The 'end goal' is to have it use the laser link to send the traffic across to a satellite close to the final destination, that should in theory help massively redistribute the ground station traffic.
It's obviously not foolproof, there's still bandwidth to be shared there but using a combination of some clever routing you could theoretically spread traffic across multiple satellites and groundstations with minimal latency impact.
With SVs separated by hundreds of km, the beam width would be absolutely tiny, and channel reuse would be effectively infinite.
Wonder why you'd rather fill LEO to the brim, emitting vast amounts of CO2 in the process and filling stratosphere with metal oxides, than figure out how to improve infrastructure in your neighborhood.
I do think this is a temporary issue; once the cable ISP monopolies are no longer valuable because anyone can just get Starlink, that competitive pressure will push down hard on those cable monopolies and infrastructure laws will have to return to sanity. Terrestrial ISPs with fiber-sharing requirements and appropriate infrastructure build-out could absolutely out-compete Starlink, but right now they can just collude together and lobby against changing the status quo.
I would much prefer to have a functional bureaucracy and intelligent, efficient infrastructure! But it's probably easier to fix that by launching the largest satellite constellation ever than by playing politics against some of the wealthiest media companies on the planet.
Example:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/space-jun...
Beware the murder hornets!
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/02/us/asian-giant-hornet-was...
Just because the problem hasn't gotten too bad yet doesn't mean it isn't real (especially because the problem involves a positive-feedback "domino effect" and junk might be infeasible to clean up).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
With regard to Starlink: I was a little bit concerned because of the large number of satellites they're putting up, but as far as I understand, Starlink isn't actually a big risk right now as far as space junk goes because the satellites orbit at low altitudes (340 miles) and are expected to naturally de-orbit relatively quickly due to atmospheric drag. (The decision to put them at low altitudes had to do with network latency.) If Elon were to say tomorrow, "hey we're moving Starlink out to 500 miles" I would hope some kind of regulation would be able to prevent that.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/59559/how-long-can...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-89909-7
That was always the thinking of all kinds of pollution that they are insignificant, till it "suddenly" became a problem and "everyone" was surprised.
Well, if you're convinced it's inevitable then it is.
Typical calculations (using only publicly available info as a caveat) generally point towards the current starlink constellation supporting a really low density of antennas.
If you want the details, the person who created starlink.sx has a great blog with some incredible calculations[0]. The section that is most relevant is under the heading "Simulation with TDM and beam spread combined".
Basically, the result is that starlink could support around 15 antennas/user terminals per "cell" at 75mbps, where a cell is about 252 square km. This is roughly 1 terminal per 17 square km.
If you allow for 10x oversubscription, fairly common for ISPs, that gets you to 1 terminal per 1.7 square km. Not really that impressive when you compare it to the density and services where 99.9% of people live, but it clearly helps out the small number of people way out there.
0: https://mikepuchol.com/modeling-starlink-capacity-843b2387f5...
Sad that you feel the need to say this.
Musk is one of the greatest industrialists the US has ever had. He's contributed enormously to the economy and the world.
That's not a quality that's worth celebrating, regardless of how much innovation he might enable. We can and should expect better of people, especially extraordinarily wealthy and powerful ones.
What about the civic sense of proving that great electric cars can be made at a profit, space launch costs can be cut 90%, and Starlink can enable communications by people who live under oppression?
Doesn't actually doing things that matter to the human race matter far more than saying comforting words and avoiding giving offense?
Of the things you've highlighted, Starlink has perhaps the strongest case for being evidence of civic sense. But that case is a potential one; in practice, Starlink (and Musk's vision) has yet to impress[1][2].
[1]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/elon-musks-refusal-to-p...
[2]: https://www.space.com/starlink-electronics-hum-disturbs-radi...
I recommend you read a biography of Musk.
He makes his electric car patents freely available, to advance the transition to electric cars. He started SpaceX with the purpose of making humans a multi-planetary species. He's repeatedly bet his entire fortune on these goals.
He's civic minded where it counts. And he's delivered results.
As for business acumen, he takes financial risks any other businessman would consider to be insane.
Hard to get more civic-minded than that.
He's become Trump 2.0.
And that unsurprisingly has led many people, including myself, to do a complete 180° on our support for who he is as as person and by extension his accomplishments.
Standing up for free speech includes standing up for the right to express ideas you don't like. I'm sure he'll allow you to post your opinions, too.
Suppressing free speech is the first step towards tyranny.
Everyone else including Western countries like UK, Australia, Canada etc have a different take. Which is that hate speech is not conducive to a healthy society and that it doesn't lead to tyranny. Whatever that even means in modern discourse.
For example, Meghan Murphy (founder of Feminist Current) had her previously banned account restored after Musk's reforms, and has again been using Twitter as an outlet for her activism and to connect with other many other feminist women since then.
So even if Twitter may have become something of a "hate spout" in your view, there are benefits to Musk's commitment to free speech being seen elsewhere on the platform.
He's the driving force behind some of the greatest innovations of our time. He's also just a person. I doubt many people can say they've had greater impact or could withstand the same scrutiny.
The issue with Musk is that those opinions are being manifested in the product decisions at Twitter e.g. taking a laissez-faire attitude towards hate speech and deliberating promoting controversial accounts in order to drive engagement.
for example I really like tom cruise as an actor, one of my personal top 10, but I don't like what he is doing in his private life (the cult thing). so what i'm doing is separating things and take what I like, and ignore (to some extent) what I don't like.
I feel like you guys take things way to serious, and expect everything to be perfect, which is not possible.
Not going to argue with the "greater impact" part, but mean pretty much every C-level executive in America with a twitter account manages to refrain from using it to repeatedly commit securities fraud.
The only other alternative is getting a microwave antenna for $300/mo with a 4 year contract from a company called Geolinks
Had a similar issue when living in SF
Some buildings, and sometimes entire neighborhoods or small cities, only have one (crappy) vendor
I’m no fan of Starlink or Musk, but there’s definitely a market for them in well established, densely populated areas in rich countries