I was living in the eastern Caribbean ten years ago (a place that is not particularly poor), and the number of web services that could not handle a slow or unreliable connection was kind of shocking. Netflix was actually pretty impressive, they were fine to about 500kb/s with a lot of dropped packets. Below that, they were slow, but by no means unreliable. Most other sites would shit the bed on a similar connection.
Starlink has been an absolute godsend for my friends that are still down there.
I have such a love hate relationship with the tech. On one hand, I live on the edge of the mountains and can get away while on-call, set up my starlink and still be within SLAs if I got paged while out of service (weekend pages are fairly rare). On the other hand, I'm an amateur astronomer, for visual astro, it's not a huge deal, but I see how it could be for astrophotography (streaks) and obviously it's a problem for radio.
Because there's entire continents of people who think it's the most ridiculous statement they've ever read on this site (which they can only access because of Starlink).
“Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.” --https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We had that before Starlink flooded the radio quiet zones with leakage.
Were that the case, there would have been nobody buying Starlink.
As they are, I think you are wrong.
Not everyone lives within a metro that has good infrastructure. This is even more true in developing countries.
More tech people need to go places.
I was living in the eastern Caribbean ten years ago (a place that is not particularly poor), and the number of web services that could not handle a slow or unreliable connection was kind of shocking. Netflix was actually pretty impressive, they were fine to about 500kb/s with a lot of dropped packets. Below that, they were slow, but by no means unreliable. Most other sites would shit the bed on a similar connection.
Starlink has been an absolute godsend for my friends that are still down there.
These are either incidental or unauthorized transmissions. Not the Ku band downlink to terminals.
I have such a love hate relationship with the tech. On one hand, I live on the edge of the mountains and can get away while on-call, set up my starlink and still be within SLAs if I got paged while out of service (weekend pages are fairly rare). On the other hand, I'm an amateur astronomer, for visual astro, it's not a huge deal, but I see how it could be for astrophotography (streaks) and obviously it's a problem for radio.
That might be dispositive if we didn't already have almost everybody on Earth wired up without using satellites.
The fact that so many people are paying for starlink suggests that it is adding something important that was missing before.
Streaming video on airplane flights?
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Got a source for that?
Because there's entire continents of people who think it's the most ridiculous statement they've ever read on this site (which they can only access because of Starlink).
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“Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.” --https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
“Assume good faith” is no longer feasible. There are so many people/probably bots commenting here with obvious agendas.
Everyone complains about Reddit and twitter and whatever else being heavily astroturfed, but we’re supposed to think HN is somehow immune?
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