them something right back, without having any real control or input over the way that money is spent by Musk and other similar corporations, or even ensuring that everyone has a chance to use the stuff that billions of dollars of their tax dollars are going to. It's an oligarchy that's been fully legalized and approved. I really don't think that's the direction we want any nation to be taking, as it does _not_ provide good results long term for the people. US broadband is a perfect example for this with the incumbent providers doing everything in their power to offer as little as possible while still technically qualifying for the subsidies so they can pocket the remainder after the bare minimum requirements are met. Don't misunderstand the high investor attention that US tech companies get as always being great innovation; investors want a good investment vehicle, and that doesn't always mean the vehicle is a worthy and innovative product. It just means it's something that has a way of providing good returns on investments, including short term fads.
- TMWNN 4y ago
seszett 4y ago
> Entire huge countries such as France and Italy produce basically nothing of value when it comes to tech, while small nations like Estonia and Finland punch well above their weight. I'm still waiting for the Estonian space rockets and Finnish airplanes and high speed rail. Seriously your rant is a bit misplaced.
- arlort 4y ago
  Tech is only tech if it runs on javascript
  - runlaszlorun 4y ago
    totally random but had me laughing my ass off…
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    Yeah like a Tesla.
- nip 4y ago
  OP words are dramatic, but he does have a point – bigger players in Europe could (and should) do better. You are on the other hand setting unrealistic expectations for Estonia / Finland. Hardware is obviously a lot more costly than software, hence why you hear more about software tech from Estonia (Skype, Transferwise, Pipedrive, Veriff to name a few) than hardware (Milrem robotics, Co-Module, Woola...) as the latter are of much smaller scale (respective to the size of Estonia) than the former: software scales a lot better.
vidarh 4y ago
> In practice, there will be a flow of taxpayer money into something highly subsidized that no one will ever use. Given that despite the comparison to Starlink, the article focuses on defence and crisis response considerations after Ukraine, I don't think the people behind this proposal are really that concerned about widespread peace time use. > Entire huge countries such as France and Italy produce basically nothing of value when it comes to tech A small subset of well-funded companies started in Paris and immediate surroundings alone in the last 20 years (most of them much more recent). Most of these have raised between $100m-$500m, and several are unicorns: Ledger, Deezer, Shift Solutions, Malt, Agicap, Back Market, Ankorstore, Vesitaire Collective, Virtuo, Sendinblue, HiFiBio, Aircall, Mirakl, EcoVadis, Criteo, DoctoLib, Voodoo, Qonto, BlaBlaCar, LumApps, Lydia, OpenClassrooms, Shift Technology, PayFit, Meero, Ynsect, Scality, Ornicar, Wynd, HR Path Paris has similar levels of (some estimate more) tech startups than London, and overall France is at a similar level to the UK and Germany in terms of tech startups. Europe ( haven't looked at numbers for just EU) is lagging in terms of VC funding relative to the US, sure - according to McKinsey, in 2019 Europe accounted for 36% of VC backed companies that raised funding in the preceding decade globally (vs. 45% for the US), and just 14% of unicorns (vs. 50% for the US), but from working in the VC field for the last 5 years, what we saw was also that capital inflows in Europe were growing rapidly as attitudes to risk have been changing, and more founders achieving exits are turning around and feeding capital back into VC funds.
troad 4y ago
You are right, though I’d add that the EU correctly reflects Europeans’ policy preferences here. European voters, more often than not, seem to believe they can have their cake and eat it too: free public services that remain competitive and cutting edge, somehow efficiently run by the government and delivered on time and on budget. Ask those same people about how <insert any existing government service> is run, and they’ll have a litany of complaints.
- t43562 4y ago
  The flip side of it is exploitative large commercial almost-monopolies which do their best to make you spend money you shouldn't on things you don't need. Markets full of almost exactly the same deal dressed up so many different ways that you don't realise you're going to be stiffed any way you go. Cheap initial prices hide very expensive prices later on etc etc. The amount of effort to evaluate everything and work out where the "catch" is ..... it's just understandable that we might look for our governments to shoulder a bit of that burden in the critical areas. At least our healthcare systems usually help us that way.
  - troad 4y ago
    > The flip side of it is exploitative large commercial almost-monopolies which do their best to make you spend money you shouldn't on things you don't need. Markets full of almost exactly the same deal dressed up so many different ways that you don't realise you're going to be stiffed any way you go. Cheap initial prices hide very expensive prices later on etc etc. Yes, Europeans are fond of telling scary tall tales about these kinds of strawmen. "Our economic growth may be sclerotic, our regulatory environment may be completely uncompetitive, and every third company may be relocating operations elsewhere, but the real win is that we don't have too many kinds of products to be confused choosing between!" It's a coping mechanism for decline.
    - t43562 4y ago
      California has a bill right now to do with preventing hidden pricing so you cannot argue that its' not an issue. We also have those problems so we don't need to "be scared by stories in the US" as we experience them. As for decline....look in the mirror. Everyone experiences it.
malermeister 4y ago
Spotify? Stable Diffusion? Elastic? Mastodon?

Havoc 4y ago

2027 seems quite ambitious. Curious what launch vehicles they're planning to use.

tpmx 4y ago
Perhaps eventually Ariane Next/SALTO, with an architecture very similar to Falcon 9? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_Next https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_Next
- microtonal 4y ago
  If the timeframe is 2027, why not Ariane 5 or 6? Ariane 6 is supposed to have its maiden flight in 2023. Ariane 5 is already in use.
  - T-A 4y ago
    Ariane 5 is EOL. There are only two left, to be launched sometime this year.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    Ariane 5 is done. Ariane 6 will launch maybe once this year. And then its already massively overbooked. So much so that many of its launches will likely fly on Falcon 9. And on top of that Amazon has bought a huge amount of launches. Flying these will take many years. Its unlikely that they have capacity. Realistically this is a ~2030 at best, not 2027.
- usrusr 4y ago
  Nice, good to see them acknowledge that a slightly better "pre-f9" rocket won't cut it. Doesn't say anything about their chance to succeed, but better than trying something that's essentially worthless even in the best case.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  No, Ariane Next is not even being seriously worked on. For this rocket to exists there will be at least 3-5 years of political discussions. The Ariane 6 has not even flown yet and Ariane 6 was already very decisive. If Ariane 6 first flies this year, don't expect funding for a new rocket for at least 5-10 years and then at least 5 years of development. Any Ariane Next will not exist before 2030 and likely not before 2035. The only viable European rocket is the Ariane 6. And that has already been booked by Amazon. So unless they want to kick out Amazon, there is no way this will launch before 2027.

gizmo 4y ago

> This future satellite constellation infrastructure will allow for synergies with private sector to develop commercial services and provide with high-speed internet and communication in all EU territory. Satellite internet isn’t great for speed. Europe is also so densely populated that full 4g coverage is totally doable. I think satellite internet is cool, but it doesn’t serve a real need and I expect this project to flounder. Also, notice that an entire continent has less ambitious goals and merely tries to keep up with one guy.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> satellite internet is cool, but it doesn’t serve a real need Starlink’s 100 Mbps [1] is faster than many European countries fixed averages and most’s mobile medians [2]. Also, the second sentence of this article cites the need: “critical scenarios where terrestrial networks are absent or disrupted, as observed, for instance, in the unfolding war in Ukraine.” [1] https://bigtechquestion.com/2022/01/10/broadband/how-fast-is-starlink-uk/ https://bigtechquestion.com/2022/01/10/broadband/how-fast-is... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_Internet_connection_speeds https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...
- the_mitsuhiko 4y ago
  > Starlink’s 100 Mbps [1] is faster than many European countries fixed averages and most’s mobile medians [2]. But Starlink also doesn’t deliver those 100 Mbps reliably. Starlink is an awesome choice if you are in an underserved region but in most EU countries most people have better alternatives. The capacity of Starlink is very low for many countries in the EU. If people were to actually use it at scale it wouldn’t work.
- microtonal 4y ago
  I am not sure how fair that comparison is. E.g., in my country most people can get 1GiB downstream/50 MiB upstream through cable internet (even in small villages), more than 50% of the households can get fiber with 1GiB downstream/1GiB upstream. Yet the average fixed download/upload speed is 123/40 MiB. Why? Most people just want enough bandwidth for Netflix (TV is reserved separately), Youtube, and basic surfing. So, they'll go with the cheapest subscription, which is usually 100MiB downstream (except on budget providers), pulling down the averages. Starlink-like bandwidth is really cheap on cable/fiber. Heck, I have unlimited 5G and I think it's only 25 Euro per month, less than a third of a Starlink subscription and the bandwidth is usually much better. Even in the small village my parents live I get 100-200MiB downstream. At any rate, it is no problem at all to get 1GiB downstream in most of the country and much cheaper than Starlink (we currently pay 35 Euro p/m for 1GBit up/down). For European countries that can't offer this yet, it makes more sense to invest in 5G and wired broadband. That said, I think the EU should also do this. Satellite internet is good for remote areas and in the case of calamities (war, disaster, etc.) and crucial infrastructure should be in European hands.

sys42590 4y ago

Sounds fantastic, but if we look at the history of the EU's Galileo GNSS [0], massive delays can be expected. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)

0xDEF 4y ago
There was little demand for non-GPS satnav. There is plenty of demand for non-Musk satcom.
- ilyt 4y ago
  There is demand for good satellite internet. There is no demand for something more expensive than starlink, aside from government stuff and you need consumers to support it and not be money pit
  - usrusr 4y ago
    Exactly: any constellation built with pre-falcon9 rockets might be non-Musk, but it won't even be remotely starlink-like. They'd inevitably aim for orbits higher than "throwaway-LEO" and the much sparser constellations those orbits enable (lines of sight less constrained by horizon) will cause considerably more latency (far from geostationary-bad, but a meaningful quality difference) even if the inherent SNR drawbacks were somehow solved. It seems quite rational for governments to desire a fallback, but it won't ever be more than that and as long as starlink is on the market any hope for significant customer contribution seems unwarranted. Without rocket parity to f9, it's just hopeless to get meaningful customer contribution as long as starlink exists. At least as long as they don't find some miracle tech to massively extend VLEO lifetimes (solar powered VLEO Bussard jet or something similarly far out), but even with that the numbers required would be virtually unachievable without an f9 equivalent (it's a somewhat crazy project even with the f9!). They should absolutely go for it, if they consider having a starlink fallback worth the investment, but they should really not base that decision on illusionary hopes for customer contribution.
    - 4y ago

kensai 4y ago

There is always bashing if there is something about the EU and its national projects, not always deserved. However sometimes I wished HN showed more of local projects. For example: has there been a post about the European AI? https://www.aleph-alpha.com/ https://www.aleph-alpha.com/

js4ever 4y ago
Maybe because it's always in response to, and generally a failed copy costing billions to Europeans because of bureaucrats?
- jevgeni 4y ago
  Or maybe it's because HN crowd parrot the same groupthink like reddit? /s
- eastbound 4y ago
  or we need a European chip manufacturer, so we take the most pathetic legacy brand around, and give it billions to build chips from the old generation. Oh, hi Intel!
- justeleblanc 4y ago
  Any examples you'd care to elaborate about?
  - CamperBob2 4y ago
    Galileo might be a good example to discuss in this context.
    - justeleblanc 4y ago
      Are you talking about the satellite navigation system that's been usable and widely used for about a decade? The one that gives location data ten times more precise than GPS (1m vs 10m)? That's a "failed copy costing billions to Europeans"? Really?

RedShift1 4y ago

I don't like putting more junk into LEO than we absolutely have to because it disrupts our space telescopes (which the EU has also invested over 1 billion euro in). I much rather have the funding go to improving land based internet infrastructure.

0xDEF 4y ago
Putting more junk in LEO is a serious problem but SpaceX started this and now others will also enter the market. Why should Starlink have monopolistic control over the high bandwidth SATCOM market?
- RedShift1 4y ago
  > Why should Starlink have monopolistic control over the high bandwidth SATCOM market? I agree, but those satellites shouldn't have been there to begin with in my opinion. But it's too late now.
  - baq 4y ago
    Genie is out of the bottle. DOD has seen Starlink in a real hot war and they love it. The constellation has become a national security asset. If it disappears, Pentagon will pay for another one.
    - runlaszlorun 4y ago
      Is there serious talk about launching one? They honestly should.
      - panick21_ 4y ago
        There are many. Lots of other large constellations being planned. Some from former GEO companies. Amazon. DoD is doing its own as well.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    Why should the not be there? They are in an orbit that has essentially 0 practical chance at causing long term harm. They provide a service that is clearly very useful.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

2.4 billions is not enough for such a project given the EU overhead in cost. Espacially since the deadline is 2027, so 2030 with delays really, that means 350 millions a year for paying satellite design, build them, send them to space.

concordDance 4y ago

Does it annoy anyone else that the title says "Musk's Starlink"? Yes, it was his idea and he is the main driving force and owns half of the company, but any project like this is a collaborative effort between tens of thousands of people.

Ambolia 4y ago
Those thousands won't get blamed personally if it fails. But Musk will be.
- karaterobot 4y ago
  Well okay, that's true, but they would lose their jobs and not have billions of dollars to fall back on. So there is a strong personal element for them. In the classic pigs/chickens formulation, Elon is closer to the chicken side — he's got other companies to devote time to.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  What are you talking about, CEOs take no responsebility. Look at any recent disasters caused by companies, such as recent train crash with a toxic spill, boeing Max scandal, BP oil spill, 2008, anything. Where has the CEO been personally punished? Or does your idea of 'blamed' mean people will write something mean on twitter? the press announce ment where CEO of Boeing took full responsebility for Boeing Max failure, CEOs of major banks took reaponsebility for 2008,
  - concordDance 4y ago
    Being blamed has nothing to do with taking responsibility. In this case, being blamed means that everyone will attribute the failure to him personally and say more nasty things about him and people will stop investing in his companies. It would probably also quarter his net worth.
- palata 4y ago
  Sure. I guess just like Musk got blamed personally for his screw up with Twitter employees all over the world? He did a whole bunch of illegal stuff there, I'm still waiting to see consequences.

nbevans 4y ago

They still haven't finished Galileo yet; with the project seemingly going backwards ever since the British were forced out. How will they deliver yet another moonshot project like this? They don't even possess reusable rocket technology yet to make such a LEO project economically viable.

bionade24 4y ago
> going backwards ever since the British were forced out. It was already going badly for years before UK left. Galileo was scheduled to be finished in 2021, shortly after Brexit and around the same time UK parted from the project.
boudin 4y ago
It's up and running, and like any project like this it's then constantly updated and maintained so "finished" makes no sense
threeseed 4y ago
Is it really a moonshot project ? ESA has plenty of experience in delivering projects like this e.g. Copernicus, Sentinel, EDRS.
- peterfirefly 4y ago
  The Sentinel satellites ARE the Copernicus program(me). Why are the EU spy sats, sorry, totally-not-spy-sats, so poor and so few compared to what the US has?
  - threeseed 4y ago
    a) Copernicus program is bigger than just the satellites themselves. b) What does a meaningless comparison with the US have to do with whether launching a bunch of extra satellites is considered a moonshot or not ?
arlcode 4y ago
Galileo has been operational for a few years. Even customer mobile devices Support and use it. Further more the British had a referendum and decided to leave on their own. Quite hard to call that force out. In fact it's impossible to expell a member state.

fweimer 4y ago

I think IRIS² is actually an extension of the EU's GOVSATCOM initiative: https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/eu-space-policy/eu-space-programme/iriss_en https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/eu-space-policy/... This means it's for government use, and is not really comparable to commercial end user services.

culturestate 4y ago
The release specifically addresses commercial use: > This future satellite constellation infrastructure will allow for synergies with private sector to develop commercial services and provide with high-speed internet and communication in all EU territory, including over isolated regions where terrestrial and broadband connection remain scarce. As does the page you linked: > The system will also allow mass-market applications including mobile and fixed broadband satellite access, satellite trunking for B2B services, satellite access for transportation, reinforced networks by satellite and satellite broadband and cloud-based services.
- arlort 4y ago
  All official releases only mention government use, I think the idea might be to use a government contract to help the industry develop know-how for private use later on
  - culturestate 4y ago
    > All official releases only mention government use... The second quote I pulled above is from an official source[1]. It seems pretty clear to me that it's intended as a dual-use constellation, with government services coming online first and an allotment for commercial services later. One of the two key objectives in the downloadable fact sheet[2] is: > Allow for the provision of commercial services by the private sector, to enable the availability of high-speed broadband and seamless connectivity throughout Europe, removing dead zones. 1. https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/eu-space-policy/eu-space-programme/iriss_en https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/eu-space-policy/... 2. https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2023-02/IRIS²_Factsheet%20%28EN%29.pdf https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/system/files/202...

amm 4y ago

Too little, too expensive, too late? Once again the EU is playing catch up with last gen tech. Starlink is almost 10 years old - conceptually even older. Iridium has been around for over 25 years. If the EU was serious, it should have invested proactively in next gen satellite direct to device tech that is around the corner in the US. AST SpaceMobile is close to starting commercial activity for satellite based 5G that is supposed to work with any smart phone. Starlink is working on something similar with T-Mobile. G-Sat already has minimal D2D capability working with the latest iPhone generation. Also, I wonder where cost competitive launch capability is going to come from for launching hundreds of satellites. Russia? China?

viraptor 4y ago
> too expensive What's your source for good cost of launching satellite communication networks? Would you like to show us the reasoning here? > it should have invested proactively in next gen satellite direct to device tech If the current one works - why would they? For defence usage, reliable is better than next gen usually. (Something something next gen F35 still not usable) > I wonder where cost competitive launch capability is going to come from French Guiana and other places like most previous launches? https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Previous_launches https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Pr...
- amm 4y ago
  > What's your source for good cost of launching satellite communication networks? - falcon 9 - $2700/kg - falcon heavy - $1400/kg - ariane 5 - $9000/kg > If the current one works - why would they? This is just low quality flame bait. If any of the before-mentioned (US) companies succeed commercially long-term, they will transform world-wide internet access especially in less developed countries. For clarification: as a European citizen, I want the EU to stay competitive in the space tech sector.
  - usrusr 4y ago
    ...and that's probably with a considerable profit margin for SpaceX and at least some amount of "we're happy for any launch that keeps the wheels spinning" subsidy for ESA.

KarlKemp 4y ago

Since it seems to be taken as fact that such projects are doomed to fail, let me give an example of the opposite: Airbus.

karmakaze 4y ago

So it seems that each group of nations needs/wants physical networks because it's not enough to use encrypted communication on others'. How many is enough, 3, 4, more? Is this solvable with a single network? e.g. Is there a way of anonymizing users of a network preventing discrimination, analogous to cryptocurrency?

zamadatix 4y ago
I'm not sure encryption really solves the root issue that is autonomy.
playingalong 4y ago
Confidentiality is not enough to claim Security. You also need Availability.
- karmakaze 4y ago
  The point is if users are truly anonymous, you can't be selectively available as you can't discriminate. It's either entirely available or unavailable.
  - cryptonector 4y ago
    Except that you will have to authenticate to use any one such network. They're not going to provide free service, and they're not going to allow parties they don't want to allow or which they are told not to allow.
PeterisP 4y ago
You might anonymize users, but for this tech you can't anonymize location, so blocking communications for certain locations is possible and governments really, really want to ensure that they have a system where nobody else can deny them ability to talk to a certain place.
- karmakaze 4y ago

mlindner 4y ago

There's many organizations that have proposed Starlink competitors, but it turns out this kind of thing is hard. Starlink isn't the first to try this either, but they're the first to succeed. There's very little hope of this getting funded or even if funded, getting developed sufficiently.

runlaszlorun 4y ago

This is probably something that the US (or other major powers) should really think about doing too. Military tactics and capabilities have generally been driven by communications capabilities. For example, radio communication technology was at least as important as the tank in for the German blitzkrieg. This becomes all the more important with drones, etc. I just punched up some quick numbers to make sure I’m not talking out of my ass and it looks like getting to the 12,000 satellites Starlink initially stated is approx $3.6 billion in total over the years. This is in comparison to the nearly $2 trillion annual defense budget. Or in comparison, I believe the military spent $15 billion on a software defined radio project that I believe never produced a single product. Sure, I get it that big government isn’t synonymous with innovation. But relying on the whims of these increasingly questionable billionaires for something like global internet prob isn’t a great idea.

panick21_ 4y ago
The US is already doing this, and not just once. They are already working with multiple of next gen network providers. And they are also doing their own. The DoD will have access to multiple such constellations and use all of them.
solarkraft 4y ago
Doesn't the US already have strong contracts with SpaceX? ... of course one can question how safe they are given Musk's condition.
- taejavu 4y ago
  Genuine question, what do you mean by “Musk’s condition”?
  - anon291 4y ago
    They mean he disagrees with them politically. By American standards, musk is still left wing and just doing what many Americans are either indifferent to (setting Twitter prices) or broadly agree with (his distaste for 'woke'ism).

mensetmanusman 4y ago

Good luck, not sure $2B is enough though…

Dowwie 4y ago

Good luck to the engineers working on the project. Is this a job for Erlang?

adolph 4y ago

With the war, Ukraine needed satellite telecommunications, but the EU didn’t have something to offer. Ukraine should not have to rely on the whims of Elon Musk to defend their people. What a weird reason to undertake such a project. Ukraine isn’t an EU member.

ssnistfajen 4y ago
I guess this is the near term reason, but the main motive for the EU to set up their own satellite positioning system Gallileo was because GPS is under the whims of US military and may not be available to even US allies under emergency circumstances. They want critical infrastructure without relying on an external entity be it the US military or Elon Musk.
scotty79 4y ago
But providing support to Ukraine is EU business. And who knows what will be the member and buisnesses of EU in 4 years. Better to be ready.

GeertB 4y ago

The new satellites will orbit the EU.

scotty79 4y ago

Why this infatuation with low Earth orbit? Why not put just few satelites further out, like every other satellite internet provide does except starlink? EDIT: To people bringing up latency. Far away satellite has them far enough that they cover large area so the signal goes to satellite and back and that's it. Distance introduces latency. But in case of constallation packet must bounce through multiple satellites and/or ground stations to arrive at the target so that introduces latency too. So it's usually not great either. EDIT 2: Never mind. Apparently Starlink manages to get pretty decent latency so far: https://blinqblinq.com/starlink-latency-and-ping-times/ https://blinqblinq.com/starlink-latency-and-ping-times/ The question reamins, if the goal is for the Europe to have a backup system for disasters such as armed conflict is the ping really key factor?

58028641 4y ago
Doesn’t that have higher latency (further distance) and lower speeds (more users per satellite)?
forrestthewoods 4y ago
Latency
renewedrebecca 4y ago
latency.
drewg123 4y ago
According to https://frankrayal.com/2021/07/07/latency-in-leo-satellites-vs-terrestrial-fiber/ https://frankrayal.com/2021/07/07/latency-in-leo-satellites-..., GEO has about 20x the latency of LEO. I think this is why starlink is so much more usable than traditional satellite internet.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
mhandley 4y ago
Starlink originally planned to put their first shell at 1100 km altitude. They changed to 550km for several reasons. First, because it offered slightly reduced latency. Second, so long as you launch enough satellites, the reduced coverage region for each satellite is offset by having more satellites and hence (other things being equal) more bandwidth per area of land. Third, satellites at 550 km will naturally deorbit in a few years if something fails. So although they plan to actively deorbit the first satellites after 6 or 7 years to replace them with newer ones, if they get something wrong and have a lot of satellite failures, they really won't cause a long term problem. At 1100 km the orbit won't decay for centuries. If you have satellites fail, the rest of the constellation will be doing avoidance maneouvers for a very long time. Thus if your launch costs are low enough and you can mass-produce satellites cheap enough, you want them as low as possible. Somewhere around 500 km is about as low as you want to go, before too much of the satellite mass ends up being fuel to maintain orbit.

kortilla 4y ago

Starlink is available to consumers. This is not and will not be. Flagged for being super misleading. I would love some actual Starlink competition. My parents live a 15 min drive into the mountains and due to the topography there is no cell phone service nor incentive to provide it. Starlink is the only realistic option they have for usable internet. They had viasat before and the latency is so high it was garbage to use.