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> It feels different when it’s the government that theoretically represents people but when it’s one person that feels truly depressing.

I worked on technology for years that the FCC effectively killed for stupid reasons. So it’s heartening to me that someone can still just do stuff and build things. It’s amazing. If you asked me 10 years ago I would have thought that getting something like Starlink off the ground would’ve been impossible due to red tape.

I feel that way about street advertising, beautiful European cities with historical buildings all around and suddenly a big screen/panel asking you to buy whatever.

Change is inevitable. I love seeing artificial objects in space, because it shows that we, humanity, are finally getting there.

Elon doesn't own space, he just happens to be the one who is currently best at making it reachable. There is plenty of space for everyone else, and others will get there, eventually.

I could eat myself up with envy over the money he's making from it... or be glad that it's at least someone getting rewarded for moving humanity forward (while also being an asshole), rather than someone who is starting wars to profit from insider trading...

> It actually makes me sad to see that on person owns the night sky

SpaceX has many owners, especially post-IPO. You, too, can buy the sky and sell the sky.

There are various satellite finder apps. I suspect you'll find starlink satellites are mostly too dim to see - with most of what's visible being other older satellites

Even if it's a government, you pollute the whole sky instead of one country's. This should be done only as a joint world effort, something that is not going to happen. It is very sad.

I wonder if (this part specifically) is a solvable problem? Is it their altitude that causes them to shine? Perhaps finally a commercial use for Vantablack?

I'm the opposite, I feel more depressed when the government controls our lives instead of hard working people who've proven themselves in the marketplace.

This strikes me as NIMBYism at a global scale. At least you've got yours right!

Money is also a voting system. He can decide those things only because people voted for him with their money. The issue is, not everybody has same voting power in this system. But then again people who have more power were voted for previously by others. So it's kind of representative democracy.

It's hard to find hard numbers, but IIUC even ignoring Elon's Space Program:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/sp/gx04-who-owns-the-most-s...

* Most satellites were private owned, for communications or resource.

* Most government owned satellites have military use, the people that is trying to spy or nuke you or your neighbor.

* A small part is used for science and altruistic activities.

I feel the exact same way after I saw a Starlink line flying over. It made me feel like any sci-fi movie where your entire environment has been purchased and is controlled by corporations. It was a sad feeling knowing even the sky has been claimed by someone now with zero repercussions.

China's Falcon 9 clone (long march 10b) is ready to go. Will you feel better when most of those sky dots are Chinese?

You'll be sad to know there's another mf trying to put a mirror to reflect sunlight near twilight

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflect_Orbital

>what I think

Did you actually check with a satellite tracker, maybe show your kids and inspire them with what humanity can accomplish?

They'll also find a way to use LEO as a sky-based advertising platform.

It's not one person though. If zero people were using Starlink, then it would be that one person's vanity up there, but since it seems people do find it useful, those satellite lines represent humans being able to connect with modern technology out in the Sahara or in the ocean. For sailors to keep in touch with loved ones and to have a less dreary existence on long ocean voyages. And not to fret, China's managed to land a reusable rocket, so soon they'll have their own constellation up there so it's not just that one particular person making a mess of things.

What we're seeing is humanity managing to become a space faring civilization. I look up and yearn to be up there as well. I'll never make it to space, but it would give me such joy if my children's children had the opportunity to.

You can say what you want about Musk (I personally think that he is an appaling human being), but Starlink represents everybody who pays for starlink to get access to the internet, not just Elon.

You're not the only one: "Beyond the limit: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48787042

Oh I agree it's an aberration but it seems unavoidable

Why didn't governments try making it?

The US has tons of spy satellites, why not make some for the folks paying taxes? Why do we have to sell our firstborns (data) to Google for maps etc?

If you believe the hype, just wait until 2029 when it's not a person at all!

One person?

If a different person made them you would say "wow so cool I can see sattelies" now you are soyposting about muh kids. Grow up.

Russia and China are coming as well. Expect all big countries have hundreds of thousands of low orbit sats. It required in order to be a powerful military nation. Without it a country is doomed.

You can't launch or transmit without the government's permission.

Come off this nonsense.

The alternative is some company charging the government for the same exact thing.

"I saw something I didn't like, so I assumed it was the fault of a billionaire I don't like" didn't use to be the top voted comment on HN.

Starlink satellites have low orbits and only reflect sunlight around sunrise and sunset.

We live in a remote area with no surrounding lights, perfect for star watching.

It disgusts me that now, at all times, I can see strings of man made objects polluting the skies.

Agreed - I'd consider this public pollution caused by extremely greedy billionaires ruining the planet. They could only amass money because they did not care about social responsibilities prior to do so; any contrary statement made by them to this is only lies, lies and more lies.

Unfortunately you need a government that cares for the whole; in the USA oligarchs rule, so the general public are treated as paying slaves.

buddy our ancestors didn’t even have light at night nor heat/ac.

life for our kin will only be better.

we will have space stations where you can visit and see all the stars you want.

there will be space tourism and that will be pretty cool.

that’s what i wanted as a kid and its cool to see it play out irl.

edit: dang didn't expect so many negative people

Also, get off my lawn.

I'm in northern Wisconsin right now and the sky looks fucking amazing. Stop being so dramatic.

It’s adorable you think the government represents the people.

Think that the sky is one nuke away from being 100% clean at any given time.

Which government ? And based on the past few month, if your are thinking of the US governemnt; I can assure you that it is actively being harmful to me.

I have no love for SpaceX but at least I can take a subscription or invest and the stock and pretend that those satellites are beneficial to me.

There isn’t a single US government owned satellite that is not actively harmful to me at the moment.

> I don't understand the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India, where they have <.1% the money to spend on such things.

India is rapidly expanding fiber internet connectivity, even in rural areas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharat_Broadband_Network

In addition, 4G/5G coverage is extensive: https://www.ookla.com/articles/india-mobile-connectivity-1h2...

See India in this 5G global coverage map: https://www.ookla.com/articles/5g-map-2026

The number of people who are not covered by above-mentioned fiber/cell network, and can afford Starlink as it is priced now, will be extremely small (likely making Starlink unviable as a profitable business).

Here along the BC Coast, the organization I work for has an expansive sensor network. Weather stations, CTDs, custom equipment in watersheds, research facilities with all kinds of equipment to monitor, and so on. There is no broadband or fiber on remote islands along the coast. We used to use satellite internet, and getting data off of our main hubs (everything is relayed to the hubs by radio) was very slow and precarious. Since starlink it's a breeze. We will finally be able to get video feeds off of some of the stations; a totally untenable concept before.

Starlink has its uses, but I really don't understand those who get starlink while living in built-up areas.

Starlink is just a re-skin of the "Wireless optic" thing a lot of ISPs are pushing because they would prefer not having to lay cables and instead have everyone use 5g routers. Of course, the service isn't comparable, but regular people don't necessarily know it. Fiberoptic is still king, and probably will be for a long time.

There's nothing comparable to direct fiberoptic cable, and anyone who says otherwise immediately outs themselves as being a sellout or having anti-consumer motives. In 100 years it may be different, but I'm probably not going to be around in 100 years, so...

Family lives in Rio/Brazil. With the efforts from our government every year that passes, public safety becomes worse and suburban areas get more marginalized, it got to a point where the drug traffickers from my area start cutting the fibers and leaving letters on mailboxes saying that from now on, anyone who wanted internet had to get their illegal internet.

Which meant shitty speeds and if you have a problem with billing/service you cannot complain to anyone. Their service would go down for days and there is nothing you can do besides rely on shitty 4G. When Starlink became available in Brazil this was the lifesaver for my family

When COVID hit, I knew a lot of engineers who decided to move to rural areas / small farms because they could leverage Starlink to work remotely.

Last year, when I asked whether they still liked Starlink, all of them said it is amazing, but they had gotten fiber coverage in their area from a local provider, so they don't use it anymore, or just use it as a backup.

I think Starlink was a huge demand signal that there were people willing to pay a premium for faster-than-radio internet. So, unless they manage to be cheaper and faster than fiber, I don't think there is much of an endgame there.

But there are a few places that will need Starlink, like planes, cruise ships, and islands. I'm just not sure if that will justify that $1T valuation.

I think in most markets the advantage SpaceX has is it isn't paying huge fees for Spectrum, the frequencies it owns were very cheap. Eg in the USA I think the providers spent nearly $100 Billion on spectrum where SpaceX can compete without that cost.

I have a friend who lives 1.5hrs outside Toronto and needs Starlink because ISPs don’t offer anything useful. Same with a family member with a house even closer to Toronto. These aren’t far off North Ontario rural houses and there’s tons of people living up there.

From India here:

With their current pricing, they can't compete with local vendors. These local vendors charge like $10/month for 100-200mbps (vendor/bundle dependent) speeds, with no data-capping. For just $5 extra, they also bundle 20+ OTT channels, including netflix and prime video (HD only).

And yes, fiber connections are everywhere here for past 5 years... and I'm from a very small town here.

I have fiber (I can get up to 300 Gbps at my home in the Seattle area, but I got opted for the 2Gbps) and I have Starlink as backup/failover. I previously used my mobile service for that but learned the hard way that when there's a large internet outage in the area, as it did when we had a bad storm, so does mobile service, either power loss or it can't support the influx of everyone using their phone internet. So now I have starlink as a backup. It's a very small portable unit that I can also take when camping. It's a great service. Also it's powering a lot of airlines now, it's fast and reliable to the point I can watch youtube and tiktok on my flights.

Well, it has proven itself to be a very useful military asset in Ukraine.

The rural & underdeveloped area and the niche applications (ex: ships and planes) will bring-in some cash.

And in addition, the US Army will pretty much guaranty it to be in the green: it wants this capability plus some control over it.

If it was civilian only, I doubt the economics would make much sense, specially given the amount of satellites and their short lifespan combined with the overall shrinking market (rural flight to cities + fiber deployment on land).

In much of the US, internet companies run a racket. While there are often multiple providers to choose from, if you want reliable service at good speeds, you end up with two, or if you're really lucky, three options. One of those options is Starlink.

There's a market for it, think internet on vacation, on ships, trains, planes, and underdeveloped / remote areas (some of which skipped wired internet entirely and just have 3/4/5G).

But you're also showing a lot of bias and ignorance towards Africa and India and their financial means.

I don’t know why India is mentioned here.

I live in India and have used 1Gbps Fiber since almost 10 years and pay only 40$ for it. Internet access in India is quite cheap and fiber is quite easily available

I think that while Starlink is a technical innovation its primary benefit is as a political innovation: it lets you sidestep a lot of politics.

Rural communities in the US should have high speed internet, just like efforts were made to give them electricity back in the day. But the layers of politics and dysfunction in the way are deep.

> I don't understand the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India

Many in Canada have no broadband options. My gf has this because otherwise, no internet access. Even cellphone reception is spotty where she is in rural Canada.

I have a really good friend who used Starlink for his cottage in Canada and as soon as there was broadband he switched away. Starlink was unreliable and slow compared to what he has now.

In my country today the people who use it the most are in northern cities that don't even have roads going to them.

There's many isolated communities abroad that benefit from this coverage. Plus, when I begin my solo sailing adventure, I intend to use Starlink as my primary method to maintain contact, of course with traditional methods serving as backup.

Many places have incompetent government that can't/won't build proper infrastructure. For example, the US has allocated around $50B for rural broadband and almost nothing has been built.

Australian here. We generally have 1st world internet for most towns. The moment you are outside suburbia, speeds are embarrassingly slow. On my own farm, we dont even have power, or city water, and little to no mobile / cellular reception. We are like hundreds of thousands of other people with rural property here. I suspect the same is true in New Zealand, much of South America, Pacific Islands, Indian Ocean Islands, rural Canada, and often times rural USA.

Fiber deployment is bottlenecked by Baumol's Cost Disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect. There's basically no productivity gains being made in how quickly skilled laborers can deploy fiber. Like everything else involving skilled labor, the price keeps going up.

India really has very deep penetration of 5g, and at very low cost. There might be a rare place that starlink might be needed but really I cannot image starlink having much consumer/retail uptake in india. Not needed, and too expensive. There might be commercial users - offshore rigs etc, but india is too densely populated for there to be many 'truly remote' locations.

India has still not permitted starlink to start ops.

In Europe, even rural areas tend to be fairly close to cities, whereas in North America, lots of farms are really remote. This map from NASA [0] should give you an idea of how remote some areas can be.

Now, 99% of these areas have electricity from the grid and analogue phone lines, so there's no reason why we couldn't also run fibre out to them, but for political reasons that's fairly unlikely to happen anytime soon.

[0]: https://assets.science.nasa.gov/content/dam/science/esd/eo/i...

> I don't understand the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India

You just said it yourself:

> Then, only months later, but after years of planning:

Starlink is no replacement for fiber, but even all across the EU and the US there are many places without fiber access.

> I don't understand the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India, where they have <.1% the money to spend on such things.

Starlink has a Military arm called Starshield. If strategically important to US military and other militaries who are partners of the USA, that will be many millions/billions.

https://www.spacex.com/starshield

Subsidies make anything possible. Your grandkids will be paying for that fibre. Starlink is revolutionary for long last-mile links that will never be economic.

Recently I flew on a long-distance (so at least a dozen hours of flight time) low-budget airline that had 60 Mbps download/12 Mbps upload and it specifically called out SpaceX Starlink for being able to provide this for free. A video call went smoothly. There was connectivity from takeoff to landing with no interruption in between. This was the best airline experience I've had yet.

Outside of war, ships and planes, I agree with you, that their benefit doesn’t seem like all that.

But then again, I never thought WiFi would take over wired network cables, but now even my desktop is connected with WiFi.

I also didn’t think cellular would be a replacement for copper or fiber, but now my modem for the apartment is 5G.

Both ended up being good enough, easier and cheaper (!)

Its also a pricing thing; in Australia our nationalised provider keeps getting more expensive, starlink is now getting cost-competitive.

I'd agree with the last part of your comment. Because at least India doesn't depend upon Starlink for broadband access. Even in remote regions, now that it has seen first hand what modern economic and tech blockade means (after struggling for decades with older sanctions including related to nuclear tests and thank goodness it did that), it really isn't very keen on Starlink and wants home-grown alternatives (which definitely will take time) and also is now indicating to multiple players that they are welcome (but within limits and regulations).

Musk isn't pushing Starlink for "upside" for the people or your "central EU", or Africa, or India, or the moon (let's just assume for the time being), Musk is hoping to saturate the market and remain the only player or only major player, and Musk wants that perceived dependency as a weapon, as a tool of control. I won't be shocked if Musk later lobbies for "ah, too many satellites up there already.. it'd be dangerous to send more… ". In fact I am counting on that.

> where they have <.1% the money

That's another part where, again, I'd agree with the last part of your comment. That country has so many people that just from one region if enough rich people (and sadly with the great divide there are way too many), if they need it, it will outspend too many countries from Europe single-handedly when it comes to Starlink or satellite Internet access.

Having said that, these things are not this black and white… but I've tried at least one part, or rather a fraction of one part I'd say.

Satellite Internet is one of the best things I'd say but I'd bet my spare kidney that not in the hands of Musk and Musk is trying hard that he/Starlink becomes the almost single player, first mover etc etc.

It's very popular in rural US where running wired broadband is cost prohibitive.

There are many parts of the US that are very spread out, and thus running wires to every home is expensive without subsidies.

Elon turning off Russian access to Starlink by whitelisting only authorized terminals in the region was a turning point for Ukraine's success. The conflict has proven that modern warfare depends on Starlink and its mimics.

I am from Sri Lanka, which is a large island.

We have a smaller number of ISPs due to the cost of submarine cables, and ISP prices were high due to profit-seeking. After Starlink came, the incumbent ISPs started to offer unlimited packages for the first time.

Also, Starlink is good as a backup connection for rural areas too.

There are many places, even in the US, where your only alternative is--believe it or not--dial-up modems. Others had painfully slow--1 Mbps up, 5 Mbps down--Internet.

Same. I bought a cabin, which had the equivalent of pretty good DSL. I got starlink and immediately cancelled it when 2gbps fiber arrived 9mo later. Fiber is rolling out faster than a lot of people think.

It works on planes, ships, and in remote areas with no coverage. I live in Canada where the whole of Europe would fit many times over, nothing else would work in the remote areas at that scale. My parents live in Panama and use starlink to get reliable high speed internet at the beach. Even when the power goes out, their solar panels keep the internet online.

Fibre is better if you have a static point on land like a farm. It works less well if you're in a moving vehicle or if you're at sea.

I wouldn't be surprised if the EU and ISPs are funding fibre to remote locations _because_ of Starlink competition.

Taxis and minicabs all over the world were unreliable, expensive, and unsafe before Uber came along with some healthy competition. The same dynamic is happening here between Starlink and rural fibre.

I have a good friend who relies upon Starlink for connectivity for his home in southeastern Ohio (USA).

We've worked through all of the other alternatives there, including using cellular modems with directional antennas mounted up high on a mast pipe and multi-carrier aggregation tricks like Speedify. There is no local WISP serving the area, no fiber, no coax for DOCSIS, and xDSL is either a bad joke, basically basically abandoned, or both in much of the US in 2026.

So far, Starlink is the win.

(I'm pleased to hear that things are better than that for you in your neck of the woods.)

Eeh even ther its a stretch , when people talk about Africa - they should really specify where exactly. PLaces like SouthAfrica [1] already have a robust Fiber network with accelerated buildout of FTTH. Ditto for most of Eastern Africa countries which have FTTH to most of the major cities and subururbs with accelerated buildouts ongoing. Unless its a conflict area most regions are getting wired up pretty fast to enhancce business connectivity - the speeds and bandwith for starlink make noe economic sense once a developing pop are factored in.The only major push for many countries approvals is basically strong armed and shaken down by the US admin on behalf of Musk[2].

[1]https://ctcommunications.co.za/blog/south-africa-fiber-rollo...

[2]https://tech.yahoo.com/science/articles/us-pushes-nations-fa...

I feel like no-earth orbit is always going to beat out low-earth orbit in the long-term. I live an area that the USDA classifies as rural and I now have multiple fiber options, including municipal. This isn't to say that Starlink doesn't have its place and I only see it becoming more niche over time and facing more competition in the LEO segment.

From a purely utilitarian standpoint, direct to cell feels like a good thing to me. Large swathes of Scotland don't even have sufficient mobile connection to send a text message (some people will tell you that's a good thing, but I'm not one of them).

Europe is too well-run (even the poorer parts) for Starlink to be as relevant.

Having lived in Central America, imagine all the workers that are laying the internet cables going back at night and digging them up to sell. A government that, 50% of the time, won't actually build anything when given the funding, and usually can't get the funding anyways. Plus, in some parts, weather can result in internet going out and, given the government, staying out for quite a while.

It's a fair point that those in poorer places will have less money, but for instance, Mexico's Starlink pricing is pretty standard, it's like 50-100 EUR per month. They pay it anyways because they need it, and because it's the best option.

Starlink is a great decentralization for anyone living under corrupt dysfunctional governments, where they can't rely on that centralized system.

Starlink is a problem that solves itself. If enough fiber rolls out that there's no more customers, they'll scale back satellites (since they only last 3-5 years).

I live in a major Indian city and 1 gig fiber up and down is $30. We've also got really good 4G/5G in most places. Also in the super remote areas WiMAX is (still) an option.

I suppose one real upside is that in very regulated areas with only one operator this gives them some baseline regarding service that they actually need to beat.

People who live out in rural areas. Think farmers, or just people who love living out on their own lands, common enough in the US. I have a friend who lives off Starlink internet, it would cost way too much to get internet all the way to his property, not really worth it.

Here in Alaska it’s literally better than the cable internet (except apparently for gaming but I don’t really game), and $10/mo cheaper for a starlink roam.

At where we are building our cabin, it’s infinitely cheaper than the alternatives lol.

There's a lot of places without fiber, e.g. all the ships/jets etc. there's a lot of low-density areas, there's islands with no internet or VERY expensive internet

One place where fiber cables cannot reach would be... way up in the air. Think about how many people fly each day and then remember how poor internet connectivity and speeds are at 40,000 ft.

So Starlink in flights seems like a perfect fit.

Starlink is a military project, but they dont say that in public.

The obvious is the cost of deploying. You don't need to dig to add cable. Full country coverage. Worldwide customers.

How much did EU taxpayers spend to make that possible?

Here in rural USA, we were paying $150 for very slow DSL, and now we're paying about $50 for quite fast Starlink.

In Asia I was paying $50 for very fast fiber, but that was in a major city; out at the farm you're on the mobile networks. So if I build a house out there and can do Starlink, I will do it.

Plus, there's the whole Starlink Roam thing: in California this summer, I see more and more vans with the little Starlink rectangle on top. "Work from Campsite" is pretty compelling, honestly.

I live in the suburbs in the bay area in California, and starlink offers a significantly better quality of service than charter spectrum cable service, which is my only other option. Considering the current state of our government, I don't see things improving anytime soon.

i live a few miles west of core Palo Alto (technically, still in Palo Alto); Starlink is my only real choice for broadband, and it's great.

one difference is that fiber isn't mobile.

Though all these satellites might give fixed-location folks higher bandwidth, they could also service many more concurrent mobile customers. Connectivity would probably be better too because more satellites would be in view.

Also, don't underestimate the benefit of robust competition, even if you don't use starlink.

I am also in rural EU and have 1 house that has fiber, and another, 10 minute drive away has nothing, not even cell signal and it won't get anything any time soon. Starlink is basically the only option.

I live in an area of the US where the only alternatives are 3.5 megabit DSL which stops working when it rains or Hughesnet, so basically no real competition at all.

Most people hate Comcast’s and att duopoly so much that’s reason enough to get starlink. I just got it in ca and it works very well

In America for my lifetime I have never been able to get fiber and it’s because America is too large and I live in an affluent suburb.

How much did it cost to have fiber ran to your house from the road?

India has one of the fastest and cheapest internet in the world. In fact you can get an extremely fast download atop Himalayan mountains in comparison to remote USA

Maybe it’s about the power to control the internet (and what is does and doesn’t serve) worldwide.

It's closer to only 10% the money to spend on such things, and that gap is closing rapidly. The poorest African countries these days still have a GDP in the low thousands per capita, and poorish central Europe trends to have low tens of thousands per capita. I could see 5 families in rural west Africa or something deciding to pool their funds to get one shared Starlink connection if they didn't have cheaper internet available some other way.

Moreover the utility of internet connection faces an extreme amount of diminishing returns - hear me out on this. You can very easily download an entire plaintext book on a subject you need to study up on in a few seconds with even a 100 Kbps connection, from any where and for any reason, and that's immensely valuable if previously you didn't have access to it before. You can't stream YouTube on it, but a YouTube instructional victory makes whatever you're doing merely easier, not possible.

WhatsApp and text messages, as well. It's very cheap to send a couple bytes back and forth to coordinate eg local market prices in fish, and so if you and a couple buddies team up to get one starlink connection you can very quickly tear the volatility of your local first market prices to shreds. I'm extrapolating from an earlier study that found just such an effect after cell phones were introduced to rural areas.

I guess my overall point is don't rule out the transformative effects that a few very reliable low bandwidth connections can have on an area. If the Romans discovered AM radio (possible given their late tech) we'd probably all still be speaking Latin, even though they couldn't play Fortnite.

Not all of us live in places with EU funding. I worked at a rural farm in California and the EU refused to fund our network infrastructure. We had few reliable options, and Starlink turned out to be the best.

This was always the sour economics of satellite internet.

Satellite internet works for a low density of customers spread evenly across the globe. But customers are not spread evenly they mostly live in megalopolist regions that can be served more efficiently with land infrastructure.

Worse most of the people not in the megalopolists have less money to spend on internet services.

So your customer base are limited to people who aren't already served by better/cheaper terrestrial internet, but who can pay for better internet.

Those people exist but the history of satellite internet service hasn't been a massive money printer. Most providers have struggled to stay solvent let alone produce great returns for shareholders.

Paul Allen wanted to build a megaconstellation back in the 1990s but then Iridium went bankrupt twice.

Iridium ended up being rescued by the US military. I wonder if this is ultimately SpaceX's plan.

I have a friend who does not live that remote in Australia and his choice is either "satellite" internet or starlink.

It's not even a choice because "skymuster" (the satellite option) can't even be considered internet. I remember him taking about getting 7 seconds of latency at one point. It's actually impressive how terrible it is.

Everyone at sea, uses them now.

> EU funding brought fiber to my farm area

Yes, boondoggle subsidies allow you to un-economically bring fiber to a subset of random places. I say this as the beneficiary of one such boondoggle. It doesn't scale well

seems like starlink is useful for armed conflicts

This is a military tech.

I live in Norway. Starlink is cheaper than FTTH by a country mile. At the very least it's going to force down prices for fiber providers.

Also just because FTTH exists does not mean it's reliable.

India? LOL, India has internet connectivity of scale the kind most other countries couldn't dream of. Though most of it, sadly, is IPV4 and concentrated in oligopolies (which for now are still "generous" enough to give us 5G for cheap).

> the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India

Which together have four times more people than the EU. Needs of the many outweigh, you know

India? It has the world’s cheapest data rates and nearly 90% of the population have 5G coverage. They don’t need this.

24/7 high fidelity radar of the entire earth’s surface. Probably used by NRO’s sentient system and similar classified skynet projects

People in rural parts of America where ISPs don't want to expand into.

I suspect what is going on is just a matter of relative density. I'm not sure what you mean exactly by "central EU," but just guessing from a map I get Romania as the least population dense country that I would think of as Central Europe at 83 / km3. That is more than double the US pop density and if it were a US state only 15 out of 50 would be more dense. So then taking the least population dense region of the least dense country I get Tulcea with 23 / km3. That's 66% of the density of the US (37) which would come in at 34 / 50 if it were a US state.

So the most sparsely populated region of the most sparsely populated country in Central Europe is just a bit below average for the US. Our least dense state is Alaska at 0.5 / km3 or almost 50x less dense than that. But that's almost cheating. So lets take mainland only and that's Wyoming, with 2.3, so 10x less densely populated than the outlier in Central Europe.

So basically the US is just really damn empty to the point there just isn't any comparison in Central Europe and that's why it's so hard to get internet access out there.

Elon is probably setting sup the infra for space data centers.

India can lay some fiber. The secret is that every time a road gets repaved it gets dug up a week later so easy conduit pathway.

(Citation: lived in Gurugram for a few years where I witnessed the same 100ft of sidewalk get rebricked and torn up monthly at least 20 times)

My parents live in New York State, 8 miles from the main east-west transportation and data corridor. They still have no high speed wired internet options. No fiber, no cable, no DSL, and dialup ISP has been retired long ago. Their only option is satellite. This is in 4th most populous state in the US, and #1 highest GDP/capita. Internet across the United States does not have the penetration many think, the US is vast.

I live not to far from NYC and I think it’s fantastic. Comcast was charging me 75 a month and Starlink charges me 40 for the same service which is generally excellent

You are in a dense population. A large chunk of the world (and many people even in the US) are in low density environments where fiber rollouts are too expensive.

You’d be surprised how poor broadband Internet coverage is outside of major metropolitan areas in the United States. Some places are simply off-grid, or have to rely on dial up. All you have to do is drive an hour out and there’s no more Internet.

But would that have happened that way if Starlink hadn't come about?

It's good to have option in case your own government turns rogue.

the next generation of satellites base stations that are currently going up remove the need for base stations

you’ll have similar throughout and latency direct to your phone

but since this dream has been mired by delays, the starlink base station is still convenient

lots of people that would otherwise be stationary for reliable internet can go on the road

week long festival campsites have lots of people who aren’t taking any PTO that connect to their teams during the day time, while everyone else has nonexistent cellular service solely due to the overloaded networks

I would wager that most don’t unsubscribe to starlink in between time they just increase their mobility since its suddenly practical

speaking of PTO, if they are accumulating it but now travelling and never using it then its functionally a raise, all because they keep a starlink subscription

bigger satellites will bring that to everyone

You’ve clearly never lived in the US! Big place, not a lot of fiber.

You’re not dumb. It has come up in extremely sophisticated valuations of SpaceX pre-IPO, if I recall off the top of my head, the only business that actually had any value, StarLink, assumes an irrational TAM.

Surely funding cell towers in Africa / India is cheaper and easier to maintain than 100k satellites in space.

but is providing access to internet for billions of people worth not being able to see the big dipper as clearly at night? I say yes, but only just barely

That’s great and I’m happy for her. Progress should be for all, not just the developed elite hanging out in tech circles.

Alas, Not In My Low Earth Orbit.

Once upon a time, people did long RV trips without internet access. Or even (cellular) phone access.

Gotta be online 24/7 or what?

This is a very wasteful way of getting communications to somewhat compensate the lack of competition in US telco market.

we should lay fiber about it, not do this wasteful atmosphere polluting bullshit

Do you know what also is important?

To know when a asteroid is on its way to us.

All that satellites make discovering them more difficult.

If your trip to desert is worth polluting whole low orbit and high atmosphere is debatable. Same goes for hypothetical business there. Maybe building towers would be a better idea in long term.

* only when you’re outdoors with good line of sight and only in geographic areas they allow.

Do we really need that? Most of us are fine with relays. The coverage in remote parts could be handled by way fewer sattelites. 100k is a lot of sattelites. Seems that with 100k leo we’d have 24/7 live coverage of every inch on earth but do we really want that?

Internet works on phones?

The more you know.

It also creates a private internet on which “private enterprise” does not have to abide by the Constitution or any subordinate laws.

Sure, it’s just “fear mongering” now, just like digital ID, digital currency, mass surveillance, and speech police were 30 or so years ago, but what happens when terrestrial cable internet gets too expensive and everyone’s subject to Elon’s space internet?

It’s basically the similar playbook as the cable/copper phone network giving way to the internet and wireless and … whoopsie … you also have a tracking and permanent surveillance device on you with no ability to keep thousands of corporations harvesting your body for data and information.

I may have blown the math, but the last time I calculated I figured there were about 35 Starlink satellites above the horizon at my latitude. Looking into the suburban early night sky I see zero, one, or two satellites with about equal probability.

I think the hypothesis this leads to is that the "don't shine" techniques Starlink is using are working. I'm guessing the ones I see are either not Starlink or are Starlinks transitioning to their working orbit (they don't do full "dark mode" until they are in place.) If in place units shown I'd see a lot more.

So at least, maybe it won't all be gloom and doom. But if it is all gloom, at least it will have little sparkles floating around it.

If you don't take long exposures, the satellites won't cause you much trouble seeing the stars. Regular light pollution is the problem.

It will be the first generation with widespread space travel. My children will have consumer access to a view that no one had seen until 1961 and only government employees had seen since.

light pollution already means the night sky is largely invisible outside of remote areas

Also the last generation to not frequent space. See the night sky up close.

At Farpoint Observatory, this is a major concern for those keeping an eye out for near Earth objects.

You can only see satellites during twilight when they can reflect sunlight. Don't panic.

Many people have never seen that properly due to light pollution.

go outside right now and look up. it's still there.

Satellites only reflect sunlight when in sunlight. This only happens near sunrise and sunset.

The night sky will be unaffected by satellites for the foreseeable future.

Simultaneously though, those 80% of Americans that live in cities/within the typical commuting distance of a metropolitan area are also the ones that are usually serviced by at least one broadband or fiber provider. Because of this:

- Having slowly-increasing pressure on those often-monopoly broadband/fiber carriers because people have the option to swap to Starlink, adds competitive pressure for them to improve their service, reduce prices, etc

- The remaining 20% of the population that lives on the 60-80%+ of the land who currently have terrible options, but fit well within the density restrictions of current-gen Starlink satelites, suddenly have options

The new satellites are like 100x better.

Um yeah but the transmission path is longer and the equipment and signal processing on each hop also adds latency. I really doubt it'll make much of a difference.

I remember ~20 years ago upgrading my house line to get something crazy like 0.5mbs and the sales guy telling me that I didn't really need it and was wasting money upgrading from my current ~0.2mbs.

Those numbers are fudged of course, I don't remember exactly how long ago or from what to what I was upgrading. My point is that we've always been having people say you don't need faster internet. And yet, I still want, and use, faster internet. 200mbs I would consider fine. But I'd still feel the difference at 500mbs or 1gbs.

>Nobody will ever need more than 640k of RAM

Eh, I've got 200mb/s fiber for cheap. It's pretty good and definitely bottlenecked by crowded wifi and upstream sources moreso than the ISP. Ethernet helps somewhat.

At the same time, I do kind of want more bandwidth just so I can download massive files like model weights quickly, host a web service out of my own house, seed torrents, etc. What might cryptocurrency look like if typical residential internet speeds were measured in gb/s? Perhaps bitcoin might be capable of more than 7 tps!

But to be fair, I am a nobody.

Yes, it would seem so.

I like him! :D

Relevant news from the past week:

"A joint investigation by The Insider, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde":

https://theins.press/en/inv/294635

Basically Russia and China are collaborating in taking down Starlink. Leaked documents showing the plans.

They don't mention social media opinion shaping, but then again the leaked documents are from 2023.

Why do you put the onus on everyone else to make excuses? It sounds very entitled.

It's an American company polluting the night sky for the entire world, for a service that will ultimately be access gated by the US government/private industry. That's where the negative sentiment is coming from. Who cares which of the many equally shitty US billionaires/oligarchs is funding it?

I think the main goal is direct to phones rather than being an alternative to fiber. But it's also a very good option for people living in rural areas with poor service (shoddy DSL).

Your comment was interesting.

i just read somewhere about spacex slowly destroying our dark night skies due to their satellite constellations. Thoughts?

I love being off-grid with just my slow inReach Mini 1. I can communicate in case of an emergency, but otherwise it's a great forcing function to not be hyper connected. I worry if I brought the portable Starlink with I'd connect much more than necessary.

> I'd love to be rid of all of it, but that's not how the world works today.

Why do we think the human made world is out of our control? Learned helplessness? We could stop this. We do not need Satrlink.

Starlink will fail. And this will be more likely the more satellites they put up[1][2]. Or the more wars we get in. It will not be hard to cause a major destruction of all Starlink satellites [3].

[1] https://outerspaceinstitute.ca/crashclock/ [2] https://spectrum.ieee.org/kessler-syndrome-crash-clock [3] https://gizmodo.com/russia-is-developing-orbiting-clouds-of-...

Starlink has an unfair advantage and is flown on the economically unbeatable falcons.

right panic, wrong fear

starlink are too low to cause kessler syndrome... but his starmind might

Don't forget MacroHard

It's not physically impossible. But the engineering reality isn't promising.

You'd need micro-meter alignment accuracy across the constellation for optical observation. For radio observation it might be possible - but I'm not sure if it would be useful.

Launching complimentary ordinary space-telescopes would also be good PR.

With modern automation and AI, tracking and adjusting paths is better every year. Also, anything with malfunctioning movement will quickly descend and burn up in the atmosphere at that very low orbit.

Space could become so full of junk that it may actually harm operations.

Yes and I'll become another space industry. Cleanup. Sort of like how (coal/ocean/etc) pollution is both a problem and multi billion dollar a year industry.

Satellites flying at 360km (the target altitude for starlink V3) deorbit very quickly without regular burns. Dead starlink satellites are guaranteed to come down within 5 years.

space is very large but low earth orbit is not.

Sounds like a job for Vantablack

"University of Surrey is developing Vantablack as a coating for satellites in earth orbit, to reduce encroachment upon ground-based optical astronomy."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack

Who's paying for this cable?

Elon mentioned he is building army of robots. This likely could be a way to manage them.

If you think cable can be run to the places where starlink is changing to world, you need to get out more.

I’ve seen it in the Canadian Arctic, remote Australia, right around Africa.

Before starlink these places had dialup, or nothing.

And: What are the externalities of this? The current 10700 satellites are expected to have a lifespan of about five years. So, averaging these burning up in the upper atmosphere there will be one deorbit ever four hour.

If I were to ask my relevant government regulator if I were allowed to burn the equivalent of a few electric cars every day without capturing/scrubbing the pollution they would laugh me out of the room.

But ”in space” nobody can hold you accountable, so burning an order of magnitude more like this is somehow on the table.

SpaceX has spent under $30 billion for Starlink.

That's less than maintenance opex for mobile networks operators in the US alone.

LVT works just as well in space.

Starlink is going to be a cellular company, except instead of maintaining cheap metal frames, they have to physically launch the antennas to space every 5 years.

How would it work indoors?

Exactly. Elon Musk does things for (1) fun (2) revenue in order to fuel his real mission: derisk humanity by conquering Mars.

Applied to who?

I'm using it for this purpose. You can just run a tunnel/tailscale net/dyndns.

You do get a public IPv6 IP, which is fine for most people (and with a simple script on a cron can keep a AAAA up to date, not that it changes often). And like someone else said, if you insist, you can use something like tailscale to punch a hole in Starlink's global NAT.

i have one

There are also several Chinese satellite constellations which will expand more quickly once several Chinese partially reusable rockets are online.

I feel like I already have internet access pretty much everywhere with cell towers, and even then if I went to the middle of alaska or montana I could already get sattelite internet before starlink with hugesnet which is fine as long as you're not gaming or something.

But at the same time I think the low-earth-orbit is pretty nice in terms of latentcy, it's a pretty innovative approach.

I just don't get the idea behind AI datacenter sattelites and moving all this non-comms equipment up in space.

Maybe he literally means that Space X is wort to him more than the rest of Earth.

People are complaining about their views getting polluted, they’re not saying they literally can’t see the night sky. If you’d like hn comments to be smarter, consider starting with your own.

You can’t get nuanced, well thought out takes here on anything AI and Elon related unfortunately.

It’s frustrating because I often come to HN for the smart contrarian takes. But now I have to search really hard to find the opposite.

The mistake was thinking the majority was smart.

There’s a lot of Elon haters here;

Anything related to Elon will always have the dumbest comment section.

You know it’s dumb when they say things like “it’s not needed. We already have this. i don’t see the point in this new tech” .

I've read the entire series of Culture novels and don't recall seeing "starmind" as a term anywhere. Mind, yes, but used in a somewhat different context, as the minds are both sentient conversational AI entities with equal or greater intellect to a meat-based human or alien, and also semi-godlike AI powers (a single Mind has the capacity to have a 1:1 conversation with all of the residents of an Orbital if it wants to).

Nothing with that kind of reach on licensed bands for that kind of money with that sort of bandwidth.

Think of it less as a comms system with a small increase in bandwidth, and more as a radar system with a larger increase in resolution.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A

People seem to have a poor understanding of just how much space there is up there. It's just very empty up there. And these things are in precisely controlled orbits that are well documented, etc. Even if you simplify your thinking of orbits to a 2D (square area), it's a lot of space.

But that would be a mistake of course. Low earth orbit is three dimensional. Star Link uses several altitude bands of about 20-30km each. It's 330-360km for the v3 satellites. The volume of that is about 17 billion cubic kilometers. About 13x the volume of all the water in the oceans. Accidental collisions are not going to be a frequent thing. These things are going to be many kilometers apart.

If you truly gave a shit, it wouldn’t be this you’re complaining about

You want them to pay a multi-trillion dollar clean-up and cancer fund for car-sized multi-year-service-life satellites burning up in the atmosphere? How much do you want incumbent multi-decade culprits to pay?

EDT: I should have clarified I'm not only talking about incumbent satellite companies because people are replying about the launch volume. Think about pollution from oil companies and coal plants and consider how that compares to an aerospace company. How much have polluting companies been fined relative to multiple trillions of dollars?

Do you have any proof that starlink satellites are worse than the tons of space debris that enter the atmosphere every day?

The amount of matter which enters Earth's atmosphere from non-manmade sources is far higher than any conceivable amount of space junk today.

"...we're good." ? It seems that you are excluding all of the actual users onboard with Starlink tech. I'm one. I had choices and Starlink was a welcome addition to the short list.

In a short time, Starlink proved to be that disruptive "invention" that changed everything. There are already millions of users. Nobody is forced to use Starlink. Yet here we are.

Whether there are investors or not, a positive cashflow and the millions of users prove that Starlink is not just valid to our society at large, but wildly so. My opinion is that it is almost as disruptive as cell phones when they became affordable.

Current number of paid subscriptions: 12 million +. So, actual users is many times that, if subscribers generally represent multiple users per account. Think "Household". And then, if one extrapolates users under institutional, municipal, state or military, the numbers are astronomically increased. Just, individuals walking around inside a Dollar General store...

> for 99.9% of everyone else? we're good!

Well Starlink has 12 million subscribers, which is already more than 0.1% of the population, so clearly you are incorrect that 99.9% of people don't want it...

imagine thinking you speak for the 99.9% lol

Starlink was funded internally by SpaceX. What investors are you talking about?

Eh, his promises are ambitious.

And the gullibility of his investors is bottomless.

I too plan on increasing my revenue 100-fold by 2030.

Say what you will, but it's staying above cloud providers.

You can’t imagine the number of lives saved with cellular access everywhere and Internet broadband where it has never been?

It won't be centuries.

starlink satellites are in low orbits and will deorbit in a few years at most if bricked; to stay in orbit, they use ion thrusters to counter drag from the very uppermost reaches of the atmosphere.

https://ai-solutions.com/newsroom/why-starlink-is-lowering-s...

Kessler is much less of a problem at their altitude (480km). Debris has too much drag and would get pulled down too quick to have a sustained Kessler situation. It's possible, but very very unlikely at that altitude.

Kessler syndrome relies on two key provisions:

1. Orbiting objects never try to avoid each other.

2. They're in high enough orbits that atmospheric drag is not a significant factor such that debris can last decades or centuries.

Starlink fails both as they constantly maneuver and they're in low orbits that are constantly cleaned by the atmosphere.

And I'd add that "kessler syndrome" is actually a statistical process, not a rapid sudden cascade of satellites crashing into each other. It takes years to decades for it to actually "happen". It's not something that can be caused by military action either.

Stop trying to make Kessler syndrome a thing - it was never a thing, it isn’t a thing, it will never be a thing.

It is just pearl clutching by those too afraid of modern life. Gravity wasn’t a documentary.

Europe alone has millions of potential customers:

https://www.esa.int/Applications/Connectivity_and_Secure_Com...