Starlink puts towns devastated by wildfires online for disaster relief workers
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
"I have never set up any tactical satellite equipment that has been as quick to set up, and anywhere near as reliable"
"there’s really no comparison" "Starlink easily doubles the bandwidth" "I’ve seen lower than 30 millisecond latency consistently" "Starlink changes the game as far as what’s available"
"great quality" "slightly obscured but it still worked like a charm, with great speeds"
"these, at least as far as we’re concerned, are here to stay for us. We want to get as many spun out to as many places as we can" "SpaceX is being very cautious right now in what they promise us, but it’s been nothing but good things"
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/29/washington-emergency-respond...
After 20 years of "talking to the hand" to telecoms about improving service, Elon Musk is going to look like a hero to governments of all sizes all over Earth who can take credit for Starlink, even if all they did was get out of the way. What SpaceX will get out of this in terms of profits, as well as political capital will be immense.
Finland is the only country that uses the proceeds from these auctions to build one network from which all providers lease.
The rest of the countries milk the auctions as a cash-cow. The cool thing for countries is that they do not have to call this officially a tax on peoples income.
https://www.gsma.com/spectrum/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Imp...
It's fairly recent (last few years) for communities to realize that cell phone coverage is just as bad as it really is.
Until then communities were asking for better landline service, where "talk to the hand" was and still is the mantra. In the case of cell phone service people didn't bother asking because they figured "cell phone companies say they serve 300M POPs" and that if their cell phone didn't work in some places they'd assume that it was something about them personally or their specific phone.
Once they tried giving grants to improve service in places that didn't have it, then they found they couldn't find coverage holes on the carrier maps, but could find them reliably on the ground -- so the scandal that "cell phone carrier maps are completely wrong" is just starting to develop.
The more I work in with open source projects, the more I realised the neccesity of public engagement in order to shape the correct narrative.
And yes, amateurs have done great things, but to compare it to a global high speed internet system with small rapidly deployable terminals is not really the same thing.
The only related news is a ham radio connected IP camera detected the start of a fire in Washington [0].
The Calfire-Ham Radio drama [1] is still in recent memory too.
[0] [http://www.arrl.org/news/ham-radio-wireless-network-camera-d...] [1] https://californiaglobe.com/section-2/cal-fire-severing-ties...