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Comment by mattferderer | Hacker News Reader

I am curious how Starlink will change this conversation one way or another.

It adds another competitor to the mix.

Could it become the monopoly if the tech were to make current ISP tech obsolete or to expensive for most areas?

If it became the better method, does that mean our skies will soon be even more polluted with satellites by exponential factors?

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It is odd that Starlink isn’t mentioned in the article. Starlink has impressive speed and latency and the potential to compete to some degree in every market in the US. Twitter angst aside (some of which is fair but much seems to be either dishonest or ignorant, even by those who should definitely know better), SpaceX has also done a remarkably good job of addressing the light pollution problem such that the satellites are invisible to the naked eye once in operational orbit (mitigating impact on ground astronomy is something SpaceX continues to work with astronomers on). They’ve done so well, this should probably become industry regulation. And by choosing a lower (self-clearing) orbit, they’ve mitigated a lot of the concerns about space debris as well. I think their approach to these problems shows it is scalable (although IMHO we should actually codify some of these mitigation’s instead of just relying on good faith).

And thankfully, competitors exist. OneWeb has exited bankruptcy and is starting to launch again. Project Kuiper also shows promise.

I think people are still sleeping on just how big of a deal Starlink (etc) is going to be.

starlink cannot compete in densely populated area because the sats have comparatively (to dsl, fiber, etc.) limited total bandwidth to spare, just like any other shared medium. musk himself was very open about this. starlink is a game changer where the last mile is prohibitively expensive i.e. sparse/rural areas a few dozen miles away from population centers.

Currently urban broadband costs are high in part because they’re subsidizing rural areas, right?

So if starlink can cover the rurals for less costs can hopefully come down for everyone

Building in dense urban areas carries its own set of problems akin to how pushing changes to a live product can be more difficult than hacking one together from scratch.

It requires aligning many stakeholders who often have conflicting interests e.g. all the building owners on the same block.

Urban broadband does not subsidize rural broadband.

Are you talking about the Universal Service Fund?

No, I just don’t know what I’m talking about. Looked into it a bit more and I was completely wrong. Thanks

Any idea how suburbs fit into that? The last mile isn't prohibitively expensive, but enough that you don't get any kind of competition, either, and the space isn't extremely crowded.

By the time Starlink goes wide it probably won't be any cheaper than I'm currently paying, but what I am paying is quite absurd given that it's not a network of satellites. It's just a fiber optic cable that was long since amortized to zero.

It depends completely on how many of your neighbors have the same idea in a few dozen mile radius, and perhaps if you have a tree blocking a large part of the sky nearby.

Starlink can, indeed, compete to a degree in more densely populated areas, as I said. (Especially DSL.)

> SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has touted Starlink’s reach, saying it could bring 5G-like service to billions around the world while also handling up to 10 percent of the internet traffic in more congested regions “where people are stuck with Time Warner or Comcast.” https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/17/spacex-testing-its-own-satel...

I’m curious what happens with rural terrestrial broadband. Does it dry up and die or do the telecoms try to compete at a relatively high cost per customer. Many don’t have dial tone and satellite TV bundles aren’t competitive so they will likely lose the customer completely and are left with an asset that makes no money.

They might open the local loop back up to at least get rent?

The DSL providers have already neglected their maintenance and upgrades.

I was the last one in my neighborhood to be allowed 12Mbps download. All new accounts are maximum of 6Mbps.

I would like to see reform in the CATV franchise laws.

Yep, got DSL at my current location in 2008 and they haven't upgraded anything since then. Very minor bump in peak bw they would configure, I'm at 15M/768k and that's as high as it goes. Network is garbage though and lots of time it's saturated upstream. $30K to run fiber to the DSLAM...if it was a fiber fed box I could probably get enough neighbors on board to swing it...but no.

I got my DSL in 2010.

1.5Mb/688Kb. No change in ten years. Also, I get dropped and reconnected every couple of days to a DSLAM channel running at 20Kb (!) down and have to reboot the modem to get back to 1.5Mb.

respect

I really hope Starlink lives up to the hype.

But if it does, how do we stop it becoming a monopoly? We don't need and can't have multiple rival fleets of satellites up there. But if it's just Starlink then how do we stop it charging more and more for less and less because no-one else is threatening it?

If it works, should the UN step in and take over the network as a service to all of humanity?

> I really hope Starlink lives up to the hype.

The technical aspects of it seem to be:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/11/space...

We do need and can have multiple fleets up there. OneWeb has already launched a bunch of satellites, and there is enough room up there for several more, particularly as operators get better at safely operating them.

I would agree, but I've seen the mess that e-scooter organisations have made of this. The city is littered with e-scooters whose name changes every few months. If the business plan doesn't work out, who cleans up the satellites?

The satellites have to have ability to do a commanded deorbit. Additionally, at the altitudes Starlink operates at, if there’s a problem with the commanded deorbit, the satellites will naturally deorbit in a reasonable time.

EDIT:OneWeb operates at higher altitudes where if there's a failure, the satellite will stay there for hundreds of years, but to try to mitigate that a bit, they added a grappling fixture/fiducial to try to make it easier for a robotic deorbiting craft to capture it.

I didn't know that about Starlink. That's cool :)

The Oneweb stuff not so much, but at least they're thinking about it.

> The city is littered with e-scooters whose name changes every few months.

You claim to be against monopolies but are unwilling to tolerate even the slight inconvenience of seeing scooters parked around? I personally love them for their amazing convenience and they're also incredibly compact relative to cars or even bikes.

> If the business plan doesn't work out, who cleans up the satellites?

Cleaning up is essentially free as long as the satellites are still operational: just command them to deorbit. Orbits are low enough that the fuel required to deorbit is comparable to a few months of station-keeping.

I'm not against the scooters being parked around. I'm against the flood of them, and them being abandoned in the middle of footpaths, cyclepaths, etc.

They were a great novelty for a while. But I got over them.

So if a satellite stops responding to commands, they're going to go get it? To make sure it doesn't hit anything else and cause more problems?

I wouldn't want the UN touching anything I ever might want to use/rely on.

Well, who then? IEEE? W3C? someone like that?

I would think IETF would be the ideal choice.

If I were to pick a second place it would be IEEE. I don't think it would be a good idea to hand it to W3C, as this is at a layer+ lower than they would typically operate.

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