Some of you may be aware that Elon Musk has been launching satellites into low orbit to eventually build an orbiting “constellation” of satellites that will provide internet to everyone on the planet.

If this is news to you then congrats! You might have just been seeing a line of lights moving rapidly through the night sky and thought the pandemic was driving you crazy.

Here’s a website where you can track the satellites and know when you’re going to see them in your area, if you’re interested: james.darpinian.com/satellites/?special=starlink

Also here’s a video someone took in Western Europe: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/g5qn9u/chain_of_elon_musks_starlink_satellites_moving/

Thoughts?

400 satellites up so far. End goal is 44k. Musk is looking to charge $80 a month for gigaspeed sat internet. Not sure how he got rid of the latency problem of transmitting to space and back though. Also how he fixed interference issues. In georgia most internet was sat based and it was fucking awful, near unable. There is a reason we did not use ISDN after it was developed.

In the near future we will no longer to be able to see stars due to all the companies that are filling the near earth orbit with sats.  Also will provide serious problems when we have to get stuff through the sat field.

It's a cool idea, we will see if it ever gets finished.

The idea is that all of the satellites communicate with each other via laser at the speed of light, which is amazing but currently they just beam back to earth and use fibre optic backhaul. I am pretty sure for laser backhaul you would need saturation to the point that you had line of sight between satellites. Given that much of the delay in latency is related to the number of steps and geographical distance, this has the possibility of being as fast as global fibre optic, which we don't have.
They are quoting an eventual 2ms latency which is a 4ms ping but only if you stay on their network, once you get onto the WWW you have to add the time for the routing.

I'm not sure he will ever get to the number of satellites he's talking about, astronomers are already cracking it saying that it will make observation of the stars impossible.

I think it will be great... Eventually... For rural customers. It's no good in cities because of the number of people trying to access at the same time, absolutely impossible to have the bandwidth for a thousand people to access at once at high speeds, maybe a thousand or so. Same deal as 4g and 5g.

Again, for routing data between countries, we have nothing even close.

Just build your damn Iron Man suit already Elon.

Apr 23, 2020 8:40:29 GMT NATH45 said:

Just build your damn Iron Man suit already Elon.

He's no Tony Stark.
SpaceX is cool, Tesla is a shit show that has the majority drinking the kool aid and the rest getting sued.