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Starlink to roll out direct-to-cell services in Ukraine - CNA
(www.channelnewsasia.com)
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this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024
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starlink should not exist.
Found the person who's never lived in a area with dial-up or conventional sattelite as their only options. I hate Elon as much as the next person, but starlink is revolutionary for those with no other options.
it's really not though it's mid at best.
Do you understand how slow dial up is? Do you understand that conventional sattelite throttles you to unusable speeds after a shockingly low data limit is used up? Those services are not modern internet services. Starlink is. In my testing, I got an average of 45mbps down over a 40GB download. That's so fucking fast compared to even DSL, which is commonly 10mbps down, and even slower up.
Also, typical satellite has horrendous lag. I used to work with someone who was in a remote area (didn't even have cell service) and the quality was fine talking with him through VoIP, but it would take a few seconds to get a response for anything. I can only imagine video. Current boss has Starlink and I wouldn't know a difference.
Heck, up until a few years ago my father-in-law had 1.5mbps DSL and that was pretty much unusable.
Second-hand experience from many years ago when Starlink first rolled out: my friend has a cabin in the Appalachians, outside any cell service, so Starlink sounds great for that. However, Starlink site says there is "no coverage" for that area. Yes, somehow, no coverage for a satellite service. The nearest area with coverage was a town with already-decent 4G. And most large US cities had coverage too. So our inside "conspiracy theory" was that Starlink resells 5G/4G modems for hipsters.
Have no idea if the situation changed since then.
Starlink works differently than conventional sattelite. I'm not an expert, so I'm not going to try to explain it beyond saying that I think it's due to the properties of the sattelites being low orbit, requiring more ground transmission stations and more sattelites than conventional sattelite internet.
I believe their coverage has increased greatly over the past few years. When it was first out my parents also didn't have coverage. They do now, and have for a couple of years.
The satellites are extremely close to Earth in order to reduce latency. Traditional communication satellites sit in geostationary orbit hundreds of thousands of kilometers above the surface, this you being that that's many times the diameter of the Earth so signal delay is pretty noticeable. Starlink satellite wiz around the Earth dozens of times a day, but the advantage is that they're only 200 km up.
The disadvantage of all of this is that each individual satellite has a very small footprint, so it's entirely possible for some regions not to have coverage yet as the network is not complete.
Care to elaborate on why not?
A megastructure filling space with trash, a project that in paper looks like either impossible to complete or a total waste of energy, time and pollution to solve a problem we don't have* and leaving this new net of satellites on the hands of a psycopath.
I really like the idea of starlink, but those are the cons I can think off.
*connectivity is solved by adding cables. What's the cost (money, energy, pollution + life) of a cable crossing the Atlantic vs the cost of a satellite?
Inb4, I'm not siding with anyone, just trying to make the discussion roll.
Also this.
People keep posting that and it's like they don't actually think about it. Space is fucking enormous it's very well named. In order to fill all viable orbits up you would have to have literally hundreds of millions of satellites. It's not like they just whizzing around randomly, we know where they are, so any launch in rocket can avoid them, obviously so because there's never been a case of a rocket been hit by a satellite.
I think you are greatly underestimating how a chain reaction works.
This got brought up when the movie gravity came out (not a movie that really seems to understand physics itself). We don't have enough satellites in space for that kind of chain reaction to happen, and we know this for a fact because Russia has blown up some of their own satellites, and it hasn't caused a chain reaction.
There is a minimum number and density of satellites required for this situation to occur, even theoretically. We don't know exactly what that minimum number is, but we know that we are below it.
The potential for the issue is being taken seriously, but no one's actually suggesting that the issue has come about or that there is any risk of coming about in the near future. We're just implementing long-term safety measures.