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Comment by anaganisk | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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