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maybe Internet for people on earth matters more than astronomy
by RockRobotRock 22d ago
maybe Internet for people on earth matters more than astronomy
- Hizonner 22d agoThat might be dispositive if we didn't already have almost everybody on Earth wired up without using satellites.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 22d agoThe fact that so many people are paying for starlink suggests that it is adding something important that was missing before.
- fluidcruft 22d agoStreaming video on airplane flights?
- db48x 22d agoMost of Starlink’s customers are simply rural people who want Internet access at decent speeds. There are wide swathes of the US where Starlink’s best competition is measured in kilobytes per second.
- defrost 22d agoSeems like a case for the US having better fibre deployment than it does for leaking interference from unshielded poorly made tin cans.
- gordonhart 22d ago~80% of Starlink customers are not in the US.
- defrost 22d agoThat'd be a point to make to the GP db48x
- db48x 22d agoNo, I mean globally most of their customers are rural. Starlink is limited primarily by customer density rather than by absolute numbers. They can provide service to just so many people per square mile before the speed drops below the customer’s tolerance. Most of the square miles in the world are rural, therefore most of the customers are as well. Plus cities have Starlink’s best competition. Starlink is amazing but FTTH is even better. If you can get FTTH at all then you probably won’t even consider Starlink. Nor should you.
- wbl 22d agoFibre rolls in a dense city have different economics from somewhere with just a few people per square mile.
- defrost 22d agoand yet Western Australia, 3x size of Texas with less than a million people in 1980 had a telephone network that covered the population. The "sums are different for rural V urban" doesn't make leaky tin cans a better solution over fibre to population, particularly given the downsides.
- db48x 22d agoPretty sure we achieved that level of coverage here in the US a decade or more earlier than that. A lot of those same rural customers still rely on the telephone system for Internet access. They might be able to get DSL now, but the speeds are going to be low; often just a few hundred kilobits per second.
- defrost 22d agoSo pull modern fibre; as should be done.
- hvb2 22d agoAnd who pays for those miles of fiber? That one customer, because he chose to live there? I assume you understand that it that's the case, Starlink is a much better option as it won't cost them 5 figures upfront
- db48x 21d agoThis is beside the point. Starlink exists and provides excellent service to customers who have no alternatives.
- fluidcruft 22d agoDon't even need fiber. Starlink is only on par with 5G.
- defrost 21d agoIt's a leaky tin can system interfering with radio astronomy, that's not "on par" with either fibre or ground based 5G. Shield it properly (as promised) or ditch it.
- fluidcruft 21d agoOr... hear me out: put up a cell tower and don't waste energy throwing devices that literally burn up in the atmosphere in a few years. Yeah, that doesn't really help boats or people in the middle of the Amazon. Satellite internet is not long term infrastructure.
- inemesitaffia 22d agoSuburban+Urban is more than rural. Rural more than Urban
- Hizonner 22d agoStarlink has 12 million subscribers, or about 0.14 percent of the population of Earth. In addition to paying for Starlink, those subscribers are externalizing costs to everybody else on Earth... for instance by screwing up radio astronomy. It is unreasonable to talk about allowing 0.14 percent of the people on Earth to have Internet as if "Internet for people on earth" were at stake. I mean, yes, they are people, and they are on Earth. You could say the same if it were two people... but that's not the slant intended by phrasing that way. It's especially unreasonable when many of those 0.14 percent want Starlink because of their personal lifestyle choice to live in the middle of nowhere. Yes, I know, somebody's grandpappy built his farm with his own two hands and the help of his trusty plow goat, Irving. That doesn't mean that person is entitled to infinite subsidies in the form of satellite access, fiber, roads, electricity, hospitals, or anything else. Economic activity can justify some of those things (and a lot of that can be priced in by markets). If you're not doing something useful, and you can't pay for all that stuff including traditionally-externalized costs, then move.
- sippingabonedry 22d agoGot a source for that? Because there's entire continents of people who think it's the most ridiculous statement they've ever read on this site (which they can only access because of Starlink).
- defrost 22d agoWe had that before Starlink flooded the radio quiet zones with leakage.
- bcraven 22d agoWere that the case, there would have been nobody buying Starlink. As they are, I think you are wrong.
- lokar 22d agoMy neighborhood has both cable and fiber, both >= 1Gbps, fairly cheap My neighbor has starlink. I assume because they are MAGA.
- RockRobotRock 22d agookay for real, i think you have elon derangement syndrome.
- Hugsbox 22d agoI'm Canadian, I disapprove strongly of Elon and his antics, and there are cable and fibre options in my neighbourhood, but Starlink is cheaper and I need to pinch pennies everywhere I can. And the service is excellent.
- chaostheory 22d agoNot everyone lives within a metro that has good infrastructure. This is even more true in developing countries.
- dghlsakjg 22d agoMore tech people need to go places. I was living in the eastern Caribbean ten years ago (a place that is not particularly poor), and the number of web services that could not handle a slow or unreliable connection was kind of shocking. Netflix was actually pretty impressive, they were fine to about 500kb/s with a lot of dropped packets. Below that, they were slow, but by no means unreliable. Most other sites would shit the bed on a similar connection. Starlink has been an absolute godsend for my friends that are still down there.
- cozzyd 22d agoThese are either incidental or unauthorized transmissions. Not the Ku band downlink to terminals.
- inemesitaffia 22d agoThey are leakage from switching mode power supplies.
- cozzyd 22d agoI bet the 137 isn't though since that's a common satellite downlink band. Swarm who they acquired used that
- sh-run 22d agoI have such a love hate relationship with the tech. On one hand, I live on the edge of the mountains and can get away while on-call, set up my starlink and still be within SLAs if I got paged while out of service (weekend pages are fairly rare). On the other hand, I'm an amateur astronomer, for visual astro, it's not a huge deal, but I see how it could be for astrophotography (streaks) and obviously it's a problem for radio.
- stackghost 22d ago[flagged]
- cwillu 22d ago“Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.” --https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- stackghost 22d ago[flagged]
- RockRobotRock 22d agoI’m a human that just so happens to disagree with you. I don’t like Elon either, but what I dislike more is that it’s impossible to talk about any of his companies without people like you assuming my motives.
- stackghost 22d agoWhat precisely are your motives, then? The umpteenth example of Musk companies behaving poorly and here you come to suggest that we can’t let pesky things like science stand in the way of “the internet”. As if Starlink services is synonymous with the internet itself. The implication is clear, to me at least.
- RockRobotRock 22d agoPrecise motives? I don’t know, I don’t think I have any. I don’t use starlink myself or have a Tesla or invest in any of his companies. Feels silly to disclaim that, but there you go. Having used starlink before on a plane and on land, it’s fast and seems far superior to previous generations of satellite internet. I’m earnestly asking if creating problems for astronomers is outweighed by giving more people access to the internet. Not just giving them “access”, but giving them very fast and low latency access.
- Zarathustra30 22d agoThe two aren't mutually exclusive, as long as aluminum foil is within a trillionaire's budget.
- Dlemlo 22d agoMaybe but people already had plenty of internet before Starlink. Everyone i know who is using starlink doesn't use starlink because htey need starlink for internet.
- RockRobotRock 22d agoIs that because everyone you know lives in a high-wealth country/area?
- Dlemlo 21d agoYepp. But if you look were Starlink is available, thats true for sure for a few more from the current 10 Million customers. So is it worth it for a handfull of people on our planet vs. destroying our atmoshpere and removing access to our space? I don't think so.
- lukeify 22d agoAs if most people use the Internet for proper utility and not just creating and consuming outrage-bait and slop. Suddenly the cost-benefit of "internet for people on earth" seems a lot less genuine. You need surprisingly little bandwidth to send and receive messages, make calls, and read the news.
- RockRobotRock 22d agoGoogle "Ukraine war Starlink". Neolibs who hate Musk's companies unconditionally are going to go quiet real fucking fast, I bet.
- throw0101a 22d ago> maybe Internet for people on earth matters more than astronomy Maybe Starlink can design proper filters and shielding so both Internet and astronomy can happen at the same time.