3h down time ... has anybody confirmed they still have access to these satellites? I'm curious for that pos mortem. Crossing fingers it's resolved soon ...
Discussion
I don't
I hope it stays down forever
Why? Isn't it a net positive?
a net positive for the elon web of surveillance and control
Explain. How is it affecting you if you don't use the service? I see it as a competitor for all ISPs worldwide which should keep under control their offers.
how can you not see a threat I'm centralizing the world's internet infrastructure under elon musk
It's one more isp. Starlink can never provide a significant portion of the traffic. No centralization risk.
is there a technological limit to it?
if yes then I'll be glad to know
It's kind of wild to have these antennas occupying space in orbit instead of having a few more but ground based but of course there is limits to putting antennas into orbit. These limits are not hard very quickly but it's mainly "diminishing returns". Now, Starlink is offering global coverage. I guess it's the first ISP that can provide this. That's a huge value proposition and people pay for that but if all the world would start using starlink, the constellation would certainly provide terrible performance especially in densely populated areas. If all new york city would try to communicate via just 2 20Gb/s satellites, they'd get 5kb/s. With glass fiber, NY citizens get 1Gb/s so to offer that level of internet, Starlink would have to increase the capacity by x200k. Kessler Syndrome and diminishing returns aside, that would take a long long time to achieve.
So it makes no economical sense to offer Starlink to all people in big cities. Starlink would be thousands of times more expensive than land based ISPs.