Here along the BC Coast, the organization I work for has an expansive sensor network. Weather stations, CTDs, custom equipment in watersheds, research facilities with all kinds of equipment to monitor, and so on. There is no broadband or fiber on remote islands along the coast. We used to use satellite internet, and getting data off of our main hubs (everything is relayed to the hubs by radio) was very slow and precarious. Since starlink it's a breeze. We will finally be able to get video feeds off of some of the stations; a totally untenable concept before.

I have a friend who lives 1.5hrs outside Toronto and needs Starlink because ISPs don’t offer anything useful. Same with a family member with a house even closer to Toronto. These aren’t far off North Ontario rural houses and there’s tons of people living up there.

When COVID hit, I knew a lot of engineers who decided to move to rural areas / small farms because they could leverage Starlink to work remotely.

Last year, when I asked whether they still liked Starlink, all of them said it is amazing, but they had gotten fiber coverage in their area from a local provider, so they don't use it anymore, or just use it as a backup.

I think Starlink was a huge demand signal that there were people willing to pay a premium for faster-than-radio internet. So, unless they manage to be cheaper and faster than fiber, I don't think there is much of an endgame there.

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 many isolated communities abroad that benefit from this coverage. Plus, when I begin my solo sailing adventure, I intend to use Starlink as my primary method to maintain contact, of course with traditional methods serving as backup.

I have fiber (I can get up to 300 Gbps at my home in the Seattle area, but I got opted for the 2Gbps) and I have Starlink as backup/failover. I previously used my mobile service for that but learned the hard way that when there's a large internet outage in the area, as it did when we had a bad storm, so does mobile service, either power loss or it can't support the influx of everyone using their phone internet. So now I have starlink as a backup. It's a very small portable unit that I can also take when camping. It's a great service. Also it's powering a lot of airlines now, it's fast and reliable to the point I can watch youtube and tiktok on my flights.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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).

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.

Ok, Walrus.

* only when you’re outdoors with good line of sight and only in geographic areas they allow.

I was only trying to talk about Starlink here, as that is what TFA is about. Starlink is AMAZING in-flight, out at sea, etc.. But since you brought it up:

> 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.

So, where does the rest of the valuation come from?

It feels like it comes from the alien simulation-theory overlords.

And for that reason the EU, India, China and Russia will build their own Starlink alternatives.

To offset costs they'll then provide it for civilian use, competing with Starlink in the above areas.

How about the sea traffic and jet plane market?

> I don't understand the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India, where they have <.1% the money to spend on such things.

India is rapidly expanding fiber internet connectivity, even in rural areas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharat_Broadband_Network

In addition, 4G/5G coverage is extensive: https://www.ookla.com/articles/india-mobile-connectivity-1h2...

See India in this 5G global coverage map: https://www.ookla.com/articles/5g-map-2026

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 (likely making Starlink unviable as a profitable business).

I think that while Starlink is a technical innovation its primary benefit is as a political innovation: it lets you sidestep a lot of politics.

Rural communities in the US should have high speed internet, just like efforts were made to give them electricity back in the day. But the layers of politics and dysfunction in the way are deep.

It works on planes, ships, and in remote areas with no coverage. I live in Canada where the whole of Europe would fit many times over, nothing else would work in the remote areas at that scale. My parents live in Panama and use starlink to get reliable high speed internet at the beach. Even when the power goes out, their solar panels keep the internet online.

In much of the US, internet companies run a racket. While there are often multiple providers to choose from, if you want reliable service at good speeds, you end up with two, or if you're really lucky, three options. One of those options is Starlink.

> there are no plans at all to improve the last mile infrastructure

The economics of laying fiber to the premises are heavily driven by density of potential customers * probability that a potential customer will sign up if you run fiber down their street. You can get reasonable intuition by focusing on the density alone & ignoring the competition / pricing side of things.

I'm not familiar with current US construction costs to install fiber but have some intuition from Australia.

With Australia's national broadband network project from a decade or so ago, it'd cost in the ballpark of $100 AUD per meter to run fiber down the street in an underground trench - most of the capex is digging the holes in the ground etc, the cost of the cable itself is essentially free. The construction budget for a suburb would be something like $2000 / premises. To give a ballpark estimate, suppose 25% of your budget is the premises-specific work to connect the house to the cable running down the street, if they choose to sign up for your broadband plan. That leaves at most $1500 / premises for the rest of your capex budget, so the economics only work if you've got a neighbourhood with a density of least one house every 15 meters. Those numbers aren't exact but they'd be in the ballpark.

There's a bit of variability in the cost per meter to install, if you can reuse existing poles & run the cable aerially that might be only 30%-40% of the cost of digging holes, so you might be able to support a lower density suburb that way & still stick to your construction budget.

In Australia for the lower density rural / semi-rural areas they'd use fixed wireless, & finally satellite for the remote extremely low density areas where it didn't even make sense to build a wireless tower.

Usually there is a 300 Mbps - 10 Gbps range of offerings.

Gotta be online 24/7 or what?

If your trip to desert is worth polluting whole low orbit and high atmosphere is debatable. Same goes for hypothetical business there. Maybe building towers would be a better idea in long term.

Internet works on phones?

The more you know.

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.

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

Its also a pricing thing; in Australia our nationalised provider keeps getting more expensive, starlink is now getting cost-competitive.

> I'd love to be rid of all of it, but that's not how the world works today.

Why do we think the human made world is out of our control? Learned helplessness? We could stop this. We do not need Satrlink.

Starlink will fail. And this will be more likely the more satellites they put up[1][2]. Or the more wars we get in. It will not be hard to cause a major destruction of all Starlink satellites [3].

[1] https://outerspaceinstitute.ca/crashclock/ [2] https://spectrum.ieee.org/kessler-syndrome-crash-clock [3] https://gizmodo.com/russia-is-developing-orbiting-clouds-of-...

I feel like I already have internet access pretty much everywhere with cell towers, and even then if I went to the middle of alaska or montana I could already get sattelite internet before starlink with hugesnet which is fine as long as you're not gaming or something.

But at the same time I think the low-earth-orbit is pretty nice in terms of latentcy, it's a pretty innovative approach.

I just don't get the idea behind AI datacenter sattelites and moving all this non-comms equipment up in space.

No, not a typo. Ziply has 300 Gbps at my house if I want to pay $900 a month. Instead I pay $65 for 2 Gbps

I think the theory is that they can expand the infrastructure enough that conventional fiber etc. stops being competitive.

Once upon a time, people did long RV trips without internet access. Or even (cellular) phone access.

we should lay fiber about it, not do this wasteful atmosphere polluting bullshit

This is a very wasteful way of getting communications to somewhat compensate the lack of competition in US telco market.

Do you know what also is important?

To know when a asteroid is on its way to us.

All that satellites make discovering them more difficult.

Do we really need that? Most of us are fine with relays. The coverage in remote parts could be handled by way fewer sattelites. 100k is a lot of sattelites. Seems that with 100k leo we’d have 24/7 live coverage of every inch on earth but do we really want that?

It also creates a private internet on which “private enterprise” does not have to abide by the Constitution or any subordinate laws.

Sure, it’s just “fear mongering” now, just like digital ID, digital currency, mass surveillance, and speech police were 30 or so years ago, but what happens when terrestrial cable internet gets too expensive and everyone’s subject to Elon’s space internet?

It’s basically the similar playbook as the cable/copper phone network giving way to the internet and wireless and … whoopsie … you also have a tracking and permanent surveillance device on you with no ability to keep thousands of corporations harvesting your body for data and information.

I doubt the transmission path is longer, fiber optic cables aren't laid in perfectly straight lines between all points.

What about them?

It will be the first generation with widespread space travel. My children will have consumer access to a view that no one had seen until 1961 and only government employees had seen since.

At Farpoint Observatory, this is a major concern for those keeping an eye out for near Earth objects.

Also the last generation to not frequent space. See the night sky up close.

go outside right now and look up. it's still there.

Many people have never seen that properly due to light pollution.

You can only see satellites during twilight when they can reflect sunlight. Don't panic.

Starlink has an unfair advantage and is flown on the economically unbeatable falcons.

Even if it's a government, you pollute the whole sky instead of one country's. This should be done only as a joint world effort, something that is not going to happen. It is very sad.

Eh, I've got 200mb/s fiber for cheap. It's pretty good and definitely bottlenecked by crowded wifi and upstream sources moreso than the ISP. Ethernet helps somewhat.

At the same time, I do kind of want more bandwidth just so I can download massive files like model weights quickly, host a web service out of my own house, seed torrents, etc. What might cryptocurrency look like if typical residential internet speeds were measured in gb/s? Perhaps bitcoin might be capable of more than 7 tps!

But to be fair, I am a nobody.

>Nobody will ever need more than 640k of RAM

Don't forget MacroHard

That's easily like a what... $10 million/year market? Checks out!

(Only being snarky, obviously as a consumer it's great to have an option like this)

Then you live in a developed country and do go off grid.

Your experience doesn't match most of the world.

Once upon a time people used to walk everywhere.

People used to die trying to cross the country

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.

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

It’s a niche, yes, but there could be others like it. No idea about how the company should be valued. We pay them chump change for our services, but enough that with any scale it could be meaningful. And their reach is pretty incredible, so, there is a lot of potential there.

Thats a nice intent i guess but doesn’t seem to work well in practice

In developed countries ISPs and telcos have to open their lines up to competition and homes pay less and have much more choice. We don't need satellites when the fiber already exists, its just hoarded.

Sounds like a job for Vantablack

"University of Surrey is developing Vantablack as a coating for satellites in earth orbit, to reduce encroachment upon ground-based optical astronomy."

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

Space could become so full of junk that it may actually harm operations.

With modern automation and AI, tracking and adjusting paths is better every year. Also, anything with malfunctioning movement will quickly descend and burn up in the atmosphere at that very low orbit.

Yes and I'll become another space industry. Cleanup. Sort of like how (coal/ocean/etc) pollution is both a problem and multi billion dollar a year industry.

Satellites flying at 360km (the target altitude for starlink V3) deorbit very quickly without regular burns. Dead starlink satellites are guaranteed to come down within 5 years.

space is very large but low earth orbit is not.

Starlink is going to be a cellular company, except instead of maintaining cheap metal frames, they have to physically launch the antennas to space every 5 years.

It's not physically impossible. But the engineering reality isn't promising.

You'd need micro-meter alignment accuracy across the constellation for optical observation. For radio observation it might be possible - but I'm not sure if it would be useful.

Launching complimentary ordinary space-telescopes would also be good PR.

Exactly. Elon Musk does things for (1) fun (2) revenue in order to fuel his real mission: derisk humanity by conquering Mars.

Yes, it would seem so.

Relevant news from the past week:

"A joint investigation by The Insider, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde":

https://theins.press/en/inv/294635

Basically Russia and China are collaborating in taking down Starlink. Leaked documents showing the plans.

They don't mention social media opinion shaping, but then again the leaked documents are from 2023.

And: What are the externalities of this? The current 10700 satellites are expected to have a lifespan of about five years. So, averaging these burning up in the upper atmosphere there will be one deorbit ever four hour.

If I were to ask my relevant government regulator if I were allowed to burn the equivalent of a few electric cars every day without capturing/scrubbing the pollution they would laugh me out of the room.

But ”in space” nobody can hold you accountable, so burning an order of magnitude more like this is somehow on the table.

You can’t get nuanced, well thought out takes here on anything AI and Elon related unfortunately.

It’s frustrating because I often come to HN for the smart contrarian takes. But now I have to search really hard to find the opposite.

SpaceX has spent under $30 billion for Starlink.

That's less than maintenance opex for mobile networks operators in the US alone.

The mistake was thinking the majority was smart.

There’s a lot of Elon haters here;

Anything related to Elon will always have the dumbest comment section.

You know it’s dumb when they say things like “it’s not needed. We already have this. i don’t see the point in this new tech” .

Who's paying for this cable?

Elon mentioned he is building army of robots. This likely could be a way to manage them.

If you think cable can be run to the places where starlink is changing to world, you need to get out more.

I’ve seen it in the Canadian Arctic, remote Australia, right around Africa.

Before starlink these places had dialup, or nothing.

LVT works just as well in space.

I'm using it for this purpose. You can just run a tunnel/tailscale net/dyndns.

You do get a public IPv6 IP, which is fine for most people (and with a simple script on a cron can keep a AAAA up to date, not that it changes often). And like someone else said, if you insist, you can use something like tailscale to punch a hole in Starlink's global NAT.

i have one

According to SpaceX itself 93% of the company's value is in AI IIRC.

India is super super poor still I cannot imagine they would build out domestic Starlink for hypothetical wars before other actual critical infrastructure.

> 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.

That’s great and I’m happy for her. Progress should be for all, not just the developed elite hanging out in tech circles.

Alas, Not In My Low Earth Orbit.

but is providing access to internet for billions of people worth not being able to see the big dipper as clearly at night? I say yes, but only just barely

I may have blown the math, but the last time I calculated I figured there were about 35 Starlink satellites above the horizon at my latitude. Looking into the suburban early night sky I see zero, one, or two satellites with about equal probability.

I think the hypothesis this leads to is that the "don't shine" techniques Starlink is using are working. I'm guessing the ones I see are either not Starlink or are Starlinks transitioning to their working orbit (they don't do full "dark mode" until they are in place.) If in place units shown I'd see a lot more.

So at least, maybe it won't all be gloom and doom. But if it is all gloom, at least it will have little sparkles floating around it.

If you don't take long exposures, the satellites won't cause you much trouble seeing the stars. Regular light pollution is the problem.

light pollution already means the night sky is largely invisible outside of remote areas

I feel that way about street advertising, beautiful European cities with historical buildings all around and suddenly a big screen/panel asking you to buy whatever.

> It feels different when it’s the government that theoretically represents people but when it’s one person that feels truly depressing.

I worked on technology for years that the FCC effectively killed for stupid reasons. So it’s heartening to me that someone can still just do stuff and build things. It’s amazing. If you asked me 10 years ago I would have thought that getting something like Starlink off the ground would’ve been impossible due to red tape.

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

Elon doesn't own space, he just happens to be the one who is currently best at making it reachable. There is plenty of space for everyone else, and others will get there, eventually.

I could eat myself up with envy over the money he's making from it... or be glad that it's at least someone getting rewarded for moving humanity forward (while also being an asshole), rather than someone who is starting wars to profit from insider trading...

There are various satellite finder apps. I suspect you'll find starlink satellites are mostly too dim to see - with most of what's visible being other older satellites

I'm the opposite, I feel more depressed when the government controls our lives instead of hard working people who've proven themselves in the marketplace.

I wonder if (this part specifically) is a solvable problem? Is it their altitude that causes them to shine? Perhaps finally a commercial use for Vantablack?

> It actually makes me sad to see that on person owns the night sky

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

I remember ~20 years ago upgrading my house line to get something crazy like 0.5mbs and the sales guy telling me that I didn't really need it and was wasting money upgrading from my current ~0.2mbs.

Those numbers are fudged of course, I don't remember exactly how long ago or from what to what I was upgrading. My point is that we've always been having people say you don't need faster internet. And yet, I still want, and use, faster internet. 200mbs I would consider fine. But I'd still feel the difference at 500mbs or 1gbs.

This strikes me as NIMBYism at a global scale. At least you've got yours right!

Starlink is wonderful for many reasons.

It allows technical folk to live wherever they’d like as long as they’re working remotely.

The mobile applications, particularly in the case of airline aircraft, have also been compelling and worth a lot of money to SpaceX.

Starlink has also brought broadband Internet to a vast number of people that would not have had it otherwise. This will boost the worldwide economy by an enormous amount.

If you read the SpaceX IPO docs, the vast majority of their self-stated addressable market is AI enterprise SaaS tools.

I’m not joking.

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.

If you wish to stop it, then stop it.

I don’t see how. Maybe someone here can attempt the napkin math. But the satellites have much shorter lifespans than fiber.

You likely meant 50 Gbps as its what come up on their website and some recent US fibre discussions.

In any case even 50Gbps likely a huge part of their total throughput and you wont be abble to use it at full speed. So its pure marketing.

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.

It's hard to find hard numbers, but IIUC even ignoring Elon's Space Program:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/sp/gx04-who-owns-the-most-s...

* Most satellites were private owned, for communications or resource.

* Most government owned satellites have military use, the people that is trying to spy or nuke you or your neighbor.

* A small part is used for science and altruistic activities.

Satellites only reflect sunlight when in sunlight. This only happens near sunrise and sunset.

The night sky will be unaffected by satellites for the foreseeable future.

Simultaneously though, those 80% of Americans that live in cities/within the typical commuting distance of a metropolitan area are also the ones that are usually serviced by at least one broadband or fiber provider. Because of this:

- Having slowly-increasing pressure on those often-monopoly broadband/fiber carriers because people have the option to swap to Starlink, adds competitive pressure for them to improve their service, reduce prices, etc

- The remaining 20% of the population that lives on the 60-80%+ of the land who currently have terrible options, but fit well within the density restrictions of current-gen Starlink satelites, suddenly have options

The new satellites are like 100x better.

How would it work indoors?

I like him! :D

Why do you put the onus on everyone else to make excuses? It sounds very entitled.

It's an American company polluting the night sky for the entire world, for a service that will ultimately be access gated by the US government/private industry. That's where the negative sentiment is coming from. Who cares which of the many equally shitty US billionaires/oligarchs is funding it?

People are complaining about their views getting polluted, they’re not saying they literally can’t see the night sky. If you’d like hn comments to be smarter, consider starting with your own.

I think the main goal is direct to phones rather than being an alternative to fiber. But it's also a very good option for people living in rural areas with poor service (shoddy DSL).

That's usually how satellites work.

Nothing with that kind of reach on licensed bands for that kind of money with that sort of bandwidth.

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

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"

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.

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

Maybe he literally means that Space X is wort to him more than the rest of Earth.

right panic, wrong fear

starlink are too low to cause kessler syndrome... but his starmind might

They have nukes and are always on the verge of war with Pakistan (who also have nukes). I'm sure they have money for war, everyone always does.

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

God I hope not. That’s terrifying.

99% of the value is goodwill towards musk

It will take years if not more to be technical capable to have modems so good that they can communicate with a starlink satelite in any reasonable 'day to day' way.

And Starlink already increased prices again.

And without Sparship and prooving that they actually can reuse it, they can't hold the price point.

Starlink satelites do not scale very well. They need v3 and even with v3 this doesn't scale efficently.

It’s a pretty low margin business, tho, generally.

Qatar just announced it's gate-to-gate and free on their aircraft.

Dude, she pays for it herself on pension.

And besides:

> Progress should be for all, not just the developed elite hanging out in tech circles.

That's... that's basically been the start of every generally available technology that exists today, to benefit of "all."

Progress isn't evenly distributed.

That's why we don't deny some access because we can't give everyone. Especially if the dispute is about method

Wifi on Delta has worked spectacularly well (not sarcastic) for like 10 years now.

It's been broken/unavailable on maybe 6 of my flights out of hundreds.

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.

30 yard wide solar array from 300 miles away. There's a brief period of the day where they're visible but hardly a risk of making a dent in your view of the sky especially compared to ordinary terrestrial light pollution.

They don't stop you from seeing the stars, but I find them very distracting. Makes the experience of looking up at the stars on a quiet night less peaceful, I find.

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

Automated cargo ships. Traveling to automated ports.

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.)

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.

There are also several Chinese satellite constellations which will expand more quickly once several Chinese partially reusable rockets are online.

your numbers are completely meaningless.

it is well known that Australia has an extremely lazy workforce that refuse to put in any real work.

the best example here is the stupid residential building cost. nowadays it costs over $1m AUD or $700k USD do a first floor 2bedroom 1 bathroom extension for an existing house in good condition. That is significantly more expensive than building a big house in the US.

Same as Russia, yeah. But Reliance Jio seems to have announced something. Don't know if it'll actually happen.

Just a choice of polluting the ground or the air.

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.

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.

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.

What makes you think india is "super super" poor? India's GDP is humongous (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...).

They have an actual space program that launches actual satellites. They have also been in several actual, non-hypothetical wars.

When I was a teenager in early post-Communist Czechia, Internet connection was also expensive. So what we did was that we pooled resources. Five or ten households had a common connection and shared it.

I don't doubt that similar schemes will be used in Africa or India.

BTW Median income in India is about $3K a year.

> would be 10% of the total income, which at those income levels, would never be a priority.

People vastly underestimate the subjective importance of the Internet for people. 10-20% of the total income seems like a very realistic figure, even if it means spending some days hungry.

How would people be able to use internet when they are inside? Perhaps under layers and layers of concrete, think a 50 stories building

This is the right answer. They are building their own cell phone network to compete with major carriers worldwide.

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.

That's a ghoulish thing to say.

Sucks for regular astronomy then, where long exposures are the norm.

Equally sucks for radio astronomy where the bloody things leak into spectrums they (Starlink) pinky promised to keep clean. And successive generations have worsened the problem, again despite promises to improve.

I'm in a heavily light polluted city (Phoenix) and even with all the air and light pollution, can still see satellites every moment past 2AM to the east. At least this time of year.

I have seen both stars and satellites from suburbs and some urban areas. They are not very remote. There is a lot to see if you look. I do not like the light pollution but as it stands it is not the end of star gazing.

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.

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

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.

Have you considered other people, the majority?

It is not because can do something that they should.

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

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.

Change is inevitable but not all changes are.

> 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).

Getting where, exactly?

If you compare 100/40 plans to starlink, starlink is about 10aud more over the best reseller promotion I can see, but has the occasional promotion; and getting cheaper.

If you are churning plans anyway, and that's the speed you want, you should have starlink in the mix.

I fully expect the NBN wholesale to keep getting more expensive, while I expect satellite providers to get cheaper.

I just checked, and now it is 50 Gbps. Not long ago it was 300 Gbps when I moved into my house. I guess they lowered it. Not really any use for such speeds in a residential home anyways.

I can’t stop. We can stop it.

> using paper maps, getting lost etc

All part of the adventure!

Yes, that's the problem.

I've been watching satellites at all hours of the night for decades. You might want to double check with reality on that sunrise/sunset claim.

Those are solid points. They also describe Starlink as a niche service with a structurally low TAM.

That's great, they still are bound by physics to spend ~70% of their time over the ocean. I would guess ~80%+ of their time is spent where there are effectively no people.

I did not get it. But may be the onus is to not have a collective bias?

population crashing will have people concentrate around cities like what is happening in Tokyo because that is where all other services will be. Rural is economic poverty.

Yeah who knows poor infrastructure might let India skip fiber in some areas entirely. Maybe it’s not that hard to launch a domestic Starlink if Blue Origin/ SpaceX will bring your satellites up cheaply .

Metrics for comparison?

- dollars/gigabit/time

- dollars/bits/distance/time

Wifi indoors, starlink outdoors

> where does the rest of the valuation come from?

AI data centers in space, of course!

About 36 thousand planes and 105 thousand of 100 tonnes ships (not a lot) or 57 thousand of over 1000 tonnes ships...

At what ever unit economic price... That is not exactly massive market globally.

> we’d have 24/7 live coverage of every inch on earth but do we really want that?

I think you misunderstand the maths a bit. If the goal is high bandwidth, which requires high density, for specific, randomly distributed, parts of the earth, then, by the fundamental laws of gravity and orbits, you'll also have coverage over the rest of it, whether you like it or not.

Just coverage is already provided by the 600-something direct to cell satellites already in orbit yes, but you need more if you want it to be useful beyond loading text-only posts or sending SMS

There are already zero private companies that have to follow the constitution, since it never applied to them, ever.

As another person mentioned, radio crosses international boundaries, but it is regulated by regulating ground equipment and people and organizations on the ground. You'll see some countries on https://starlink.com/map that are greyed out because of regulatory issues... for example, some countries such as India heavily control the use of satellite comms

Do ISPs have to comply with the 1st ammendment? My understanding was that they have some sort of common carrier law but net neutrality did not hold up.

Do you think Starlink is somehow extraterritorial or something? They're no more or no less a "private internet" than any other ISP. People need to get a reality check. Hacker news is becoming one of the most luddite places on the internet.

I mean with satellite it's longer. You have to go up and down, and starlink sats prefer sending data streams back to the ground as soon as they can (because the laser interconnect capacity is limited).

And variable, no less due to the high differential speed of the satellites. And the signal conditioning is much more involved than on the ground.

This isn't true

Crews on those ships are spending nearly all their time maintaining them.

Many flag and port states already allow One Man Bridge Operation (OMBO) in many circumstances. This means there's basically on person on the bridge, and maybe one other person down in the engine room keeping an eye on a floating city block moving through the water at 15 knots

Never going to happen in your lifetime.

Salt water, is nasty, it gets everywhere, the environment on boats is damp. Ships are complicated and require constant effort to keep running.

Any sort of "automation" you build in is subject to those same environmental conditions, and wont last long.

“You can’t see it most places so who cares if it goes away” is my most charitable interpretation of this.

Well, yeah, but my problem is with the long exposures that I'm trying to get.

“Remote areas” make up most of the world.

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

São Paulo: Cidade Limpa

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

We have starlink. It’s better than a lot of ISPs we’ve had. I think of them as the new hughes.net. If you are worse than them, you go out of business.

They can’t remotely repeat with local ISPs now that fiber is being rolled out.

Starlink: I have spent 4-5 days debugging cables because in some ketamine fueled manic episode, elon thought he could do better than RJ-45.

Local ISP: “We’ll be happy to run fiber and new ethernet through your existing network conduits, trench to the curb, and help bodge in active poe ethernet repeaters for runs that are too long.”

Edit: As for satellite light pollution, yeah, that sucks, but it’s something like 0.001% (if that) of the problems we have because Silicon Valley tech campuses stay lit up like Christmas trees all night. (And those are probably dwarfed by porch lights, street lights, etc.).

We’re in one of the darkest spots in the region and can pretty much always walk around without lights at night. Seriously, how bright do you need unoccupied spaces in the cities to be at night?

Hardly, and not by a factor of ten - at best it allows for digital mapping and (unreliably) replaces an ePirb.

What it does do, for sure, is encourage people with no proper grounding in multi day off road adventuring to have a go and die through lack of prior experience and skills.

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/

You forgot about the radio spectrum pollution which affects the night and day sky right now .. and for the foreseeable future given the lack of progress in addressing that leakage.

I don't like him. I don't hate him either. He's not a thing in my life. But the companies are, SpaceX etc. do impact me.

Basically I would hate to see HN become Reddit.

Do you feel the same way about Guowang and Qianfan, two very real very large constellations notably not funded by US billionaires?

A more accurate description would be that starlink will become the trunk, and possibly the service. Local cell services will own the poles but will essentially provide access for starlink customers. It's not a bad business idea, actually. People pay $30-40 a line for starlink cell service, starlink provides the big pipes so to speak and splits the bill with the local companies that put up the last mile towers.

In rural areas you can put up isolated 5G towers that have their own dish connection to starlink, no need to string a line to the towers anymore...

There’s some folks here that seem to think otherwise

You can already try it with T-Mobile and it’s pretty limited. Great if you need sms and there’s no other towers around. Still requires line of sight.

SpaceX is by far the most cost effective way in this world to send things into space.

That is very valuable.

This would allow you to throw a flock camera up literally anywhere on earth. If we are being honest, we are probably only a couple years out from real Orwellian mass surveillance states, totally censored and mined communications, and general purpose compute restricted or made illegal I wouldn't even be surprised. All the incentives lead right to that and we are halfway there in many ways already.

It doesn’t. The network is governed by the FCC and any other regulatory agency where they place RF on the ground.

The 5 wage slaves on current ocean giants aren't even a rounding error on any calculation.

This idea that putting $500m+ of assets in the water, but thinking that even one person on the boat is too many has got to be one of the silliest things in modern capitalism (obviously the crown goes to orbital AI data centers).

The same bosses will pay multiple security guards, in addition to staff, to guard <$10m in goods at a Walmart. But when 50x the goods are in the ocean, suddenly the staff is the limiter?

For context, that revenue was $18.67 billion in 2025, with a net loss of $4.94 billion.

And we must remember that 6G is in the final stages of development, which has peak speeds of 1 Tbps.

Yeah but it doesn't become a Trillion dollar business if they don't solve the Starlink Satelite v3 issue.

They need Starship to be able to send v3 up, without v3 it doesn't scale well enough.

Starship still hasn't proven it can actually bring up the relevant payload high enough and they need it to be reusable otherwise costs will increase.

And they already exist and only have 10 Million customers. They need to get countries on their side like India but these countries are not stupid. Elon Musk showed them very clearly what he can do like his statements he did when Ukraine war started.

> My informed opinion

Well, my informed (I guess? it's first hand) opinion says exactly what the PC said. And no the plan has been underfoot for so long that it really pretty much has nothing to do with the current regime even though I am sure like any regime they'd say they did it from the scratch.

I'd say we are getting really great at getting broadband to everyone than giving enough bread and education and healthcare to everyone :D (ignore the smiley, this sucks)

Its very easy to dig.

You still need a powerline to your house, sewer and water.

There are plenty of fibers and dark fibers on power pools.

Starlink doesn't 'just' pollute the night sky for EVERY SINGLE HUMAN (8 Billion people) it can also poisen our atmosphere when they re-enter and burn up.

I haven't been helping up with the development, are they getting close?

Competition is going to be grand!

> 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.

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.

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?

>> 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”?

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

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.

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

Ownership means nothing without control.

I doubt you are the average consumer though. Now days I think the biggest average consumer use case is streaming and game downloading, with game downloading being the biggest “I want it now!” impulse. But do you need 1gb service to download that call of duty game every year? I even think most people could get by with 50mb/s and not even know as long as the latency keeps up. If it’s fast enough to stream Bluey the masses are content.

Starlink only has 10 Million customers, too expensive for most countries already.

Starlink brought internet to a lot of people who had it before already but made it easier for them.

Its still quite a interesting technology, given, but for the fact that he destroys potentially our atmosphere, has control over war critical tech, can do survailance and wants to send out A Lot MORE into our space, its a net negative for at least 7-8 BILLION people while 10 Millionen people benefit from it.

And they even increased the price just a few weeks back...

I mean, it’s actually not that bad of a play at least here in AK.

There’s billions of dollars in monitoring and maintaining remote sites / handling remote connectivity, doing bespoke SaaS tools, etc. Like, literally high hundreds of millions or low billions.

> It allows technical folk to live wherever they’d like as long as they’re working remotely.

Turns out a simple water cooler technology is enough. We are all back to office because of efficiency.

India's total exports are in the same ballpark as the Netherlands, a country with half the population of the city of Bombay.

India may not be a poor country, but GDP doesn't capture the real state of india's wealth.

The denominator

> BTW Median income in India is about $3K a year

I explicitly mentioned income per person. This is household income, which obviously will be higher than individual income.

And as far as connection pooling goes, India already has 88% 4G and 80% 5G coverage in the villages. Far cheaper connections are already available that are already being leveraged in a way that you describe. The market where Starlink is appealing is much smaller.

People struggling for food, water, medicine, shelter will not in any world spend 10% of their income on internet. Thinking that they will is out of touch with reality and would only be a valid chain of thought when you’ve not seen what real poverty looks like.

People vastly overestimate the subjective importance of the internet if they think people with relatively little historic exposure to and practical use for the internet would rather go hungry or have a worse marriage for their daughter to replace the erratic internet connection on their phone and cybercafe use with a high speed broadband connection in their house...

No they sell a story to investors.

Right now we do not even have the antenna technology in current high end smartphones for 'easy to use, normal speed' mobile to satelite communication.

And funny enough, the more local mobile phones you would have, which want to send data to a satelite, the harder the problem gets due to interference.

With 5g we do already a lot of beam forming etc. Try beamforming into 500km space with uncoordinated random amount of mobile devices with very very little sending power and one satelite 'beamforming' its a few hundred square miles.

> to compete with major carriers worldwide.

I don't see a reason why countries with existing carriers would allow that, given the owner's stance about political meddling.

Can you empirically say internet access improves wellbeing? Anecdotally, my answer is a resounding "no".

This is a first world problem that has a first world solution: get in your car and drive to the woods.

Sucks being out bush stargazing and then seeing a massive constellation to remind you of Musk's wealth and influence. It's no longer possible to totally escape visual reminders of civilisation

That's simply impossible. You must be seeing something else. They aren't that bright.

Starlink made a $4 bn profit last year, and is apparently growing 30% YoY.

Will sending bits to space and back really be faster than fiber? How?

We already have Starlink. Starlink only has 10 Million customers.

Starlink increased prices just a fwe weeks ago.

So whats stoping the future starlink explosion?

I disagree, maintaining a giant fleet of satellites is almost certainly more expensive in the long run than just running a lot of cable. Not that cable doesn’t need maintenance but Starlink needs to replace every satellite every five years. And they can’t recycle a thing, they just burn up.

You’re presenting a false choice. It isn’t “Starlink or no internet”, it’s “why not other internet options?”

Assuming there are poles (or trenches) for electricity, cable is a modest addition.

I'm fairly sure there are also houses in Australia being built for less than $1m AUD given there are new houses being sold for less than $1m AUD with no indication those developers are making a loss.

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,

Kind of fucked up lol

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

Your moral and ethical bar is Trump?

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).

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...

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).

what you do to fill difference between 200, 500 and 1gb?..

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.

I don't think rurp was saying there is no market, just that there was no obvious realistic TAM worth 1.6 trillion (going by the amount given by the S-1). How many people living remotely in an area with no fibre do you really expect there to be?

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.

And they claimed their TAM was 20% of world GDP!!!

How often do you need to replace the cable in the ground compared to the satellites in the air?

I've been on tiny Indonesian islands far from anything that could be considered civilization, and they'll have cell towers more often than not.

It has everything to do with the lack of competition. US tax payers paid $4 billion to AT&T in 2004 for fiber to -every- home. And that was never delivered, yet they keep getting more money. This is regulatory capture.

But the long tail isn't served. The reality of your statement turns out to be that, if there aren't enough customers to justify an expensive tower or wire, no service will be provided at all.

It occurred to me after reading the original story that if space based internet gets fast enough, we'll stop using any other kind for most purposes. That means, as a platform, SpaceX could carry a significant amount of the entire world's internet traffic. No wonder Elon is interested.

To launch a starlink style system, you need to be able to rapidly design and produce hundreds of thousands satellites and launch them within relatively short period of time with extremely high success rate. only the largest industrialized nation on earth can do that. india is 30-50 years away from such achievement.

To give you some quick ideas - for the total of 330 space launches in 2025, the US had almost 200, China had close to 100 launches, Russia had 17 launches, the rest of the world had the remaining 20 in total.

The page you need to look at is GDP per capita:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

…which lists India as #148, below countries like Zimbabwe, Haiti, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Palestine.

That's exactly what's happening. Entire villages are sharing one connection.

The same way they already do with DAS and WiFi routers

Starlink actively works with radioastronomy sites to avoid causing interference. They've posted about this before.

If you have evidence of them causing interference on a spectrum they shouldn’t be on, report it to the FCC. They take that very seriously

You should be using stacking software anyway. It's a complete non issue.

I'm sorry I brought this upon you...

You've never been to a dark sky area and seen how many Starlinks are flying around in the sky already. Its not one object in the sky.

Vermont doesn't allow it either and it remains the most beautiful state IMO

my comment is pushback against claiming "this generation" as uniquely doomed, and doomerism in general

You can see it all over the USA, there are many localities and routes that have banned outdoor advertising, and when you're traveling on a parkway with nothing but trees on either side and then you come to the end and there are billboards every 100 yards it's really noticable.

Given the nightmarish nimby gridlock I’m less and less convinced it’s a good thing. I’d rather have people mad about windmills being eyesores than be perpetually chained to oil and gas for energy, as an example. I’m also not a fan of endless roadblocks to all manner of construction, even for such simple things as housing.

Yes, having a data center that raises your utilities costs by 300% jammed down your throat because the local mayor got blatantly bribed shouldn’t be a thing, especially when it’s powered by mobile gas turbines that stink up the entire area (note: I’m not against data centers on principle, but there are many ways for ultra-wealthy interests to leave people hosed). But things like faintly visible mini-sats don’t seem like a big deal, subjectively, unless you work at an observatory.

> And there was a lot of billboards in front of these manufacturers' shops. And when they uncovered, we could see through the window a lot of Bolivian people like sleeping and working at the same place. They earn money, just enough for food. So it is a big social problem that was uncovered, and the city was shocked by these news.

Wow it’s like when I move some pieces of wood or other items near my shed outdoors and I see a bunch of activity that I never knew existed.

Weighting by population seems reasonable here!

The majority of people live in cities - and a growing majority.

Similar things happen in hiking, people who shouldn't be there get encouraged by by how accessible information is to do things whereas before (most) people got info from someone knowledgeable.

There is nothing more abundant than the extra room there is in space!

Earth orbit is more constrained, but it's very far from full. Geostationary orbits are about 20% full, but the rest is practically empty still.

They don't mean technological advancements.

It's the same neo-liberal aggression couched in rhetorical trickery.

My area has both ATT fiber and the local cable service. Both fast and reasonably (for the US) priced.

My neighbor has starlink. Very weird.

Empirically, we can't. We can barely even build EV chargers.

And are also worse in several ways?

It's definitely happening

This is a dumb question given that being funded by a US billionaire is what shapes their opinion.

It was never necessary to run fibre to any specific individual tower. Microwave backhaul works fine of you have good coveragef the area. Less well if you don't. If cell providers wanted to put up enough towers that's a self solving problem.

Yeah, autonomous shipping makes sense for naval/coastguard drones but not much else. Shipping companies can pay most of the staff Filipino wages, and they run around doing all sorts of maintenance tasks, not just navigation and contro.

Now the crew will be very pleased if they get a Starlink connection rather than the ridiculously small crew connectivity allowance Inmarsat et al will give them, but that all depends on shipping companies not having to pay premium prices for maritime connectivity.

Not according to their prospectus (which was what was asked about), where it accounted for slightly under 2% of SpaceX's market.

Starlink by itself does not have a net loss.

It will definitely be faster when someone drops an anchor on the undersea cable.

The parent comment of your reply is intending to create more laughs than less.

You have a very peasant perspective. And that's not meant as an insult, it's just the kind of perspective of a peasant about what is going on in the kingdom, let alone in the palace's inner chambers.

That only matters if you want to know how much an average individual can spend. Gross GDP is more relevant when you're discussing how much the state could spend on defence programs.

Their IPO made me look up what TAM was, and TBH it looks like the kind of metric where you're allowed to draw the boundaries however you like.

To the extent that they're not actually wrong about that TAM:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_addressable_market#/medi...

Note that I am not claiming they'll get sales anywhere near to close to the TAM. It's not like Wikipedia's market value is even close to {peak price of Encyclopedia Britannica} * {number of people on the internet} even despite it no longer being generally contested which of Wikipedia and Britannica is now better.

With positive thinking and maximum upside ?

Uploading large files is probably the biggest thing, 4k video streaming (out) while others in my house are streaming in or playing games with no slowdown.

I remember watching hours pass uploading files on my 200 mbit. Still take time but much faster with gigabit (measured at 940 bmit, so not the full 1gbit)

Starlink often struggles in thunder storms.

Modern installation is direct bury. There are no trenches, no way to run new cables without new directional drilling. In any already built areas, these projects are constantly hitting gas, water, sewer, cable, electric, and other already buried infrastructure. Maybe (probably) it's still cheaper than launching satellites but it can be quite disruptive.

So that's a no.

Phone > Satellite connection cannot happen indoors directly, whereas 3-4-5g can, today, not 10 years and billions of R&D into the future

We're not talking about fiber, we are talking about cellphone coverage. As I said, no company will put a tower up in a remote area.

> what[']s stop[p]ing the future Starlink explosion?

Constellation numbers are still below the Kessler syndrome threshold?

More expensive for whom?

Brendan Carr seems more interested in settling political scores

Yes, they do post about it.

Yes they do talk about working to avoid causing interference.

That's been ongoing since before the first Starlink went up and has been ongoing as later generations haven't improved.

Second-Generation Starlink Satellites Leak 30 Times More Radio Interference, Threatening Astronomical Observations https://www.astron.nl/starlink-satellites/

  Observations with the LOFAR (Low Frequency Array) radio telescope last year showed that first generation Starlink satellites emit unintended radio waves that can hinder astronomical observations. New observations with the LOFAR radio telescope, the biggest radio telescope on Earth observing at low frequencies, have shown that the second generation ’V2-mini’ Starlink satellites emit up to 32 times brighter unintended radio waves than satellites from the previous generation, potentially blinding radio telescopes and crippling vital research of the Universe.

Still, at least they are talking about maybe doing something. Eventually. Perhaps.

I've never seen a glacier before, have you?

Does it really? Every time I heard the "we'll run out of space" FUD argument it was followed by a drastic increase of satellites in orbit with no issue...

It is legal to cover windows with advertising?

I agree with this. But imo its pretty clear that cheap and easy access to the internet on the entire globe is a clear win.

The best way to create change is to create the conditions where change is necessary. If Elon causes Kessler syndrome in low earth orbit, it will quickly be illegal to launch satellites without permits.

Your focus should be on junkyards on earth, which are exponentially greater in number on a surface area that is a fraction of the surface area of observable space. You’re complaining about a potentially artificial speck of light in the sky while plastic litters the highway you commute on, and India produces literal rivers of trash.

The topic is seeing the night sky.

> Local ISP: “We’ll be happy to run fiber and new ethernet through your existing network conduits, trench to the curb, and help bodge in active poe ethernet repeaters for runs that are too long.”

I live in a major metro with a half a dozen apartments constructed within a block of me while I've lived here and this is very much not the case. I call them, they say they'll be happy too and then they ghost me. Of course I also can't get Starlink.

1. That's not true. 2. It's not "at will" if you actually read the article you're commenting under you'd see it is about them _applying for a license_ to do something.

The thing is, everyone's interpretation of "environmental impact" is different. To one person it can mean, "don't put the construction garbage in the river." To another it can mean "not one single Delta Smelt can be scared because of this construction."

And because it's so flexible, in states like California where we have aggressive environmental laws, it's leveraged as the NIMBY trump card. When it can't block a project, the process is used to make it inordinately expensive and take decades. One example would be the environmental studies for the CA High Speed Rail.[1]

[1] - https://ifp.org/fast-track-democratically-approved-transit-p...

You really want Starlink to be bad, huh?

The limitations on the current T-Satellite service have a lot to do with the spectrum being shared with terrestrial towers and the low number of satellites.

The new constellation will be physically closer, with much larger antennas and a much larger number of satellites with a much higher capacity per satellite. It will also use dedicated spectrum with no terrestrial interference. Coverage and speed will be improved tremendously.

>which are the biggest contributor to the glints we can see in the night sky.

>They're such an enormous part of the problem

What an incredible life of privilege you must live to perceive a few glints in the sky as a huge problem.

Can you source a citation referring to people that had "no proper grounding in multi day off road adventuring", and were thus "encouraged" to " go and die through lack of prior experience and skills" via Starlink?

Whether you like it or not, Starlink being an easily-accesible internet service has likely saved dozens of noobs from certain death by offering emergency eSIM services, GPS navigation, or communciation systems that they wouldn't otherwise have. Can I prove it objectively? Likely not (outside of forum anecdotes), but I wasn't the first to make a claim with the burden to do so.

The wage isn’t the problem, it’s the regulations.

No its not.

The payload we send to space is very limited and the 300% increase in the few last years was ONLY starlink itself.

Thats the issue Musk has to sell it to the investors and his idea is datacenter payload.

Just that he would need to send 300 Starships up there to even install a smallish datacenter like his own colossus 1.

Starship is not done yet, we have not seen it fly up there and return for 300 times at all.

Starlink isn't billed for the cost of launches.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/06/29/spacex-secret-laun...

Lightspeed in air is close to c_vacuum. Light speed in fiber is roughly 2/3 c_vacuum. So for transatlantic it might be faster.

I hate to break it to you, you are already in an "Orwellian mass surveillance state" and just don't realize it, just as the majority of people in the Orwellian mass surveillance state also were not aware of.

Case in point, are you aware that the whole 2+2=5 line was a deliberate falsification of a perfectly sound and even healthy statement that Orwell stole and perverted, i.e., 2 + 2 + the people's enthusiasm = 5 ???

Then, when you start finding out that the CIA, at the same time that it was conducting its MKUltra "experiments", was aggressively buying up all the rights to 1984 and then pushed them into schools and made the movies in close collaboration with Propagandawood; you have to at least start asking yourself extremely uncomfortable questions about whether 1984 was actually a warning or preconditioning, aka grooming.

6G will have worse physical penetration than 5G, which makes it worthless in rural areas where 5G is already severely inhibited by tree leaves.

I can give an example. My parents live in the UK, and their house was built in 1985. A couple of years ago the copper phone line had to be replaced as it had degraded somebow. The operator had to dig up and reinstall their driveway, brick pathway and garden. Now the operator is installing fibre to replace copper phone lines, so again they need to dig it up.

One days work for one house. Multiply that across an entire nation, and work out how much diesel is burned for that. Where they live you can't get cable (not very common in the UK), but if it was available I guess there would have been another digging day in the 90s.

As long as the externalities are paid for, I don't see the problem. Musk has made the world a worse place in many ways, but I don't see how this is one of them.

That’s my point, they are serviced by solutions like Starlink because they don’t rely on towers or wires and are just available everywhere.

I’m writing this from a small island in a remote country using Starlink, and it’s very popular over here for people that want reliable internet.

He is not a trillionaire anymore, though.

That chat control vote in the EU sure was sometime, wasn't it?

Do you like looking at city skylines? I'm not a misanthrope so I like seeing humanity's progress.

That is great, but it also sets the stage for actual fiber to be drawn as it is vastly cheaper to connect to an existing end user network than to build it up from scratch. When a critical mass of villages have built internal networks it will be worth drawing cable for them as well.

Lack of sufficient population density and political instability is what would stop this.

Not enough bandwidth

Because Indonesia has a massive population, far more people than the US and much more densly populated. It's internet users are vastly mobile as opposed to desktop or LAN connections. The US geographic landscape and computer use landscape are entirely different.

Would the “datacenter” satellites be much larger? I thought each of them was only going to carry a rack or a cabinet worth of GPUs?

India was the first country to reach Mars on its first attempt. ISRO is a highly capable org, and cost effective. India also was #4 to land on the moon after the USSR, USA and China - beating Japan to the punch. SpaceX is yet to deliver a payload to the moon or Mars - orbit or lander.

A v2 Starlink satellite costs $800K and on average 25 are launched at once. Launch cost for a reusable Falcon 9 is $15 million. So that's $1.4 million per satellite to orbit lasting 5 years that's $280K / sat / y, or $2.8 billion / y to maintain a constellation of 10,000. And SpaceX is not known for complacency. The unit cost will continue to drop.

On the other hand there are currently $63 billion (22.5 years of Starlink cost) of rural broadband subsidies active in the US and it hasn't come close to running all that fiber. So $63 billion to not even finish the US vs $2.8b / y to provide service to the entire world. I think it's safe to conclude that the satellite option is in fact much cheaper.

There's more like 30 always visible...

The 1 I suspect is some other satellite

In the future, nobody will have to work (thanks AI!) and we'll all be digital nomads roaming the earth living off of 0DTE option gainz and UBI. /s

I watch them come up over the horizon right after sunset. Only a couple specific trajectories are visible and they disappear pretty quick. Later on in to a clear night and after your eyes adjust to the darkness, you can find them all over the sky. They look like very faint stars speeding around. It's quite spectacular and hunting them makes for a fun activity with others while relaxing in a hot tub.

Scientists analyze 76 million radio telescope images, find Starlink satellite interference 'where no signals are supposed to be present' (2025)

~ https://www.space.com/astronomy/scientists-analyze-76-millio...

and several other papers over the past half decade.

It's old news that they leak, and old news that F-all gets done about it.

Back to you.

I'm not confident after all government investigations and lawsuits against Elon and his companies were dropped when Elon illegally accessed government systems, illegally took government data, illegally terminated government employees, and illegally eliminated government departments and programs while creating billions in expenses while pretending his intention was to help anyone but himself.

But sure, the FCC might take it seriously.

nice straw man, you can of course find houses below $1m when you go to regional areas where job opportunities simply do not exist. how about you just compare construction cost in Sydney with say those expensive part of the US, e.g. LA and SF?

let's don't even start on the quality of those new builds, that would be the laughing stock of the entire world.

No idea. They put cardboard things, they don't entirely cover the window but they are very large and annoying.

Kessler syndrome isn't possible in the StarLink orbit.

Almost all of us already have that, and the rest can as well.

The problem is not 'space' - it's getting ourselves sufficiently organized.

It's already pretty cheap, global and universally available.

The brief history of the internet suggests to me that this is not a clear win.

Did I say that? I’m being realistic and not drinking the Elon koolaid. I think starlink is great and it’s hugely improved life for a lot of people and made remote work a lot nicer.

The deregulation stuff isn’t about nimby. It’s making nimby 10x worse by making it hyper local. That means poor people who are poorly organized get boned. State regulations tended to help with that.

I live in upstate NY, the rebuild of the GOP here is around hyper local issues, mostly apartments and solar. MAGA changed the discourse and allows the rabble rousers to say the quiet part out loud. (Ie bike infrastructure and apartments will bring poor black people to rape and pillage)

Orthogonal issues. Will the trash on earth be reduced if we start littering low orbit with junk?

> I live in a major metro with a half a dozen apartments constructed within a block of me

Good chance Starlink (or any satellite-based internet for that matter) probably won't do well for you either tbh. Too many clients in too tight of an area all fighting for such a small slice of bandwidth and birds overhead.

I didn't say whether I thought it was a huge problem. I just said it was a problem, and identified the largest contributor to that problem.

But really, what point are you trying to make? I don't need to think that satellites glinting in the night sky are the literal worst problem facing humanity for that to be a valid topic of discussion.

Unless you're trying to do something like high frequency stock trading, this does not really matter. Most of the added latency is added in the hops themselves, as packets are being classified and routed. Your generic Internet user won't be able to see any difference.

Let’s see if we can bring the cost of hollow core fiber down, it would be faster transatlantic even

You need to take error into account, too. Can atmospheric conditions corrupt the transmission (this is not a rhetorical question, I actually don't know)? If so then your latency and bandwidth will both suffer.

EDIT: also, in the very likely case that the packet is not addressed to the satellite itself, routing comes into play. In the best-case scenario where the satellite is somehow able to transmit the packet directly to its destination the distance it travels is actually doubled. If the packet instead gets transmitted from the satellite to a base-station which then routes it through fiber-optics then there's no point in trying to argue that the satellite connection is the faster of the two even if that is true.

Awesome. So we agree!

In my area they did a whole street with fibre in one week.

Installing subterranean cable is presumably a choice right? Couldn't it be above ground?

this thread is about satellites cluttering the night sky. Is SpaceX paying for this? Not the mention the CO2 emissions of all the rockets.

The CIA did help fund some movies of 1984 to make them more anti-totalitarian and anti-Soviet, but that's not the same thing as them buying up all the rights to it.

It's not that simple. Yes, newer standards push for higher frequencies to get more bandwidth, but 5G for example also uses the old sub GHz bands with excellent range and penetration.

Money

They would be as large as your average hyperloop capsule.

Yet. I one was one of the first people in Silicon Valley to have DSL when dialup had that same bandwidth problem. I posit it will be solved.

Also government subsidised

I think you're missing the wood for the trees. He's still insanely wealthy.

> provide service to the entire world

If the entire world used Starlink it would grind to a halt. They’d need to spend exponentially more to have more satellites to provide that necessary bandwidth.

600k excluding launch

Starlink has 10 MILLION customers. Thats just nothing.

All the investment in Fiber and mobile towers are long lasting investments.

Starlink NEEDS v3 to scale because they already have scaling issues. They need Starship, which doesn't work yet, to work to even send v3 up there.

And while Spacex has some first mover advantage, other companies start doing the same which will eat their margins. Makes it even more complicated to run all of it.

They have to do 300k orbit correction already last year, kessler syndrom can happen which will block access to space for all of us.

We don't even know yet how dangerous the poisoning of our atmosphere will be.

Glaciers have never been accessible to most people.

The night sky has, until recently.

Yeah. Hiked on and around them in PNW mountains.

And?

We're also facing a climate and pollutant crisis as a species so we seem only capable of thinking in the short term. We're not doing that well right now after only a brief period of industrialisation.

The guy in charge of it has demonstrated that he'll cut people off from accessing it on a whim, though, so it's not really cheap and easy access for the entire globe. It's access for the selected people.

did you read the article? it is already illegal to launch satellites without permission, hence the article (above the fold in the summary) is stating SpaceX applied for permission :)

You’re still limited to the transmission and receive capabilities of mobile devices which already struggle with current cell networks. I’m Not arguing it won’t be nice for people truly remote, but people keep acting like this will replace cell towers, which it won’t.

Parent might be talking about amateur radio astronomy which I agree might be straying from the main argument

Taken literally you are technically correct, but... 1. Space is big, but LEO is not that big and if a single company clutters it enough, other organisations might start bumping into issues like 'if i don't get sign off from starlink corp, i might hit one of their satelites on the way up and my insurance wont cover that so I cant afford to launch given the risks of being sued by elon'. 2. Applying for a licence in this context, mostly means greasing the right palms (preferably the pudgy bruised ones).

To be fair, part of the inordinate expense is just because it takes longer for the environmental reviews (costs are in expected year of construction, so pushing a project a decade into the future can increase costs by 30-40+% (inflation + interest) depending on the specifics, even if everything else costs the same).

That's why the cost estimates for CA HSR jump a bunch every time an administration hostile to it enters the white house.

> Can you source a citation referring to people that had "no proper grounding in multi day off road adventuring"

Sure - West Australian newspaper pretty much any week of the year - tourists come from all over the globe to visit the vast untamed outback, rent a 4x4, head out, and get into life threatening (sometimes life ending) trouble despite having a phone connection via either mobile towers or starlink. You know, no charge, no backup, no paper maps, no experience, etc.

Whether you like it or not, ePiRBs being an easily accesible service has actually saved dozens of noobs and experienced personal from certain death by offering emergency service alerting - Fact! (and no internet required)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_position-indicating_...

Interesting. I didn't realize that.

"No it's not" replies and silent downvotes instead of arguments didn't use to be how HN worked.

Sad to see this place becoming a normal web forum.

... would there really not be regulations on giant unmanned ships? That seems concerning, though I could certainly understand international / maritime law having a gap.

> in rural areas where 5G is already severely inhibited by tree leaves.

This is not a problem in Africa and India.

Often the bigger difference is just that fiber never goes in a straight line, even if it’s going to the right city. All that pesky geography gets in the way and makes the path longer.

Much larger.

The compute part may be a rack or a cabinet worth of GPUs (though TBH the public designs are currently vague to the point of being artistic impressions), but they also need to come with a PV array big enough to power that, plus a cooling array that's going to be close to 25% as big as the PV array regardless of what unit size they go for in the end.

If they settle on making e.g. 120 kW satellites, that would be about 400 m^2 for the PV and another 100 m^2 for the radiator.

> the first country to reach Mars on its first attempt

Well doing it decades later than others did help with that.

Are you attempting to make an argument? Because just off-handedly referencing topic-du-jour doesn't exactly achieve that.

Yes but would these need to be in LEO? I would imagine that they would aim for farther orbits to spend a smaller percentage of their time in Earth's shadow

Visible in RF. That doesn't mean literally visible. They few that are seen are those still in sunlight when the observer is not.

Out of interest, where are you on this scale? I don't think I've ever been better than a 6 from those star pictures, despite how I'd otherwise categorise where I live as suburban/rural transition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bortle_scale#/media/File:How_l...

Didn't know Perth was a regional area now, my mistake.

Then just wait until the next administration. If they are building with technology that relies on the FCC being gutted, they will be in for a world of hurt when that changes.

The owner of starlink is planning to be the only remaining capitalist. UBI is not for the US, a return to indentured servitude is.

"It is important to note that Starlink is not violating current regulations, so is doing nothing wrong. Discussions we have had with SpaceX on the topic have been constructive," said Tingay. "We hope this study adds support for international efforts to update policies that regulate the impact of this technology on radio astronomy research that are currently underway."

Sounds like not transmitting but just electronics existing in space.

This is directly the opposite of the implication of using Ku/Ka bands they shouldn’t have (which is what the agreements were with astronomy groups - aka “pinky promise”).

I understand that you want Russia to have access to it without interruption but until there is some sort of "International law" regarding those newer ways of providing Internet, politics will win.

Are you sure? Most people live in urban centers the last few generations and see few if any stars in the night sky

The limitations of mobile devices are mostly due to regulation (power limits and spectrum allocation and other requirements) and not inherent to the technology of handheld devices. And despite this, you can increase performance almost arbitrarily if you are able to increase the size and power and number of the antennas on the other side.

Yes, the Gen3 Starlink Direct-to-Cell constellation won't replace cell towers in urban or suburban areas. But I believe it could replace them in rural areas.

Killing Russian access was good, no?

> project a decade into the future can increase costs

A very good point.

I don't agree we can blame Trump for HSR though. 2/3 of the time that has passed have had Democrats in the white house. HSR is nearly all pure-California-style self-inflicted wound. And honestly it's just the most visible project California has failed with, there are many others. The one I'm personally angry about is Prop 1. We're now 12 years after, and have no additional water resources even broken ground. It's shameful.

Asking permission from whom? The entire world or just the corrupt bonkers folks?

Professional radio astronomy - SKA et al.

eg: Scientists analyze 76 million radio telescope images, find Starlink satellite interference 'where no signals are supposed to be present' (2025)

~ https://www.space.com/astronomy/scientists-analyze-76-millio...

and the topic is Starlink (and other sat constellations) and their impact on the sky (visible and non visible).

It came on a whim and you didn't complain about that.

You get what you pay for and the service got paid for ultimately.

If it was important enough, it would have been paid for.

Good for you getting that in before they disappear, probably got to see the night sky also, you can tell your grandchildren about that.

* https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

We're doing extremely well compared to an unimaginably long period of pre-industrialization.

Doesn't that hold for all internet providers? I'm not familiar with SpaceX cutting people of, but that doesn't sound out of line compared to industry.

It introduces no issues for space travel. And what exactly do you want to happen here? LEO to stay empty because no one else is able to fill it and for spacex to not to try to expand because the regulatory process isn't perfect according to your standards?

You need an /s or a /jk or people will take you seriously.

https://www.google.de/maps/place/Nairobi,+Kenya/@-1.2745409,...

How did that help them?

And how does it matter why they succeeded when the question is "are they capable of doing a Starlink?"?

Depends how cheap they can launch them.

Even very optimistic estimates (by people who aren't Elon Musk) say it will take a decade to get the costs low enough to be worthwhile for LEO; higher orbits are much more expensive.

The nice thing about there only being one capitalist is that it’ll be easy for the rest of us to deal with him.

It's not true.

It's billed at cost. Not at price.

No cardboard, no cardboard derivatives, no cellotape.

I mean, it was a response to a claim, without evidence, that it was valuable.

Is your position that _you_ can make assertions without evidence but that lesser mortals may not contradict you without writing a paper on the subject?

I’m convinced that a large part of the user base of this site is genuinely, literally, solipsistic.

Have you seen Real Engineering's analysis? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qpdUNMt2yg

I give coastal piracy about 3-weeks to figure out how to commandeer unmanned cargo ships. I bet they’d be ecstatic.

No, I don't like it. Because it relies on someone getting a specialized piece of hardware in advance of an emergency. That's a silly notion.

You could do that, or you could do the 21st century thing, and put up enough satellites to have emergency-grade LTE coverage across the entire country. Compatible with any smartphone.

Perhaps there will be communications nodes in LEO with high bandwidth directional links to heavy compute nodes in higher orbits? At some point I would assume that the jurisdiction of the FCC no longer applies? Or maybe you use laser links?

I still cannot believe it's economical to have "data centers in orbit" but I guess the truth will be seen in whether or not it actually happens.

Well, you seem to be giving blanket support to the government and conflating it with democracy.

I thought a good example of the pinnacle of government bureaucracy in action acting undemocratically both undermines your position and, secondly, might have you alter your opinion a bit.

You've, essentially, just appealed to authority to justify your position.

Starlink is leaking into radio astronomy bands, they initially said there wouldn't be a problem, but there was. They've later stated it would addressed in Gen-2 - it got worse.

> Starlink is not violating current regulations, so is doing nothing wrong.

Might be time to make global regulations on spectrum usage in space? That could take a while.

There are many past examples of companies "not violating current regulations" despite leaking toxins and other now recognised violations of the commons.

How many[1] others? Not many countries can claim that achievement, industrialized or not, which is telling.

1. The answer is 3.: USA, USSR, and the European Space Agency

As far as I can tell it almost exclusively follows the existing roads in Europe. Probably an easier way to secure rights in one go like rails used to be for telco lines.

The message I responded to was about visible light:

"Will this be the last generation to remember the night sky?"

If you all are so sad about it do something about it.

Like travel less, spend less on technology

You're part of the problem. It's not just you but it is you too.

So what I will tell my grandchildren is "The old Geezer Americans are fucking losers who fucked you over before you were born. You don't owe them any respect."

Other Internet providers at least have true boards of directors, shareholders with decision power, etc. One person doesn’t have the power to snap their fingers and make decisions based on how much ketamine they’re on at the time.

In the short-term. Thanks for proving my point on perspective.

They also have cut off people who paid, though. It's currently being paid for and had another cutoff for Ukraine in early February.

Yes.

Yes; their video pertains to two specific proposals for the data centres, unfortunately I am finding that *all* the various proposals fail to make sense but for different reasons.

You think current sea pirates are deterred by an unarmed crew of 5?

> Starlink is leaking into radio astronomy bands, they initially said there wouldn't be a problem, but there was.

Again, these are two different things and conflating them is not productive. The initial discussion with Starlink and the astronomy community that I followed closely was explicitly about conflicts on the service frequencies (i.e. the thing unique to Starlink). They were cooperative with that.

Now it turns out electronics in space emit EM noise and that is the thing showing up in astronomy and it has nothing to do with the RF internet side. Non-Starlink satellites emit it as well but the sheer volume of starlink sats makes it easier to detect theirs.

The distinction matters because the same thing will happen with any constellation regardless of its purpose if it has onboard computers, batteries, solar arrays, etc.

I’m for passing regulations on this emissivity, but the framing that this is some kind of rug pull by spacex is dumb. They could have participated in the community the legally required amount like the Chinese do and we’d be in a much worse position.

> At some point I would assume that the jurisdiction of the FCC no longer applies?

The FCC has regulatory jurisdiction for communications on US objects in space, regardless of distance from earth.

Pipelines, Sewer systems, rail too.

Uhhh no. I was pointing out the fallacy of GP portraying “government” outcomes (they’re the only ones that made a blanket statement) as somehow characteristically not generated by marketplace victories.

Actually many forms of government mandate and authority are generated by marketplace mechanisms, many of which are actually more true to desirable marketplace dynamics than those we see in private marketplaces, due to concentration of power, which is a known failure mode of marketplaces in general.

The idea that “government” is some mysterious mythical entity that just exists outside of people’s input and outside of marketplace forces is juvenile.

Neither government nor private market outcomes are intrinsically more legitimate than the other.

> it relies on someone getting a specialized piece of hardware in advance of an emergency.

Like Starlink? Glad we agree.

> to have emergency-grade LTE coverage across the entire country.

Literally does not stop people dying and is not a substitute for knowing what you're doing in remote areas.

The claim was:

  For all its minuses the internet makes these long trips 10x easier.

which is false - at best it's a 5% improvement on what was required as prep for long remote trips before Starlink.

A big issue with yelling help! from a remote location rather than having the skill set to self rescue is that now third parties (rescuers) are putting themselves at risk and using their time and resources which may or may not be reimbursed.

My position is more that it's OK to mention a well known and easily verifiable fact without digging out authoritative sources.

taps head

cant' steer without a helm

How many countries can claim the achievement of developing nuclear weapons? Does that make North Korea somehow an inherently more successful country than Germany?

Spending money on a space program while hundreds of millions of your citizens are living in extreme poverty is obscene (unless it provides significant economic value)

I'm sorry that I don't agree with you that a out of touch board of directors or shareholders are better from the get go than Musk.

Yes, so let's think long term. How do we keep it rolling? Perhaps we will need to continue to advance our technology, especially moving industries to space where there is no ecosphere.

Early February 2026 was at the directive of the Ukrainian government in response to hostile Russian use.

Please just stop this thing you're doing. It's nakedly markedly dishonest

There's LTE from space already btw in Australia. Will one day be a carrier requirement.