> Starlink-style connectivity

Note that one of the higher-profile deliberate internet shutdowns was Starlink itself shutting down internet connectivity in Ukraine.

Ultimately it just becomes a question of where you want the choke point to live — in a state actor, or in a private operator.

Neither option is risk-free; the failure modes simply differ.

A government can shut you off for political reasons, a corporation can shut you off for contractual or geopolitical ones.

As long as the system assumes centralized stewardship for safety or reliability, someone will inevitably hold the switch — the only variable is who.

> in a state actor, or in a private operator.

multiple satellite operators are coming on line. what are the odds all of them coordinate to shut down in one region invalidating using the other providers as fail over?

I might be mistaken, but as far as I know there is currently no other LEO broadband provider that is meaningfully comparable at a global scale.

Starlink is often treated as the reference point not because it is perfect or fully resilient, but because there is no second network at a similar scale that could realistically serve as a failover today.

If we imagine a hypothetical future where three mature operators exist, then yes — absent coordinated political or geopolitical action, at least one network might remain online.

However, even that surviving operator would not necessarily provide full coverage of the affected region. Global redundancy is extremely hard in practice, because maintaining continuous, worldwide LEO coverage is not free — it requires massive capex and opex, ground stations, regulatory permissions, and local political approval.

True worldwide failover remains more of a theoretical construct than an operational reality.

== Low Earth Orbit

What about failing over from LEO to geosynchronous? E.g. Viasat?

Is anyone left doing network from GEO? Places like HughesNet were soooo slow that I can't imagine their users have not all switched to Starlink.

Viasat is still doing it.

Notably absent from TFA...

Probably because it's not actually a truthful characterization of what happened! I know it's popular to find every possible reason to bag on Musk, but you don't need to resort to disinformation to do it.

Are you trying to argue that Starlink isn't cut off Ukrainian access? Because they did and it was well documented.

They didn't, and you're again repeating misinformation as fact.

What happened was that they refused to turn access on for the Crimean region, which is not the same as "cutting off Ukrainian access".

I understand nuance is hard to grasp sometimes, but if you're going to continue to conflate the two things, I can only chalk it up to a desire to deceive.

Is that true? This comment suggests otherwise, with citations. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46351511

That particular section I have to Wikipedia article seems to have gone through a bunch of anonymous edits back and forth around the content of this citation

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/07/elon-musk...

The beam forming used by Starlink (and Starshield) is highly resistant to jamming. But Starlink doesn't offer service in some countries. And the ground terminals can be detected.

Can't talk for the USA, but it's widely acknowledged that the spread of broadband in Europe was driven by P2P and tools like Emule/eDonkey or BitTorrent.

We need some similar killer application for satellite connectivity and mesh networking. Something that makes the technology so requested and so ubiquitous in such a short time that it couldn't be banned even if they tried.

In Tanzania they went around to hotels during the ban to make sure they didn't have starlink. It's illegal here but many have it. During that time some enterprising individuals charged tourists to access theirs.