So, due to abnormal solar activity¹. The title made me wonder how one can have unpredicted loss of satellites, and yeah, this is a way.
The more satellites you have, the more of them you will lose like this. Doesn't look like anything unhealthy for them.
1 - Because yeah, we couldn't just have abnormal geological activity this year without the Sun also deciding to add up some.
You're right, $250 million is no joke.
Elon is a joke however.
Based
That is based on $67,000,000 per falcon 9 launch. I suspect it cost SpaceX way less to launch than that even though they might bill that amount to customers.
Not to mention that assumes a launch serves no other purpose than putting those satellites in orbit. AFAIK they use these launches as test beds with the cherry on top being that they also get to deploy an additional revenue stream into the upper atmosphere.
There's also the future possibility of using Starship for launches which could fit up to 600 of the current Starlink satellites per launch.
AFAIK SpaceX ias ruinning at a loss, meaning the total cost of a launch is more expensive than what they charge.
They're private, so it's not disclosed, but I'm pretty sure it's been stated by Shotwell at this point that they're cash positive.
They don't even really build Falcon 9's anymore, the existing fleet is so reliable. They're the best launch provider in the game currently, and while they spend a lot on Starlink and Starship, their actual launches are tremendously profitable.
Yes they are cash positive, that's because they still have lots of investor money to burn. But they are still running at a deficit AFAIK.
Twitter, Starlink, SpaceX are running at a loss. Is Tesla operating at a loss as well? Cause that would make me chuckle.
No but I think Boring company is basically dead, and Elron Musk has a bit of a con going on with Tesla. They have clearly over-hyped their technology for autonomous driving. Investors who have no clue, probably believe Tesla is worth 5 times more than it actually is.
Lol probably? It has a negative PE and they make 8.5 precent of the cars in the market but has a market cap that's still larger than the last 5 last time I checked.
Here's the kicker. They only make 20% of electric vehicles so they aren't cornering that market either. Self driving? Nope not winning there either.
The whole thig is propped up by hopuum.
Yes all true.
Self driving? Nope not winning there either.
It's actually worse than that. They are not even near being in the lead. Mercedes, Waymo, GM are all ahead, and probably Mobileye and nVidia are too. And that's without considering anything Chinese who also have contenders.
There is no way Autonomous driving will be the gold mine for Tesla they hope, there are way to many competitors, and most of them are even way ahead.
And the competition has also caught up to Tesla now on EV technologies, so the growth will only get slower from this point on.
The Boring Company is alive and well in Texas, they just held a job recruiting event a few weeks ago.
OK according to Wikipedia they had less than 200 employees last year.
The company may have been founded to promote the hyperloop hype, which was a hoax. There are some lofty claims surrounding the company, but they use traditional technologies they bought from other companies. So I don't see any basis for their claims, making the reason for the company to exist nul and void.
Unless it's changed, the only reason Tesla is profitable is subsidies
Gotta love the free market at work!
Socialism for me, but not for thee!
Privatize the profits, socialize the losses!
that would certainly trickle down to customers. they could have made the use of falcon heavy more common thou: 150 tons worth of sat weight in one sling shot, the gains would be worthwile i assume
they could have made the use of falcon heavy more common thou: 150 tons worth of sat weight in one sling shot, the gains would be worthwile i assume
Falcon Heavy doesn't make sense for Starlink launches since they are a bunch of little satellites going to a low-energy orbit. Falcon Heavy is best suited for sending a single heavy satellite to a high-energy orbit. If you can split your payload into little pieces, it's much more efficient to launch three Falcon 9s than one Falcon Heavy.
Low Earth, and High Earth orbits.
Lol Twitter is worth about $5B now not $50B.
Yeah, but just because he can afford it doesn't mean that it's not incredibly wasteful.
Elon spending 250 million on satellites is about equivalent to me spending $1.00 on a burrito from Taco Bell
do the satellites give him the shits later?
No, so really he's getting an even better deal
Too bad.
Depends on where they crash
It is to modern Billionaires. To people like Bezos and Musk 250 million dollars is well under 0.2% of their net worth.
Compared to the average western homeowner(assuming house price of 1 million dollars), its the same as spending 1,000 dollars.
"average western home owner"
"House Price 1 million"
Lulz...
Just because they're worth that now doesn't mean the people living in them paid that price 35 years ago, plenty of those owners are worth a lot but only if they sell, 1k out of their real pension of under 100k/year is quite a lot more than 250m to Musk!
The average price of a house in Vancouver is roughly 2 million. It's been over a million for a decade now. I figured 1 mill was a decent ballpark.
1.3m average in Vancouver, 650k in Canada and that's an average, there's a lot more room to pull the average up than down, so most are under that price (although it seems impossible to find median pricing).
The point being that 1k to the vast majority of people, even most home owners, is more than 0.1% of what they're worth.
1.3 million is not the price of an average house. It is the average price of a condo, townhouse and house.
The average price of a house in 2023 in Vancouver is 2.3 million dollars. Townhouse is 1.3 mil and condo is 805k
Oh fuck off now, homeowner is anyone who owns their own home.
Vancouver is also one city in one country out of the whole Western world.
Just because they're worth that now doesn't mean the people living in them paid that price
So, just like with companies? Just replace the second half with people working in them
We would still be taking about people owning them, not working in them (the kids of the homeowner can't claim the house they live in as part of their capital).
Median home price is around $400k nationwide. For California only it's around $800k. It sounds like there are around 80 million mortgages in the US, so most "average" homeowners will have a net worth far below the value of their home.
A better comparison IMO would be $200 (but most non-homeowner Americans can't afford that, either. Poverty sucks.).
https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/u-s-mortgage-market-statistics/has estimates for some of the mortgage figures.
You can't really use home valuation here as a comparison. A homeowner cannot just sell a piece of their house to go and buy another one. Doesn't really work like that.
average western homeowner(assuming house price of 1 million dollars)
That is not in any way average lol
It is to me
Nah it kinda is, Elron Musk can do that 176 times, before losing as much as he did on Twitter.
Maybe you forget how staggeringly filthy rich that guy really is.
To Nole Skum it is a joke. He has a total wealth of about $270 billion. $250 million is approxinately 1/1000 of that.
So divide your wealth by 1000, think of how you would feel losing that due to a rare event, while you knowingly took the risk. Does not seem like a big deal to me at all.
He has a total worth of something which is very different from Wealth. His 100-1000 overvalued Tesla stock, for example, is a lot of that worth. He can't really just spend it when he wants to
He can't really just spend it when he wants to
Can't he? Didn't he just went away and bought a 44bn company because he wanted it?
Sure, but I can’t touch my retirement either and that’s what I used for my number
The "paper billionaire" argument does not hold: https://github.com/MKorostoff/1-pixel-wealth/blob/master/THE_PAPER_BILLIONAIRE.md
Lots of things wrong in that post, before I stopped reading after like the 3rd paragraph.
For instance, yes routine, planned selloffs do not trigger market waves. That's why they're scheduled that way. Suddenly liquidating absolutely would.
This person isn't smart just because they wrote a blog. Matt Walsh has a blog.
We are talking about his company, not his individual wealth. It's estimated to be worth $75 billion.
And that would be hilarious. I would love to see it bankrupt him but he’s so rich that’s impossible
less sats, more latency. 250$ millions for an extra 5ms (factual) ping ? maybe sometimes less is better
This is to be expected with low earth orbit (LEO) satellites. The orbit will decay fairly quickly and with so many satellites needed for a LEO constellation this is going to be business as usual. I’m curious if this number is any more than what they expected, but it’s not big news.
We're certain that burning this many satellites won't end up being some irreversible environmental issue right
The environmental issue here isn't really that they will re-enter, but that we will need to use lots of rockets to replace them. Rockets produce a ton of greenhouse gasses, but no one really cares because we don't launch a lot of them. However, if we start launching rockets far more frequently to replace disposable space debris, then we're gonna start hitting big numbers.
Would much rather that these small satellites burn up safely (as designed) rather than hanging around in orbit as trash for hundreds of years. Believe it or not, but they did actually think about this before sending the rockets up.
irreversible environmental issue
I seriously doubt it.
200 satellites burnt up in a year and don't reach the ground vs Every year, the Earth is hit by about 6100 meteors large enough to reach the ground, or about 17 every day, research has revealed.
I think the concern is with emissions from burn up process as well as launching rockets to replace said satellites. Do wonder what ends up being prdouced/deposited in the atmosphere during burn up and how it compares to natural objects?
Nevermind the burnup, think about how much fuel it takes to launch them
One consideration is the satellites have processed aluminum alloys, while the meteorites have naturally occuring ores. The former may (not guarenteed) have an effect only because the meteorites have been coming in for millenia and the atmosphere we have survived it
It has no impact.
The launches have a big impact, though.
You think that was taken into consideration? Hahaha. Ohh wait, you're serious? Hahahaha hahahaha.
Grow up.
The cost estimate is way way higher than reality. They are basing it off of what SpaceX charges for other companies using a brand new rocket, while they are actually providing their own launch at cost and reusing the vehicles many times. In fact, they recently broke their own record and launched as well as landed a rocket for the 16th time. This means that their actual cost is mostly fuel and some refurbishment costs, not the price of a fully new vehicle.
This means that their actual cost is mostly fuel and some refurbishment costs, not the price of a fully new vehicle.
They do still need a new second stage for each launch. Internal cost is definitely below 67M$ though.
That's definitely the case for now yes with the second stage, though even that is set to change with Starship. But I think it's crazy how quickly some people discount the fact that they are able to land an orbital class rocket on its flamey end and launch it again, 16+ times over. Literally no one else has managed to do this, despite decades and billions of dollars of a head start.
It's far less expensive for SpaceX as they own the rockets. The article lists a $67M launch price, but I'm not sure if this is the sale price for SpaceX customers rather than the cost price.
Each launch also has 50 satellites
Plus whatever other payload is getting a ride share.
Not to be pedantic, but if they could sell. That space for something else, then they should use the sale price indeed, not the cost.
That's the opportunity cost of money they could've made with other clients besides themselves.
XM... as in the radio? That's unidirectional, low-bandwidth. It could be served by geostationary because the latency from source to receiver doesn't really matter.
However, the internet is highly transactional and thus it requires a very low latency. LEO was chosen because it is closest - the speed of light is the dominant factor for latency when comparing GST and LEO. Yes, that increases costs, but it is the only way to make the internet served by satellite be suitable for modern day use.
Pretty sure XM is not using Leo. Xm is using geostationary.
Generally we've avoided doing much at LEO, precisely because of this.
Any long term LEO endeavor requires constant replenishment of satellites. Shorter lifespan than terrestrial infrastructure, and more expensive deployment.
Satellite radio, tv, satellite phone, traditional satellite internet, gps all do higher orbit. For interactive (Internet) the latency sucks.
The Pentagon had a $145 million check ready to hand to me,
In regard to Ukraine. I think they'll be fine.
I wonder if this has anything to do with my Starlink connection dropping out in the middle of the night. Maybe a handful of the lost satellites would've been passing through my area in the night.
Several times in the night, between 2 and 4 AM, my connection blips for a few minutes. Which is normally not a big deal, but I'm a night owl and usually awake all night. Plus it interrupts any online services I have running overnight, so I've lost progress on projects I'm working on throughout the night.
Meh, Starlink is just a temporary fix anyway. I live out in the countryside, where I've been lucky to get 20-30 Mbps speeds for years. Starlink brings high speed Internet to my home (100-200 Mbps speeds), but it's been kind of unreliable. And their single public IP address for my entire network messes with my home servers that require their own independent IP addresses, so I can't run any of my online services from home. Not without buying a dedicated VPN server out on the Internet somewhere that I can route my traffic through.
Thanks to Biden's high speed Internet initiative, I'm finally getting a dedicated fiber line out to my house. Gonna take at least a year before the local ISP wires my region, but once that's in place, I'm throwing out Starlink.
I haven't ever heard of a home user getting more than one public static IP address for home Internet. I host just fine on a dhcp address with a free dyndns provider.
Starlink gives you NO public IP address.
not even a publicly routable IPv6 address?
No. Everyone is behind a commercial nat
I get what you're trying to say but nobody in their right mind will Nat ipv6, you either allow it or disable it.
Starlink are slowly rolling it out but you van use ipv6 tunnel should you need it: https://starlinkhow.com/starlink-ipv6/
Yes, with a tunnel: https://starlinkhow.com/starlink-ipv6/
Depending on your tech skills, tail scale works, but you could also set up a relatively simple reverse proxy: https://serverfault.com/questions/753105/how-to-reverse-proxy-to-different-places-depending-on-subdomain-in-nginx
You’d still need a public IP for that. Starlink connections are behind a commercial nat.
Oh, I didn't realize, that's a hassle
I suspect your outages are from holes in the constellation. It's not complete yet.
Not sure if it would fit your use case, but have you looked into using Tailscale to access your self hosted services? My ISP uses shared public IPs as well and that's what I use.
Seconding Tail scale, if you have already tried it though, there is also ZeroTier
It depends on what kind of services you are hosting, but for general my general use (having a NAS accessible for rare file-sharing, Nextcloud, Home Assistant and git), Cloudflare Tunnel is amazing. The only drawback is that their ToS does not allow file streaming or larger ongoing data transfers, so technically even my usage is against it due to file-sharing, but I only need to share like one small file every month tops, so I haven't run into issues yet.
It's also nice that you can set up traffic filtering to be pretty restricted, so your servers can be both publicly accessible, and also safe - i.e I just geoblock traffic from outside my country, since I never need to use it from there (and can easily change it when I do). And it's also pretty quick to set up!
Sounds like most people I know on Starlink, and very similar situation except in Canada. Government funding for rural broadband is getting a lot of things moving and I see fibre going in all over the place. I was one of the first to sign up for Starlink beta but it was taking too long. Put up an 80ft tower on my property with a local WISP that they can use as backhaul, I get over 100Mbps with 10ms latency, they run fiber to towers wherever possible so I'm like 2 hops and trunked in to the country's main network operations center. Before this I had 3 wireless providers, all complete shit, load balanced into a single connection that just barely did the job. The crazy thing is I can see the Toronto skyline on clear days yet we are completely rural. For a long time the only one who had gigabit out here was deadmau5 just cause he could basically operate as an ISP, and bought data wholesale using an AirFibre on a 130ft tower, tapping in through another ISPs backhaul with a dedicated link. Now everyone either has Starlink, the small towns are getting fibre, and there's just coils of fibre and contractors lining random rural roads.
For anyone that doesn’t click…
It was 200 satellites. Estimate is based on the cost of a falcon 9 launch ($67,000,000) which can take about 50 satellites.
Which will not be accurate at all. It doesn't account for the fact Starlink launches use reused boosters, multiple times. So the original customer payload paid for the new booster itself, it's nowhere near manufacturing cost to send the booster again, basically fuel cost.
SpaceX offers a discount for using reused boosters, and for Starlink they're likely paying at or near cost instead, which is nearly zero for refurbishment compared to a new booster.
Starlink's actual deployment costs are negligible, mostly paid for by the regular SpaceX launch business. It's really just the satellite cost.
I’m sure it’s cheaper than 67 mil since they can launch at cost and not worry about profits but it’s definitely more than just the cost of the satellites.
I won't click bc OP has been spamming that site all over lemmy so I don't trust it.
OP is also the only person who's submitting the site here. Also, one of the links from the site that they submitted here is of "Interesting video from South America showing what looks like an alien abduction", to which OP added the comment "Kiind of interesting don't know if you guys can see the person being sucked into the cloud". So yeah, I suspect you are correct to be dubious about this source.
Fair enough!
Sounds like an enormous waste of resources. Why do we allow so much wealth accumulated in one person to found such stupid projects?
This 100%. Before Starlink my folks in the Outback had dial up speeds because Satellite is terrible and affected by weather dramatically.
Now they can work from home instead of driving hours every day.
Why not use high-altitude balloons instead? They're steerable, they're re-usable, and they would likely provide the same service.
The outback is very very big.
Google Loon
So it worked, it just didn't make them money fast enough. Typical.
Arguably, they might never have made any money because they were being out-competed in many rural areas by alternative internet options, including regular broadband and cellular. The need for Loon was decreasing even before they had a major rollout of their technology.
Is it really cheaper to have this many satellites for a couple of home than laying a few landlines? I am really curious about the costs.
It depends a lot per location. One of the problems with the dedicated satellites has always been that they start out amazing then get shitty as more people use them and have crap installs and poor line of sight. Starlink sort of fixes that with it's mesh. Ground based wireless is becoming so cheap and fast so I think there's always an opportunity for WISPs to take Starlink customers if they can keep the costs lower and not to sub-par installs. Depends a lot of geography though and ability to put up towers where you need them.
Running lines or fibre should be the norm, it's still very expensive to run fibre, and sometimes there's environmental concerns, or you're on a rock formation or something and you can't bury, so you have to get involved with the municipality or however the power poles are managed, and hope they are able to accommodate data infrastructure. That means expensive and skilled certifications for anyone installing it on poles etc. I think this stuff should be managed as public utilities though and create efficiencies in the red tape that way.
The real money in starlink is low latency stock trading. Kid you not.
Edit:look at me, getting down votes for conjecturing about real things. Yes, I know it's not cool to say that Starlink has some good ideas. Sadly, taking a few milliseconds off latency to more effectively trade stocks isn't going to make the market more efficient, it's just an arms race for computer-assisted gambling. But yes, starlink is aiming for super tiny latency, and the laser links in their next Gen satellites might just get them there. Yes, this may make Musk even richer than he already is.
Low latency? Starlink has ADSL tier latency.
Starlink is still in beta, it isn't routing connections from satellite to satellite yet, which is where the low latency will come from.
Just wait for 40,000 of them being up there, and we'll see who gets lower latency from NYSE to JPX or ASX.
It's latency is supposed to improve with laser links.
Low latency? Starlink has ADSL tier latency.
What distance are we talking about for the latency? When I look up the latency info for comparisons, no one ever posts where the end point is. Without that, there is no way to make a proper statement on what kind of latency any service has.
You know that certain government contracts with other SATCOM operators only have an SLA or 30ms.
Dedicated fiber to anywhere is much faster.
You'll have to be more specific, because before LEO proliferation, yes, you'd expect huger latency with a GEO or MEO satellite.
Maybe my recall of Starlink's business model is out of date, but there was talk 2-5 years ago about this being a big market for them.
It absolutely is not
If I recall, the laser links between satellites is projected to lower the latency to maybe 10ms
it absolutely was one of the stated goals for starlink.
it hinges on the laser mesh networking though, which isn't online yet, iirc.
It also helps they're contracting their own aerospace company, which in turn makes most of it's money from US military contracts.
You don't even need landlines. There's 5G or if that's not good enough or for very remote areas there's point-to-point radio. Absolutely no need for satellites.
Good luck using point-to-point radio for a sailboat halfway across the ocean.
My pre-starlink shitty rural internet disagrees with your statement.
I'm no fan of Elon. But some of us rely on Starlink to get connectivity on our phones because not even LTE covers the area.
5G is cool but absolutely horrible for that purpose, the lains it uses are able to transfer a lot of data but only over very short distances so for remote areas you are probably better off with LTE or something even weaker, it's a tough question to answer but I think we can all agree that the answer shouldn't be owned by a single company, it's critical infrastrtucture for both living and military activities!
The constellation costs 40 Billion dollars to get into orbit. Satellite lifetime is 5 years. That's $8B per year just to keep the current setup operational.
SpaceX projected 20M customers last year and only has 1M.
If they want to increase the bandwidth to densely populated areas they will need to increase the size of the constellation.
The project is not going to work.
And we'll be left with a ton of additional, useless space pollution, yay.
All those satellites fall back to earth after five years
Well that's better than them staying up there for sure, thanks for the clarification.
Because people liek him managed to get people to prefer "owning the libs" over owning the ressources to life a happy and safe life.
Starlink has been a godsend for rural Canada
Canada needs national ISP
Yeah it's totally stupid that people in the global south, to say nothing of besieged communities like Ukraine, have the internet.
That's for the rich countries!
Internet that gets turned off whenever elon decides it’s furthering a war effort in a way he doesn’t agree with.
When did this happen?
There were a few recent news articles that discussed some of the content of the new book about Elon Musk in which he shared that he had realized that a particular request for bandwidth could only be for a Ukrainian boat drone strike against Russian warships, so he turned off the coverage in that area to save lives, which disabled all the drones.
Those warships later fired rockets into Ukraine, killing people.
The takeaway most people got from this is that Elon is using his influence to decide who lives and who dies in a foreign war where the US has a stake, and he chose the opposite of US foreign policy.
If you think he's smart, he is potentially traitorous to US interests, if you think he's dumb, he still got people killed.
He saved only Putin's life.
"This is not war of Russia vs. Ukraine. I'm against such definition. This is Putin's war."
- Boris Nemtsov
I think he's a dipshit, but the claim that he will turn off your Starlink you've contracted for if he disagrees with you is not an honest claim.
Musk can be an asswipe and companies he owns can still be doing good things. SpaceX and Starlink are both exceptionally good things.
They didn't say he will, they said he can. Musk himself has admitted he did just that with a judgement call. Whether he has a contract or not doesn't change that.
Whether or not there is a contract most assuredly changes that. That's what contracts do.
Again, this is not what is described above.
You’re bringing up contract violations and whether Ukraine is part of Crimea, etc. which has nothing to do with things.
As Musk has a contract with the US government, details do in fact matter
You have problems.
Only problem I have is that I enjoy correcting people on the internet.
It's manageable.
A few days ago he disabled starlink in the Crimea because he apparently doesn't view that as part of the War and with that inderectly part of Ukraine, he claimed that he never enabled it there later on but Ukraine used it before so that's a lie and he didn't back down from thing stupid garbage ether! :/
He is contracted to provide Ukraine Starlink over Ukraine territory, and Crimea was stolen from Ukraine years ago.
Once they recapture it, they'll have a plausible argument that his contract includes Crimea.
So did he actually turn off Starlink in violation of a contract?
The point that was being made was that it's abhorrent for one person to have such power. Should be in government control. Elon may be a complete and utter asshole, but it's actually not his fault. It's a want of government oversight that is the problem 😉 that was the point in the comment you first responded.
You would prefer the US government control worldwide access to the internet (because no other government has even close to the ability), over an independent business that can legally be forced to honor contracts?
...why?
And the initial claim was that Musk will personally violate contracts if he is angry at you or disagrees with your national politics, which is false.
False (and stupid) dichotomy.
The person said government control. How you envision government control of a worldwide ISP to work, exactly?
Here's a hint: the US will run it. Through either hard power or soft. The US dictates the world order, like it or not.
Crimea IS Ukrain territory according to any paty except Vladimir Putin, you can't just "steal" parts of a country and legally pwn it! How dso you imagine they will they recapture without their ship drones, it's a fuckinnng half island and yes he did turn it off despite his bs that he never enabled it because Ukraine already used it before. I don't know what kind of contract they have but you are more than just a little delusional with that comment!
I don’t know what kind of contract they have
I don't know things, and
Crimea IS Ukrain territory according to any paty except Vladimir Putin, you can’t just “steal” parts of a country and legally pwn it
...I say things that are demonstrably wrong, but
you are more than just a little delusional with that comment
Lol ok.
Luckily I can laugh about this pro Putin garbage, go and learn international law if you want to argue about that stuff because you are hilariously wrong there!
I'm not pro Putin at all. I think the US should just bomb his family until he steps down. I fully believe the US should call Russia's bluff and send forces to Ukraine itself. I'm both anti-putin and pro-interventionist
I dislike Musk personally, I dislike him professionally as a leader, and I dislike the knock-off effects of his totally unmanaged manic episodes. I am not your ideological foe.
I am also, however, correct.
On 27 March 2014 100 United Nations member states voted for United Nations General Assembly Resolution 68/262 affirming the General Assembly's commitment to the territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders while 11 member states voted against, 58 abstained and 24 member states absented.
"International Law" doesn't mean anything without consequences, and until the rest of the world gets serious about real consequences this war will drag on.
Leaving it up to a private business owner is not what I would consider sane policy. The US did the right thing by banging out a contract, and the problem is resolved per those terms.
I don't just trust the fucking ISPs to keep giving me Internet for fun. I sign a contract that demands certain minimums for the price I pay.
Because people like you has ran out of other peoples money somewhere around 1990.
It is a bit ironic though, because the spacex is thriving mainly thanks to the central planning of the US government.
People like me? (-:
Unless you're one of the people getting richer, you're one of the people getting poorer.
Which one are yoy?... If you are of the ones getting richer, why do you protest others doing the same?
Add another troll to the block pile.
Don't engage with him, the attention is what he's after.
User was banned over 12 hours ago for spamming their dumb site. Not sure why their posts get to stay up.
Yeah why are there any comments taking this seriously? Not that it couldn't be true, but the linked site talks about prayer being the reason the satellites are going down, and how non human entities are attacking us.
Apparently it's a "privacy focused" spinoff of Tumblr. Highly questionable.
In space nobody can hear you burn satellites
Well, low orbid satelites don't really burn in space, they are designed to fall towards earth and burn up before they reach us in case they ever dtop moving, there are evwn videos that look like metrior showers but it's acrually a bunch of Starlik satelites!
someone complained that starlink doesnt work under rain. 100$/month + 400$ for terminal..yea not worth the price
We've got a few deployed, they seem to do alright in rain or snow unless it's absolutely torrential.
interesting feedback. would it be viable to run a small isp service on top of it ? like a small village or so ? 100$ for 100mbit donwload + repeaters and switches ... ?
On SpaceX’s X
… so dumb
would be interested if u could provide a link ? i already have the SpaceX twitter app installed haha
about to read it
thats cool, when a gov or a state decides to fund such thing. but also companies like google or meta piggybacking on isps by using excessive amounts of bandwidth, they should fund network installations like this instead, it least lay the grounds for relays and whatnot.
Remote work camps for mines use Starlink. The one I was at was pretty terrible. Not sure if they had multiple units running or what. There we about 1500 of us at the camp.
if each worker was guaranteed 5mbit of download, there probably were about 75 units maybe lol, or 50 if the mine was served by 3 shifts per day
That's been my experience as well. I'm in FL and have been through two tropical storms now and still had limited connectivity.
Ours works fine in rain. Have had momentary service interruptions when a storm cell is directly overhead but that is very rare. Quite a bit of speed variance through the day. Never below 35 down 12 up usually 80 down 30 up.
My fiber stays at 1gb up/down all the time though
How do you run fiber somewhere remote or on a ship? It's not like satellites work well in high density situations but they're the only solution for some.
would be cool if there was a terminal that could support 1Gbit download, but probably would cost 1k$ per month and terminal would cost..4k$ ?, but also could take it anywhere: hongkong, australia, chile, the arctic, u name it..
The issue is there's limited bandwidth per satellite. So it all the users were in the same location, the bandwidth would still get split between the users. Maybe you could setup a system where your pricing is user density based?
possibly
Can you connect that to my RV?
With a long enough cord anything is possible
Or my suburban household in the middle of a moderately large city?
it really makes sense if u travel alot, and dont want to deal with random data roaming shenanigans. 100$ per month is nothing for a weekly traveller
Been talking about it at work. Have an office one for all the field work.
are u a tech nomad haha ? if u are please stop paying portugese rent with californian salary or whatever, u would ruin it for locals. not cool bro! cool if u dont 👌
Those are a string of english words.
:(
And if my nan had wheels she'd be a bike
Cool come run it out to me then
Mine cuts out only when theres an active lightning storm overhead.
And the ONLY other choice is comcast business at $250/mo
i remember reading someone saying that he was paying 70$/month for a 4Mb/s downstream (wtf), and probably was comcast. what a shitty company that is
I haven't seen any issues with rain and Starlink personally. Issues originally when the satellite network was first launched and coverage was more spotty due to fewer satellites, but nothing weather related.
glad to know. people really have mixed takes about this
From my experience it seems like most takes people have on social media, including reddit and lemmy, for Elon's various companies are people that have never used the products and are very loud about never planning to. Companies where they only read articles headlines and seem to assume that everything in those articles are true simply at face value, simply because they don't like Elon.
There are a lot of things to dislike about him and some things each company does, but that needs to be separated out for each company. Elon's attitude has nothing to do with Starlink's performance, but some online commenters will try to mix them.
There are a lot of things to dislike about him and some things each company does, but that needs to be separated out for each company. Elon's attitude has nothing to do with Starlink's performance, but some online commenters will try to mix them.
yea, totally agree on this
I've learned recently on social media that the truth behind every headline/post is the most boring version of it, or to put it another way, every headline/post is written in the most explosive language possible to describe what actually happened. The vast majority of people never go further than the headline and take it face value, then post reactionary hatred hot takes.
It really bums me out. Makes it hard to enjoy the internet when everything is about riling people up, and people being riled up at the wrong thing.
Higher latitude more satellites
Explain this please.
Inclined orbits:
So lower latitudes more satellites too.
i see. but copper/fiber internet is way cheaper. and only few could afford a 400$ price tag. not a sane decision when u are betting on profiting throu quantity. mobile network providers would catch to this in a heartbeat. but starlink still has its own usecases
Yea the use case is you can use it where there isn’t copper/fiber so long as you can see the sky clearly. It’s not meant to be better, it’s meant to be available
i guess so. would it be profitable in the long run? idk :/
So as copper/fiber/cell slowly expands. More people will opt for more expensive slower service?
When cable really started to take off in my area, we had a local ISP who was doubling down on dialup with heavy compression. The owner locked the doors a year later and tried to flee the company with the company payroll
Copper/fiber is only cheaper if it's available to you. These locations aren't where Starlink is targeting, it's people who are mobile or live in rural areas where companies like Comcast pocket government funds that were supposed to expand their service to rural customers. My coworkers mom, who lives in rural SW Washington got Starlink after I suggested it to him. Previously she had HughesNet and was paying $200+ per month for 2mbps with a 20GB data cap -- something too slow to even watch Youtube or Netflix. You can't tell me Starlink is worse than that by any measure.
true, makes all the sense. also it sucks that isps are leeching on taxpayer handouts, with no value in return
It works fine under rain, lightning knocks it out though. Maybe not worth the price for you, but being someone where satellite is the only way I can get internet, it's been an absolute game changer. Nothing else even comes close.
so not working under rain is just a myth? would be worth it otherwise then. because people living at the equator would be struggling otherwise
Yea. It 100 percent works under rain. I'm in Florida. We had a hurricane pass over us last year and I never lost connection. It's the EMF from lightning that knocks it out for a little, so a storm with no lightning (like a hurricane) has little effect, but a big thunderstorm will take it out.
This is planned attrition, right?
Thats what i assume but nobody has confirmed
We’re they able to de-orbit them, or do we have 200 17,000 mph projectiles waiting to obliterate other satellites and cause a shell of death trash around our planet?
LEO orbits aren't stable- they're still partially inside the atmosphere and eventually fall far enough to burn up/become not-space trash.
unless, you boost it back up like they do with the ISS every so often.
Since Starlink operates in Low-Earth Orbit, they shouldn't be a danger to all of the more common Geo-synchronous Orbit satellites who are 10x father from Earth than these LEO objects.
If they can't bring their thrusters back online they will decay naturally in no more than 5 years. Fewer things go lower than that, the risk of collision is minimal.
Makes you wonder how much mining your Internet traffic is worth to go through all this trouble
People have run the numbers, and direct cost vs direct profit doesn't actually make sense. Unless they can land some large business clients, the whole venture will be a loss.... unless they're making money some other way.
IMO, starlink will likely continue to exist because there's a huge underserved market in the international transportation sector. Think long-haul freight container ships at sea. They literally don't have a good option for staying connected with anything that's remotely high speed for internet.... then LEO swarm systems like starlink come along and suddenly high speed access is normalized.
Companies will pay big to get real time feedback for exact data on the position and status of their vessels... and they'll be able to keep in constant contact with employees and the employees will have constant contact with their loved ones by extension, which may increase employee retention.
Copy/paste for other applications including, potentially military contracts with the US MiC, and there may actually be profit in the venture...
The use cases you suggest don't require highspeed internet: if all those companies need (and they're the ones paying, not the ship crews) is real time tracking and status data and comms, that can be done via existing networks of satellites in GSO, since the 300ms signal roundtrip to geosynchronous orbit doesn't really matter for those things.
(And the kind of companies who hire cheap crews from the Phillipines aren't exactly under market pressure to provide fast internet on board to attract manpower).
That stuff does make total sense for cruise ships, but there are a lot fewer of those than there are commercial ships.
Starlink seems at lot more geared to serve people in rich enough countries that they can afford their upfront costs and fees, and who live in remote enough areas that wired access isn't feasible.
(There's also the ones were wired access is feasible but not provided yet, but that's a naturally shrinking market segment given that they're in "rich enough countries to afford Starlink upfront costs and fees").
Business-wise this is a strange one, because to grow the size of their potential market they need to sell the services cheaper (thus making it accessible to people in middle income countries were wired internet access provision is worse) but there's a bandwith limit per satellite so if they sell too many subscriptions in one area (to make up for the lower price) the service gets worse per satellite. Now, they can scale up bandwidth by putting more satellites up there but there is a second factor: the more satellites are up the more will naturally fall down due to orbital decay, so the higher the replacement costs.
In other words, they're pressed from several sides in terms of cost, market size and quality of service requirements and trying to find a pocket of profitability in there which might or might not exist and even if it does it might not be there for long as terrestrial wired internet networks extend and reach previous Starlink customers.
The US MiC has its own satellite networks. I'm sure they could supplement those with Starlink, but they don't need it.
It scales better than sending fiber lines out to rural places
They have upgraded the satellites over the years. They probably are disposing of the old ones. Solar flares do increase drag, but it doesn’t suddenly deorbit satellites that have thrusters.
But it can fry their electronics and make them as good as dead.
Pretty curious on how the insurance on those satellites work, I don't think there's really a way to find the risk price with so little previous experience on the space industry.
They probably aren't insured at all. These aren't billion dollar satellites, so they're probably just launched at risk.
They're only meant to stay up there for ~5 years before deorbiting anyway, so there's probably no insurance on them.
Even if it might be fun to see Elon lose money, remember that Starlink is very important to Ukraine to defend themselves against Russia.
When Elon allows it.
Except for when it's very important to Russia.
Sad that fuckface Elon disabled it above Crimea now, let's see what area "isn't" actually part of the war effords accroding to his infinite wisdom next time I guess!
Who cares?
He is not loosing money, it was expected and intentional. Those are low-orbit satelites.
Geomagnetic storm after a just one day operational? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-60317806
What if they weren't lost and just changed owners? I'm not saying honest Elon would do this, but....
That's because if they plaster the news that there's a huge uptic in solar activity impacting earth like that then people might start to think that maybe the heat this year is caused by the sun, and you can't have that.
The uptick in solar activity that has been weirdly increasing at roughly predictable rates every year since the rise of industrialization?
Wait a sec. What?
I’m reading that as human activity influencing the sun directly. I can’t be interpreting that correctly. Do you mean something along the lines of human activity changing the atmosphere, which determines how sunlight affects Earth?
If you could clarify that for me, I’d appreciate it.
Betwixt is saying the sun is the cause of climate change.
Wolf is saying if it's the sun then isn't it strange how the sun started heating up at the same exact time and intensiveness as industrialization? (Humanity is causing climate change)
OOOOH. That went right over my head. Thanks!
Sure thing! I had to read both of them a couple times to figure it out myself lol
I didn't say that.
We read betwixt the lines
You mean you ungenerously ascribe statements and positions to people that they have not espoused? I believe climate change is mostly driven by fossil fuel burning, so your reading betwixt the lines is really just you seeing ghosts and looking for enemies.
No, I made a joke based on your username, I’m not the other person.
You did write that incredibly tone deafly, if your intent was to worry that solar flares will have a chilling effect on climate policy, just fyi. “And we can’t have that” is a classic sarcasm indicator.
My intent was to point out that lying about solar flares will have a chilling effect on climate policy.
It was sarcasm. It's exhausting really. You want to educate people about climate change and you have to contend with obvious bullshit the media spews out, how are you supposed to convince skeptical people it is real so that something can be done about it if they can just whip out article after article about how already explained weather phenoma is the world being cataclysmically destroyed by climate change?
“You can’t have that” is typically used differently. Say, if I’m ranting about my boss, because I’m angry about a tight deadline, I might say “if he hadn’t texted me last minute, I could have finished it Friday morning, but then I’d have a free weekend and we can’t have that”
It means, I think this is a good thing, but a scapegoat doesn’t. So in this case, most people interpreted you to be saying “if we informed people about the real cause of global warming, they would start resisting the evil climate conspiracy, which I think is a good thing, but the mainstream media doesn’t.”
But it now sounds like it wasn’t sarcasm, would you prefer that people don’t know about the solar flares, so they don’t get confused about climate change?
I said it was sarcasm.
Right, then you said that more article noise would be harmful for people. I just don’t know what you actually mean, because there are solar flares this summer.
You inferred.
Implied *
We inferred, they implied, just fyi.
I did no such thing. I'm convinced that climate change is mostly man driven by fossil fuel burning.
if they plaster the news that there's a huge uptic in solar activity impacting earth like that then people might start to think that maybe the heat this year is caused by the sun, and you can't have that.
How is the heat this summer being caused by the sun mostly man driven?
The heat this summer isn't. The general trend of warming is. But they feel like to convince us they have to bullshit us about every weather event that happens.
Let me give you some examples. According to the IPCC climate change will not cause an increase in frequency or intensity of tropical storms/cyclones/hurricanes. That's the IPCC, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That doesn't stop the propaganda machine from blaming every storm that causes some damage on climate change.
Remember that heat wave in the pacific northwest a few years ago? That was a bubble of heat caused by a geomagnetic anomaly. All studies on the phenomenon conclude that climate change that we are causing will decrease the occurrence rate of these particular phenomenon. That didn't stop the propaganda machine from blaming it on climate change.
Climate change is caused by people. Fossil fuel burning, methane emissions, all of that. The globe is getting warmer in aggregate. But instead of just educating us on it, the media continually bullshits us on it. Every deviation from a calm, smooth weather pattern is blamed on it. And it's because they view us as stupid children who need to be managed, like telling us the cop will arrest us if we turn the light on in the car. All I'm saying is, they need to stop it with that dishonesty, it only hurts them. We are adults, tell us the truth, we can be trusted with it. Tell us that the sea level is rising and that we have to reduce carbon emissions and all that, and do it without blaming el nino on climate change because you think it's expedient.
I hear ya on that.
Unfortunately they feel like they need to accommodate the lowest reader. Because it sells more, and money over rides everything. I hate it.
I'm just talking about this year man.