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Comment by huevosabio | Hacker News Reader

I have Starlink in an Airbnb in Puerto Escondido, Mexico.

It has been a blessing. It used to be that we had to deal with either cell carrier 4G wifi or wait until the phone company would finally extend service one block away from its current service area.

Even if you had access to either, both solutions were pretty bad. They were so unreliable that some coworking spaces had *three* providers: "broadband", 4G, and old-school satellite.

Starlink arrived last year in earnest and... really life changing. It even dropped the price some months ago. The internet _just works_.

Anything that bypasses local monopolies and government stasis will get my business with true joy.

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I'm pretty sure you can't just launch satellites into orbit randomly without govt blessing it or stream data to ground stations legally (Eg: India doesn't like satellite phones), at a certain point Starlink could itself be the monopoly you dread.

Doubt it since there will probably always be lower latency and higher reliability on fiber connections.

I wish that was a good enough reason... because I wish fiber was everywhere. The truth is that most people won't care that much about 20-40ms of latency. I mean, people use 5g hotspots for their internet and are just happy as clams, ISPs are pushing for it, trying to get everybody on wireless connections. The benefits of fiber for customers doesn't outweigh the profits that wireless drives to ISPs.

And as anecdata, my Starlink connection that I've had since the beta days has been more reliable than Comcast or Centurylink that I've had at other places. I haven't even had weather cause an outage that I've noticed. It's at least good enough that most people won't care.

We are the only people who care, and understand why low latency and high speeds are important.

Well, you CAN do all of those things - until a gov’t comes knocking anyway.

Paperwork isn’t required to launch a rocket, just to not get arrested later when they try to find who did it.

I get what you're trying to say, but the paperwork isn't just to not get arrested. It's also to make sure your rocket doesn't flatten a building when it comes down uncontrolled, doesn't hit an airplane on the way up, doesn't crash into any other spacecraft in orbit, and doesn't turn into yet another piece of untracked space debris cluttering Earth orbit.

None of which gets in the way of actually making a rocket or launching it though, as unlike for example cars or guns everyone builds and launches their own anyway. Well, 99% of the time anyway.

Any idea why India doesn't like sat phones? I've never heard of this.

Might be the same reason China doesn't like satellite phones: the lack of government control over information available to its citizens.

I watched a documentary about the 2008 earthquake in China; one city was completely cut off from the outside world in, and only one person in the whole city had a satellite phone—the mayor.

Yes starlink works great until other people sign up too.

if you read the article it doesn't just work for a lot of people, and is very slow. this is nothing that wasn't easily predictable, but you having a good experience where there's clearly a surplus of capacity doesn't mean this will last.

It also doesn't mean that it will always be slow. There's another launch scheduled for this month and more to come after that. SpaceX is also launching satellites for many other internet competitors. As long as progress continues at this pace, rural customers will eventually have all the options they could want. Many people here are complaining about lack of infrastructure, look up!

launching more satellites has a tremendous cost, but a small, incremental capacity improvement since most of the capacity is stranded over water at any time.

Which is why the new generation of satellites are larger and more capable.

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