This is why satelite internet is a dead end. The latency and bandwidth are fundamental limitations of physics which are incredibly expensive to scale up compare to cable and cell towers.
Even if we have a complete satellite roll out we’d still have to go back to cell towers for better latency. So why even entertain this detour if not for war machines - one niche where satellites are actually better.
And even then, why the everlasting fuck do you want low watch orbit satellites for this? Why do we need to pollute the shit out of our ecosystem, our LEO, and our night sky (fuck those moving blips) just to have latency low enough to play a game over na internet connection that shouldn’t be used for any of that…
Everything about starlink is maddeningly stupid and it is negatively impacting so many people that want nothing to do with it but hey, it’s Elmo Musk, so just let him do that shit anyway!
I’d say LEO is where we want these, no? My understand is that if SpaceX went defunct tomorrow, the satellites would (eventually) burn up on reentry, so there’s no risk of them managing to fragment and become more permanent bullets wizzing around in our orbit. Or is that incorrect?
That’s sort of like saying you’d want the milk to spill in the kitchen because it’s easier to clean up. But the thing people are upset about is that the spilling of milk in the first place is not necessary.
Satellite internet is extremely important for certain regions of the world. Good luck running anything to remote areas like Alaska, or areas of northern Canada.
It’s an extremely important piece of infrastructure, even if you have zero use for it.
Satellite is better for remote people. I know a woman whose Alaskan village (indigenous, not colonizer) got significantly better internet once starlink was rolled out.
Now you could say that nations with meaningful duties to remote peoples should band together and essentially jointly operate (maybe having the UN administer it) such a service for them and use it as the last resort akin to sat phones. And I’d be cool with that. But I so think such people should have internet, and this is probably cheaper than running and maintaining cables all across Alaska and northern Canada.
That’s true, but it’s largely due to a market that doesn’t prioritize remote clients and a regulatory system which has roped off huge parts of the radio spectrum.
Instead of a starlink receiver talking to low orbit, you could have a dish that uses fixed wireless access or point to point connections to access a terrestrial tower. In exceptional situations geostationary satellites make sense, but these low earth constellations are getting out of control.
Give them internet via a geo stationary satellite.
You only need a few in a space where there is a lot of room, and it won’t bug anyone, contrary to the shit show we have with the countless starlink satellites visibly zipping over while working hard to make the Kessler Syndrome a thing.
I’m not even talking about the pollution caused by those rocket launches
Give them internet via a geo stationary satellite.
We have that already. Its comparatively very expensive, and also very very high latency simply because for the speed-of-light. The satellite at GEO sits at 20k kilometers. That by itself introduces 250ms of latency each way. So a 500ms latency is not uncommon for GEO satellite internet. Also, GEO satellites are very expensive because of how much energy (deltaV) it takes to get the satellite out that far and for how long they have to operate to make that money back.
Idk if I’d call it a dead end so much as a service of last resort. There’s definitely utility in a global network of always-on wireless communication. But because it’s expensive to deploy and saturated quickly, you can’t operate at the volume of a wired network or local wireless system.
So why even entertain this detour if not for war machines - one niche where satellites are actually better.
I think you’ve answered your own question. The incremental value of satellites as part of a weapons system far outstrips normal business applications (nevermind consumer markets).
But you still run into the same constraints at a certain scale. Even if your transmission system is unassailable, it cannot support the volume of traffic of wired connections. So you’re still going to see drone pilots with enormous spools of fiberoptic wire moving along the battlefront.
The latency and bandwidth are fundamental limitations of physics which are incredibly expensive to scale up compare to cable and cell towers.
Latency is theoretically much better because the speed of light is much faster in the vacuum of space than fiber optics. So the ping from continent to continent is better using a satellite network that transmit data to each other using laser light.
I suspect we could be moving the orbit of the satellites higher so we can reduce the insane number of them, while still have better ping. I don’t see a technical reason why bandwidth would be more limited in space than on the ground. It’s fundamentally easier to scale since you can just launch more satellites along certain orbits to add bandwidth.
The fundamental problem is of course privatization and the inevitable monopoly. It will never really be cheaper than land based internet, and so both will continue to coexist, so it just adds additional resource waste for no real benefit except to make some guy rich.
I can’t remember where I read it, but there was an article in high finance tech, where they were dealing with billions of transactions per second and relied on sub-millisecond timing. They still used terrestrial long-haul (cross-continent) microwave tower networks for this because even the time it took to transceive between optics and electrons in each switching segment meant fiber was slower. The latency tolerance for those applications preclude the drive up and down to space.
This is why satelite internet is a dead end. The latency and bandwidth are fundamental limitations of physics which are incredibly expensive to scale up compare to cable and cell towers.
Even if we have a complete satellite roll out we’d still have to go back to cell towers for better latency. So why even entertain this detour if not for war machines - one niche where satellites are actually better.
And even then, why the everlasting fuck do you want low watch orbit satellites for this? Why do we need to pollute the shit out of our ecosystem, our LEO, and our night sky (fuck those moving blips) just to have latency low enough to play a game over na internet connection that shouldn’t be used for any of that…
Everything about starlink is maddeningly stupid and it is negatively impacting so many people that want nothing to do with it but hey, it’s Elmo Musk, so just let him do that shit anyway!
I’d say LEO is where we want these, no? My understand is that if SpaceX went defunct tomorrow, the satellites would (eventually) burn up on reentry, so there’s no risk of them managing to fragment and become more permanent bullets wizzing around in our orbit. Or is that incorrect?
That’s sort of like saying you’d want the milk to spill in the kitchen because it’s easier to clean up. But the thing people are upset about is that the spilling of milk in the first place is not necessary.
Satellite internet is extremely important for certain regions of the world. Good luck running anything to remote areas like Alaska, or areas of northern Canada.
It’s an extremely important piece of infrastructure, even if you have zero use for it.
Satellite is better for remote people. I know a woman whose Alaskan village (indigenous, not colonizer) got significantly better internet once starlink was rolled out.
Now you could say that nations with meaningful duties to remote peoples should band together and essentially jointly operate (maybe having the UN administer it) such a service for them and use it as the last resort akin to sat phones. And I’d be cool with that. But I so think such people should have internet, and this is probably cheaper than running and maintaining cables all across Alaska and northern Canada.
That’s true, but it’s largely due to a market that doesn’t prioritize remote clients and a regulatory system which has roped off huge parts of the radio spectrum.
Instead of a starlink receiver talking to low orbit, you could have a dish that uses fixed wireless access or point to point connections to access a terrestrial tower. In exceptional situations geostationary satellites make sense, but these low earth constellations are getting out of control.
Give them internet via a geo stationary satellite.
You only need a few in a space where there is a lot of room, and it won’t bug anyone, contrary to the shit show we have with the countless starlink satellites visibly zipping over while working hard to make the Kessler Syndrome a thing.
I’m not even talking about the pollution caused by those rocket launches
We have that already. Its comparatively very expensive, and also very very high latency simply because for the speed-of-light. The satellite at GEO sits at 20k kilometers. That by itself introduces 250ms of latency each way. So a 500ms latency is not uncommon for GEO satellite internet. Also, GEO satellites are very expensive because of how much energy (deltaV) it takes to get the satellite out that far and for how long they have to operate to make that money back.
Yeah, my family was forced to get starlink because ATT and other wireless internet sucks in where we live
Idk if I’d call it a dead end so much as a service of last resort. There’s definitely utility in a global network of always-on wireless communication. But because it’s expensive to deploy and saturated quickly, you can’t operate at the volume of a wired network or local wireless system.
I think you’ve answered your own question. The incremental value of satellites as part of a weapons system far outstrips normal business applications (nevermind consumer markets).
But you still run into the same constraints at a certain scale. Even if your transmission system is unassailable, it cannot support the volume of traffic of wired connections. So you’re still going to see drone pilots with enormous spools of fiberoptic wire moving along the battlefront.
Latency is theoretically much better because the speed of light is much faster in the vacuum of space than fiber optics. So the ping from continent to continent is better using a satellite network that transmit data to each other using laser light.
I suspect we could be moving the orbit of the satellites higher so we can reduce the insane number of them, while still have better ping. I don’t see a technical reason why bandwidth would be more limited in space than on the ground. It’s fundamentally easier to scale since you can just launch more satellites along certain orbits to add bandwidth.
The fundamental problem is of course privatization and the inevitable monopoly. It will never really be cheaper than land based internet, and so both will continue to coexist, so it just adds additional resource waste for no real benefit except to make some guy rich.
I can’t remember where I read it, but there was an article in high finance tech, where they were dealing with billions of transactions per second and relied on sub-millisecond timing. They still used terrestrial long-haul (cross-continent) microwave tower networks for this because even the time it took to transceive between optics and electrons in each switching segment meant fiber was slower. The latency tolerance for those applications preclude the drive up and down to space.