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Comment by apexalpha | Hacker News Reader

So I guess companies will now fill the entire global sky with thousands of sats just to make up for the fact that the US government ignores rural houses when it comes to digital infrastructure?

I'm sorry but how is 42Mbps worth spamming the entire nightsky with to the point that it prevent astronomers from obtaining useful data? Not even 10Mbps upload?

My inlaws live in a village in France that has 70 people total. It's 25min drive to a bakery, 45min drive to anything resembling a supermarket. I'd say it's rural.

They now have 16Mbps *DSL and are scheduled to get Fiber in 2021. Next village already has it.

But because the American government refuses to invest in infrastructure the rest of the planet just has to accept some American company is going to put 14,000 sats in low orbit?

Besides the progress this resembles I still think it's pretty strange the US government can greenlight this plan even though it has global implications.

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But are all villages in France like that? I doubt it.

Even in Norway there are thousands of people without access to sufficiently fast broadband, and some 80k DSL customers who apparently will never get fiber at all. The proposed solution for the latter is to use 4G/5G, which comes with its own issues of course.

I'd say even in well developed countries, Starlink is a nice option to have. As I understand it, the 42Mbps they see now is only going to improve as well.

Eventually everyone is going to get connected, yes.

I mean someone in Norway also had to draw a powerline to these people, to use electricity. Why not draw a fiber link, too? It's just part of infrastructure.

I'm not saying that Starlink isn't useful. I'm just really wondering what the implications for astronomy are going to be, whether we will always see these things at dusk.

Now it's Starlink, but what if 3 or 4 companies in total want to have a network? What if on top of that China and India want their own, just like GPS?

It just seems we're running head first into this without anyone thinking of the implications or governance of it.

You don’t need to draw a power line if you can just tap to a local mountain river

I think it'll be nicely self regulated. It's expensive to run, those that are not profitable will not be able to maintain their network and being in low orbit, those satellites will fall into the sky and burn up.

> I'm just really wondering what the implications for astronomy are going to be

More space based telescopes?

Hopefully using satellites like this is a temporary solution for the next decade or two until we have a better solution.

Their limited lifespan is what makes me much less pessimistic than I would be. They have relatively high maintenance costs which means that if utilization is low, it won't make sense to keep replacing them.

The power lines were, to a large extent, built with U.S. money after the war. Many rural areas have seen little infrastructure investments since then.

Anyway, if governments, businesses and individuals care enough then it's easy enough to develop that infrastructure now. The satellites will come down in a few years.

Who volunteers to tell Musk?

Yes I think all French villages have at least super fast ADSL.

The US is much larger than France of course, but whatever the reason, it's incredible and really upsetting that they can pollute the earth like this, and for the rest of eternity, just to solve a temporary domestic problem.

The satellites deorbit automatically. You are misinformed.

> The US is much larger than France of course, but whatever the reason, it's incredible and really upsetting that they can pollute the earth like this, and for the rest of eternity, just to solve a temporary domestic problem.

Temporary domestic problem? It's a problem worldwide, the fact that France can get fast ADSL almost everywhere doesn't means it's true worldwide.

Wireless has the advantage of not needing a huge infrastructure locally, which is a huge help where you don't have any. I remember a presentation from Charles Sirois, one of the guy that brought cellular networks to Quebec. He told us how he helped build some cellular networks in some place where they didn't even have phones. Sure I have no doubt it wasn't easy to build theses towers, but it was certainly much easier than bringing cable to every single building. Every business had cellphones afterward, it was a huge boom, it helped develop so many industry.

Now imagine the same but with freaking internet. This is going to be a huge boom for so many third world countries.

But no you are right, France can pay to lay fiber everywhere, theses third world country should just do the same, they are just not trying enough.

Ah yes, third world countries. That's what Musk is after, that great philanthropist.

ADSL and super-fast don't go together as adjectives. ADSL is by far now a legacy technology.

You are ignoring millions of people in rural Asia and Africa who don't have internet connection, or a spotty 3g/4g connection for internet. Satellite internet is legitimate use case for these people. Starlink might be too costly for most of them, but some other satellite internet company might cater to them.

Something like 45% of the world's people don't have internet access right now, so that number would be billions, rather than millions.

Also, Starlink doesn't have to be too costly for them. The constellation's operating costs could potentially be fully paid by North American and European users. The satellites would still incidentally fly over the southern hemisphere, and any revenue at all from Africa/South America/Asia would mostly just add to Starlinks bottom line profit. The marginal cost of additional users should be minimal once general revenue targets are met.

I'd like to hear whether the throughput will increase with additional satellites, or whether it requires re-designs. I wouldn't expect the current satellites to be saturated with users by the currently "limited" number of beta test users.

Cost of end-user terminals also will likely have to come down significantly before the worlds poorest would have any access. Although sharing the cost of that among a large group would help, it would also help a lot if the speeds were actually closer to gigabit for sharing the connection.

I'm looking forward to seeing StarLink go up against the Great Firewall. Although Tesla is booming in China right now, so the CCP would probably just retaliate for making service available to Chinese citizens by going after Musk's other company.

I'm French too. France is tiny. It is not about the number of bakery you have but how far your are from the closest medium size city.

Also, the satellite are not geostationary above the US. They rotate above the Earth and will bring the internet everywhere... Bringing internet to everyone in the World is nothing to sneeze at.

(I agree with the last bit of the rant. It sucks that private companies can launch whatever they want in space. That is not specific to the US however.)

On the flip side, why should the majority of us in denser areas in the US subsidize people who want to live in exurbs/rural areas? If you want to live in a place like that, be prepared to pay the cost for the infrastructure.

We already pay enough subsidies for roads, water, power, etc in rural/exurban areas.

I'm healthy but I pay for those who are not.

I grew up fine but I pay for those with special needs.

I have a job during Covid but I pay for those who don't.

I guess in Europe we call this 'society'.

Europeans really barely understand the US. Yes, of course, we understand how investing in communities makes a society work. What Europeans don’t understand is just how fucking huge the US is and how low-density huge swaths of the country are. Farmers might live 500 miles from a metro of 100,000 people. It’s a huge challenge to give everyone fiber without the 1% of hyper rural America doubling costs for everyone else.

Yes, yes, all of Europe fits into Texas, and even Texas fits into Texas, and that's just one state. We get how mind-bogglingly huge the US is. It's been said over and over again by every single american whenever the subject of your subpar infrastructure comes up.

Europe is just as big. Not as dense, maybe. But your telcos were given hundreds of billions to do something (that should have been the job of the government), and simply pocketed them, with your government doing nothing about it.

So, if that money was properly invested, instead of polluting low orbit, that'd be nice.

I have zero intrest in having the government control my access to information, no thank you

That the biggest thing Europeans do not understand about the US, many of us hate our government, distrust our government, and the only thing we desire from government is for them to leave us alone..

The US is a individualist nation, not a collectivist nation, though many are trying very hard to change that.

You have it backwards. Almost none of the telecom infrastructure in Europe is state owned. As the comment you are replying to explained it's in the US where huge government incentives were paid out to telecom companies for broadband deployment who then proceeded to pocket that money and sit on their hands.

>I have zero intrest in having the government control my access to information, no thank you

They kind of already do. NSA splitters are common knowledge by now, and PRISM was yet another proof that they have access to most of your data. Make no mistake, if the US government wants to find you or what you've been doing, it won't be hard for them.

You're either dealing with Mossad or Not Mossad: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/08/mickens_on_se...

You're dismissing the very valid geographic argument completely by being snobby.

This argument shows up in all these discussions and is way way overused. The EU only has ~2-3x the population density of the USA. It's not even a single order of magnitude and people have already given examples of how very remote places in Europe have very reasonable infrastructure. If you already have telephone and/or electricity poles to somewhere running fiber is definitely an easy problem to tackle for what is supposed to be the world's most advanced economy. Capture by telco special interests is a much more likely explanation.

3x population density is a lot, no? That means for every person that can access, say, a fiber line in the US, 3 people could access it in Europe. That would seriously change the economics.

Further, the US's population density is very varied. About a third of the country (the non-coastal West) is very, very sparsely populated, punctuated by only a few semi-large cities like Denver and Phoenix. If you live on the coasts or the Great Lakes, density is a lot like Europe and the services are similar. In between, it's really, really sparsely populated.

https://www.census.gov/dmd/www/pdf/512popdn.pdf

I vot for calling it civilization.

I love that we still live in a world where different countries can make different choices about how they want to structure their societies.

Kind of telling that North America immigrants were largely people escaping European utopian society. I guess different people have different values?

Exactly, Why did all those European immigrants leave what many now call a more civilized and progressive place.

It makes no sense. I mean it’s not as if Ireland has changed at all since the potato famine when my ancestors came over right?

As you can tell, I do not think highly of the argument you have made. It seems to ignore something important.

If, in Europe, if people decided to pave over every natural area within 100 miles of where you lived because they want to live far away while, you paid to make it cheaper for them to do this, would you still be ok with that?

If this caused all of the water (streams, lakes etc) in the area to be polluted and unsafe to swim in and drink without heavy treatment, would you still be ok with this? I can't think of a single body of water where I live that doesn't have excessive algae growth from fertilizer runoff from the massive number of suburban/exurban lawns. I was exploring in my favorite nature preserve that has a nice size stream (well, one of the few over 10ft that hasn't been culvertized) and one of the park rangers told me to be mindful that there was a septic system a mile upstream leaking E. coli in to the stream. In a city that has a "township" designation literally so they can get tax breaks and grants for roads meant for farmers. There isn't a single farm in this city, nor in any of the other "townships" in the area.

I can go on and on, do you still think subsidizing this life for people is reasonable? It certainly isn't done to this level over in Europe. Why not?

How many of those things are choices? Can you not think of other alternatives to this "problem"?

This seems wholly different to the point of making the analogy laughable.

Because we need rural areas to supply us with food and other materials.

A massive number of the people that live in rural areas are not providing food and key materials. In fact, the amount of farmland and farmers has been declining for years due to increases in agricultural efficiency (green revolution).

I've got no problem (to a point) subsidizing infrastructure for farmers and other key jobs, but acting like all of these people who insist on living in an incredibly unsustainable way deserve to be subsidized is ridiculous.

Does that matter? Not really. Infrastructure (Internet counts as that) should be available everywhere people live. Who knows, one day you might be in such a situation.

Sure, just expect that if you're going to live that way by choice, pay the costs for it!

What costs? Of course I'll pay for internet/power/water.

Some things are just common goods.

Because that's what a country is.

Boldly asserting that we already pay "enough" subsidizing other utilities is lazy. Why are "road, water, power, etc" subsidies fine but internet subsidies not? They all fall within the same category: essential services that would be low-return/high-risk if provided by private entities.

In fact, your argument basically boils down to "Why should X pay for Y?" So why should astronomers pay for Starlink?

Oh, I'm not fine with many of the other subsidies as I think they are incredibly excessive at this point.

I should add that I live in the midwest (Cincinnati) so I directly see a lot of rural/exurban areas people are talking about here. There are just miles and miles and miles of suburbs out in the middle of nowhere because people here are obsessed with the idea of them. The amount of money that gets dumped in to those areas while people complain up a storm when the urban areas try to build out their own infrastructure is insane.

I can't tell you how many coworkers I have had that drive 45mins+ just so they can live in some suburb far away from everything. If they want to do that, fine, but don't beg for internet, roads, etc to be paid for at the cost of sucking resources away from people living in urban areas.

Why should the rural people in podunk nowhere subsidize our food?

Ultimately it is in the best interest of cities to keep on good terms with their breadbasket.

The economics of farming barely work out at market value. How are they subsidizing others and how can they afford to given those margins?

Again, people are trying to frame this as an "all people in exurbs and rural areas are farmers" and this straight up is not true in the slightest. The issue here is that massive numbers of people move to the far out of the way places which requires an inordinate amount of resources to support, and there is this expectation that everyone else should pay up to let them live that lifestyle.

Here's a example of these sort of areas on the midwest: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9232568,-84.4006112,11979m/d...

Almost none of the land in that area is farmland, yet I've had coworkers who got USDA loans for houses in the middle of this area while working white collar jobs.

For the last couple of few years a local developer keeps lobbying to have a multibillion dollar highway built through this area so they can develop more suburbs. http://www.cincyeasternbypass.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02...

Why does everyone else have to keep paying for this garbage? When you bring up things like toll roads all of these people scream their heads off, because they know it means they wont be getting their subsidies (ironic considering how many people in these areas are highly conservative, anti-subsidy).

This isn't about subsidizing farmers, this is about subsidizing people's choice to live an unsustainable life style.

The latest generation of Starlink satellites is invisible to the naked eye once fully raised to full height in a couple of months. The impact on astronomers is real, but very small.

OTOH, the benefit is the ability to participate in the modern economy.

Cost/benefit to the world seems pretty clear to me.

Seems to weigh on the side of not interfering with astronomy, given that we have plenty of alternative options for accessing the internet.

Your comment kind of make me sad... this is such a big issue of perspective. It's something that I often see coming from the US, but any first world country often has that issue, we forget that there's more than us in the world.

> In 2019, Internet access became available to 51 percent of the world's population. When households are taken into account, the index increases, reaching 57.8 percent.

42% of the world don't have internet. We aren't talking about not having competitive internet, literally, no internet at all.

At the bare minimum, you forgot about 42% of the world... that kind of sad.

The 42% of the world that doesn't currently have internet won't be able to afford Starlink anyway, and unless Elon has discovered a way to make satellites 99% cheaper, Starlink will never be the solution for them.

Why? That's not obvious at all. The internet is useful, even essential for many modern economic activities. Modern astronomy is useful for what, exactly? Learning things about objects that are physically impossible to reach?

Ask almost anyone what they care about most, the internet or a book on astronomy, and they'll think you're joking.

But it doesn't significantly interfere with astronomy.

I'm in Italy, 15km from the province capital, 7km from a major turistic village, in a village of 3000 souls. I'm waiting for 2Mbps ADSL since 2007.

Where do you live? (I'm Italian as well). Mobile connections aside, there are some vendors who would reach you through WiFi if you're in line of sight with any of their repeaters. (eolo.it and alternatyva.it came to mind, but there are others). In 2009 I brought a whoppy 4DL/4UL connection (with a really low latency excellent for online gaming) to a house in a rural area where the only available option would have been a 57k analog modem. Now there are much faster solutions.

Also, don't trust the national provider Telecom Italia. Before finding that solution, we pestered them with requests to cover that area, and their canned response has always been "we're working on it", while actually they were waiting for more people to move in that area so that it would have been more convenient for them.

Province of Udine. Yes, Eolo has been my provider for the last 10 years, I was one of the earliest adopters in the province. The service has always been good, but worsening in the last 2 years due to too many contracts been sold without improving the infrastructure. IE, during the lockdown I had to rely on the 4G network (even checking email was not possible through Eolo) and somedays I still have troubles.

If I may, which provider offers you 4DL/4UL and how much does it costs?

The 4UL/4DL was an offer by Alternatyva.it back then. I don't recall the costs, but they were comparable, although a bit higher, to a wired ADSL. They kept it until Telecom Italia finally covered that area with faster ADSL, which if memory serves had been 5 or 6 years later.

I seem to remember we had to settle to a 4/4 setup although the contract allowed a bit more DL speed, due to the distance from the only repeater we had in line of sight. Performance was good during day and very good from evening, with speed tests around or very near the theoretical maximum.

In all your anti-american rambling, you are ignoring that SpaceX isn't the only company doing this.

> Other operators include the London-based OneWeb, which has launched 74 of what it hopes will be a gigantic fleet of 48,000 satellites

It's not anti-American rambling. As I said in my other comment I'm aware of other companies doing the same. Although an American company will be first, with clearance from the American government.

I'm more drawn to the fact that the American government can greenlight this, even though it has global implications.

These things will also impact astronomy in Argentina. Where can they lodge a complaint? They will impact the night sky in Europe, yet we have no say in American government or decision making.

I can understand this has never been a problem because no one has ever been planning to launch 14,000 sats! But within 10 - 15 year maybe 3 or 4 companies might do it. Then we have 50,000 sats in LEO.

Will this be worth it? And if so, who weighs these pro's and cons? Just one government?

Feels like we're running headfirst into a new world where no one has thought of the consequences yet.

I agree that it's irresponsible, but most of your comment is "American infrastructure is horrible, European infrastructure is great. I can't believe American would force this on the rest of the world", even though it's a European company that's planning to put more of these satellites in the sky than every other company combined.

> I'm more drawn to the fact that the American government can greenlight this, even though it has global implications.

They only need to greenlight the launch, and radio-transmissions over the US.

As far as I know, there is no central authority anywhere to stop you from putting/keeping a satellite in a certain orbit. (aside from someone else moving it out of that orbit by force)

Space border laws aren't super-well developed yet.

Oneweb is bankrupt. It may be half-rescued by the British govt as an attempt to build its own GPS system since they got kicked out of Galileo due to Brexit, but it is unlikely to be a player anymore.

Bharti Global didn't plow 1/2 billion into OneWeb so it could just be a GPS system for the UK.

To be fair, the network is currently only at ~5% capacity and average speeds can be expected to increase as the constellation is fleshed out and direct laser linkages are brought online.

My parents live in the mountains of Panama. They have ADSL internet, but it's so bad at times they have to resort to tethering over a weak 3G connection and paying per GB for very slow data. They are waiting anxiously for Starlink to be available outside of the US.

Starlink is not just about the US, it's a global service that will connect people anywhere the local infrastructure is not yet up to speed. Also comparing rural France to rural US is oranges and apples. The US is almost 20x larger than France.

About 70% of the earth is covered by water. If you had a sailboat with an auxiliary motor you could go hang out in the Sargasso Sea and have perfect weather most of the time, eat healthy with fresh caught fish and use silar panels to have enough electricity for laptop and starlink modem.

We are working with a county in West Virginia that is 2 hours by car from Washington DC. 2 hours!

The school officials have decided to do remote schooling.

Fully 50% of the students have no internet at all.

Another 30% have internet that is incapable of remote.

You might say that they're too poor. And that is part of it. But there are plenty of people with lots of money in DC and the surrounding area that would be interested in moving here or having a vacation cabin, but cannot buy internet access for any amount of money. It just doesn't exist.

The communication laws desperately need an upgrade from the 1930s laws on the books that regulate everything like it is a telephone invented in the 1800s.

West Virginia is a bit cherry-picked, it is by far the most systemically poor state in the mid-Atlantic, and it’s got immense infrastructure challenges due to the mountains. I sympathize with those people, but the vast majority of the US is doing better.

Living in Vienna, Austria, I can give at least 4 locations in the inner city which don't receive even this speed of connection even though the city promised to roll out fiber 15ish years ago. Then our telecom became privatized and now we are stuck with 40/10 (on good days) DSL connections because no matter how often I call and ask for them to do something about it, they push a hybrid DSL/LTE Modem on me which isn't significantly faster.

France also has a high population density. Even "rural" areas are still close to major population centers. That is not true in rural Siberia or the Rocky Mountains.

Is it possible to retrofit and run fiber across sewer systems, telephone poles, and electrical towers so we can connect rural areas without much effort digging trenches to get there by using existing infrastructure?

Sad this is the top comment.

Can you elaborate why you find this sad? Do you disagree with the opinion in the comment?

>spamming the entire nightsky with to the point that it prevent astronomers from obtaining useful data

Is simply not true. It's outright false and the commenter that posted it clearly just has an axe to grind against Elon Musk along with a million other people on this website

I think we're going to see some pretty awesome, in the true sense of the word, activism on this one.

Hacked sats. Pirate-style space cleanup sats. It's gonna make an excellent Wired article.

If your inlaws weren't scheduled to get an upgrade to fibre and were instead cut off from the world due to costs of servicing remote areas would this comment be different in any way?

It's a _big_ world.

Imagine being so full of yourself that you forget that literally half of the planet is not connected to the internet in any way whatsoever. The world isn't the States.

Ah but then another company can send telescope satellites to a higher orbit and charge out the ass for NSaaS (night sky as a service)

Maybe it’s not at full capacity? I mean they are just testing it after all. Lots of fine tuning to do.

The US is terrible when it comes to infrastructure. Sweden is similar to France here, expanding fiber internet to all households that want it even if they are rural. Someone mentioned Norway as a reply but I think it's an unfair comparison as Norway will have more trouble building this infrastructure since there is mountains everywhere.

> to the point that it prevent astronomers from obtaining useful data?

Define useful

I am sorry but how it is the role of government to provide everyone with internet?

The American government "refuses" because there is no Constitutional Authority for which it could use to provide such a service, and that is a good thing

People seem to think government should just provide everything to everyone, the government should be very limited in size and scope, and providing internet is WELL outside what a limited government should be doing.

under the federalist system that is the United States you could make an augment that STATE governments could provide such a service but it should not be a Federal program at all

Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the United States Constitution, known as the Postal Clause or the Postal Power, empowers Congress "To establish Post Offices and Post Roads."

In an alternate reality, it’s easy to see how this could be interpreted broadly as meaning the government has an impetus to provide for communications infrastructure.

This clause like many others have been abused to the point there the literal words do not mean anything, this is the so call "living document" interpretation of the constitution, one that should be rejected as it sets in place a "standard" that the words mean what ever we choose them to mean

There was an Amendment process put in place expressly to prevent the type of "reinterpretation" you are advocating for, if we the people desire the US Federal Government to provide us with Internet then we the people need to pass an constitutional amendment declaring that power

"... The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters too of their own persons, and consequently may govern them as they please. But persons and property make the sum of the objects of government. The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished then in their natural course with those who gave them being. ..." - Thomas Jefferson

https://jeffersonpapers.princeton.edu/selected-documents/tho...

Jefferson was in favor of living people controlling government, rather than trying to divine what dead people would have wanted. The living document approach to understanding the constitution is a way to keep the text of the constitution static while still allowing for each generation to interpret it as they see fit. It's a pretty good compromise.

Also: words always mean whatever we choose them to mean. As my favorite law professor would always remind us, words don't leap off the page and become reality by magic. People read the words, and people take actions. So what you're disparaging as "reinterpreting" I'd argue is just "interpreting," and is a necessary component of all written language.

That is a gross misrepresentation of Jefferson's view

The modern "living document" is nothing like what Jefferson called for, which was all laws, even the constitution be sunsetted after 19 years allowing for the current generation to pass new laws and a new constitution

This is a far cry from "these words mean something else now because we 9 people say they do" which is what the living document of today comes down to.

Jefferson wanted robust debate and the consent of the governed to deiced the rules of their society not 9 people redefining words to fit their personal world view, in fact Jefferson wrote extensively about the problem the power the Supreme court held would have on society

The US spent a bunch of money on rural electrification back in the day. It’s hard to see how this is much different.

There are a few ways to look at this, while your statement is true it in no way refutes my position that it is a proper role of government unless one also believed the Rual Electrification was also proper use of government

the after effects of these government monopolies have been felt by scandal after scandal

Further before these enforced government monopoly on power farms were using a distributed network of Wind Generators, which Ironically are now being put back into place on some of these very same farms but instead of being able to give the farms good power they are being put in place by these came corrupt government run power companies

Had the government not interfered in the market place who knows what out have happened, may renewable energy and distributed power networks would have emerged decades sooner instead of just not emerging as a replacement for Coal power

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