People can still "do stuff and build things" while having consideration for environmental impacts.

You might have thought they were stupid reasons but protecting a public good is a very important and challenging task. Unlike the FCC, spaceX isn’t accountable to democratic forces and can do antisocial things with the shared resource and there will be little we can do about it.

Some people want to live in Star Trek, but don't want to look up and see McKinley Station in the sky...

Have you considered other people, the majority?

It is not because can do something that they should.

I'm sorry for your loss.

Too late for your endeavor, FCC is now a pay to play racket.

Perhaps you should try again?

What are the "stupid reasons"? Are they "regulations"?

except it's not so much about do stuff and build things, it's about literally raping the planet, extorting and exploiting everyone including retirement savings, and also to "move fast and break things" which we know understand better was really meant to mean "remove accountability for the richest people", a.k.a. remove public oversight. Taxes for the poor, and the money goes to multi-billion dollar corps. Vaccines? Red tape! Safety belts? Red tape! Environmental concerns? Red tape!

And by the way this guy is responsible for the death of multiple hundred thousands deaths according to estimates. Because he championed removal of Red tape and shutdown of that allegedly "criminal organization" (his words), USAID. Tell that your children.

I wonder what you mean by "moving humanity forward". Just technological advancements without other considerations? In my opinion it should at least require reducing human suffering, and if ao he has done more harm than good

We don't need to have space literally transformed into junkyards to make progress, and there is nothing going wrong with going a lower pace if it means reduced impact on the rest of society.

Who is envious of his trillions? I'm certainly not. I am very annoyed at someone who buys elections, literally promising a million dollars for a vote, and then running in and gutting key portions of the US government, and playing fast and loose with our data - at a bare minimum.

We will be investigating him for decades and he deserves every second of it.

> I love seeing artificial objects in space, because it shows that we, humanity, are finally getting there.

The problem is that nobody asked the other 8.3 billions people what they think about seeing stuff in the sky. For the benefit of 1/1000th of humanity (~10 million starlink users).

Change is inevitable but not all changes are.

I didn’t say I am against change. I said I am against one man owning a monopoly on a common good.

If technological progress requires monopolies and the road toward serfdom is that really a path we want?

No, this is not really moving forward, it's just a traffic jam and pollution in an otherwise pristine space - for money.

It's just the money.

If we were actually going to Mars, then yes, but somehow he made himself the 'First Trillionaire' - without even so much as getting out of Earth's orbit.

This is NFT progress, in that, there is some plausible economic value in NFTs, but in reality, it's just a hustle.

Getting where, exactly?

> I love seeing artificial objects in space,

Kind of fucked up lol

> rather than someone who is starting wars to profit from insider trading...

Your moral and ethical bar is Trump?

> or be glad that it's at least someone getting rewarded for moving humanity forward

Forward back to fascism. No thanks. He already caused astonishing harm.

Yea but it introduces a lot of issues for space travel and other satellites. The useful space in space we have is extremely limited. A single company shouldn't be able to just clutter space at will.

I lived for a few years in Hawaii, where they have banned most outdoor advertising. Having seen the difference, I strongly support such initiatives.

The first time I saw a giant floating tv billboard at the beach was the first time I felt the urge to sink a vessel. I found it offensive but everyone else seemed to just accept it as normal.

São Paulo: Cidade Limpa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa

I had read that some municipalities in switzerland were banning them.

Me, I just do what I can and at least trash the ones covering the windows on public transport here.

That is an interesting take. Now I probably can‘t unsee it.

Where in Europe have you seen this?

Don't want to doxx myself but no outdoor ads on the main street here.

Maybe Stockholm has some.

A slingshot is a worthy investment for opponents of outdoor video advertising

You can see them very easily at dusk. It’s dark enough but they are still in sunlight making them very clearly visible. There is always one or more easily visible (by design).

Their brightness is a mixture of a lot of things, including the huge PV arrays and the angle they have with the sun when they cross the terminator between night and day.

Starlink have already put a lot of effort into their satellites being much less bright than most satellites, including tilting their PV away from earth during the terminator crossing, so from what I've read you'll mainly see them while they're being deployed and while de-orbiting.

(Part of my still-expanding draft blog post about space data centres is to work out how bright a million much larger objects would look. If they were in the orbit with the most sun, that's a terminator-following sun-synchronous orbit, which is maximum brightness).

Anything up there needs to reflect as much as possible to avoid building up heat. That which it can’t reflect is absorbed and needs to be emitted as efficiently as possible. Vantablack would likely make it absorb heat readily and glow in the near-IR.

Counterintuitively, the best way to make satellites less visible for ground observers is actually to make them MORE reflective. You want the reflection off the nadir side of the vehicle to be as specular (mirror-like) as possible so that the light reflected from the sun only makes it to a single point on the Earth's surface.

You can see that SpaceX (and probably other LEO operators as well) are already doing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfJWli7YKPw

This video is a good visual illustration of that effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8I25H3bnNw

It’s not the visual that bothers me. It’s the evidence of a monopoly that is being built that will dominate humanity for the benefit of literally one person

This is a bit like suggesting we slather cars in vaseline to prevent traffic jams.

Maybe we could just blast Anish Kapoor into space on a one-man prison vessel instead?

Its more the other way around. Its mostly used by the wealthiest few percent, the majority of the world has to pay for the damage it causes.

> those satellite lines represent humans being able to connect with modern technology out in the Sahara or in the ocean

Or basic locations in Europe, that can be as close to 20km from a big city. There are a ton of spots where you have at best spotty 4G coverage or no coverage at all.

Used to live where we had 1Mbit ADSL, and no cell ... Trust me, you feel the limitations of that. Keeping your PC running 24/7 to download/buffer, so you can use your day traffic for more important stuff.

Starlink is a insane deal in my eyes. Sure, it uses a lot of power but your paying the same as typical vDSL in Germany. And ironically, ... Starlink is faster then the fixed lines we have here in the "3th" biggest city in Germany.

People really underestimate how much underinvestment there has been in Internet connectivity even in rich countries.

It is one person who controls it, at his discretion who gets to share in the utility. What your saying can also be true without such an ownership model, right?

What percentage of spaceX stock does humanity own? What about Elon?

Can the government shut off your access to GPS? No. Can spaceX shut off your access to their network? Yes.

Do you have rights to judicial review if government harms you? Yes. If spaceX does? Probably not because their terms of service create a contract not a legal right.

We're not space faring. We just put up satellites. There's nothing for us outside of the earth. It would take months of travel just to get to the useless barren wasteland that is Mars.

Maybe some day we'll be mining asteroids near Earth or something. Maybe we'll mine the moon. Going to/living on different planets is pretty much science fiction though. It's hard enough to live on the earth, it's gonna be 1000 times harder to live anywhere else.

I am a progressive. But ownership of the commons is something that requires careful policy decisions. The same applies to utilities, the open ocean, wireless spectrum.

We shouldn’t allow monopolies in the name of progress or the monopolistic rent seeking will stifle progress.

The government could have absolutely done all of this and more if there was any commitment to the investment. Instead nasa had its budget gutted.

My kids won’t have a future with any opportunity if resources are so concentrated that their bargaining power can’t have any effect in the world.

By this logic we should also enjoy every time someone puts a motorway through woodland. Just look at the human achievement embodied in all that concrete!

More than 2/3 of all active satellites are part of the SpaceX/Starlink constellation, and it's a full 3/4 of those in LEO, which are the biggest contributor to the glints we can see in the night sky.

They're such an enormous part of the problem that it does a disservice to the problem to not metaphorically shine a spotlight on them.

I had trouble finding another source that summed up the data so nicely, but other sources did corroborate these figures: https://satfleetlive.com/blogs/how-many-satellites-in-orbit/

I think this needs to be addressed with a crowd-funded projectile. This sort of stuff must be done on a planetary-scale consensus basis only.

To anyone thinking that 18m² isn't that big for how large the space is, please recall how bright reflective things shine during the day when you hit the right angle.

Wut? This has to be some sort of a scam. There's no way you're going to be reflecting enough light from hundreds of kilometers away.

> You'll be sad to know there's another mf trying to put a mirror to reflect sunlight near twilight

This has been approved:

* https://ca.pcmag.com/networking/16760/fcc-approves-reflect-o...

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48866452

Yes. But by allowing a monopoly to exist each of those customers has the risk of being forced off the service by a terms of service change, price gouging, or other predictable monopolistic behavior with no alternative. And this is avoidable by ensuring a competitive market or regulated utility.

Elon owns 80% of voting shares, and 42% overall.

>> SpaceX has many owners, especially post-IPO. You, too, can buy the sky and sell the sky.

Perfect, how can this not be a win win for anyone not involved?

An opportunity for everyone to become wealthy and scale our riches together.

Without Elon, how would so many of us .. “ever have made it”?

Ownership means nothing without control.

Laughable to imply that an individual retail investor will have any say or influence on a corporation as large as SpaceX in which Musk has a controlling stake.

SpaceX has many investors, not owners. If you don't have any say in how the company is run you're not an owner.

SpaceX utilizes a dual-class share structure where CEO Elon Musk retains between 82.4% and 85% of the total voting power, despite only owning roughly 42% of the company's actual equity.

You are missing the point. It’s not that I don’t find technological progress inspiring, it’s that it is an emerging monopoly that will capture a common good with no accountability and permanently deprive people of a precious opportunity.

Compounding interest means, left unchecked, the natural progression is the “voting” power concentrated until there is only a monarch.

A trillion dollars will accumulate $100 billion in passive wealth simply by existing

Good, god, no, money represents the balance of power in a system, there's not thing 'representative' about it from a civic perspective, completely the opposite.

Undersea fiber is cool until someone sends a submarine to snip it or sends „not associated ship” to drag anchor over the coordinates of fiber cable.

It is harder to break satellite constellation in a concealed way.

You know the point of democracy is that the government is also run by people who've proven themselves in a marketplace, right? It's just one where having more money doesn't entitle you to vastly more power, which is, you know... one well-established failure mode even of private marketplaces...

The marketplace is distributed. A monopoly is not. You’re confusing the two and ignoring the harm the winner of market competition does when they escape competition.

You’re also ignoring that a government is accountable to people. A corporation is not.

Can't speak to the world as a whole but the US has we spent 50 years gutting most government functions that aren't part of the police/military/surveillance apparatus (and many of those as well). SpaceX itself is an example of the primary mechanism of this: Diverting funding to private, no-bid contracts that remove both market forces and democratic oversight from those services while also ballooning their costs

Maybe because republicans spent generations claiming the government can’t and shouldn’t do anything.

Once you notice the pattern of how these companies are started you will see that there is a hidden hand of government behind much of what we think is an independent, market driven, capitalistic enterprise. Whether it’s Facebook or Oracle or Palantir or SpaceX it’s all the same. Heck even the founding of Silicon Valley itself can be viewed to be government driven. The bottom line is national security is not going to be left to the whims of a market when the pentagon has a black budget that can eclipse all of VC spending with the stroke of a generals pen.

> Why didn't the government try...

As a broad generality, governments are utter crap at inventing/building/operating bleeding-edge technologies at giga-scale. Exceptions are generally narrow-focus military hardware, plus flood control, aqueducts, and other "obviously needed for the nation's welfare" stuff.

Look at elons comp package and voting share and tell me he isn’t the singular person driving the process and capturing the gains.

Take the trolling elsewhere. I don’t like monopoly. I don’t like monarchy. They lead to human suffering and stifling of innovation. Your playground insults about soy anything are unbecoming of HN.

Very untrue. Go somewhere with low light pollution and you'll see them in the dead of night. I was out in rural Australia and used a satellite tracker app to confirm what I was seeing - they are very distinctive and definitely visible.

They are not overwhelming, mind you, but I did notice them immediately. They stood out enough that I wondered what they were and started researching, that alone says something about the prevalence.

Edit: An LLM tells me that this is partly unique to how far South Australia is and the positioning of the sun in Australia's Summer. But I lack the physics knowledge to confirm that.

What percentage of satellites are launched and controlled by spaceX? When is a market considered a monopoly? When does a monopoly cause harm. Those are the questions you should be asking because if you want to participate in the innovation process there has to be a market where you can participate and not be squashed by a monopoly.

If you're seeing "strings" those are recently launched satellites. Operational satellites are below visual magnitude.

This is the same logic Trump used to fight a wind farm put in off the coast of one of his golf courses.

"I'd consider this public pollution caused by extremely greedy billionaires ruining the planet."

This is such a weird framing, as if Starlink was a frivolous project for some rich person's fun.

There is genuine demand for orbital ISP from people, including people in poorer countries whom a better connectivity may help improve their incomes and lives, where an alternative is basically impossible (you won't get optic fibre in the Himalayas or Papua or the Andes anytime soon, if ever).

20 million people are now using Starlink and that number will almost certainly grow to maybe ten times as many, eventually. Ukraine uses Starlink to defend itself from being devoured by an aggressor. Sailors and other people in far away places use Starlink to keep in touch with their families.

Did you know that before Starlink, the South Pole Base had just 2x256 kB connection for everyone?

I get the "pollution" angle, but not the "hey, one guy is ruining the planet" angle. At the very least, all the customers are complicit, and I would add all the governments that don't seem to be able to build terrestrial connections for their own population.

Billionaires are not responsible for this, we the people are. Market forces and society chose this.

You are emotionally disregulated and unable to think critically.

Blaming this on billionaires instead of “the whole” who are customers of space-x is asinine.

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> 'My kids had to see a power line going through the country side'

A lot of people get upset about such things, even those are rather more important than just adding to the world's existing widespread internet access.

> you should be celebrating what Elon and his companies have achieved

The level of servility of some people never ceases to amaze me. This sentence is viscerally repulsive to me.

Maybe somewhat ironically, I think this is an overly cynical take.

People can acknowledge a difference of values and recognize what they consider a destruction of the commons without their stance being distilled to simply being a hater.

Would you also considering people who bemoan the degradation of Lake Erie by industrialists of the last century as “crab mentality”?

Similarly, people at the time took what may be closer to the opposite stance: “Fundamentally this level of environmental degradation was accepted as a sign of success.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/cuyahoga-river-caught...

until the kessler effect traps is on this ever-heating rock

Hope for what?

For less starving people? For less child abuse? For less climate change?

I look up at the night sky and i want to see stars and the endlessness of the universe and don't want to be reminded that Elon Musk will poisen our atmosphere.

That’s a very reductionist and dismissive take. Also it’s rude.

I’m an occasional astrophotographer, and the baseline of photos you can took are absolutely breathtaking now. Seeing this destroyed in real time is depressing.

I used to see a rare flyby of a satellite in the complete dark, but now it’s much more, and besides my personal annoyance, many people much more serious about sky and space are rightfully angry. Maybe you can ask them to grow up, too.

Not every progress is good progress. We should understand that by now. You should understand that better than all of us combined, since you’re apparently grown up, way more than us.

What happened to you that you became that dismissive?

Was it not a big issue for you that aeroplanes were flying overhead?

Whos responsibility was it that you were living were you lived?

I guess there is a small difference between being able to choose or parents have choosen for you vs. everyone on the whole planet needs to endure it.

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments

Dude, are you okay?

Why is that better? Because you read about it in a sci fi book?

That’s not how the curve of history has always bent. There were long periods of extreme inequality where most people were serfs and a few controlled the assets. That is the norm, the recent period of opportunity.

I have no problem with billionaires. Or trillionaires. I do have a problem with monopoly because it destroys the very ecosystem that creates the increased well being you describe.

Granted “we” are billionaires.

Not only you didn’t get the point, but you still hold on to your delusions:

> life for our kin will only be better.

Right? In this subscription economy? Where you have just limited time to watch the movie you loved? You can’t afford to rent the house you loved let alone buy it? (previous generations could afford) the list goes on and on.

Maybe stop spreading lies and see things more objectively?

Buddy our anceostors were able to see the night sky.

I don't need a space station with space tourism only the richest can afford and will be still very dangerous to see the stars right now.

What you will see is how Starlink satelites will poisen our atmosphere at re-entry.

No. It’s more don’t buy all the lawns in the entire country and then dye the grass purple and then rent it back to me at 50% of my wages. Thats what happens in a monopoly.

There is a lot to criticize about governments. And there are many bad ones. But structurally a corporation has no obligation to represent society, government does.

Comments like this always make me lol. It's a pointless comment. Do something about it if you think the government doesn't represent you. Or shut the fuck up.

it is represent people, but its not which people think actually is

How?

Its working for me. Have you ever thought of moving to a territory where your properly represented? If your in the u.s. i think you can still walk across the Canadian border.

You use GPS?

> He's more sci-fi author than CEO at this point.

L. Ron Hubbard comes to mind.

Turo (then Relayrides) partned with GM to allow you to rent your own vehicle out while you were at work or anywhere, so it's not science fiction, it was done back in 2012 and the concept was the same, your vehicle will help pay for itself.

Every mile logged by autonomous driving, every accident caused by a human vs autonomous vehicle where the human is at fault, will make insurance companies price risks accordingly. So far, autonomous vehilces doing very well in the cities where they operate.

It's inevitable these two concepts will merge, and it solves many problems with lack of access to affordable transportation especially for those who can't drive. Public transportation can't survive on fixed route, major infrastructure spends like rail and bus and meet the needs of the greatest number of people.

I think there would be no point in making the claim if the probability estimates were truly in good faith.

AirPower would've been a fraction of a fraction of a single percentage point of Apple's accessory sales

Apple is facing a multi-million dollar lawsuit over Siri features it promised, that it would not charge for or make money off of, but didn't deliver

As the comment you are replying to does not, on its face, seem to have a political bia you should be explicit about where/how you identified that bias. Without this you are the one injecting politics not the OP.

> > Apple announced AirPower and then didn’t end up shipping it. In a “functioning economy” should Tim Cook be indicted for misleading investors? Obviously not.

Apple doesn't have a history of having to pump the stock to survive. Also it's a pretty ubiquitous company and they delivered a pretty life changing product for all of us.

On the other hand Tesla has a history of lying constantly and also life and customer experience is pretty much the same in the sectors of the economy that they attacked , as a matter of fact a 2002 Mercedes (the year in which Tesla was founded) is better in many departments compared to a 2026 Tesla

No Lidar, no chance…

> disagreement with the founder’s politics

Are you talking about the guy who did a double-down Nazi salute to celebrate Trump winning the election?

> The number of people who are not covered by above-mentioned fiber/cell network, and can afford Starlink as it is priced now, will be extremely small

People vastly overestimate the purchasing power in places like India. Most of the purchasing power is concentrated in the top 1% of the population and most of that 1% lives in urban areas with fiber connectivity. The bottom 90% don’t even make $1K/person/year. Even a $10/month subscription (1/5th of what it costs right now) would be 10% of the total income, which at those income levels, would never be a priority.

Global cellular operator revenue is approx $1T. They have put their toe in the water with direct-to-cellular support for starlink, and have bought spectrum to improve this. I'm sure they basically want to offer cellular to everyone in the world and get a good chunk of that $1T. Maybe they want 20% of it? Sounds crazy, but China Mobile, Verizon, and Deutsche Telecom each have 10%. Sounds it's not so wild that they can grab a big chunk, especially if they can find new customers that are not already connected.

And of course they can also continue to grow their broadband internet access business.

I suppose they will likely start putting cameras and other data sensors on the satellites so they can sell other data for mapping, positioning services, agriculture, weather, etc. The incremental cost to add this to the platform will be almost nothing compared to existing systems.

Starlink is currently partnering with United Airlines for Wi-Fi coverage, so that's one thing.

Additionally, India is currently banning starlink for national security reasons.

Starlink accounted for 69% of SpaceX revenue pre-merger and is speculated to be already profitable including launch costs.

And this is all before they launch a phone or something, or replace global fiber interconnect with a lower latency space-based alternative, replace all forms of space based telecommunications (TV, Satellite Radio, etc). Starlink is a $1T+ business without even getting creative.

We’ll how that prediction turns out…

My informed opinion says that you are wildly wrong.

(Also don’t forget the Starlink related military contracts that SpaceX has.)

Starlink is going to be panopticon surveillance satellites long term - I hope I'm wrong.

Space Bears have been saying this for quite a while, we live in megalopolis which already are covered very efficiently and we are only becoming more urban. Of course their voice was drowned because rockets are essentially giant penises piercing the atmosphere and hence the intersection of nerds getting excited for the sake of technical prowness and rich guys who don't get laid who seem to be nowadays at the helm of the intelligentia didn't want to hear none of that.

On top of that add the reusability stunt streamed in 4k making them extrapolate a not well defined pivotal leap for ROI....and there you have it , it's the Apollo sinkhole all over again with money being lit on fire an essentially no quality of life ROI for society.

At least the Apollo mission got us the ability to deliver nukes to Moscow in 30 minutes or less. This will be a total sinkhole.

All the while we are held hostage by a Nation with consumption rates which are a thenth of ours and we still have the audacity to reject nuclear fission because it's "dangerous"

Automated cargo ships. Traveling to automated ports.

Sure, and that's great, but this is an extremely small niche case right? No one is denying that there are some cases where Starlink is amazing, but niche products don't usually command a $1T value.

> There is no broadband or fiber on remote islands along the coast.

I have family on the USA side of the islands. Kenmore Air is subsidized, but the trees are so darn tall that at many homes, Starlink is not an option. (they like the trees and use directional microwave, which sucks for Zoom)

Meanwhile, as one of those engineers, they ran fiber down the highway a mile from my house circa 2021, but they did not do any upgrades at all to the last mile infrastructure so I still only have a ~10Mbps DSL option for wired internet at that house, which is a big step up from literally no wired option before, but still vastly inferior to Starlink. (The terrain makes terrestrial wireless a nonstarter in the area). I've since moved back to civilization, but I still own the house. As far as I know, there are no plans at all to improve the last mile infrastructure.

Separately, from SpaceX's own prospectus, Starlink is only a tiny fraction of the overall conglomerate that went public recently. It "only" needs to support double digit billions of valuation to pull its weight inside of the company.

There are areas where the bureaucratic hurdles to changing anything and the incentives for changing anything work out to nothing ever changing. I assume in 20 years most of Berlin is still going to have 50mbit/s max. I hear residents of New York have completely given up and are using 5G modems because putting up new cables just isn't practical. On the other hand, these cities do have a significant minority of flats with gigabit internet, so if you care you can pick a modern building with modern cabling. Maybe the segment who both live in old apartments and also are willing to pay for fast internet is too small to bother with.

Not just cruise ships, but practically every boat with a bed in it. People sailing on small boats all around the world have starlink now. It's kind of a game changer in a lot of ways for small boats.

> But there are a few places that will need Starlink, like planes, cruise ships, and islands. I'm just not sure if that will justify that $1T valuation.

There's also drones and front-line trenches, but your point still stands.

As with the data centers, starlink is not actually what people think it is. There’s a military purpose underlying its public front

For war it is. Drones and other unmanned aircraft are the future of warfare. That's the whole reason why every country now heavily invests in low orbit sats. It's not about consumers. Also not for spacex. Defence contracts are zillion times more worth. Once you are in you reach the end level as a business.

I don’t see why it would be different in 100 years. The fibre might be slightly better (hollow core fibre will increase speed from 2/3c to nearly c), but, absent new physics, it’s hard to imagine anything beating _that_.

Maybe neutrino comms for long distance? :)

Starlink has more suburban and urban users because there are lots of enclaves without service, reliable service or unlimited service.

So the drug traffickers that cut the fiber have no problem with your Starlink dish outside your home, and don't break it and/or threaten you? If they care, that seems like an oversight they will soon correct once enough people start using it.

That is freaking amazing. I want to be clear that reusable first stage of Falcon 9 + Starlink is the coolest tech that I have ever seen. It was just that for me, the financials didn't work out.

[dead]

300Gbps? Is that typo? Unless you are connecting to some very particular infrastructure on the other one, nothing you could possibly connect to could use it, and you would need gear that would be somewhat high end even for server grade.

(I know you said you didn't select that option, but just the idea that it's even offered to residential units is mind blowing).

That was my thinking as well here in EU farmland. I would use it as a backup. I really wanted to have an excuse to use the cool af Starlink tech. However, after half a decade the fiber has gone down 3 times, and I just shared my iPhone's LTE as a hotspot in 2 cases, and in the third I did yard work for 20 minutes.

If we can get internet from the sky, it's hard to justify digging up the earth with cables for the same thing.

I realize Space X "pollutes" space and astronomy is also important, but it's not more important than communications and information for people on earth.

I think that's the idea of robust competition.

if the incumbent(s) don't invest in infrastructure (which can actually be cheap) and start losing customers at 3mb to starlink, they can justify the expenditure.

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In NYC we’re often only wired for one provider. 5G home internet was a big deal in finally opening up that competition.

1 billion of that rural broadband funds was allocated to SpaceX, but the Biden administration revoked it in 2020. I wonder which has connected more rural Americans

I have it, I live in a very rural place.

I've had to reset the router 3 or 4 times in two years. I don't suffer outages even in thunderstorms.

It may be slow compared to fiber or something, but it's the fastest steam game downloads I've ever had personally (no big city life).

But reliability has been almost 100%

I wonder if that was at the beginning. They've been quietly launching so many satellites over time.

Unreliable usually means not a clear signal? May have needed to adjust the install.

He probably had it pointed at trees. It was super reliable for me when I worked from a rural location in Maine for a couple of months.

The sailing-around-the-world (and similar) market is obviously miniscule. The isolated communities probably tend to be on the less affluent part of the world, so it doesn't seem to justify a 100x expansion.

This is great right? Lets pollute our sky for 8 Billion people that tyjen can send a whatsapp message to people while sailing.

Awesome!

Starlink has worked great for us so far from Europe to Polynesia. Prices keep going up, so would be nice if the service had actual competition.

The backups are sadly becoming trickier, as fewer and fewer carry SSB radios or operate shore stations.

And yet we do have SSB, and also an Inreach as backups. You never know when Elon wakes up and decides he doesn't like sailors.

OK, so for this, Starlink is AMAZING! In-flight Starlink is undeniable.

The first time I experienced it, I could not believe what was happening. I messaged my nerd friends with screenshots of https://speed.cloudflare.com/

Also, their required zero-friction UX is the shiznit.

Then, I fell asleep as I finally had theoretical time off.

I flew Delta about 6 months ago and they had something similar, also for free, but they use Viasat. I think most of the big airlines were moving this way anyway to be honest, Starlink just has a good opportunity for advertising.

I’ve read so many posts from both CEOs and programmers about their higher in-flight productivity thanks to be offline.

And this is exactly why we don't need internet on planes.

Right the areas that companies took money to roll out high speed internet to, then just kept the money and called DSL high speed or just did nothing. The government should keep giving companies money and investing in them. It's brilliant.

Exactly. Central Europe is one of the most densely populated regions on the planet outside of Asia. High population density makes fiber more economical, and low population density, the inverse. As other la have pointed out, India actually has very deep fiber penetration exactly for this reason. The Americas, by contrast, are largely devoid of people which makes the economics of any networking infrastructure harder

Stop using Telstra then. There’s an abundance of NBN resellers who sell better packages for cheaper than Telstra. At this point Telstra is just for old people who don’t want to change the services they’ve always been with.

Some day before invading Taiwan China and Russia will try to take them all down: https://archive.is/AMIxX

China has a huge microwave to destroy any kind of Starlink over its head.

Would fiber have come so fast without starlink as a threat though

Still no 100% coverage and export promotion is part of Foreign Affairs work.

I live in what is probably the first place to get these things in the world, but it feels like fiber is being built at an extremely rapid pace. Just in the past couple of years it seems like Google and AT&T fiber went from being a relatively confined thing to being available everywhere in the city, and everywhere outside, and at my friend's ranch 100 miles in the middle of nowhere. Everywhere.

Who digs up fibres to sell? It's worthless material. Copper yes but nobody lays that anymore. If it even has to be metal it's usually mostly aluminium.

Starlink is popular in rural England. Trenching fibre to farmland isn't economical and poor DSL is often the only other option.

>Europe is too well-run (even the poorer parts) for Starlink to be as relevant.

Except there's rich parts like Germany or Austria where internet infra is poorly run due to monopolistic telco capture and regulations keeping infra upgrades costs high, and so have slower and more expensive internet than Starlink in some areas. Poorer nations of EU often have faster internet than the richer ones so poverty is not a reason.

So Starlink is definitely still relevant. I've seen several small/medium businesses here in Austria that have a starlink terminal as a backup.

Not if you're a publicly traded company and that's a major part of your revenue.

Ships and jets are different segments from residential. Planes are definitely a textbook use case for satellite internet, but just like airlines are in a race-to-the-bottom for everything from in-flight snacks to legroom, they're not going to spring for premier high-quality internet service, they're just going to scrape by with the bare minimum. The market potential is not spectacularly impressive. Meanwhile, for residential services, rural areas continue to shrink, the people remaining in rural areas tend to be poorer, and the rural areas where rich people live have fiber, because the rich people can pay for it. Satellite internet will remain a crucial service for certain rural populations, but it's not going to take over the world, and it's not going to justify an order of magnitude more launches. Let's stop beating around the bush: the bull case for both Starlink and SpaceX is that the US military sees them as indispensible military assets, the former for global logistics, and the latter for the rapid weaponization of space.

I agree with that, but it's great for a greenfield project/area. Say, Mars or very high and low latitudes, or ships/airplanes.

However, once you are in an area of "civilization," there is not only an opportunity for fiber, but also maybe the locals don't want a foreign power controlling your citizens' data access. India + China = 35% of the global population, and Starlink is not legal in either place.

Meanwhile, the free speech absolutist is focused on breaking up the ~5.4% of the globe, (EU) where Starlink is legal.

The price difference for mobile satellite service is rather substantial though.

Crazy, I didn't realize starlink is in the gigabit range for bandwidth? And how are they getting past the speed of light wall on their latency?

They seem to be expanding even across rural America. These days it's fairly common for small and medium size towns to have access to 500mbps-1gbps for $50-$90 per month, and essentially all small cities and above.

Reddit is overflowing with threads where people are getting AT&T to give them 1gbps for $30-$35 per month. Comcast has repeatedly offered me 1gbps for ~$50/m for five years locked-in. I have no practical use for it.

The US has more broadband than it knows what to do with at this point. Somebody needs to figure out a mass public use for home 1gbps+.

Very little, EU budget is minuscule - something like 500 euros per person per year.

> where fiber rollouts are too expensive

Or in cities where fiber gets blocked by cable providers bribing corrupt local officials.

Lack of competition is the reason. Not the size of the country. Especially in a suburb.

Option being Starlink run by the rouge fascist billionaire who tries to use it to manipulate global wars?

Space Bears have been saying this forever.

It's not but it's all so tiresome to explain why. Also, those (hypothetical) towers have no ROI because they only serve poor people. Starlink covers the entire world so parts of the world can subsidize service to other parts.

Yes and people lived without internet. You should be one of those.

What an argument.

Internet access is good.

You can call your relatives and check in. That has been huge. My relatives traveled the US in the 80s and could call home maybe once a week? Month? Now intl calls are free.

You don't need to check everything everyime like social media apps brainrot.

Once upon a time people used to walk everywhere.

People used to die trying to cross the country

They did and it used to take a lot of planning, using paper maps, getting lost etc.

Just like once people didn't use electricity or vaccines or indoor plumbing. For all its minuses the internet makes these long trips 10x easier.

Definitely! I was doing the observing during an RV trip, but my comment was about how it impacts business even more.

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Many, many businesses do, including ones we all like such as power and water and firemen, etc. Th thrust of my comment was about business and public infrastructure as a social good.

The star link network is actually remarkably cost effective in getting internet access to rural areas. There's a reason that these areas still have poor connectivity: it's just not cost effective for anyone to build land based infrastructure there.

SpaceX spend a few billions on StarLink. But if you look at how much network operators have spent over the years on cables, base stations, etc. it's not all that much for a network that offers high bandwidth access all over the planet.

Adding 100K more satellites is going to make Star Link a direct competitor to many of these operators.

It has nothing to do with competition. You could have as many competitors as possible and no one is going to put a cell tower up in a remote location.

Eh, I think the economics of rural areas play a role as well, and this “wasteful” way is actually very well suited for serving that long tail.

Just a choice of polluting the ground or the air.

Could star link add some cameras on the back of those satellites and make the detection actually much better?

This is unironically why I believe lights should be shut off at night. Entire cities.

I'd love to see the sky. Actually see it. Even the most remote places have light pollution, so it's impossible and likely will be going forward.

Maybe it's silly, but it makes me sad.

What percentage of humans are urban dwelling and don’t even see the stars at night? Related there aren’t many places on earth where you can still see the Milky Way. In that way a similar trade off has been made with no forethought whatsoever. Should this time be different? I think so.

That's a ghoulish thing to say.

Rather than deciding for them from your bubble of privilege in your fiber-connected utopia, you could just ask these poorer countries if it is worth trading global full, high-speed internet access for "not being able to see the big dipper as clearly at night".

Or just watch what they do when presented with the choice.

I’m not sure if that’s true of these use cellular frequencies.