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Comment by AntiUSAbah | Hacker News Reader

We do not need Starlink! It only provides service to 9 Million! People

We are a planet with 8 Billion People.

Do i want cheap and reliable internet everywhere and perhaps work remote? Yes. Should someone like Musk destroy our look into space for just me and my use case? No.

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I do wonder if in 100 or 200 years if we do become interplanetary as a species, and technology advances if many of these satellites will just disappear from the night sky and it would be long since forgotten or if remembered only as a steppingstone towards an interplanetary future.

In the meantime, Starlink is the only thing that gives my sister in Puerto Rico access to the internet when the grid gets completely nerfed by a hurriance so she can tell us she's alright, well, that and landlines if she gets a power generator, otherwise, we're left to wonder how my sister and nephews are doing.

You don't need starlink to get a message out of Puerto Rico.

We also don't need starlink as a stepping stone.

What we need is food for the planet, resiliance infrastructure, proper health care, stable energy grids.

I sure hope you never have to wonder if your relatives are safe and doing well after they have no way to communicate with you for weeks.

1. to keep this argument properly, you still need to see what the overall benefit for the whole society is and not just your little bubble. And putting a lot of satelites in sky, affects 8 billion people.

2. As i said, robust infrastructure would fix that too. Fiber under earth, backup energy etc.

Not to play the musk’s advocate, but there is a case to be made that proving internet access in remote places is more valuable than a perfect night sky. If you live in the cities you can barely see the stars anyway, so you’re not missing much. But in an austere environment, connectivity can be the difference between life and death. It also lowers the bar, encouraging more people to visit wild places and make them more likely to support their protection in more meaningful ways.

Yeah just that these satelites are not geostationary. They have to fly around. So its either all or nothing.

And People survived fine without Starlink

Speaking as someone comfortable with the outback night sky I'm fine without it thanks. So are pretty much all the locals and traditional owners of the Murchison Quiet Zone which is focused more toward radio silence overhead for SKA and such things .. so that all dovetails together.

If you're relying on starlink via a smartphone, you're basically unprepared in any case.

Nice to have, better to be better prepared.

It is obvious that the 9 million current customers are just the beginning of where SpaceX wants to take Starlink access. Easy to imagine Starlink serving 1 billion + customers in the near future.

Its already quite cheap so why are people are not running to Starlink?

Probably because a land line has still less latency, doesn't consume that much energy and everyone has either a land line or mobile connection.

When Amazon Leo, Eutelsat, Telesat, Chiense and co enter the market, the margin will go down significanlty. The effort for handling the space and crashes etc. will increase.

Additional to this, my landline is stable. Its stable in heavy rain, with and without snow.

And the worst thing about Starlink and its adoption is the Satelite handoff every 15 seconds. I tried Starlink at my father-in-laws home and i was unable to use MS Teams reliable enough.

To finish Starlink off: it doesn't even properly scale. Right now they need v3 which they are not sending up because of the bandwidth limitation of one satelite. Then they have to route traffic through their satelites to were they have base stations. Now they also need to build basestations everywere together with sending up new satelites every 5 years.

1 billion customers? in that market? in the near future? never. The base stations we have are there, well connected, relativly cheap, very fast, very direct.

I've had no issue with starlink when using it at a friend's house, and I would be happy to use it myself if my internet provider decided to charge me more than what Starlink costs. And fiber has its own costs to install and maintain. A lot depends on the economies of scale for both systems, but to think that base station capacity and kessler syndrome fears are insurmountable obstacles is ridiculous.

To me, this is no different than the adoption of mobile phones: "Cell phone usage will never overtake landlines, we'll never fix the problems of bandwidth and cell phone towers that need to be installed everywhere. Sure there might be a market for a few million in the US but no more than that".

For me its a night sky and astrophotography issue.

https://www.space.com/space-exploration/international-space-...

https://www.chosun.com/english/industry-en/2025/12/11/55MMV2...

And Starlink, Amazon, China, etc. and co want to send up A LOT more.

As others have mentioned in the thread, the narrow impediments to some night sky photography affect a much smaller portion of the population compared to the benefits these satellites already provide. Returning to the cell phone example, would be like opposing cell phone towers for impeding wildlife photography.

How many hours are spent looking at the sky compared to Starlink usage?

Puh i would say a billion to 1? Like i look at the sky very often but i do not use Starlink.

My wife enjoys sun rises and sun downs.

Culture wise I know plenty of people around me looking up.

How about you?

Are you or people around you do that for hours every night? Is this a deliberate activity, or are you including random quick glances? How often is yours or people's around you sky watching experience actually negatively affected by satellites?

Sun rises and downs is not affected by satellites, due to overwhelming brightness difference. For casual stargazers, light pollution is much more of an obstacle than the satellites. Plus, for half a day on average, the stars not available at all, unlike Starlink or other satellite services

I'm not a Starlink user either, I do like to look at the sky with naked eyes and telescopes, but I do not share the sentiment that it's imperative to keep it "pure" for the sake of whatever. Also, a personal anecdote, satellite spotting is quite fun :)

I think its a fundmanetal human thing to look in the night sky. It swhat anyone did before us.

I also enjoy doing astrophotography, I want to build my own mirror.

People around me do this too yes.

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