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This is what the future of communication looks like. It's really a massive step forward. No one will have to die from exposure when their cars break down, no pl

by caseyy 2y ago

This is what the future of communication looks like. It's really a massive step forward. No one will have to die from exposure when their cars break down, no planes will go missing, and no more black spots in natural disasters. It is also quite dignified and civilised that we are using this technology first to help the most vulnerable. Communication is and has always been an important element in human organisation. Imagine if corrupt governments could no longer shut down the internet and cell service. Even a world war probably wouldn't disrupt this. People will be really empowered by this technology, we just need more competition in this space. But one step at a time. Also: simmer down Elon fans and haters, this is not only about Elon. Look at the bigger, global picture.

asynchronous 2y ago
I agree with the sentiment but LEO constellations like Starlink can and have been disrupted, via sub-orbital jamming. Not to mention that in actual large conflict surface to LEO missiles will simply destroy large amounts of satellite constellations.
- panick21_ 2y ago
  No government currently exists that has nearly enough rockets to impact Starlink. There is a big difference between doing individual tests and taking down a constellation of 1000s.
  - verzali 2y ago
    You don't need to hit every satellite. You only need to create a lot of debris, and that'll do it for you. Alternatively the radiation from a nuclear blast could take out a big chunk of the network, which is presumably why Russia is working on orbiting nuclear weapons.
    - panick21_ 2y ago
      Actually its not that easy even if you did create some debris. Orbit is much bigger then people think. And these sats are much smaller then people think. Without propulsion lots of that stuff quickly drops below the level of the sats. Sats can also raise their orbit in response and fly corrections. Even modest investment in better tracking could massively improve crash avoidance. It would take far more then a handful of sats to truly impact the functioning of the network. And even more to complete take it out. Russia is working on everything if you believe their marketing. I seriously question if any work on 'orbital nuclear weapons' is anything other then marketing. And its questionable how effective that would actually be. This isn't as easy as people think. A country like Russia might have some readiness of nuclear weapons. And maybe a small readiness of anti-sat weapons, but not anywhere close to enough to attack a network like Starlink. Preparing for something like that simply wasn't a thing anybody considered necessary until 2020 and Russia certainly hasn't invested huge amounts of money in that since then and given their recent success with rocket development, I not sure how effective it would have been even if they had.
- dotnet00 2y ago
  Starlink is supposedly harder to jam than typical satellite comms due to its use of phased array communication. IIRC you need to either be flying overhead or putting out a ton more power in a ground based jammer to be effective. And as the other user mentioned, no country at the moment has the kind of stockpile of ASAT weapons needed to wipe the constellation (plus, due to orbital dynamics, there's a limit to how quickly they can take out satellites). Between trying to wipe the constellation and jamming it, it'd be far more cost effective to jam even accounting for the higher power requirements/lower jamming range. There would also be other interesting options like capturing and using enough terminals to force the entire cell to be disabled. That has been one of the challenges SpaceX has had to deal with near the frontlines in Ukraine.
  - throwaway48476 2y ago
    You can build a Faraday cage with a hole in the roof and starlink will be mostly unjammable.
    - throw73391073 2y ago
      Starlink satellites are vulnerable to repeated uplink transmitting their preamble code (which is public and the same across any user terminal). The satellites are so tuned to that code you can jam them through their receive sidelobes.. taking out all beams on the satellite.
      - throwaway48476 2y ago
        Won't you need n jammers = n satellites in view for this? I haven't seen anyone commit to investing in this.
        throw73391073 2y ago
        A single omnidirectional transmitter on the ground can transmit this one preamble code in all directions and it jams all satellites in view. All Starlink satellites use the same uplink code and they can't change it because it's how new terminals enter the network.
acidburnNSA 2y ago
Agree with all of that, except the world war part. Satellites will definitely be fair game in world war 3... probably one of the first targets. Ham radio will live on!
- caseyy 2y ago
  I don't know – would we risk Kessler Syndrome for a war? Win a piece of land and doom humanity for a hundred years of regress in space? Maybe, probably can't be ruled out. As for jamming, is it feasible or practical to jam very large parts of the world? I can't imagine it would be. It seems to me like jamming would probably be used for specific military purposes and people would be left alone to communicate with each other otherwise. It's not that I'm saying this could not be done. It could. But this is not the most likely scenario in my head. The immense benefit to all humanity is a very likely scenario, in contrast. LoRa is another equally exciting technology that has a lot of potential in all the spaces I mentioned. I just can't currently imagine a reason it would go mass-market.
  - 0xffff2 2y ago
    Of course we would. And anyway the Starlink constellation is low enough that even destroying the whole constellation would have a minimal impact after a decade.
    - semprewar 2y ago
      [flagged]
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - forgot-im-old 2y ago
      [flagged]
    - fukashimoto 2y ago
      [flagged]
croes 2y ago
Satellites can be hacked, jammed or destroyed LEO satellites need constant replacement.
wkat4242 2y ago
Planes have had access to sat Comms for decades. MH380 had it but it was deactivated. Most likely by a suicidal pilot. The engines had their own uplink that was still active. But Starlink isn't going to solve that kind of problem.
acover 2y ago
Drones staying connected in enemy territory.
akira2501 2y ago
> Imagine if corrupt governments could no longer shut down the internet and cell service. Even in the parts of the world where this occurs it has been shown to be nothing more than a surface level inconvenience. > Communication is and has always been an important element in human organisation. Precisely. We don't exactly need the internet or cell service. We've got techniques and historical methods going back to the beginning of, unsurprisingly, recorded history. > People will be really empowered by this technology They're already empowered. This will mostly just convenience them.
- gruez 2y ago
  >> Imagine if corrupt governments could no longer shut down the internet and cell service. >Even in the parts of the world where this occurs it has been shown to be nothing more than a surface level inconvenience. "Internet shutdowns" like the ones in Kashmir involves all internet being shut down, not just a few sites being blocked on the ISP's DNS servers. That's hardly a "surface level inconvenience". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_India#Internet_shutdowns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_India#I...
  - akira2501 2y ago
    You've misunderstood me. People who have ears and mouths will communicate. Even if you blind and gag these, they will _still_ find a way to communicate, and to organize. Put another way, these peoples lives are "not good," not because the Internet is hard to use, it's because of other factors. Which means improving their internet access will only _minimally_ improve their position.
throwaway48476 2y ago
The aircraft body attenuates the signal. That's why all the antennas are placed outside.
numpad0 2y ago
Why does this exact word "hate" always appear in the top comment on Musk related topics? Is someone grepping this string for some purposes?
hcarvalhoalves 2y ago
> Imagine if corrupt governments could no longer shut down the internet and cell service. Even a world war probably wouldn't disrupt this. That’s quite naive, to believe a private company is not under political influence. https://ofac.treasury.gov/sanctions-programs-and-country-information https://ofac.treasury.gov/sanctions-programs-and-country-inf...
delfinom 2y ago
Eh? Planes going missing is because operators don't want to buy into satcom systems or the pilot pulled the fuses. Most US airlines fully know where their plane is at all times , complete with plane internal telemetry beamed to an engineering department at the airline.
ActorNightly 2y ago
>Look at the bigger, global picture. Global picture doesn't work with people in charge of this. If someone shows substantial evidence of mental decline, would you want them anywhere near anything that has to do with global communications?
tzs 2y ago
> This is what the future of communication looks like Is there sufficient capacity? For broadband Starlink has an upper limit on the density of its customers. By density I mean number of customers per km^2 rather than some prohibition against dumb people using Starlink :-) Estimates of this limit vary. When I did a back of the envelope calculation a couple assuming all 12000 planned satellites get deployed I got 4.4 simultaneous people doing full speed downloads per km^2. I had to make some guesses for that, in particular the number of satellites visible. If the satellites were spread uniformly around the Earth then at any one time about 360 would be visible from any given location. But they aren't uniform. They have orbits that favor spending more time over the mid latitudes than the high latitudes. That increases the number visible from the mid and low latitudes and lowers the number visible from high latitudes. I just assumed an even 1000 at any one time in mid latitudes. Others estimates are as high as 30 simultaneous people using full speed per km^2. This is why providers of wired/fiber or terrestrial wireless broadband in decent sizes cities aren't worried about Starlink. I'd expect Starlink LTE to have the same kind of limitation, albeit with very different numbers. The bandwidth needed for one 100 Mbps download would be enough for at least 1000 telephone quality voice streams, but I doubt the satellites have the same amount of bandwidth available over LTE as they do over whatever they are using for the internet stuff, so I don't see any way to get a good estimate.
- throw234904 2y ago
  [flagged]
bigfatkitten 2y ago
> no planes will go missing This doesn't change anything for aircraft because aviation has had this capability for decades. Even light aircraft have ELTs and ADS-B, and larger aircraft operating in oceanic airspace also have real time position reporting via datalink over VHF radio and SATCOM. > Imagine if corrupt governments could no longer shut down the internet and cell service. Satellite operators will continue deny service to particular areas whenever they're told to, just as they do today.

by caseyy 2y ago

asynchronous 2y ago

I agree with the sentiment but LEO constellations like Starlink can and have been disrupted, via sub-orbital jamming. Not to mention that in actual large conflict surface to LEO missiles will simply destroy large amounts of satellite constellations.

panick21_ 2y ago
No government currently exists that has nearly enough rockets to impact Starlink. There is a big difference between doing individual tests and taking down a constellation of 1000s.
- verzali 2y ago
  You don't need to hit every satellite. You only need to create a lot of debris, and that'll do it for you. Alternatively the radiation from a nuclear blast could take out a big chunk of the network, which is presumably why Russia is working on orbiting nuclear weapons.
  - panick21_ 2y ago
    Actually its not that easy even if you did create some debris. Orbit is much bigger then people think. And these sats are much smaller then people think. Without propulsion lots of that stuff quickly drops below the level of the sats. Sats can also raise their orbit in response and fly corrections. Even modest investment in better tracking could massively improve crash avoidance. It would take far more then a handful of sats to truly impact the functioning of the network. And even more to complete take it out. Russia is working on everything if you believe their marketing. I seriously question if any work on 'orbital nuclear weapons' is anything other then marketing. And its questionable how effective that would actually be. This isn't as easy as people think. A country like Russia might have some readiness of nuclear weapons. And maybe a small readiness of anti-sat weapons, but not anywhere close to enough to attack a network like Starlink. Preparing for something like that simply wasn't a thing anybody considered necessary until 2020 and Russia certainly hasn't invested huge amounts of money in that since then and given their recent success with rocket development, I not sure how effective it would have been even if they had.
dotnet00 2y ago
Starlink is supposedly harder to jam than typical satellite comms due to its use of phased array communication. IIRC you need to either be flying overhead or putting out a ton more power in a ground based jammer to be effective. And as the other user mentioned, no country at the moment has the kind of stockpile of ASAT weapons needed to wipe the constellation (plus, due to orbital dynamics, there's a limit to how quickly they can take out satellites). Between trying to wipe the constellation and jamming it, it'd be far more cost effective to jam even accounting for the higher power requirements/lower jamming range. There would also be other interesting options like capturing and using enough terminals to force the entire cell to be disabled. That has been one of the challenges SpaceX has had to deal with near the frontlines in Ukraine.
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  You can build a Faraday cage with a hole in the roof and starlink will be mostly unjammable.
  - throw73391073 2y ago
    Starlink satellites are vulnerable to repeated uplink transmitting their preamble code (which is public and the same across any user terminal). The satellites are so tuned to that code you can jam them through their receive sidelobes.. taking out all beams on the satellite.
    - throwaway48476 2y ago
      Won't you need n jammers = n satellites in view for this? I haven't seen anyone commit to investing in this.
      - throw73391073 2y ago
        A single omnidirectional transmitter on the ground can transmit this one preamble code in all directions and it jams all satellites in view. All Starlink satellites use the same uplink code and they can't change it because it's how new terminals enter the network.

acidburnNSA 2y ago

Agree with all of that, except the world war part. Satellites will definitely be fair game in world war 3... probably one of the first targets. Ham radio will live on!

caseyy 2y ago
I don't know – would we risk Kessler Syndrome for a war? Win a piece of land and doom humanity for a hundred years of regress in space? Maybe, probably can't be ruled out. As for jamming, is it feasible or practical to jam very large parts of the world? I can't imagine it would be. It seems to me like jamming would probably be used for specific military purposes and people would be left alone to communicate with each other otherwise. It's not that I'm saying this could not be done. It could. But this is not the most likely scenario in my head. The immense benefit to all humanity is a very likely scenario, in contrast. LoRa is another equally exciting technology that has a lot of potential in all the spaces I mentioned. I just can't currently imagine a reason it would go mass-market.
- 0xffff2 2y ago
  Of course we would. And anyway the Starlink constellation is low enough that even destroying the whole constellation would have a minimal impact after a decade.
  - semprewar 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - forgot-im-old 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - fukashimoto 2y ago
    [flagged]

croes 2y ago

Satellites can be hacked, jammed or destroyed LEO satellites need constant replacement.

wkat4242 2y ago

Planes have had access to sat Comms for decades. MH380 had it but it was deactivated. Most likely by a suicidal pilot. The engines had their own uplink that was still active. But Starlink isn't going to solve that kind of problem.

acover 2y ago

Drones staying connected in enemy territory.

akira2501 2y ago

> Imagine if corrupt governments could no longer shut down the internet and cell service. Even in the parts of the world where this occurs it has been shown to be nothing more than a surface level inconvenience. > Communication is and has always been an important element in human organisation. Precisely. We don't exactly need the internet or cell service. We've got techniques and historical methods going back to the beginning of, unsurprisingly, recorded history. > People will be really empowered by this technology They're already empowered. This will mostly just convenience them.

gruez 2y ago
>> Imagine if corrupt governments could no longer shut down the internet and cell service. >Even in the parts of the world where this occurs it has been shown to be nothing more than a surface level inconvenience. "Internet shutdowns" like the ones in Kashmir involves all internet being shut down, not just a few sites being blocked on the ISP's DNS servers. That's hardly a "surface level inconvenience". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_India#Internet_shutdowns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_India#I...
- akira2501 2y ago
  You've misunderstood me. People who have ears and mouths will communicate. Even if you blind and gag these, they will _still_ find a way to communicate, and to organize. Put another way, these peoples lives are "not good," not because the Internet is hard to use, it's because of other factors. Which means improving their internet access will only _minimally_ improve their position.

throwaway48476 2y ago

The aircraft body attenuates the signal. That's why all the antennas are placed outside.

numpad0 2y ago

Why does this exact word "hate" always appear in the top comment on Musk related topics? Is someone grepping this string for some purposes?

hcarvalhoalves 2y ago

> Imagine if corrupt governments could no longer shut down the internet and cell service. Even a world war probably wouldn't disrupt this. That’s quite naive, to believe a private company is not under political influence. https://ofac.treasury.gov/sanctions-programs-and-country-information https://ofac.treasury.gov/sanctions-programs-and-country-inf...

delfinom 2y ago

Eh? Planes going missing is because operators don't want to buy into satcom systems or the pilot pulled the fuses. Most US airlines fully know where their plane is at all times , complete with plane internal telemetry beamed to an engineering department at the airline.

ActorNightly 2y ago

>Look at the bigger, global picture. Global picture doesn't work with people in charge of this. If someone shows substantial evidence of mental decline, would you want them anywhere near anything that has to do with global communications?

tzs 2y ago

> This is what the future of communication looks like Is there sufficient capacity? For broadband Starlink has an upper limit on the density of its customers. By density I mean number of customers per km^2 rather than some prohibition against dumb people using Starlink :-) Estimates of this limit vary. When I did a back of the envelope calculation a couple assuming all 12000 planned satellites get deployed I got 4.4 simultaneous people doing full speed downloads per km^2. I had to make some guesses for that, in particular the number of satellites visible. If the satellites were spread uniformly around the Earth then at any one time about 360 would be visible from any given location. But they aren't uniform. They have orbits that favor spending more time over the mid latitudes than the high latitudes. That increases the number visible from the mid and low latitudes and lowers the number visible from high latitudes. I just assumed an even 1000 at any one time in mid latitudes. Others estimates are as high as 30 simultaneous people using full speed per km^2. This is why providers of wired/fiber or terrestrial wireless broadband in decent sizes cities aren't worried about Starlink. I'd expect Starlink LTE to have the same kind of limitation, albeit with very different numbers. The bandwidth needed for one 100 Mbps download would be enough for at least 1000 telephone quality voice streams, but I doubt the satellites have the same amount of bandwidth available over LTE as they do over whatever they are using for the internet stuff, so I don't see any way to get a good estimate.

throw234904 2y ago
[flagged]

bigfatkitten 2y ago

> no planes will go missing This doesn't change anything for aircraft because aviation has had this capability for decades. Even light aircraft have ELTs and ADS-B, and larger aircraft operating in oceanic airspace also have real time position reporting via datalink over VHF radio and SATCOM. > Imagine if corrupt governments could no longer shut down the internet and cell service. Satellite operators will continue deny service to particular areas whenever they're told to, just as they do today.