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Elon Musk Is Charging Starlink Customers Gigantic Bogus Fees Because Its Network Is Being Crushed by “High Demand” (www.yahoo.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 41 points 3 months ago* (47 children)

This is why satelite internet is a dead end. The latency and bandwidth are fundamental limitations of physics which are incredibly expensive to scale up compare to cable and cell towers.

Even if we have a complete satellite roll out we'd still have to go back to cell towers for better latency. So why even entertain this detour if not for war machines - one niche where satellites are actually better.

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  • [–] 19 points 3 months ago (28 children)

    Satellite is better for remote people. I know a woman whose Alaskan village (indigenous, not colonizer) got significantly better internet once starlink was rolled out.

    Now you could say that nations with meaningful duties to remote peoples should band together and essentially jointly operate (maybe having the UN administer it) such a service for them and use it as the last resort akin to sat phones. And I'd be cool with that. But I so think such people should have internet, and this is probably cheaper than running and maintaining cables all across Alaska and northern Canada.

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  • [–] 13 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    That's true, but it's largely due to a market that doesn't prioritize remote clients and a regulatory system which has roped off huge parts of the radio spectrum.

    Instead of a starlink receiver talking to low orbit, you could have a dish that uses fixed wireless access or point to point connections to access a terrestrial tower. In exceptional situations geostationary satellites make sense, but these low earth constellations are getting out of control.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Give them internet via a geo stationary satellite.

    You only need a few in a space where there is a lot of room, and it won't bug anyone, contrary to the shit show we have with the countless starlink satellites visibly zipping over while working hard to make the Kessler Syndrome a thing.

    I'm not even talking about the pollution caused by those rocket launches

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  • [–] 12 points 3 months ago

    Give them internet via a geo stationary satellite.

    We have that already. Its comparatively very expensive, and also very very high latency simply because for the speed-of-light. The satellite at GEO sits at 20k kilometers. That by itself introduces 250ms of latency each way. So a 500ms latency is not uncommon for GEO satellite internet. Also, GEO satellites are very expensive because of how much energy (deltaV) it takes to get the satellite out that far and for how long they have to operate to make that money back.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (20 children)

    But it's not better. It's just rhe only option. They would very much prefer to be connected with a cable or a cell tower no? Why wouldnt they?

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (19 children)

    You have permafrost melting so northern tundra areas will be worse to build on going forward. But the context is tiny rural places that don't have roads and you travel by plane or snowmobile, they're not getting cable.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (16 children)

    they're not getting cable.

    why not?

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Hundreds of miles of expensive cable because terrain make expensive to serve dozens of hundreds.

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  • [–] -3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    It's significantly cheaper still. Cable is dirt cheap, technology of laying cable is mature and we already have roads developed to piggy back off infra off. Now think about satellites that only live a few years and are incredibly expensive and immature.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (11 children)

    Which part of permafrost do you not understand?

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    Beyond permafrost it's also extremely remote and often separated from Anchorage (metro area has the majority of the population of Alaska, at a similar population to the city of Cleveland) by national parks, mountains, and rivers. It's very expensive to run cable out to such small populations

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (8 children)

    Cables dont freeze lol

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (7 children)

    Ah. I see. You're thinking to let the fiberglass cables lose on top of permafrost like it's a hose from a shed.

    If you're able, you can learn why that is a bad idea online. There is plethora of reasons why fiberglass cables usually go underground.

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  • [–] -2 points 3 months ago* (6 children)

    I genuinely don't understand you. Ok so they go underground next to a road - then what? They freeze and explode? Or do you imply we can't afford to dig ditches but can afford to fire rockets?

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Which road?

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Are you implying there's a large amount of people not connected by roads? How many you think?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

    I literally direct you again to fucking google that, because the first response from Google literally tells you why that will not fucking work.

    Are you so entitled that you demand we copy paste it for your pleasure.

    The google will include the over-the-air elevated fibreglass that costs 20x more per mile than anywhere else, why it would cost one third of that number a year to maintain, why it cannot go underground (because of permafrost melting when being dug up and turning into mud and bog and sinking the installation and million other things), thst there are no roads in many places at all, etc. etc.

    Your laziness is offending.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    5G is the answer for most people. The few people living in extremely remote places are not worth rolling out special satellites for them. It will not be profitable. They can use existing satellite services for basic communication.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    And even then, why the everlasting fuck do you want low watch orbit satellites for this? Why do we need to pollute the shit out of our ecosystem, our LEO, and our night sky (fuck those moving blips) just to have latency low enough to play a game over na internet connection that shouldn't be used for any of that...

    Everything about starlink is maddeningly stupid and it is negatively impacting so many people that want nothing to do with it but hey, it's Elmo Musk, so just let him do that shit anyway!

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I’d say LEO is where we want these, no? My understand is that if SpaceX went defunct tomorrow, the satellites would (eventually) burn up on reentry, so there’s no risk of them managing to fragment and become more permanent bullets wizzing around in our orbit. Or is that incorrect?

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    That's sort of like saying you'd want the milk to spill in the kitchen because it's easier to clean up. But the thing people are upset about is that the spilling of milk in the first place is not necessary.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    Satellite internet is extremely important for certain regions of the world. Good luck running anything to remote areas like Alaska, or areas of northern Canada.

    It’s an extremely important piece of infrastructure, even if you have zero use for it.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    Thousands of satellites are immune to anti satellite missile, with only a few dozen geosats one country could blow up those sats and cut a few ocean cables and cut off most of the International transocean internet access. That's a good thing, because it makes it so that any nation preparing for war isn't tempted to cut off internet because it wouldn't work anyway.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago

    This is why satelite internet is a dead end.

    Idk if I'd call it a dead end so much as a service of last resort. There's definitely utility in a global network of always-on wireless communication. But because it's expensive to deploy and saturated quickly, you can't operate at the volume of a wired network or local wireless system.

    So why even entertain this detour if not for war machines - one niche where satellites are actually better.

    I think you've answered your own question. The incremental value of satellites as part of a weapons system far outstrips normal business applications (nevermind consumer markets).

    But you still run into the same constraints at a certain scale. Even if your transmission system is unassailable, it cannot support the volume of traffic of wired connections. So you're still going to see drone pilots with enormous spools of fiberoptic wire moving along the battlefront.

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  • [+] -11 points 3 months ago (11 children)

    The latency and bandwidth are fundamental limitations of physics which are incredibly expensive to scale up compare to cable and cell towers.

    Latency is theoretically much better because the speed of light is much faster in the vacuum of space than fiber optics. So the ping from continent to continent is better using a satellite network that transmit data to each other using laser light.

    I suspect we could be moving the orbit of the satellites higher so we can reduce the insane number of them, while still have better ping. I don't see a technical reason why bandwidth would be more limited in space than on the ground. It's fundamentally easier to scale since you can just launch more satellites along certain orbits to add bandwidth.

    The fundamental problem is of course privatization and the inevitable monopoly. It will never really be cheaper than land based internet, and so both will continue to coexist, so it just adds additional resource waste for no real benefit except to make some guy rich.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    I can't remember where I read it, but there was an article in high finance tech, where they were dealing with billions of transactions per second and relied on sub-millisecond timing. They still used terrestrial long-haul (cross-continent) microwave tower networks for this because even the time it took to transceive between optics and electrons in each switching segment meant fiber was slower. The latency tolerance for those applications preclude the drive up and down to space.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (9 children)

    Vacuum of space? Dude there's an entire atmosphere with clouds and shit in it.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (8 children)

    In low earth orbit?

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (7 children)

    yes, where else it would be?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (6 children)

    So what are you trying to say? You signal goes up a few kilometers, then you're in near vacuum in space where signal travels with proper light speed and results in faster transcontinental ping.

    There are no clouds and atmosphere in space. That is what makes it space.

    EDIT: Actually radio signals already travel near speed of light in the atmosphere. Only light in fiber optics is about 66% of speed of light.

    EDIT2: Oh wow, a Chinese research initiative just achieved a breakthrough with hollow core fiber optics which does transmit close to the speed of light. This could render that advantage of sattelite internet moot! Upgrading cables is going to be a massive infrastructure project though.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (5 children)

    and what's in those few kilometers? not atmosphere? Sure the signal travels a bit faster between satellites themselves but this is not relevant in modern networking. Almost everything is cached on edge in your regional server these days so only "the last mile" is what matters for latency. Even if you ignore all this the math would still favor cable every time - 66% reliable speed of light will always beat "potential 100% speed of light sometimes for some part of the distance"

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (4 children)

    Ping

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (3 children)

    I can imagine some use cases for faster ping between two low orbit satellites could be important but my imagination begins and ends at rocket guidance. I don't see that ever being useful for 99.9% of networking. The signal has to go down to earth receiver at some point and atmosphere and dish overhead will always lose to a cable.

    It's a boring answer - but cable will remain undefeated until some magic breakthrough in physics comes along. It's simply just that good.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

    Well with the new hollow optic fiber you would be right.

    Average ping time between Europe and US is 100-150ms, which is high for e.g. gaming. Satellite constellations could cut that down by 33%. Which was a huge promised benefit of starlink, even just for HFT stock trading which is like cheating and mining gold.

    But yeah with hollow optic fiber being able to do the same, much of the value of Starlink should be wiped out! SpaceX stock should take a massive nosedive lol!

    Afaik you're wrong about overhead with atmosphere and dish.

    The only value internet constellations now provide is universal coverage. But that could be achieved cheaper with a higher orbit of 2000 km instead of 500km. Coverage goes up to 12% instead of 3.6% so you need like 9 times (square) less satellites? I think? And the ping would be worse but still acceptable like 200ms between EU and US if you live somewhere off grid or on the ocean.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (1 child)

    Satellite constellations could cut that down by 33%

    Ok this is pure marketing bullshit. Source? The physics simply doesn't check out.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    The speed of light in fiber optic cable is ~66% of what the speed of light in vacuum is (or radio signals in atmosphere). Signal first has to go up but then travels faster than in fiber optics cable and arrives faster. Hence faster ping.

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