Starlink launches "cellphone towers in space" for use with LTE phones
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
And protip the people that actually do it as a hobby tend to call it caving not spelunking :)
Would love to hear HNer recs on caving spots
They want to text and call and stream and email. You don't. They can. You don't have to. I get what you're saying. But lamenting advances on account of some folks' poor impulse control is neither here nor there.
If something becomes the norm, it creates social pressure to do the same. Sometimes you can opt out, but not always and usually with a cost.
One of the biggest lessons in life is learning that you don't have to care what the fuck others think about you.
Your life is short, and less than 1% of 1% of all the people you would ever meet will be of any consequence to you, let alone the rest of humanity whom you will never even know existed.
So if you want to disconnect: Go for it. Pedal to the metal. Afterburners blazing. Who the fuck cares? It's your life, not their's. They can leave a voicemail and wait for you to get back at your leisure.
No, but there are still consequences.
"and catching up on work emails"
If everyone is doing this, there will be a expectation of you to do it. And if you don't - you will have to really shine somewhere else, to not get serious disadvantages.
Also I already had various big drama in my life for not being reachable (I still have a phone where I can put out the battery) - so yes, I know how to disconnect and I do. But there is an increasing pressure to be always reachable and when you don't live totally on your own - it is a real struggle to get away from it.
Can you name them?
Seriously? Have you ever worked where the expectation is you'll be on-call, even on your vacation?
If we're talking just socially, that will impact how the people you interact with perceive you. It's the same thing, as work, but with different stakes in terms of your ability to move among social groups that use texting constantly.
>If we're talking just socially, that will impact how the people you interact with perceive you.
I reiterate for emphasis: Stop caring what the fuck others think about you.
>Have you ever worked where the expectation is you'll be on-call, even on your vacation?
You are working at your choice of employment out of your own free will; you chose to work that job that demands you be on call even on vacation. If you don't like it, you have a right to quit and find other arrangements better suited to your lifestyle.
I suppose you do not have a family or other ties? When you are young and unbound, the possibilities are a big bigger, than when you are settled down and don't want to uproot everyone to get a new job.
No, because that would be illegal in my country, as it is in many. One call to the relevant government department would launch an investigation and at minimum lead to hefty company fines and the practice stopping.
If that's normal to you, you should fix it or leave whatever country you live in. That would be laughable to most of us if it weren't so sad.
Most people don't go to low- and no-connectivity areas to recreate. If you're bucking the trend by doing that now, it isn't much different to turn your phone off (or leave it at home).
Well, those who do, are unfortunately often those who do it, so they don't catch Corona via the 5G waves ...
But my point was more that right now, it is still an acceptible excuse (in some areas) to not be reachable, to say you just had no reception. That is going away soon - and then it seems I will have to defend every time I turn off my phone and someone wanted to reach me with something "important". So yes, the problem is not the technology in my eyes, but the social expection. The result is still the same.
Is it? Honestly, global trade/capitalism has ravaged our planet - we have a fire season nearly everywhere now, ocean acidification/plastic gyre. The same engine that can give us global wireless broadband has polluted our planet beyond restoration.
Yes, medicine and technology is arguably better for most but increasing income inequality is making everything less available to all.
I would urge you to confirm your priors on whether the concept of "ongoing progress" is a state of nature, or a belief system.
Life quality in cities is still improving, assuming one can afford it. In more rural areas, often simultaneously subject to all kinds of attacks on nature and a lack of opportunities and essential services, I'm not so convinced...
Yes, nature and the planet are in a worse state but the humanity is in a much better one. And I am confident with time and technology we will improve them both. The engine of progress has already solved much harder problems than the current ones.
I suspect the harder problems you're thinking of are all technological. The current ones we are facing are social and political more than anything, so I don't share your optimism...
Humanity is huge and diverse - if a group of people decides to stop evolving and stagnate, another will gladly steal their place.
What you call "progress" is what led us here. Remains to be seen if "here" is a trap. You seem to think that everything is fine since everything will be fine, but that opinion doesn't have a consensus right now. I prefer to remain more doubtful.
This is valid. That said, if you're close enough to hear a cell phone ping, you've chosen proximity. You're close enough to hear a lot of other sounds. You retain the option to move away.
> "sorry I didn't have network" is no longer a convenient excuse when you are on these trips
To whom are you giving this excuse? Because if you were previously saying you were going somewhere without connectivity, you can still say you're going to reject connectivity.
If there are other people around you at all, you're not really in the backcountry.
The number of projectors I have seen in use at campgrounds in the last couple of years is just profoundly irritating.
100% agree.
Is it so different from two hikers conversing?
At a psychic level it also kind of sucks in ways that are harder to describe.
I imagine there may eventually be sufficient demand for private locations that ban devices?
Is there something about this that makes it distinct from a “kids these days” kind of lament?
She was trying to talk to her relatives, because her house had caught on fire, while her kids and babysitter were home. She was freaking out and trying to find out if everyone was ok.
You don't like that other people are connected, when you want to disconnect. That's really a you problem, not a them problem.
When I was much younger I also felt a profound sense of loss when I found that the Iridium constellation covered the globe.
Thankfully our shared thought that you can't be away from everything is not true: caves, anything underwater or dense forests around the world are totally inaccessible for any satellite devices.
Also, not sure if you've used any satellite devices but even in most conditions you're still pretty away from things. You have to set up the device with a view of the open sky and wait several minutes for a text-only message of a handful of bytes. Using it in a Costa Rican rainforest was almost impossible.
For better or for worse, there are pretty large parts of the Earth where we will have no Internet for most likely our entire lifetimes.
You, yourself, are free to live more or less however you please. You are not free, in any way, to regulate the lives of people around you. If your happiness depends on the people around you behaving according to your rules/values/etc, then you'll be profoundly unhappy regardless of them checking their instagram.
Which is funny, because you can't manage to regulate yourself, but, you desire to regulate other people, as though you are at all qualified to do so. The reality is, you're only qualified to make people as miserable as you are.
And while I don't disagree that, people being overly connected is a huge problem, and a general cancer that's eating humanity itself, I understand that it's not my job to save the world, only myself, and once that's sorted out, I might be able to save a few people around me that I hold dear. Anything broader than that has one outcome, and that's failure, not just for myself, but also the people I care about the most.
What you need to do is disconnect-in-place, you don't need a forest or a mountain or an ocean to do that, you can do it right now, spin yourself down, feel yourself breathe, clear your head. You'll suck at it at first, as you have sucked at many things you're now good at, embrace the suck, and get to it, stop basing your wellbeing on things rightfully outside of your control.
[0] https://www.predictwind.com/?lang=en [1] https://www.predictwind.com/iridium-go
The fact that you see other people getting on with their lives as something that needs to be wrenched away from them lest they ruin your naturalist fantasy, deeply irks me to no end.
It’s perfectly reasonable for nature parks to have a no devices policy.
If anyone has any connections with the REI Board of Directors please ask them to stop selling that crap.
But you raise a good point: A hike being quiet or noisy depends much more on the social norms of your fellow hikers than their and your ubiquitous reachability.
I've been annoyed by large groups on narrow trails talking at the top of their lungs in order to be able to lead one big conversation, and at the same time I would not even notice somebody texting a few meters away from me as long as they have their phone on silent.
We need to fix our browsing habits. Saying you dread the day when anyone anywhere can call for help because your poor impulse control might interrupt your disconnect is just ridiculous.
Ion thrusters use the same general principle, but they need to carry their own source of ions into space. Most use tanks of compressed noble gas, but Neumann's new design turns solids into gas as part of the ionization process. This is great because noble gas containers are heavy for space applications, and the gasses themselves can be scarce and expensive.
Everyone in Thailand uses LINE for (data) messaging and calls. Everyone in the US uses (cell) SMS and calls. Having just a US number with satellite data would give me total coverage
Surely they won’t notice you teleporting around?
Hopefully the phone doesn’t mind the latency when talking to its SIM that’s supposed to be 3cm away.
being able to use SMS in a disaster area is a big deal.
Not my experience at all. I use SMS more now than I did a few years ago. The aggregate hardly matters when it comes to individual choices.
> T-mobile and Google Fi > free wifi coverage.
Ha! Where do you live? This doesn’t hold up to any place I’ve been that isn’t the flatlands. Cell coverage sucks any place with real terrain.
I live in California within 25 minutes of a major metro, but in the hills. I only get one provider, Verizon, at my house, and only a few bars of LTE, no 5g. Any other provider gets no service at all. There is no place with free wifi within a 5 minute drive that I know of.
Ceteris paribus, yes. In practice, beam forming and the lack of vertical compared with horizontal obstacles reduce the distance. I'm not finding ready information for 5G terrestrial towers versus Starlink.
The Voyager spacecraft are billions of miles away and use 23 watt radios. The video streamed from the moon landing used a 20 watt radio to transmit a quarter-million miles.
Starlink is just a couple hundred miles up.
Transmitting from a 3.6 meter wide parabolic antenna, received by 70 meter wide parabolics, at a rate of 160 bits per second...
Also, the bandwidth is pretty low. It tops out at 18Mbps per cell, but that is divided across all the users in the cell. Each person will get 100kbps.
Starlink is going to start with texting and add voice and data in 2025. They haven't indicated how fast data will I'm guessing 2G speeds. The service will basically be 2G, text, voice, and some data, everywhere.
There is a certain area of town where I frequently go, and there is a conspicuously disguised cell tower across the street, and I've suddenly become suspicious of it. As you roam around the countryside, do you trust the cell tower that's providing service to you? What happens when a rogue tower begins to lie about the time of day, or begins to harvest your data traffic for later decryption, or simply analyzes your SMS traffic on behalf of organized crime threat actors?
It seems high time we need strong authentication mechanisms between handsets and towers, but on the consumer level, this is not a realistic goal. Have fun out there.
On one side yay Telstra and Optus can go jump as they finally have some competition. On the other hand their competition outperforms them so heavily we are gonna end up under a monopoly exporting fat gdp out of the nation via starlink. We're probably worse off in the long run with the monopoly.
I wonder if any one has contemplated how easy it would be to knock out a run of starlink sats and toss a region into comms blackout in future years as reliance grows? Probably could be don't with a semi trailer truckload of balloon drones.
As to the blowing up LEO stuff yea, at the minimum NATO and China have that capability. China caught a bunch of ire a few years back for demonstrating their capabilities.
The reason nobody is doing it now is because it's a one-shot weapon. You fire it once and your target will wake up and actually do better (rather, the government will force them to on national security grounds).
However, non-disruptive attacks on mobile carriers are common. I'd wager any competent intelligence agency has a full view of worldwide SMS comms for example. Similarly, non-government bad actors also have insider access via malware or bribery.
Nah, it's just that Musk is the Emmanuel Goldstein du jour, and a Two Minutes Hate is mandatory any time he or one of his companies get mentioned.
OneWeb is B2B only. I assume, but don't know that it's because they can't get the cost of their user terminals low enough.
> Amazon's Kuiper constellation is planned to have over 3000 satellites; they've got regulatory approval and launch contracts signed, and their pockets are deep. Once those come online properly, it'll be hard for Starlink to charge anything like proper monopoly rents.
It'll certainly be interesting to see how that goes. They went with the "hire everyone but SpaceX" launch strategy, which means that none of the rockets they've signed with are operational yet. And they have a looming FCC/ITU deadline. There's widespread belief that if they make a good effort, they can get a variance, but it's certainly not guaranteed.
In general, I agree with you, though. There's not much evidence that SpaceX is trying to squeeze customers. In part because there are often plenty of competing options, and in part because Elons companies tend to keep prices low even when they do have a defacto monopoly (like right now with space launch).
Satellite-based cellular is never ever ever going to be competitive with locally deployed terrestrial infrastructure in urban environments.