This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This is why satelite internet is a dead end. The latency and bandwidth are fundamental limitations of physics which are incredibly expensive to scale up compare to cable and cell towers.
Even if we have a complete satellite roll out we'd still have to go back to cell towers for better latency. So why even entertain this detour if not for war machines - one niche where satellites are actually better.
Satellite is better for remote people. I know a woman whose Alaskan village (indigenous, not colonizer) got significantly better internet once starlink was rolled out.
Now you could say that nations with meaningful duties to remote peoples should band together and essentially jointly operate (maybe having the UN administer it) such a service for them and use it as the last resort akin to sat phones. And I'd be cool with that. But I so think such people should have internet, and this is probably cheaper than running and maintaining cables all across Alaska and northern Canada.
That's true, but it's largely due to a market that doesn't prioritize remote clients and a regulatory system which has roped off huge parts of the radio spectrum.
Instead of a starlink receiver talking to low orbit, you could have a dish that uses fixed wireless access or point to point connections to access a terrestrial tower. In exceptional situations geostationary satellites make sense, but these low earth constellations are getting out of control.
Oh shut up with the colonizer bs. So its OK for the indigenous to use a Nazis system because burns hits them.
But it's not better. It's just rhe only option. They would very much prefer to be connected with a cable or a cell tower no? Why wouldnt they?
You have permafrost melting so northern tundra areas will be worse to build on going forward. But the context is tiny rural places that don't have roads and you travel by plane or snowmobile, they're not getting cable.
Give them internet via a geo stationary satellite.
You only need a few in a space where there is a lot of room, and it won't bug anyone, contrary to the shit show we have with the countless starlink satellites visibly zipping over while working hard to make the Kessler Syndrome a thing.
I'm not even talking about the pollution caused by those rocket launches
Give them internet via a geo stationary satellite.
We have that already. Its comparatively very expensive, and also very very high latency simply because for the speed-of-light. The satellite at GEO sits at 20k kilometers. That by itself introduces 250ms of latency each way. So a 500ms latency is not uncommon for GEO satellite internet. Also, GEO satellites are very expensive because of how much energy (deltaV) it takes to get the satellite out that far and for how long they have to operate to make that money back.
And even then, why the everlasting fuck do you want low watch orbit satellites for this? Why do we need to pollute the shit out of our ecosystem, our LEO, and our night sky (fuck those moving blips) just to have latency low enough to play a game over na internet connection that shouldn't be used for any of that...
Everything about starlink is maddeningly stupid and it is negatively impacting so many people that want nothing to do with it but hey, it's Elmo Musk, so just let him do that shit anyway!
Thousands of satellites are immune to anti satellite missile, with only a few dozen geosats one country could blow up those sats and cut a few ocean cables and cut off most of the International transocean internet access. That's a good thing, because it makes it so that any nation preparing for war isn't tempted to cut off internet because it wouldn't work anyway.
This is why satelite internet is a dead end.
Idk if I'd call it a dead end so much as a service of last resort. There's definitely utility in a global network of always-on wireless communication. But because it's expensive to deploy and saturated quickly, you can't operate at the volume of a wired network or local wireless system.
So why even entertain this detour if not for war machines - one niche where satellites are actually better.
I think you've answered your own question. The incremental value of satellites as part of a weapons system far outstrips normal business applications (nevermind consumer markets).
But you still run into the same constraints at a certain scale. Even if your transmission system is unassailable, it cannot support the volume of traffic of wired connections. So you're still going to see drone pilots with enormous spools of fiberoptic wire moving along the battlefront.
Since the article doesnt make it clear
This is for new or re-activating customers in a congested area.
This isnt a random usage fee, this is for areas they claim are too busy, so you gotta pay if you want to gain access.
Its like when you call a contractor and they quote you a stupid high number. Its often because they're too busy, but if you'll pay the stupid high number theyll do it.
There was no world where SpaceX could support unlimited customers in a cell region.
This isnt a random usage fee, this is for areas they claim are too busy, so you gotta pay if you want to gain access.
Congestion pricing is the PC way to describe it.
Price gouging is the more honest term.
There was no world where SpaceX could support unlimited customers in a cell region.
You can charge a fixed rate and ration bandwidth during peak use.
Or you can charge a variable rate in order to maximize revenue during peak demand.
One maximizes utility while the other maximizes profit.
Neither of those options would support everyone living in a high density urban area, bandwidth would drop to nothing and no one would want to buy it, and people generally hate inconsistent bandwidth, or random peak hour usage charges on their bill.
Edit: Their overall bandwidth per cell is just too low to be able to support everyone in high density areas like that.
That's why dense urban communities prefer using ground fiber and big routing stations to cellar satellite, sure.
But now we're talking about the real bandwidth capacities, not the pricing for connectivity.
I mean don't get me wrong, it's 100% pure capitalism to do something like, we can confidently service 1000 people per cell region and maintain our advertised service, but once we reach 950, we're going to charge super high fees to connect. They don't have to be doing what they're doing, but they saw a way to make money.
Edit: And this is all assuming the congestion is even real.
LOL...from the beginning of this grift, experts said Starlink was not scalable.
From what I see, 99% of the business community thinks all graphs linearly extrapolate.
Spoiler alert: AI learning is not scaling either.
Satellite internet is a last resort. People shouldn't be using it if they have fibre broadband or 5G options that provide the same speeds. It's a lifesaver if you're on a boat, or live off grid, or just a few miles from where the broadband ends. But if it's anywhere with other people then it's going to max out with horrible contention. At the point the only option is "moar satellites".
Even the 50k sat max size constellation isn't anything for dense urban areas. That's never been the intended market.
I am guessing this is to amp up the stock price of the GrokSpaceLink IPO.
Investors should have learned by now that Musks endeavors are 100% ADHD cycle projects; hyper focus, obsess, launch, start to lose interest, hop on the the next, abandoning previous project, instead of building on the success.
Who wrote this article?
"A SpaceX support page (which appears to only be available in Swahili, for some erason)"
Don't get me wrong. Fuck any satellite service, and especially FUCK fElon. This article is trash, though.
The whole concept is rotten right from the start.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk maintains an extremely close relationship with Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr.
Under Carr's leadership, Musk's rocket company has effectively been given carte blanche in its efforts to roll out its orbital Starlink broadband service to more Americans, a glaring conflict of interest that could have profound implications for society.
That's despite concerns over thousands or even millions of satellites cluttering our planet's already extremely busy orbit and the environmentally damaging rocket launches that send them up.
And the space-based network is already starting to experience some major strains — as some experts have long predicted.
"How can Europe compete with that?" I ask myself more and more often (also AI bubble/data centers). Hopefully in the long term.
Will never use his services or products. Until he is dead and his children divest.
are his children/baby mamas even eligble to his fortune. probably only the one that he used as a human shield. it will be hilarious when 14+ children fight in court for his money,.
Billionaires will kill us all, while millionaires scream and yell. Thousandaires defend them both, while we all suffer in hell.
That's great, gonna have to print it out on stickers and place them around town.
Over promise and under deliver, the musk way. Fucking clown ass Nazi piece of shit. I know there’s not a lot of viable alternatives, but if you’re using a Nazi service, I lack sympathy when the Nazi raises your prices.
So basically:
His companies are hilariously insolvent, so he rolls them all together and does the biggest IPO of all time to raise money.
But he still needs more money.
So then he tries to do a corporate bond issuance... doesn't go super duper well.
So he still needs more money.
Welp, ok then, jack up fees, whatever, not very original, but does at least kind of work.
Any takers as to whether or not he'll still need more money?
If you guess correctly, you get a free Neuralink installed in your head that you can send OTA bluetooth firmware overrides to nearby devices with your brain!
Or well, maybe it works... maybes its the opposite of that. Whatever.
... But you can recharge them with your solar roof tiles! And then get in your Tesla Roadster! And then take a Starship ICBM flight to Hong Kong or Moscow or Buenos Aires or Rome! And then take the hyperloop to Antarctica!
I mean, high demand shouldn't justify surprise pricing
To be fair, the network being crushed by high demand is extremely unsurprising. Cellular networks have always had this problem in dense areas, where it’s no way you're reaching the advertised speed. This is mainly due to the available channels being shared by everyone in a relatively large area, connected to the same cell. Which is mitigated somewhat by setting up more cells with shorter range for a higher cell density in cities.
How could a satellite based network ever scale? Where you have what, a handful available cells to cover an entire state?
I thought the whole point of this service was to provide internet to places that traditional services couldn’t reach. Meaning they wouldn’t be over populated because those people already have good internet.
Now that I think it through, there’s no way that demographic is generating enough money to make this work.
Whoops?
The sats pass by every location, because of physics they circle the globe constantly rapidly. They can't only operate in rural areas. So you will have some people in cities use it just not very much.
I remember when starlink first became available here and had better speed than you could get with terrestrial services. 5 minutes research showed network bandwidth would be a problem once they had significant adoption. Lo and behold...
