Not sure I'd be trusting Musk's communication network at this point. Especially not in Ukraine.
this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024
75 points (92.1% liked)
Technology
60191 readers
1472 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Any details on the technology? "Beaming phone signals" doesn't tell anyone much. Would this require a proprietary antenna (thus new, flagship-only models after a few years, like iPhone 15 with its emergency satellite calls) for whatever protocol Starlink uses (unless there is some unified ground-to-satellite protocol by now)?
Satellite phones aren't new, but are expensive for obvious reasons.
Starlink sats have enough transmit power and receive gain to use normal cellular frequencies with a normal antenna on the phone side.
You might think it's a long way to space, but a few hundred kilometres of direct line of sight to your cellphone antenna isn't that much more to overcome compared to say, 25 km to a cell tower on the ground.
The biggest hurdle was getting a few thousand satellites into orbit so that coverage and availability is there.
starlink should not exist.
Found the person who's never lived in a area with dial-up or conventional sattelite as their only options. I hate Elon as much as the next person, but starlink is revolutionary for those with no other options.
Second-hand experience from many years ago when Starlink first rolled out: my friend has a cabin in the Appalachians, outside any cell service, so Starlink sounds great for that. However, Starlink site says there is "no coverage" for that area. Yes, somehow, no coverage for a satellite service. The nearest area with coverage was a town with already-decent 4G. And most large US cities had coverage too. So our inside "conspiracy theory" was that Starlink resells 5G/4G modems for hipsters.
Have no idea if the situation changed since then.
Starlink works differently than conventional sattelite. I'm not an expert, so I'm not going to try to explain it beyond saying that I think it's due to the properties of the sattelites being low orbit, requiring more ground transmission stations and more sattelites than conventional sattelite internet.
I believe their coverage has increased greatly over the past few years. When it was first out my parents also didn't have coverage. They do now, and have for a couple of years.
The satellites are extremely close to Earth in order to reduce latency. Traditional communication satellites sit in geostationary orbit hundreds of thousands of kilometers above the surface, this you being that that's many times the diameter of the Earth so signal delay is pretty noticeable. Starlink satellite wiz around the Earth dozens of times a day, but the advantage is that they're only 200 km up.
The disadvantage of all of this is that each individual satellite has a very small footprint, so it's entirely possible for some regions not to have coverage yet as the network is not complete.
Care to elaborate on why not?
A megastructure filling space with trash, a project that in paper looks like either impossible to complete or a total waste of energy, time and pollution to solve a problem we don't have* and leaving this new net of satellites on the hands of a psycopath.
I really like the idea of starlink, but those are the cons I can think off.
*connectivity is solved by adding cables. What's the cost (money, energy, pollution + life) of a cable crossing the Atlantic vs the cost of a satellite?
Inb4, I'm not siding with anyone, just trying to make the discussion roll.
Serious question, have you ever been outside of a major city? Because that's the type of ignorance you typically see from someone who's spent their entire life in an urban environment.
You're not running fibre out to every remote settlement, high country station, or remote farmhouse, most of these places aren't even connected to the grid.
Never mind the many marine vessels that have Starlink.
I generally prefer arguments without this kind of hostility, specially after I specifically said that I was just enumerating whichever cons I could think off.
I think you understand that starlink did not invented internet through satellites. Do we really need this escalation?
People keep posting that and it's like they don't actually think about it. Space is fucking enormous it's very well named. In order to fill all viable orbits up you would have to have literally hundreds of millions of satellites. It's not like they just whizzing around randomly, we know where they are, so any launch in rocket can avoid them, obviously so because there's never been a case of a rocket been hit by a satellite.
I think you are greatly underestimating how a chain reaction works.
Starlink can get fucked.
Don't satellite phones already exist?
You don't need a satellite phone for this, though