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It's still a mystery to me how building a mega constellation of satellites is more achievable than burrowing some fibers and building cell towers. The only app
by h4kor 3y ago
It's still a mystery to me how building a mega constellation of satellites is more achievable than burrowing some fibers and building cell towers.
The only application I see where Starlink is preferred to "traditional" communication system is warfare.
- redeeman 3y agothose things needs all sorts of permits and interactions with governments. This illuminates the true cost of such
- lupusreal 3y agoTurns out that putting things in space isn't really all that expensive, once you move past the Old Space models.
- stickfigure 3y agoYou vastly underestimate the scale required to serve a large country like the US with cell towers. Maybe in Kansas sure, but hilly areas block line of sight. I live an hour from SF and I don't have cell service in my house. I can make/receive calls because of Starlink.
- kredd 3y agoI’m actually curious what’s the percentage of people not covered by cell reception in USA vs rural areas of other big countries like China and Russia. I know in Canada it’s somewhat similar, but people who live in northern Ontario/BC in tiny towns still have decent cell reception. Not everywhere, but still. I could see governments with more top-down approach would be able to complete “everyone gets covered” mission much easier than US/Canada. A lot of money burning since there is no/little profitability, but I could see it being a greater good for the citizens.
- op00to 3y agoCan you get land line service? When was your house built?
- stickfigure 3y agoI could, but why would I?
- 3D30497420 3y agoSimilar reasons why flying can be better than ground based methods. There are lots of obstacles to putting in roads/tracks/etc. (existing structures, mountains, rivers/lakes/oceans, complex jurisdictions, and so on).
- ClumsyPilot 3y agoMy friends in a village in Romania has gigabit internet. This is literally a first world problem, with mad permitting, and land ownership obscured through shell companies, etc. in UK it’s illegal to put up a cell tower over 20 meters in height. People submit objections to planning permission for underground cables, claiming they will ruin the landscape. Solar panels get noise complaints. On warfare, it’s possibly the opposite - every major nation has ASAT missiles, and you don’t need to shoot down thousands - destroying just a small fraction will fill LEO with hypersonic debris and turn all remaining satellites into Swiss cheese.
- nippoo 3y agoThe US isn't the only country in the world, either. Starlink has revolutionised communications at sea, in the air, and in countries where "burrowing some fibres" is nigh on impossible.
- h4kor 3y agoThe US (and Germany where I'm from) seem to be the exception. Most countries have virtually complete coverage.
- inemesitaffia 3y agoThere's always that last 1% where there's no service or it's has unacceptable performance. Hence people using starlink in South Korea, Japan and in within cities like Sydney, Rome, London and Boston. You'd be surprised with the bad performance of some Fiber providers
- krisoft 3y ago> still a mystery to me how building a mega constellation of satellites is more achievable than burrowing some fibers and building cell towers To get permission to build the mega constellation you need to convince a few regulatory agencies. To burrow fibers and building cell towers you need to convince and appease every local authority and land owner who is in your way.
- VHRanger 3y agoThere's a bunch of stuff in the way when installing fiber. Also humans telling you you can't build there. Starlink also makes sense for rural uses.
- somenameforme 3y agoOh my friend, you should step into the country sometime! The US, alone, is 105,847,090,000,000 square feet. I used that awkward unit because it's easy to visualize. Not that we can visualize or even really imagine a hundred trillion, other than that it's just absurdly stupidly vast. Covering all of that region (or even just the parts with a human within a reasonable distance) with towers and wires is an absolutely massive undertaking. This is why, to this day, many places in America still lack access to high speed internet. And then when a tower goes down, or a wire gets cut - it's a major issue that will result in downtime and require costly maintenance. By contrast a relatively small number of satellites can provide coverage to this entire area. And when a satellite goes down, it's not a problem at all - it's a perfectly normal part of the system, and is seamlessly replaced by another instantly. And all of this is just for one country! Starlink covers the entire globe meaning regardless of the state of the country you live in, you can get access to reliable high speed internet.
- cma 3y agoUltimately everywhere that has wired power should be able to get fiber, if right of ways were reasonable.
- jagger27 3y agoFibre can go about 100 km without a repeater which in the grand scheme of things isn’t very far. Keep in mind that Starlink works best with a fibre base station inside of the coverage cone. A few of those stations in northern Quebec built next to existing cell towers gets you a lot of connectivity for cheap.
- cma 3y agoSeems like a repeater could be powered just from induction with neighboring powerline, or solar+battery.
- ftth_finland 3y agoSubsea cables have built-in repeaters and they span thousands of miles. On land it’s usually easier and cheaper to use huts with power.
- dzhiurgis 3y agoSatellites got cheaper and land work became more expensive
- panick21_ 3y ago> only application I see You have never seen a ship or a plane before? Are you just perilously saying nonsense?
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoMore generously, those examples just hadn’t come to mind when they were writing their comment.
- panick21_ 3y agoWhen they wrote 'warfare' did they not think of planes and ships?
- arlcode 3y agoA company I know, uses it to build out internet on inside industrial construction sites. Even if the basic infrastructure like power is there, sufficient internet often isn't (yet). Much easier to setup a few starlink terminals and/or LTE antennas on the roof/container and temporarily bolt a few wifi router to the ceiling than run cables all around.
- Ekaros 3y agoExactly LTE or 5G... If there is enough demand, supplying that should be reasonable enough if the system wasn't entirely broken. And if there was no demand, well there would not be enough paying customers either...
- randomcarbloke 3y ago>It's still a mystery to me how building a mega constellation of satellites is more achievable than burrowing some fibers and building cell towers. NIMBYs is why
- notquiteright 3y agoYet the US spends a greater amount EVERY year on building fiber into ever more remote areas (between FCC and NTIA programs, over $10 billion per year) than it has cost Starlink TOTAL to build a network that covers the entire country. Starlink needs more satellites to increase the max number of subscribers they can support, but their costs are actually going down. Digging trenches in the ground is expensive. It’s a big country. You need immense amounts labor and at the end of the day, you just have a barely profitable fiber line, if that. Many of the new fiber lines will only survive on further government subsidies. Meanwhile, Elon builds a spaceship to launch satellites and people pay him handsomely for access to it. That’s not to mention that construction is heavily unionized, requires locality by locality planning permission and rights of way, etc.
- idiotsecant 3y agoLet me resolve that confusion for you. Its because there's not enough money in rural fiber. Its not worth it or someone would have already done it.
- account42 3y agoThere is also not enough money in rural powerlines or rural roads yet somehow we manage to build those.
- asadotzler 3y agoNot well. I have power down 10-20 days a year and I'm less than 12 miles as the crow flies from the Googleplex. There's no cable, fiber, or cell here and our neighborhood has to maintain a mile of its own road to service 35 homes because the county will not. Same for water. AT&T is in the process of ending our landline service.
- idiotsecant 3y agoHold that thought. We built also all of them nearly a century ago now, and we can barely keep them up.
- wkat4242 3y agoIt's not a replacement for land-based connectivity. The available bandwidth will not permit the same density (by far) nor cell coverage indoors. This is for the more rural areas, or downright remote ones.