I thought starlink was just an alibi company to buy rocket launches from SpaceX, and make SpaceX appear profitable on paper?
Leopards ate his… internet?
Then what, are you going to tell us next that going to Mars also was? Come on! /s
Amazon is launching a competing service on its own satelites.
Maybe they’ll collide with each other.
Probably, and well be forever imprisoned on the planet in that scenario because we won’t be able to launch anything for a long long time again.
Upside to that is it ensures the billionaires can’t escape and are stuck here with the rest of us who are getting increasingly angry.
We already had undersea mashed potato billionaire, I bet space mashed potato billionaire tastes much better.
Maybe we just need stronger spacecraft. I look forward to a future where every trip to space goes through the trash zone where you hear the continuous pattering of small satellites smashing against the hull.
Fortunately, they’re all pretty low orbit, so it isn’t super permanent…
It’s also not as if we can’t launch spacecrafts at all, as long as your destination is high orbit the chances of collision are low.
Maybe that forces ppl to actually care about climate change…
Slide to switch plan
Ooooh, that’s cutesy.
How about “Point a firearm at the screen and scowl menacingly to cancel the service”
this slide to switch sums up Elon’s perspective on tech, he will want something super impractical and unnecessary implemented as long as he thinks it is cool
Oh, now it’s worse than every satellite internet company I know. Shame I recommended it to someone because I thought it would be reliable and remain cheap.
Starlink was never a viable business prospect. It never will be. Anybody who signed up to Starlink was just waiting for this to happen without knowing it.
well it might’ve worked if he didn’t turn out to be a fascist… but since most people don’t want to support that, kinda fucks up the business model.
perpetually burning up satellites in the atmosphere is a pretty shitty business though.
I literally canceled because of his fucking nazi salute. Not giving that pos any money
perpetually burning up satellites in the atmosphere is a pretty shitty business though.
Exactly. The business isn’t remotely sustainable. All that money being invested into new satellites will, by next year, need to be invested constantly to keep the network at the same size.
Starlink needs run as fast as it can, just to stay in the same place, and the investment money is finite when people see it’s not going to grow.
What was the life expectancy of each satellite? I think I read something like 5 to 7 years. If we were talking about dozens of satellites I would say no problem, but thousands?
There’s a bunch of technology problems that make it undesirable, like the light and projectile pollution in leo
I just generally doubt anything Musk does because of his track record. However, is there a particular reason why Starlink is inherently not viable? Could a competent person do it or it is fundamentally flawed? To put it another way is it cybertruck bad (yes people want electric cars but not a barely driveable dumpster held together with glue) or hyperloop bad (physics said no)?
The physics of it mean you basically have to be constantly launching new satellites to replace the 5 year old ones de orbiting. Further, it will also be disadvantaged to anything closer with ability to choose a cable medium. All this adds up to the most expensive infrastructure that exclusively targets very low population density areas and/or areas too poor to afford good Internet. The people that could afford to sustain this can afford to move somewhere with a bit more infrastructure or at least within reach of a terrestrial tower and have an even better result.
It is closer to a hyper loop system. For the internet to have low enough latency it has to be put in quite a low earth orbit. That means we need more satlights to make coverage, ballooning costs. However that is not the part that kills it, it is that it is in such low orbit we can expect air resistance to significantly degrade orbits. There are too many satilights to reasonably boost them all, and when they start to degrade it will be too fast to reasonably replace them all.
Not everyone needs super low latency. Satellite phones exist for a reason.
And they first batches of the current network are at their end of life. That means that with the same level of investment, growth will slow down, which is terrible for venture capital.
And orbital mechanics is a bitch. You can’t add more speed to a certain area (like a city with a lot of people) and less to the empty ocean. So there’s a harsh density limit to your subscribes.
I mean, the need for internet satellite is mostly in low density areas. In big cities fiber will always be cheaper and more reliable (except maybe in the US where operators are allowed to fuck you). I hate Musk and I guess Starlink is squeezing their monopoly position right now, but I’m not 100% sure they are not profitable.
Maybe a better answer is WiMax.
Yeah, the big problem is that by definition most people live in the places where most people live. Urbanisation is over 80% in Europe and the US (and European countries hold a much looser definition of “urban” than the US).
To increase service to most people, you need to upgrade the entire world, which is expensive.
I’m not 100% sure they are not profitable.
I am. They’re reporting a profit right now because theyre calling the cost of new satellites as “investment” and not expenses. In a few years, when every satellite launched is a replacement, those “investments” become running costs, and there goes the profit.
That, and as they burn up upon re-entry, they’re fucking up the environment:
https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-reentry-pollution-damage-earth-atmosphere
The former $240/mo was not outrageous to begin with?…
These Elon fanboys just love getting scammed by him. I can almost hear the little pay piggies squealing now.
Like it or not, it’s the only option for high speed internet for large swaths of the world. ViaSat is the only competitor and they’re even worse: slower, unusably high latency and ridiculously low data caps.
But for those large parts of the world, 240 USD per month is even more ridiculous
I looked into Starlink years ago when I was RVing. It came out to over $600 up front in equipment costs, THEN $240 a month or w/e. And it’s not like Elon wasn’t a piece of shit back then, either. $50 a month for T-Mobile “5G at home” with no upfront or hidden costs did the trick nicely and bridged the gap until I found a place with cheap fiber. Now I have 2.5Gbps up and down and it’s still less than half the price of Starlink before this price hike.
Starlink makes sense for the scenario it was designed fill the gap for. A lack of any other terrestrial options.
Legacy satellite has always been terrible, but the only option in many rural areas, and obviously the middle of nowhere. Starlink is an insanely reliable and decent deal in most of those circumstances. That’s it’s bread and butter.
But if you have literally any other option, it’s usually not the best choice, it’s not meant to be the best choice, it’s intended for use where it’s likely the only choice.
One of my brothers is in Alaska right now. It’s wild to me that he even gets internet where he’s at. Where he’s at they don’t even have mailboxes just PO Boxes.
He is sharing 1TB a month among ~60 people tho
It’s worth it.
If you’re in the middle of the Pacific often.
Yeah, but the 5000 people that applies to can’t afford the entire network.
I know one guy where he’s just on a damn mountain. Not many other options.
Not saying it’s the option I’d take, just saying. If you’re in the sticks in a red state…
Yeah there are always exceptions of course. I’ve seen some in that position able to get away with direct line-of-sight connections for a reasonable rate, but it depends heavily on the layout of the surrounding mountains and location of the service provider plus you have to shell out for an antennae or dish. For any wondering, that’s almost always cheaper than the Starlink sign up costs.
Then again, if internet is important to someone, gotta consider if mountain-side living is the right choice to begin with. I’m sure your acquaintance has his reasons though!
I only have this to say: Fuck the sky pollution. Starlink has been ruining stargazing and star photography and Elon lied about its impact. He claimed they would be invisible with his amazing paint but they’re still visible and fuck it up for people who enjoy watching the stars.
If you think ruining stargazing is the biggest problem, don’t look up Satellite Collision Cascades
The fucking muskrat is going to lock us down to Earth and make launches too dangerous due to debris fields
And all of you are just complaining about artificial light
I see them all the time without a camera. They are bright as the stars when they pass over.
pros and cons…
pros:
- internet in remote places
cons:
- at the cost of literallt everything else
Damn, maybe you should move to a radical leftist city where fiber internet is $50 a month.
13-18€ for 1gig/1gig in Copenhagen is the going rate
Sad German noises :/
40€ for 250M over cable here. At least I don’t have issues with congestion/slowdown in the evening, which is a common downside of cable.
Try 10€.
Flat fee of ~€70 to connect and then free for as long as I live in this apartment. 1000/1000 speeds as well, pretty sick honestly
Where?
Romania probably.
They went hard on fiber investments a decade or two ago and now they have some of the world’s best internet.
Last I checked you could get 10 Gbit for around 12€
Best place in the world to acquire porn: it’s made there (farm to table), and you can download it nigh instantly
Do they have porn markets like farmer markets?
Last I checked you could get 10 Gbit for around 12€
then it would be €1200 for a TB (assuming the price goes up linearly), so not cheaper than starlink
10 Gbit as in speed, not data cap. In Europe (at least in most places afaik) we don’t have data caps on fiber.
So no, not even close.Then you should write Gbit/s or Gbps, not just Gbit
Also I live in Europe and my internet is capped at 50 GB and the max speed is 30 Mbps, so 10 Gbps is baffling to me.
I think you’re misreading that as “10 GB of data,” when it’s actually download speeds of 10Gb/s. I looked it up, and there doesn’t seem to be a data cap.
So it’s quite a bit cheaper than Starlink.
I’m not misreading. The comment clearly says 10 Gbit, not 10 Gb/s
We pay 4.58€ for 1gbit/1gbit fiber in our condo association in Sweden…
If only I could immigrate. Know any single swedes looking for a spouse?
Whatcha got to offer? Gotta sweeten that pot, or you’ll lose to other bidders.
how is this better? the twitter guy is ordering a TB not a GB
That gigabit per second, without any datacap.
Twitter guy is ordering 1000 gigabyte worth of data, or slightly over 2 hours of internet in Sweden at full speed.
why is everyone dropping the “per second” part
Because gigabytes (GB) are units of storage capacity, and gigabits (Gb) are units of data transfer rate.
It’s implied it’s gigabits per second, as no one ever really measures it in like… Gigabits per hour, or year.
Radical leftist city.
Also, I’d just like to say that even 240 is expensive as hell.
For mobile satellite internet, it’s an absolute steal. If that’s what they had.
I pay €18 for 250/100, of course unlimited data, and the company has no tracking and fully supports privacy etc. their main servers are based in the old cave where the pirate bay used to have theirs. It also comes with a great VPN, ID security and antivirus from f-secure (not that I use it since I’m on linux). And they just opened a datacenter inside an old war bunker in my city, with this description: “Freedom of communication and the virtual world need to withstand both Russian bombs and Donald Trump’s Cloud Act. This industrial bunker is built for just that.” In Sweden, if you hadn’t guessed.
Strange, I’ve downloaded almost 6TiB over the last month so far and my bill is still $120/mo.
EDIT: This appears to be for global priority customers (movable dish between addresses, on boats, etc) and seems to be because he’s increasing his data cap by choice, not because rates are actually getting hiked. Us normal residential customers are the same as always. Fuck Musk anyway, but this one seems to be a non-issue.
global priority customers (movable dish between addresses, on boats, etc)
Because of-fucking-course anybody who wants to buy and live aboard a cheap (easily $50k or less) old sailboat instead of paying rent forever or grinding for a $500K house is a “rich yacht owner” who can obviously afford $1000/month Internet. And have their home sunk by orcas while we’re at it, because why not?
Just when I thought I had a viable plan to escape this shithole consumer trap of a country, the Internet service I would need to do it not only ends up being run by a goddamn Nazi, but they also jack up the price on that use-case.
Look into Eutelsat. I’ve heard mention recently that they’re expanding as a viable starlink competitor. I have no direct knowledge, but maybe they’d cover your needs cheaper.
First, screw Musk. Second, you would only need this level of satellite internet service for your boat if you want to be able to use full broadband speed with over 1TB of transfer in the middle of the ocean far away from terrestrial cellular networks. If you really need full broadband speeds in the middle of the ocean and you only need 50GB of it a month its only $250/month.
If you’re at a boat dock you likely have wifi available or even just anchored close to land you can likely just tether your mobile phone.
Second, you would only need this level of satellite internet service for your boat if you want to be able to use full broadband speed with over 1TB of transfer in the middle of the ocean far away from terrestrial cellular networks.
Well, the ideal goal would be to be able to do things like work remotely and keep my kids entertained while circumnavigating, so yeah.
work remotely and keep my kids entertained while circumnavigating
FWIW depending on your work you can do a lot of that on the cheap, namely if you work is not heavy bandwidth or latency dependent, code and voice do not take much. You can get a lot of resources offline too, e.g. Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, etc in a convenient package with Kiwix. Download this at the port or prior to the legs of the trip where you don’t expect to have good connectivity then update at the next point. It’s honestly a matter of hours at most. I do it before every trip and it gets easier every time.
My suggestion anyway for kids entertainment is also offline entertainment, e.g. GCompris but even content. Again you can put Wikipedia from Kiwix on your then local WiFi (no Internet, just all devices on the boat) with a small RPi Zero (low energy consumption) with a 1TB microSD card (so cheap now!) but also a media server with all the videos you want from Internet Archive. There is a TON of content. Once there they can watch with any media player that supports network play, e.g VLC or mplayer.
TL;DR: 1TB from the middle of nowhere on the cheap is indeed tricky but 1TB from a good connection THEN go offline is actually both very easy and more than enough to be entertained for months, if not decades with e.g. Gutenberg project!
I’m not a boat person but it feels like you’ve got conflicting ideas about whats possible. You said:
Because of-fucking-course anybody who wants to buy and live aboard a cheap (easily $50k or less) old sailboat instead of paying rent forever
…and…
the ideal goal would be to be able to do things like work remotely and keep my kids entertained while circumnavigating
I don’t think you’re going to find a $50k boat you can buy (and maintain!) that can house four people comfortably for transoceanic cruises while also affording you the ability to work a full time job from the boat. I would think you’re looking at a MUCH larger boat, possibly with some full time crew to accomplish that, and at that point $1k a month for global high speed low latency internet is probably a a small fraction of your monthly expenses.
I’m talking about a monohull in the 40’-50’ range (e.g. this), which I believe would be… “very cosy”… but not completely implausible for two adults and two small kids who can share a bunk.
Admittedly my dream boat would be a 35’-40’ catamaran (e.g. this), which would be way more spacious and comfortable, but they’re not only way more expensive but also come up for sale on the used market way less often.
Anyway, even in the latter case where you’re talking about more money, you’re still not talking about anywhere near “full time crew and $1000/month internet” money!
I’m just going with an Iridium for calls and short texts. I save up all the bigger missives for when I hit wifi. That doesn’t work for most work situations I think.
Just in time for https://lemmy.world/post/29463383
Any future where these fuckers don’t end up in jail is going to become hell.
good ol’ bait and switch
WOMP ∞/GB PRICELESS x2
Grifter gonna grift…
