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comment by wasoxygen
wasoxygen  ·  1004 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Starlink is a very big deal

Great to see you around again!

    I see at lest two trains a night on every moonless evening I am outside.

I am hoping to get a look but haven't had any luck yet. You probably make better use of a moonless evening than I do.

    All this shit so they can sell you disposable gear to feed internet ads

It's an ISP. Wasn't everyone complaining about inadequate ISP options not long ago? The FCC handed out a ton of money to help "close the digital divide" by bringing service to difficult-to-reach rural areas "at rates that are reasonably comparable to the rates for similar service in urban areas." Something something poor people.

    The goal is to get so big as fast as possible that they cannot be regulated, ie the Uber model.

Larger firms are easier to regulate, they are more conspicuous and less flexible. Perhaps someone in D.C. will manage to optimize all the tradeoffs implied in the NOIRLab workshop report and keep SpaceX and Amazon's Project Kuiper in line. Then someone in London will do the same for OneWeb. And Ottawa for Telesat. Surely Beijing will follow the same rules with their mega-constellation, right?

National governments have externalities too.

    The ESA had to move a weather tracking satellite because nobody at SpaceX/starlink was available to talk about moving their satellite on a "near pass" orbit.

Forbes changed their headline from "SpaceX Refused..." to "SpaceX Declined To Move A Starlink Satellite At Risk Of Collision With A European Satellite". According to a statement, they replied to a warning of a "1 in 50k" collision risk, below the threshold for avoidance, and missed a USAF updated risk assessment of "more than 1 in 10k" due to a "bug in our on-call paging system."

Sounds like a flimsy excuse, but ESA confirmed that "Contact with Starlink early in the process allowed ESA to take conflict-free action later, knowing the second spacecraft would remain where models expected it to be." ESA performed 28 collision avoidance maneuvers in 2018, though this was the first incident involving a satellite constellation.

    You cannot use a Pihole or adblockers with starlink either, that is buried in the user agreement.

I can't find any evidence of this in the Starlink Pre-Order Agreement or Starlink Beta Consumer Service Terms.





steve  ·  1003 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Wasn't everyone complaining about inadequate ISP options not long ago?

I was (and still am) certainly complaining. we have zero market competition for internet in my area.

wasoxygen  ·  1003 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I sympathize with your plight, living in a part of the world where the law shields ISPs from municipal competition. City WiFi is not ideal, but could promote better service.

You and your neighbors complaining that you have dollars you want to exchange for better data is the most hopeful approach, I think. HughesNet and Viasat already offer satellite service with speeds that would have seemed great ten years ago, Starry is expanding its wireless network, and Starlink adding one more potential option at least isn't making the situation worse, assuming you are not a grumpy astronomer.