Unpopular opinion: we don’t need freaking internet from satellites, just get cat6 in every home and everyone is happy. I’m sure the cost would be lower then having to launch 999999.91 satellites to have similar speeds
You need to plug it into something though. If you are on a boat, what are you going to plug into?
For my house I use a 4G router and a combination of ethernet and wifi over the LAN. 4G is also fine for kayaking, but if I had a larger boat that went further out and for longer I would probably consider satellite options.
cat 6 in every home lol. you have any idea about range of cat 6? I mean, any?
~50m for cat6, ~100 cat6a, enough to get you to a switching box where you connect to fiber.
This would work in the US on the coasts and in the cities.
Even the eastern parts of the west coast states the math gets bad. Running cables over/mountains to service the poorest 10% of the states population.
Getting into the square states you have 10s of thousands of miles of mountains and deserts to get to a vanishing small number of people. There are twice as many people in my city as there are in the entire state of Wyoming and we are the third largest city in Texas.
Are you really going to run cables all over an area of the alps but the size of France to bring service to a number of people equivalent to one midsize city? Most of it is protected national Park people don’t even live in.
Most of Nevada is uninhabited desert with some of the hottest temperatures on earth.
We can leave half of Texas empty and still have service for 95% of the population.
It’s not as simple as “just do it” over here. We have huge problems, but the challenges are legit.
oh I didn’t know there’s a fiber box in 100m at any place in the country! tell that to my ISP who cant serve any internet through the landline telephone cable because it’s too far from distribution! oh and also to all the customers of microwave wireless networks.
and this doesn’t even need to be on the countryside! It’s a problem here even in villages that the ISP is not allowed to run any cables on the high voltage electric poles!
There are remote areas where cable won’t reach. For example, I need surveillance on a remote farm and I would love to get internet there.
Cable will reach anywhere. There is not such a place that cable “will not reach”. Is there a profit incentive to serve you as a customer in a capitalist system? Maybe not. But cable will reach.
One broken cable can result in a city/town without internet. Speaking from experience.
Also satellites have other uses like GPS
I know plent of places in my European country where cable does reach, but was made for landline phones and cannot carry any data for internet because its so far from the nearest distribution center. even wireless like microwave can’t sustain more than a quality camera feed
You’d need signal boosters at regular intervals, which need power… so now you’re running multiple cables.
But you can’t run them too close together as the power will induce noise in the data cable.
And after a long distance even the power needs boosting.
And to protect the cables, you’d need to bury them or put them on poles. Separately.
At a certain point, cable becomes the expensive option…
Not sure if you are in Europe, but in the US there are places where you could walk the width of Germany and see 100 houses. It does not serve to be technically correct here. Also, how would that work with boats / other vehicles and places without infrastructures?
I understand, but that is the exception. Even in your case probably getting 4G / 5G to that area would be cheaper / easier long term. Also Europe has a relatively high density compared with other continents
I’m in Italy and outside cities, the Internet is still horrendous. And as I said, if you have a remote farm or garden, which are fairly common here, then you are on your own. Sim based internet is a thing, but there are monthly limits which are risky when you need surveillance and automation to be always live.
Cat 6A caps out at like 330 ft. Also thats a ton of copper.
Fiber optic nonprofit utilities makes more sense in cities and in rural areas we should just subsidize cell phone data plans.
Now get rid of the home and the cable, how do you cover 99.9% of the earth? Nomads need satellite, and so do rural homes too far from an isp fiber/copper endpoint But yes, if starlink has it done, why double the satellites to do it again with a different name? Because it’s easier to launch 1000 more satellites than dismantle the system that enables such feats.
SpaceX and Starlink have no competitors. They’re so far ahead that it’s not even funny. I really wish Elon had just kept his mouth shut and kept working on it without sullying its image. I bet he wishes that too sometimes.
Clearly not what he wishes. Shows no regrets whatsoever. He wishes for everyone to lick his boots and obey whatever he thinks is right. He’s acting like he’s a king or god or so… He gets what he deserves, disrespect and contracts failing. They might lead technologically but that’s no reason to take all this BS. It’s extra reason not to.
I don’t know, the man is hard to read. I’m extremely cynical and I don’t believe he’s genuine ever, but he gave an interview recently and he did choke up when asked how he was managing to run his companies. I don’t think he’s as good an actor to fake that.
The best conclusion I have arrived is that the man may well be completely self deluded and he might really believe himself the savior of mankind so he needs to get us to mars by any means necessary. Maybe because of the heavy drug use and obvious sleep deprivation, his sense of reality is probably warped. Or maybe the pressure from the Twitter purchase got to him and he broke because that’s when he absolutely went bonkers. He had to overleverage himself in order to do that and he even took money from the saudis.
All in all I don’t expect things to end well for him.
SpaceX and Starlink have no competitors
This is a very soviet mode of thinking.
It’s not a mode of thinking it’s a fact. As of this moment there’s no one who is even close to being a competitor to them. I’m not saying there can’t be one, but there isn’t one right now.
I am not denying Starlink and SpaceX have a dominant market position.
When I said “this is a very soviet mode of thinking,” I meant that it’s unreasonable to think that they are unbeatable.
This is just one thing, but if you use Starlink or SpaceX you have to deal with Americans and Americans cannot be trusted.
Being a reliable partner is a competitive advantage and has an impact on the cost function of a given relationship. Americans (government or companies) are not reliable.
Idk. Musk seems to have gone completely mental. Dunno what the cause is, but the man is not healthy. Not sure how much self-reflection he’s capable of.
I was just talking about this with a friend today. Musk was basically on track to become a real-life Tony Stark, exactly as he’d envisioned, but he just couldn’t keep his mouth shut and ended up ruining it for himself. Money buys many things, but it doesn’t buy respect - and once you’ve lost that, it’s nearly impossible to regain. The number of young and ambitious people he let down is simply staggering. I was really rooting for him and hoping he’d turn this around but after the nazi salute I no longer do. That was the last straw for me.
A European Starlink rival’s shares skyrocketed 390% in a week — here’s why
OOOH!!! OOH!!! I KNOW THIS ONE!!! STARLINK GO BOOM! PEOPLE GO NOPE! TESLAS STOCK PRICE GO (bomb falling sound effects) KABOOM!!!
I’m stuck with star link as of present. I would defiantly like for a competent and competent competitor in the market. Competition is the core of capitalism and the driving force behind development.
But also, we cannot have so many god-damn satellites polluting the night sky. Starlink should never have been allowed to get up there as a private actor in the first place.
It’s a tricky situation, as international cooperation would be extremely difficult to maintain, especially during situations like the Ukraine war. But having private companies compete to fill the orbit with space waste as soon as possible is hardly a good solution either.
The states has been moving towards authoritarian corporate control for a long time though. The freedom cities controlled by big tech, setup in whatever country they want, operating outside ‘local’ regulations, with services via satellite and protection via US military, very much fits with what Starlink has done. Techs push for ‘rare earth’ (uranium) is likely about powering these sorts of cities, without needing to rely on a ‘countries’ power grid – to make them autonomous and impervious to local issues.
A few big military powers to allow for the “constant enemy” setup similar to 1984, with a corporate backend to prop up oligarchs that can act based on the whims of the oligarch without fear of repudiation.
Authoritarianism is on a big upswing lately, and egalitarian ideals are busy eating themselves alive – mired in demographic politics. And the conspiracy gremlin in me says it’s been intentional on the part of the democrats/progressive sorts, as they’re just as beholden to ‘rich’ authoritarian leaning tech people as the right wing/republican sorts.
There’s so much more room out there than there is here on this finite planet.
There are a number of concerns, from hindering science by blocking pictures taken by Hubble to flat out malfunctioning and crashing into the ISS. For every new satellite the risk increases. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/satellites-spacex-problem-space-pollution
Competition is the core of capitalism
Lemmy tells me that exploitation is the core of capitalism. Not so?
Lemmy seem to misunderstand that exploitation is a byproduct of human nature and change the system isn’t going to help that (see: USSR). The purpose of government is supposed to be to keep the capitalist system in check in regards to preventing such exploitation. The average Lemmy tankie seems to want to monopolise exploitation to the government itself and remove your freedom to leave to a less exploitative arrangement.
Good. Fuck Starlink.
