714
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
714 points (97.0% liked)
Technology
59669 readers
2708 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
So why do you think that launching thousands of satellites would be more cost-effective than other options?
Satellites are expensive.
Launching them into space is expensive.
Cell phones, and cell phone towers are cheap.
Elon Musk is launching them into an orbit where they'll decay in 10 years anyway, meaning you'll have to perpetually launch these thousands, or even 10s of thousands of satellites into space just to keep service.
Traditional satellite companies launch fewer numbers of many satellites into the sky to cover large swaths of land instead. Since they aim at rural areas (ex: the Ocean with no one there), they are superior in a cost/efficacy perspective. Yes, there's less bandwidth, but there's less people, so its a fine tradeoff.
If you need more density, building cell phone networks / cell phone towers is just superior.
If you need even more density than what cell phones can give you, then there's always fiber optic directly.
Lmao go run some fiop in the Amazon and let me know how that shakes out
All the satellites in question burn up within 10ish years due to their placement in orbit. In fact, a large number of SpaceX satellites already exploded due to mistakes during their deployment.
Cell towers don't burn up like that just sitting around.
Cool. We already have Hughesnet and have had it for decades.
You don't understand then. The Starlink satellites are designed to fall out of the sky, explicitly. They're at an extremely low orbit. The entire constellation will fall out of the sky on a regular basis.
That's the explicit design of Starlink. Its collossally stupid. The lower your orbit, the sooner you crash into Earth. Starlink has chosen one of the lowest orbits.
Hughesnet's satellite is in contrast, in a 500+ year orbit. So they don't have to replace their satellite all the time. Also, there's only a few of them, its not like Starlink that has thousands of them.
By being lower in the sky, Starlink satellites have a limited range and only cover a small area. They need many, many,many satellites to even have hope, extending the costs and destroying the feasibility of the entire design.