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SpaceX says states should dump fiber plans, give all grant money to Starlink (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 10 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Yeah, I can’t imagine a medium sized town all using Starlink at once without issues.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Read this quick before the people selling generators get it buried: https://www.wtsp.com/article/money/consumer/south-tampa-generators-fail-during-hurricanes-teco-peoples-gas/67-144d70da-bb27-496c-8928-ab7e61a53b00

    The gas company finally figured out how to deflect their responsibility in the matter: they say that the generator owners "didn't register" their generators, but... now that it has been a year, has the gas company done anything to improve service capacity?

    Anyway: the tie-in with Starlink is, anything like this works great until everybody tries to use it all at once at high capacity. When all 53,000 residents of Grand Island Nebraska decide to stream different high definition videos all at once? A good fiber system can handle that, Starlink? I'm curious...

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Keeping the electrical grid balanced with varying loads is so hard I’m amazed it works at all.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    It's something that's only possible because of the scale a grid works on. It also helps to have generation like hydro, which can ramp up and down very fast.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I believe Florida's recent build-out of utility scale natural gas plants is driven, in part, by their ability to ramp up and down virtually instantly.

    However, the linked story is about a residential neighborhood where lots of homeowners installed individual natural gas powered generators for their homes. Then, when the public grid failed in a hurricane, they all switched on their "whole home, natural gas powered" generators at once for the first time and the natural gas supply to the neighborhood was nowhere near up to the task of delivering all that fuel at that rate.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago*

    Companies like Viasat with GEO sattelites have the advantage of one mololithic sattelite with massive coverage. They have a ton of little antennas on each sattelite that they can adjust as demand changes. Need more coverage in an area due to demand? They can task an antenna not doing anything over there.

    Latency is a B though. Minimum 500ms each way. Which is minimum 1sec round trip just physics not actual. What's interesting is the layperson (non online gamer) doesn't notice much. It's not abnormal for a rando website to take a few seconds to load on my wifi. Or for a netflix stream to take a few seconds before it starts buffering. The biggest problem a company like viasat has is old tech in the sky. They can't handle the load of everyone watching netflix. So, they have to data cap everyone. It'll be interesting to see if their new sattelites later this year fix that or if they keep the caps on.

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