I've had faster Internet than the average Starlink speedtest says, in rural Romania, at the foot of a mountain, wild bears and all: https://twitter.com/q3k/status/1172621386977861632 . Internet access in rural areas is pretty much a solved problem, it just now hinges on enough of a societal push to apply this solution where needed.
Starlink is yet another SV-style attempt to solve (US) societal problems by blindly applying technology. Except this time, this also affects other countries, and we're furious.
The point of my comment isn't to defend the satellite launches, quite the opposite.
It's saying that even as somebody that would be in favor, not carefully considering the trade offs before giving permission to permanently alter the night sky is not acceptable. This is exactly the kind of thing that bureaucracy should make painfully slow.
When was the last time that you were in Africa? And in which country, because it's an entire continent.
EDIT: So I guess HN doesn't like being called out on https://africasacountry.com/ issues? Well sorry not sorry, but as someone born in Ghana I'm more a little tired of the sentiment on display in the cited part of comment I'm reacting to, which is the implication that Africa as an entire continent is inherently and forever will be a place too poor to have proper infrastructure.
North America and Australia (where I'm from) have the exact same issue. No country is going to spend a million bucks to lay fiber to ten person towns in the middle of nowhere.
Why not? It has been done before. Every developed country went through a period of rural electrification whereby schemes were developed to encourage and/or force electric companies to run wires out into the rural farmland. Internet is the modern analogue for electrification. Those same approaches would work equally well for fiber.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_electrification
The American approach: "The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) was created by executive order as an independent federal bureau in 1935, authorized by the United States Congress in the 1936 Rural Electrification Act, and later in 1939, reorganized as a division of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. It was charged with administering loan programs for electrification and telephone service in rural areas. Between 1935 and 1939 – or the first 4½ years after REA's establishment, the number of farms using electric services more than doubled"
I am talking about money already spent and delivered, not future project that will probably be delivered on.
EDIT: Wow, you guys are really bad at admitting your own blatantly obvious biases, aren't you?
There are equivalent places in central Australia, but even though I grew up here I haven't been more than a few hours drive away from the coasts.
I haven't been to North America. Russia didn't cross my mind, but I haven't been there either.
This isn't to say I don't have warped perspectives or prejudices about Africa. I didn't realize the population density is that high in the south, where I haven't been.
Western media only discusses African countries when things go wrong. The only people I know from there are three white families who left South Africa. If you asked me to draw a map of the countries it would be my worst continent.
The original post though really was just based on my personal experience with remoteness.
For what it's worth an initial rush of downvotes (or upvotes) is fairly common on HN; I'd ignore them for the first hour or so. After that you'll probably have a fair idea of the HN consensus (fickle as it is).
People that really care about an issue will sit there and refresh a thread constantly, so in the short term you're mostly knowing what they think about your comment. But they can't vote more than once.
My first comment in this tree was downvoted to -3 within two minutes of posting, but now sits at +40. I actually wasn't sure at first whether it was being downvoted by people for or against Starlink et al. Maybe both.
Except they could have been referring to the continent. "some of the places" could refer to different places in different African countries, hence "some"; and doesn't imply all, everywhere, or "forever" in Africa.
Perhaps you are. I'm from the same country, and I couldn't be happier :).
I mean, LEO Internet constellations are awesome for providing access (not just in rural areas, but also in remote areas and at sea). But more than that, we're talking Starlink here in particular. The problem it's solving isn't (just) how to improve Internet access for some people. The main problem it's solving is how to fund SpaceX's R&D on Starship. Which translates to dropping another order of magnitude from the cost of access to orbit. Which will, longer-term, translate to a boon for astronomy.
The North Slope Borough in Alaska is nearly the size of Romania, but has only about 9,000 people living there. The state as a whole is larger than all of Western Europe, but has only about 700,000 people.
Much of Canada is the same, only more so.
If we are just going to completely ignore costs, then I can say that getting great astronomical observations is solved as well, since we can just launch satellites to take the observations instead of doing ground-based observations. So it's not clear what the big deal about these satellites is anyway.
No it isn't. Just because it works for you it doesn't mean the same solutions can apply everywhere.
But I know people from rich countries like UK, US, Germany with download speeds under 5 mbps paying more than you would pay for the most expensive line on Romania.
I've gotten decent internet speeds in one place that looked pretty wild, therefore worldwide internet access is a solved problem.
So it's not exactly a good potential userbase for starlink. However, most of South America, Africa and Central Asia could benefit massively from Starlink and start participating in the global digital economy
Perhaps in the US, but other countries, even poor ones, manage to do rural internet fine without cluttering the night sky.
I, for one, am not stoked about the implications of an American ISP forcing worldwide coverage for themselves. Their shady business practices and the questionable reliability of the US government make it very hard for me to see many upsides.
Were this to be released only in remote areas and third-world countries, I would agree that there is a large net benefit to Starlink. However, because of the way the system is designed, every country on the planet will now be forced to deal with a solution for the anti-competitive behaviour of the American ISP market.
As long as Starlink is managed by a an American company, I have little faith in their intends and purposes. Being able to intercept or duplicate random internet communications worldwide seems like an NSA wet dream come true to me.
Current mitigations (visorsat) by SpaceX already make the satellites completely invisible to the naked eye. It’s less of a visual impact (zero once deployed) than any other visible LEO satellite or air travel. Celltowers high enough to need a light are highly visible and are a much greater visual impact than Starlink.
Most of sub-saharan Africa has slow and expensive internet. I would guess there is 1 billion people who will have access to the internet via mobile tower with starlink & competitors backhaul in a few years. This is enormous.
There's nothing in the landscape that prevents Africa from running fiber to every house like Eastern Europe has been proven to be capable of. In fact, a lot of infrastructure is already there. Geopolitical instability, poverty and instability of the power grid makes it very unattractive to build data centers in the continent and that's what's forcing ISPs to use expensive cables to access most websites, driving up the cost and reducing the speed.
This problem can be partially mitigated by using StarLink instead of oceanic cables, but I don't imagine their system will be able to replace the fiber optics that carry most large volumes of data between governments. StarLink is fast, but still depends on ground stations for decent speed internet access. Collecting internet traffic for one entire continent on another isn't feasible in the plans I've seen.
StarLink will reduce latency and improve coverage for customers already using satellite internet connections. African people can already use those if they have the means to afford it, yet many African cities have dial-up or slower internet access because of the lack of resources.
Has any nation ever successfully outlawed satellite reception? The roofs of buildings even in nations like Iran and KSA are studded with dishes.
Musk has already admitted that providing satellite services to countries like China can become a problem [3]. Countries that don't want StarLink and don't have the capabilities to take out LEO satellites might start to team up with China, Russia and other countries that do to protect their sovereignty.
Of course there's no way to prevent hardware that someone managed to sneak in from connecting to the satellites. Those devices will all need to come from the black market though, severely limiting the reach and future business StarLink might have in such a country.
[1]: http://www.gard.no/web/updates/content/26690148/ban-on-use-o...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_phone#Countries_with...
[3]: https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-internet-satellite-co...
The obejective is noble but can you provide any realistic data or estimates of how this infrastructure can scale to more than a few million users and _still_ be high bandwith. Beyond that your bandwith will go down as you add more users.
The only use-cases that this serves are high-income people that want to go off-grid but are unwilling to sacrifice high-bandwith, and military deployments (which SpaceX does not hide as an objective).
Actual rich people can afford to put in fiber or line of site wherever they are. $100,000 or whatever, doesn’t matter. This is for the regular people in rural areas.
Seriously, has no one making these claims ever talked to someone whose best internet is geosynchronous satellite? Do they think only the very rich live in rural areas?
Rural internet access is absolutely not an US-centric issue, many parts of the world have much worse infrastructure. Being opposed to new technologies because "I already have fast internet" is unbelievably narrow minded.
2) The only limitation on bandwidth (and thus users) is the number of satellites in orbit. If the constellation bandwidth is saturated, launch more satellites and you get more bandwidth.
3) I guess you'll just ignore the use cases for the tens of millions of non-rich people who literally can't get decent internet because it doesn't exist where they live?
One nation launching thousands of satellites because three companies want to make a pile of money and also because that one country can't get it's act together and do something about its own predatory cable companies seems like a weak argument to make from a moral point of view.
But what about third world countries and such? Summary opinion: The people who could afford Starlink already have broadband, and we wouldn't want to subsidize others access, would we? That path leads to socialism and the USPS. Or indeed broadband as a right attached to cable company's license. Impossible! (In that one country.)
Let third world countries sort out their own broadband and make their own money. And let them have their own view of the damn stars.
If the internet was simply a wellspring from which one could obtain knowledge you may be correct.
But most likely, the internet will instead be used to proliferate bigoted and intolerant opinions, while spreading lies and misinformation in the form of crude memes. As the last of human populations without high speed internet comes online, they will expand their capacity to inflict harm at speeds never before seen.
Weep for the clear skies we have lost. Forever.
However, this conversation has basically been skipped over. Maybe you're right and I'm wrong.
The constellations are being launched, and there's zero chance of shutting them down once they're serving a commercial role. Considering the abundant red tape in the modern world, it does seem like it was a little thin on the ground here.