Starlink Is Quietly Expanding, but Speeds Are Getting Worse | Hacker News Reader

Starlink Is Quietly Expanding, but Speeds Are Getting Worse

forbes.com

22 pointsbarbacoa16 comments

There was no mention of latency, which is the real game changer for Starlink vs other satellite providers. Seems like FUD.

It would be surprising if speeds were not getting worse. Less than 10% of the sats are up. Probably most of the tricks to minimize wasted bandwidth aren't deployed yet, waiting on enough volume for them to be useful, and edge services to integrate.

How does starlink compares to the space shuttle program regarding cost per launch? Regarding peak capacity the program was able to do a launch per month with only a few navets. I'm kind of convinced that starlink is actually inferior on most metrics it's simply that space navets are banned because of irrational aversion despite their excellent track record (over 150 successful launch, among the two main accidents, one was ridiculous (inept management not listening to the unique conditions (launch colder than anyone before it)) so a cause that has no real reason to ever happen again in history. As for Columbia, i wonder if the insulating product they putted on the wing could have been made safer. There must be a reason why it only cause issues for a minority of flights. Moreover when it induce damage, they coulf always throw the navet and return manually or stay on the ISS.

1.6 billion per shuttle flight, more like 60 million per falcon 9 flight per google.

This isn't to say it's a sign that NASA was bloated. Often the first movers to fast moving tech experience the most costs. That was, in fact, part of the original mission of building a NASA - get the 80% of the original cost down for future development to improve upon.

Interesting but firstly the shuttle would be more comparable to the starship regarding payload size. Secondly the shuttle could have been unmanned hence massively reducing cost and security paranoid costs. Thirdly it's not just that the shuttle navets had higher capacity, in practice their payloads and missions were more complex than routine satellite launch AKA remote repairing hubble and building the ISS Finally had the shuttle been ran by a private company.. Economic efficiency would have been more aligned.

Keep in mind the space shuttle had other goals beyond acting as a delivery mechanism to space. Such as the ability to repair satellites (or sabotage/steal satellites).

Ten years after the shuttle was retired, do we miss those capabilities?

I assume the USAF either does or has replaced them. But without them, we would not have had the Hubble this whole time.

Even after all the improvements the shuttle was less safe than Soyuz or Crew Dragon and it was ridiculously expensive.

Starlink's sats are 30-60x closer to earth than other satellite providers (500-1000km vs 35,000km), so their coverage area is lower as well. In that sense they are competing more with mobile telecom (Verizon, T-Mobile, etc).

As Starlink's speed lowers they stop being as competitive with mobile data service, which can have fairly low latency (5G is in the 20ms realm, Starlink in 40-100ms?).

But it always depends on where you are to pick the most performant service.

It makes sense that as the number of customers grows, the median speed would go down. That just seems like a general scaling cost, even if the number of satellites (and downlinks!) per customer remained the same. Especially since you can select the sites with the least issues into your beta program first.

Forbes is generally a poor source of information unless you are looking for FUD.

Click bait central imho.

Stupid Question: Wouldnt it be better for starlink, to be actually linked- as in fiber-optic tethered together satellite constellations?

Thanks for the answer: alskdjlkjklj

No, light moves more quickly through a vacuum. And that's ignoring all the other physics problems that come along with trying to tether satellites together physically.

What was the answer? I can't see it.

alskdjlkjklj 2 days ago | parent | next [–]

No, light moves more quickly through a vacuum. And that's ignoring all the other physics problems that come along with trying to tether satellites together physically.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com