Starlink Direct to Cell
starlink.com
starlink.com
I’ve seen talk of competitor satellite networks or a possible competitor emerging. Folks it’s game set and match, the trophy has been handed over and the crowd has gone home.
SpaceX and Starlink have the same owner, both are private companies, with SpaceX launching 80% of the global space payload last year and rising, and Starlink has a constellation two orders of magnitude bigger than any competitor. It’s over. And IMO it’s awesome.
We can only hope the competitors are half as responsible as SpaceX has been about space debris risk and ensuring the satellites are not visible to the naked eye and don't disrupt astronomy. So far the proposals I've seen have been much worse than Starlink in these areas.
Today, SpaceX offers world leading low prices to launch satellites: $4 m / tonne[1]. But Starlink has access to launch at cost, which is $0.86 m / tonne[2]. Which is a huge advantage when launching an enormous number of satellites.
One thing to keep in mind, especially for these LEO constellations: the lifetime of these satellites is 5-10 years. Which means the operators can never stop launching. It's an ongoing operational cost.
For smaller operators like OneWeb, they don't have to launch that often, but for a serious competitor like Kuiper, they'll be constantly launching some satellite every year.
IMO, launch cost will be a problem even for China. The cost of an LEO constellation is so high that even if it's partially subsidized by the military it'll be a serious cost for the country.
That could change pretty soon, though - various companies and organizations in China are aggressively working on getting reusable rockets working.
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1. $70 m / 17.5 tonnes == $4 m / tonne
2. $15 m[3] / 17.5 tonnes == $0.86 / tonne
3. The $15 m number is not public info, but it is widely believed that it is in the correct ballpark.
>We can only hope competitors are half as responsible as SpaceX... about space debris.. and satellite [visibility]
Economics?
Competitors would have to match SpaceX's vertical integration: Satellite design, reusable launches at cost, its exiting armada of satellites, and its moving target of customer penetration. The latter is huge. Starlink is clearly not satisfied leaving any satellite demand on the table.
There is no military on Earth that has demand for satellite bandwidth approaching anything like SpaceX's, which is basically being designed to meet the needs of the whole planet.
Note that militaries (US, China, Russia, Europe, ...) have their custom means of communicating on planet, for unique reasons, but the vast majority of their communication is over commercial cell phones. This is no different.
If anyone was going to have a chance, it was Bezos. But neither his launch capabilities, or big satellite constellation plans, have amounted to much.
China will feel the need to try. But they won't have SpaceX's customer base to support a fraction of a comparable effort. (And I say that as someone who has tremendous respect for the multi-decade cadence of their space capability march.)
It’s as if Intel released the Pentium Pro back in the 50’s when everyone else was working with vacuum tubes. Yes, in theory there is room for competition. But the gulf is so large in practice.
If you read his biography he is obsessive about cost cutting like no else in the history of mankind. There are plenty of examples where Musk brings down the cost of a component by 90%.
No other leader takes risks like Musk and hence he will always push frontiers.
His companies never get lazy or bloated even if it reaches $10T market cap.
Musk methods can't be replicated because it is the anti-thesis of every management practice.
Probably they are using GSAT satellites.
Pretty soon AI agents could reasonably take a crack at it.
Starlink is like Elon's other companies. Engineering marvels—where the customer's are merely an annoyance and the means to an end. They are basically hostile to the customer every step of the way; and from what I've seen from Elon—I think this attitude comes right from the top.
One my colleagues tried Starlink at his cabin in the PNW and he had to return it. He just couldn't get a clear and wide enough line of sight through the tree cover. I wonder if that was your issue?
Musk is famous for being contemptuous of his employees, and he's starting to show more and more contempt for Rest of World. Cybertruck and X both reek of it.
Everyone here is assuming Musk is rational and SpaceX and Starlink will continue to develop rationally.
I don't think they will. He appears to be becoming more and more unhinged, and that's going to have negative effects on his fledgling empire.
Personally, I monitored latency more than speed, as I always had enough speed to do whatever I wanted. When I first started using SL, latency averaged around 100ms (which compared to my previous provider HughesNet was amazing, but was high compared to ground based connections), but today averages around 35ms which is still technically higher than ground based connections, but for all practical purposes for me, is indisguishable from any other internet option, even for online gaming and live video streaming.
Although I did not monitor speed as regurarily, it averages around 300Mbps for me. Sometimes it exceeds 400Mbps (I just ran a speed test and got 420Mbps), and it is rarely less than 100Mbps.
I have contacted support twice, and always received quick replies. However, based on my monitoring the Starlink Reddit forum, customer support during their beta period did appear to have often been poor. And there was also a period of time where performance was poor in many populated regions as they started opening up the floodgates a bit sooner than they probably should have, resulting in slow speeds for people in many regions, until their satellite launches caught up to demand.
However, my impression is that both of these issues have improved significantly since Starlink left beta. I do still see some complaints about customer service, but anecdotally it appears less frequent. My impression is that they have the ability to remotely troubleshoot many hardware issues, and will quickly send a replacement if they can confirm a fault. I do worry about this though, as even a quick reply and a quick hardware replacement means several days of downtime.
Speed complaints are almost certainly less frequent than they used to be.
I have no doubt that your customer service hell story is true, and if that happened to me I would be just as turned off, but I think that, especially today, that is not the norm.
I have considered purchasing a spare terminal as a backup, but I do have some concerns. I have heard that terminals that stay unpowered and unconnected for very long periods of time get too behind on FW updates and essentially become bricked, I don't believe that is the case today but I am not 100% sure. Also, back when there used to be a queue for signing up, it would not have been practical to just set up a new account for the new terminal, but now that the sign up queue is gone, maybe it is an option today. I have not fully researched my options for this redundancy idea.
* Mbps
Yep. Tesla infamously doesn't have a Public Relations department ( I assume because he got rejected by a woman who worked there) and
“press@twitter.com now auto responds with [poop emoji],” Musk tweeted.
Ladies and gentlemen, the richest man in the world!
I agree the pace of change is amazing. I marvel at everything spacex does. The starship catch was ridiculous.
But no competition always leads somewhere really bad eventually
Not to say you're wrong, we all benefit from competition in the long run. We get it from a level playing field and preventing natural monopolists from locking the gate behind them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIS%C2%B2
https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/eu-space/iris2-s...
We've seen that when Germany introduced the Autobahn toll, it was a complete disaster.
If I had to guess who's going to have a Starlink competitor up next, I'd point to China.
Remember when the EU wanted to build it's own internet browser? Or it's own search engine? Or it's own sovereign cloud?
None of these initiatives panned out. This is just political posturing when they have literally zero plans on how to achieve that.
SpaceX, as much as there is to dislike about its founder, has the advantage of being one company with a founder at the top who has made it very clear that only his vision matters and intra-company political bullshit just Does Not Fly.
It makes some sense for Europe, but it will likely be more for government use and a few large European commercial uses. This has no chance what so ever in the larger global consumer market.
And the claim that it will exist by 2027 is utterly hilarious.
But even this small constellation is way beyond what European industry can currently do, they need to basically mobilize every European space company to do this, and all of them working together to get this working. Lets see them pull this off first.
I don't want to spend hours typing on this so let's just say this; Arianespace is on the "team", so it's going to launch on Ariane 6, a rocket that was obsolete before it launched (and it was not a successful launch).
The idea that you can launch mass on Ariane6 to challenge Starlink is like saying you can win NASCAR on a horse and buggy. I'm not even exaggerating, that is literally the price differential between Starship and the rest. This initiative is a joke.
I think your emotions and tribal instinct would be better served towards something more benign, like football or baseball ...
Lest your voting intentions become equally malignant.
EU will step in eventually and regulate if it becomes too great of a concern, right now it's quiet because it hasn't reached critical mass yet.
Musk's empire is already being dismantled and the trend will continue, either by direct competition of laws.
Their CEO has come to the same conclusion as you. The major space companies of the future have to be vertically integrated if they want to compete. The founder has a pretty cool story. From New Zealand. Built a rocket bike and a rocket pack, but didn't go to college. Being a foreign national without traditional education meant he couldn't work in the space sector due ITAR. So he started Rocket Lab in 2006.
Their small lift vehicle (300kg) was the fastest vehicle from first orbit to 50 orbital launches, and tracking to be the fastest to hit 100 orbital launches. Their medium lift vehicle (13,000kg), if it makes orbit next year, will become the most capital efficient ($300m spent) MLV developed, and the fastest MLV to go from announcement to orbit (5ish years).
After Rocket Lab and SpaceX, the competition is pretty thin. Blue Origin is launching their HLV (40,000kg) New Glenn for the first time in early 2025 and there are a couple of startup and traditional defense contractor projects, but all unproven.
SpaceX is so insanely far ahead of everyone else. They will hit 100+ launches in 2024, Rocket Lab is at 15ish with their 300kg vehicle, and planning to scale their 13,000kg vehicle to 3 launches in 2026, 5 in 2027 and 7 in 2028. New Glenn will be on a similar ramp.
Define the time frame. 1 year? Quite likely. 10 years? nothing is less sure ... But in 50 years, I bet SpaceX doesn't even exist anymore. Companies rises and falls and it's always been like this (and the same applies to Empires, Countries or .. Species). It's always a matter of timeframe
This is more common with public companies than private companies though.
Founders have their own life, honor, ethics, desires, etc. which usually help strongly keep the company on a positive track. e.g. Valve Corporation.
SpaceX can just asked for an absurdly high price, because if they want to sell into the broader consumer market, people aren't going to pay 1000s of $ a month to watch Netflix.
And perhaps you’re unaware just how many national telcos world wide have a national monopoly and for the first time ever may have to compete with Starlink?
Perhaps you’re also unaware of the grip that Russian rocket engine manufacturers had with the RD180 engine on the US launch sector until recently and the positive impace SpaceX has had on that.
For example: Mitutoyo seems to have a monopoly on producing accurate digital calipers that have battery life measured in years (using one dainty little LR44 alkaline cell). They use approximately fuck-all for power whether switched on or off.
Certainly, the market is open for others to produce an actually-competitive product with similar performance. All it takes is for the competition figure out how to do it and put them into production, since any necessary patents expired long ago.
But they simply have not done so.
So here we are today, wherein: The free market has decided that Mitutoyo has a defacto monopoly on tools of this capability.
Is that... is that implicitly a problem, somehow?
Sure the prices might not be quite as good as what Starlink gets but definitely comparable in big-O notation (especially compared to other launch providers).
It’s not over precisely because it’s vertically integrated. Buyers want to maintain leverage. SpaceX wants to avoid forced divestiture. Hence the airlines inking deals with AST Mobile, and SpaceX lofting their birds.
A state-funded competitor could come up though. China for instance may want their own satellite internet for strategic reasons, and fund that. I am sure Russia would be interested too. This in turn, will pay for development of a reusable rocket program.
China is deftly building something. Russia doesn't have a snowball chance in hell of building something like Starlink.
To be precise: Starlink is a division of the SpaceX corporation, it's not a separate entity.
Swansat anyone?
https://web.archive.org/web/20080119080404/http://swansat.co...
Don't forget over $15bln of tax money they got for doing barely anything so far.
pLEO, Starshield, SDA, NSSL, Commercial Crew, Commercial Cargo?????
Only HLS is in view. And it's less than 5 billion.
Everything listed above is delivered and has more expensive alternatives.
But monopolies due to excellence in the development of the product, like Starlink, are not bad at all. In any case these are extremely rare and tend to last very little time.
Has this ever been the case in the history of business?
It won't be easy, but forever is a long time.
There are multiple players working on constellations of low-orbit satellites competing with Starlink
Starlink "pays" for launches at cost. While we don't know what SpaceX's cost margins are, they are not trivial. To setup a low orbit constellation is extremely expensive and competitors lose millions per launch that Starlink gets to reinvest.
There's been 136 launches of Falcon 9 for Starlink. ~US$62m per launch? If their margins are 20% that's that's $1.6b in savings. And I bet F9's margins are closer to 50% - supporting Starship and more.
Starlink also has launch priority. Good luck with getting 50 launches a year as a customer...
I'm not entirely convinced that becoming a strong political figure by aligning with one side is a wise long-term strategy. This election was a loss for the opposition, not just because of their poor communication of achievements but also due to the ordinary cycles of politics. People often place blame on those in power for any problems during their tenure. The pendulum of trust will eventually swing back to the other side. Musk's political aspirations also pose a risk for him, as they could jeopardize his relationships with allies within the currently dominant party.
What I’m suggesting is that monopolies like this often collapse when they become too politically entrenched, threatening the very power structures that initially enabled their rise and powet accumulation.
It's a monopoly engaging in anti-competitive practices, and should be broken up.
The problem with launch companies is that you have nothing to launch. It’s a vicious coupled system, because it also means you can’t bring prices down to increase the number of launches. You need scale to bring prices down. You can’t implement the Silicon Valley model of run all your competitors (ULA) without dumping 10x down the drain compared to your Uber or Netflix.
So the reason it works is because SpaceX is its own customer. You are bootstrapping. The satellite internet idea isn’t even new. I was pitching this to a company I worked for in the early 2010’s (inspired by the brand new planet labs), but what helped was I even found white papers by Qualcomm and others that clearly had the exact same idea. My boss dismissed it because the failures of Celestri, Teledesic, Iridium, and Globealstar. I’m sure this is why I was able to find those white papers too, and very clearly so did SpaceX.
The difference here is that SpaceX is a launch company AND has the funding of a billionaire that is willing to take the risk [0].
Imo, the real question is who pitched Kuiper and did they do it before Starlink? It’s a good and obvious idea, so I’d put money down that someone did. I’m pretty sure they’re fucked now as there’s legitimate reasons you want LEO satellite mega constellation to be handled by a monopoly. You just can’t have a dozen of those companies running around.
[0] side rant: why the fuck are more billionaires not willing to take big risks. Especially those with at least a billion liquidated from their stock. What’s the point of that money? You’re so wealthy it’s effectively impossible to go broke. The real exception is if your wealth is mostly paper and you’re defrauding people. At 10 billion it basically will not happen even then. If you can stash (not even) 50 million, you never have to work ever again to live in high luxury.
After writing this out I’m beginning to doubt the market would be big enough but I know at least 20 people with 2 or more LTE cams for deer season.
Even if you have solar and a fixed platform, you usually want to deploy as little solar as possible. Especially if you need to carry the gear on foot. So minimising power consumption is really important.
Christ what more do you guys need to shoot a rabbit.
For me, the draw of the woods and rivers is the chance to disconnect from technology and reconnect to nature.
Additionally, Starlink was a complete lifesaver during Helene.
No new antennas implies we're in the 1-6 GHz region. Should be fine?
In general, having low-bandwidth Starlink IoT connections globally accessible would be just great, I can see lots of usage.
Presumably there's a market for this in other niches, e.g. weather monitoring, defense/border monitoring, etc... The question is whether the juice is worth the squeeze. Where's the really valuable data?
Direct to cell bandwidth is obviously very limited.
One space based cell plan for the whole world
However, a Starlink mini dish can let you cheaply make calls from basically anywhere with some minor setup.
I think this is the biggest reason. All nation's governments will absolutely ensure, overtly or covertly, that their national regulators limit any space-based supra-national system from being able to threaten their national telephony and data carriers. Why? Preventing losing national capabilities, government revenue (taxes, licenses & other domestic carrier fees, lobbying, kickbacks, bribes, etc) and, most importantly, losing the ability to snoop at will on calls and data (at least metadata if not full-take). Even in countries where the major carriers are all based in other nations, existing towers being land-based creates jurisdiction for the government to control and tax.
While many westernized democracies like to proclaim their commitment to freedom, rule of law and individual human rights - in practice there are currently zero governments on earth free enough to not consider loss of that absolute control over citizen's private communication an existential threat. Even in places where existing laws don't currently make it illegal, as soon as technology enables it - it will certainly be made illegal (by any means necessary). I assume SpaceX is smart enough to understand this reality.
There are millions of cell towers.
During a major event, cellular companies set up portable cell towers (COWs) and even these are not enough.
And a cell tower that is right next to you still pales in comparison to a single cable in bandwidth.
This is a general starlink issue, which is why I don't understand how is it economically or physically viable in crowded areas, such as cities, where the majority of human population lives.
Partnering with a national carrier handles the licensing aspect and if the tech pans out the economics could shift to allow them to buy national spectrum and offer direct service.
And a single entity to decide who gets disconnected if they do not behave
I was looking into the bandwidth (apparently most important parameter in cellular service) offered but nobody is mentioning including the Starlink landing page for the service. Sure it mentioned LTE but it can be anything from 1 to 100 Mbps and LTE+ can be well into Gbps.
Here is the previous post last year on Direct to Cell by Starlink and the main complains is about the puny bandwidth [1]. But if you are outside the town in remote places or in the middle of ocean any communication albeit a few bytes is most welcome, beggars cannot choose. For most IoT services it should be adequate but if you're inside tropical jungle or Amazon forest it will not work need to climb tree for the reception to work.
[1] Starlink Direct to Cell:
If they want customers all over the world, they'd need to match the cheapest offering, as it's hard to argue that the service for some reason is more expensive in the US. I tried finding the price for a US cell phone plan, I can't actually do it. AT&T is impossible to navigate and always seems to bundle a phone. Mint Mobile tries to push 3, 6 or 12 months, which isn't even legal and the plans still come in at $40 for what is a $25 plan here in Denmark (with no additional fees).
If Starlink launched a world view subscription, at competitive prices they'd immediately crash the US cell service market.
The baseband on handheld devices do not have that much power to transmit and receive from Starlink directly; and hence the partnership with MNOs. With 5G (after Google & Meta got involved, the designs took on a Cloud/Internet-heavy focus), Starlink very well might have "slices" carved out exclusive for its own use world over.
See also: Cloudflare's Zero-Trust SIM (2022), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32982697
That is exactly what this is about, direct from standard handsets to starlink satellites.
It turns out they do.
And then one day: one censorship for the whole world.
No, thank you. The availability of different providers in different jurisdictions is crucial for thwarting world to function. I speak as a person from a country with government censorship implemented.
Agreed on the potential complication if/when I'm in another country, but, well, everything can't be simple...
I'm optimistic.
I think that, once SpaceX starts launch Starlink satellites with Starship, they'll be able to increase their globally available bandwidth by a factor of 5-10x (although it might take 5 years to roll out). A lot of that bandwidth will be eaten up by existing demand. But hopefully some of it will enable novel services like global cell service through a single provider (even if it's limited to low bandwidth applications like text and voice).
Musk mentions this in the very first announcement of Starlink. https://youtu.be/AHeZHyOnsm4?t=191
It would be very interesting to see some kind of diagram depicting all of the corporate entities Musk is involved in and how each entity does business with one another.
xAI just raised billions to help Tesla build out FSD (or at least that was part of the pitch).
His empire is divided into so many corporate entities, but they all cross-pollinate and are clearly under his direct control for the most part.
The closest comparison I can think of is Berkshire Hathaway (one person/group controlling multiple wide ranging private and public companies).
Musk Inc. is, in essence, a privet equity company. He raises a fund, and invests it along with his own cash into a business he knows well, and with which he believes he can disrupt the status quo.
He's very hands on, understanding all the important core details, setting culture, and pushing hard. But he also delegates to experts he brings in to run his businesses.
It's obviously not the same as PE, but there are distinct similarities. With each of his companies he clearly can't take an active role all the time, but what his team are experts at is identifying the areas he needs to be on top of, and they will quite literally fly him in for it. It seems to me it's always the start of something, be it a new company or project. He will be there 24/7 getting it off the ground, but then hand over to lieutenants to run.
It's a formula that seems to work again and again. We're (well those of you in the US) are in for an interesting time over the coming year as he has a new project to kick start.
It's not unusual for large companies to have a large web of corporate entities, but what's problematic is that they have different ownership rather than the same owners/owned by each other. (I started to say that one is public and others private, but it would be the same issue if two were public, as they would obviously not have the exact same set of owners.)
When xAI makes a deal with Tesla, if xAI is getting the better end of the stick, that is a self-dealing problem that the SEC can investigate on behalf of Tesla shareholders. The assets of Tesla belong proportionally to its owners, so Musk or another large owner can't make deals that give their private company an advantage at the expense of Tesla owners.
If Tesla gets too generous of a deal, that's something the non-Musk owners of xAI if any could raise an issue with, but when the public company is allegedly getting shortchanged, the SEC gets involved too. Moreover, even if you are trying to do it right, there is always the opportunity for someone to challenge you.
My understanding is that, given Tesla is a public company, any collaboration between Tesla and other Musk companies needs to be approved by the board (or maybe by other C-suite executives) without Musk in the room. Musk can come up with the idea for a collaboration, but then the decision that it is in the best interests of Tesla and all its shareholders to proceed with the collaboration needs to be made independently of him.
By contrast, I don't think the rules apply as strictly to his other companies since they are privately held. The law cares a lot more about protecting shareholder rights in public companies than in private ones.
I don't see what's confusing about it.
It’s going to be unambiguously good for wilderness rescue and disaster response.
But I like camping and hiking in remote areas in order to remove myself from the world. And I think the lack of connectivity discourages unprepared people from taking on more than they can handle in the wilderness. If the wilderness becomes fully connected, will it spoil that feeling? Will it lead to the last few truly remote places in the US suddenly being overrun with TikTok crowds? I honestly have no idea, and it’s a little scary.
But it feels like an anachronism that we don’t already have worldwide connectivity, and I guess this was just bound to happen.
https://www.t-mobile.com/business/industry-solutions/connect...
so just wait
I hope that they will, but the engineers at SpaceX have made me a believer. If the gen 1 direct to cell sats don’t perform (it seems like they do), they’ll just launch another batch a couple weeks later. I don’t think AST will have this ability, so I hope they get it right.
The world is continually moving towards being centred around cities where it makes sense to simply rollout fibre.
Especially with gigabit speeds being the new standard.
And even in Australia they are starting to move remote areas onto fibre.
It seems Musk liked the idea so much that he decided to do it himself.
To me, this (along with Zuck's issues with Apple over the app store) explains a lot about why Zuck 2.0 has been so focused with avoiding platform risk with recent endeavours.
1. As others have pointed out, the link budget (how much energy loss a particular radio link can handle before it is broken) for D2C satellites assumes a nearly direct line of sight from your handset to the satellite. This is much easier to achieve with satellites in space than it is with traditional cell towers that might have numerous walls/buildings in the way.
2. The D2C satellites use massive phased array antennas that are able to point a very narrow beam very accurately to the ground. This provides a substantial amount of antenna gain that further helps the link budget. The gain from the antennas allows the satellites to pick up even relatively weak signals from a handset.
There are other tricks as well, but these account for the largest differences. Of course, doppler gets in the way, but it is a solvable problem.
The complication is that the base stations will be moving much more rapidly than traditional terrestrial towers.
I assume that if Starlink was trying to do this without agreement, in violation of the interational treaty on radio regulations, the USA would have to prevent them from doing so. If the USA did not, I don't see what would prevent China from shooting down Starlink's constellation.
As a side note on the technology, since Starlink satellites orbit 340km from earth, I wonder if they emit a directed signal. If they don't, I don't see how they intend to respect borders when sending messages down.
Probably not happening until next year:
> But in September the telco (and Optus across the Tasman and other Direct to Cell exclusive partners) removed “launching 2024″ references from its website. -- https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/commerce-commission-take...
What it would allow however is you to get in-touch with family to come get you should the need arise.
Also why does my cell phone not need a clear view of the cell tower? It works in my brother in laws walk in closet just fine. Same frequency.
Direct to cell is only possible because it's an almost entirely unobstructed view.
It's not the coverage; that's mostly good. It's not the price; mostly SIM cards and plans are cheaper when travelling than they are at home. It's the hassle of swapping SIMs every time you cross a border.
As of this year I ditched my T-Mobile prepaid data SIM and exclusively use prepaid eSIMs (esimdb.com has a great comparison, but Nomad makes it very easy with their app). So I still have to "swap sims" but it's all done on the iPhone itself, no need to bring a sim ejector/paperclip.
What's really funny is that last week my eSIM ran out (I forgot to top up) and my 16 Pro connected to the satellite network (since it assumed no service was available I guess?), where I was able to use iMessage (in the limited way (to individuals, not groups)).
Which isn't really a negative to this. Indeed, if you have the means, I'd say go for it.
Personally, I still buy SIM cards (or, more recently, eSIM plans). Not so hard, but way cheaper, and you can get a local number and use with local services that require one.
>E-UTRAN Node B, also known as Evolved Node B, is the element in E-UTRA of
>LTE that is the evolution of the element Node B in UTRA of UMTS.
This is great for regions that need to be connected and the power elites, but for the rest of us it wouldn't change much.
I disagree with almost all of Elon's "politics" but Starlink still has huge potential. Hopefully, he doesn’t abuse the power too much and focuses on making the world more connected, in the hands of the us government and given away like GPS it could be the way to go to get the whole world connected.
The best possible outcome for Starlink is that he gets distracted with something else and doesn't meddle in it whatsoever.
That's at least a billion people. I don't know what the intersection of that with the affordability is, though.
I'm writing this from an Ayahuasca center in rural Peru connected with Starlink. Before, internet was a ten minute drive into town away. We're now connected when at one side of the center. It would be nice to have it all the way into the jungle. And when you want to be disconnected, just turn your phone off or leave it behind.
Haha, good one.
And as such it's an action against every other state. Much like the War on Terror, some NSA activities and so on it's the US making aggressive moves against everyone else.
Applying this to Starlink, its emergence as a leading provider in satellite-based mobile connectivity could be seen as a result of substantial innovation and investment. Such a position enables the company to offer services that were previously unavailable or limited, particularly in underserved regions. Considering Milei’s argument suggests that in the absence of government-imposed barriers, a monopoly like Starlink’s can maintain competitive pricing to deter potential competitors, ensuring consumers benefit from both advanced technology and reasonable costs.
Milei emphasizes that market failures are often the result of state intervention rather than the natural outcome of market dynamics. In the case of Starlink, minimal regulatory interference could allow the company to operate efficiently, maintaining an environment where innovation thrives, and consumers receive enhanced services. Its the potential drive of the market (competitors) and innovation to keeps them in check with pricing and perceived consumer value. [2] [3]
[1] https://www.hoover.org/news/market-ourselves-argentine-presi...
[2] https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/01/special-address-by-j...
Could be that the signal strength is really weak so they have to use a very directional antenna to transmit and receive signals. I would bet that receiving a signal from a cell phone is the hardest part. You can always omf up the transmit power, but to receive you really need to have a sensitive and directional antenna
The following is somewhat speculative:
The bearing to the next satellite ahead or behind you in the same plane should be roughly constant; likewise, the bearing to satellites in adjacent planes orbiting in the same direction will change slowly during most of the orbit.
Near the poles the required slew rate will likely be too high to keep the side-to-side links working but that's also a part of the planet where subscriber density will be low so losing that capacity for periods of a few minutes when near the poles likely won't matter.
There's the Tesla Optimus bot too..
Even just going straight up and back down to a ground station within the same cell adds minimal latency.
350 miles * 2 / speed of light = 4ms
USC students just broke the non-government, non-corporate rocket launch altitude record, reaching 143.25km[1]. But that is still a long way from the ~500km that Starlink operates at.
On top of that the person would have to develop a guidance system and payload capable of targeting and sufficiently damaging one of these satellites - not an easy feat.
Finally, it seems unlikely that a single hit would cause a chain reaction. There aren't that many satellites that are part of Starlink. Imagine 6000 cars spread over the surface of the Earth. Except that they're even more sparse than that because many of them are at different altitudes.
Additionally, SpaceX has already had to deal with the result of the debris field from the Russian Cosmos satellite that was destroyed by a Russian anti-satellite missile.[2]
Starlink has a lot of protection compared to other constellations since the satellites occupy such low orbits that most debris spontaneously deorbits in 5-10 years.
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1. https://viterbischool.usc.edu/news/2024/11/usc-student-rocke...
2. https://spacenews.com/starlink-satellites-encounter-russian-...
And then that kills 1 sat. SpaceX has many 1000s of sats.
So a small rocket like Electron cost around 8+ million $, lets say 6 million $ in cost. Plus lets say 1 million for the anti sat.
So you need to invest a couple 100 million $ into the development and produce many rockets. So you can calculate 7 million times * 6000, that gone be around 42 billion $.
Of course you would need to launch them from somewhere without a government that can stop you. Taking out vital infrastructure used by the US military tends to make people a bit angry. And neither China, Russia or Europe will want you anywhere close to them. This is likely gone make this much more expensive. Maybe you can make a deal with the Taliban? But they likely don't want that heat either.
So this is just a pure fantasy scenario.
> Maybe starting a cascading effect?
That's not gone happen. Far to low in orbit. As soon as they don't have propulsion they will drop lower. Until then the others can slightly raise their orbit.
There is not even a single nation state who has the capability to take out Starlink.
And no amount of people who burn down 5G towers could ever pull this off.
Rockets are a military technology, and are treated as such.
not plausible at all. Most /countries/ aren't able to launch a rocket to orbit.
Starlink has 6,426 [2] (Though that number is likely out of date by the time you read this)
[1] https://www.groundcontrol.com/knowledge/calculators-and-maps...
Oh, no. Apple owns them at this point. 20% ownership, and they have 85% of Globalstar's current satellite capacity for themselves. GSAT isn't really putting new customers on the constellations and Apple is funding all the replacement hardware.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/1/24285347/apple-globalstar...