I am skeptical of anything like 600Mbps being offered to anyone at anything like an affordable price, but overall, sure, globally-available internet seems like a good thing.
Too bad we have to give up the night sky for it, though.
Too bad we have to give up the night sky for it, though.
We're going to have a lot of satellites and even space stations (hopefully) in our future, its just the way it is.
Exactly. If ITS/BFR/whatever it is right now actually starts launching in the next 10-15 years we'll be able to deploy (relatively) cheap space telescopes of all variety.
Even better, if it does get operational, we'll be able to build one or more observatories on the moon where you'll basically have a 14 day night at any point and they could be operated entirely remotely and actually be upgraded/changed as needed with manned missions showing up to swap out instruments.
You could even go drop a bunch of smaller-optic telescopes on the moon and use optical aperture synthesis to do some pretty impressive stuff. Spread little clusters all around the moon and you'd have an optical astronomer's dream come true. Similarly you could distribute a bunch of relatively small radio telescopes on the far side of the moon and aside from some communication relay satellites (which you could use lasers for) you'd have virtually no interference from Earth.
While it's certainly said for research from Earth right now, if Starlink gets profitable it gives SpaceX more money to develop better launch technology which opens up space for far cheaper science.
With Starlink we're talking about covering the whole world, not a 40 million country. So I believe it may be usable for rich people in rural areas, but in densely populated areas it stands no chance to LTE (and 5G is coming and promises lower latency than physically possible with Starlink).
I imagine usage is not evenly distributed between those nodes!
Also LTE connections are limited by the speed of the connection running to the base station. even worse, if that base station is on a microwave link to another tower that then has fiber running to it, expect slower speeds.
Also there is the phone hardware. Take Wi-Fi for a minute, which is a more controlled environment, the performance difference between different chipsets rated at the same speed can be huge! Firmware, drivers, and just how the chip is wired up. Plenty of opportunities to screw things up, sometimes even with the same chipset between different laptop manufacturers.
https://www.speedtest.net/insights/blog/samsung-galaxy-s10/ is a nice overview of how carriers cap speeds, though I have to say 50Mb/s isn't exactly shabby for a phone.
And finally, there is going to be a power trade off, I wonder how inefficient those LTE chips are when running full bore! Now I am curious as to what that graph looks like. :) Some sort ∩ shape I imagine where it starts being more efficient as you download faster so the radio is on for a shorter period of time, and then getting less efficient as you try to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the chipset.
Work is ongoing to reduce their visibility during twilight, and even during twilight it's not giving up the sky, just making a minor alteration.
For comparison, there are as many planes in the sky at any time as their second phase plan of 12,000 satellites, and planes are much more concentrated around where humans are. There is also something like 5000 satellites already in orbit.
Oppressive governments that don't like the internet aren't going to just allow the transceivers. They need line of sight to the sky and even if you hide them, detecting them would be trivial. Super rural areas and 3rd world areas have their own set of problems. I'm thinking of the OLPC type issues here. I'm all for spreading knowledge, but these areas have far bigger issues than internet access.
Personally, I view this as just another bulldozing a place of nature to build a hospital or something like that. Is that hospital useful? Undoubtedly. Is it worth having one less place of nature? Debatable.
The only difference is scale. We're talking about the destruction of a place of nature for the entire world. Over dramatized? I don't think so- there are many examples of people talking about looking up at the stars in wonderment, driving them to great things. Maybe that will still happen when there are thousands of satellites streaming by, but nobody has that foresight.
Sure he cooks on a fire because it's practical. You don't need to fetch gas/fuel for your stove. Now with Starlink you won't need to go to town once a week to check your bitcoin transactions.
> Too poor to make stove out of bricks
> Goes spend full day per week to go an check on their bitcoin transactions
Uh, are you sure you have a grounded understanding of what rural poverty means?
Starlink satellites are quite small and probably won't be very visible even when deployed. SpaceX is working to reduce "glare" so this will probably be further improved.
Even with a full grid deployed, I doubt you would see more than a dozen satellites at any given time. Someone probably has numbers so please correct me or chip in.
[0] http://astronomy.com/news/2020/01/with-more-spacex-starlink-...
Oh, I wasn't aware we were getting any choice in the matter? Isn't this SpaceX just putting whatever they want up there?