
Why SpaceX Is Making Starlink - samcday
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giQ8xEWjnBs
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hadsed
Well, a better video title would be "How Starlink Works".

I think it's high time that communications gets disrupted. And this is Elon's
brilliance yet again. Targeting the financial industry with a low-latency
communications solution will put them on the best possible path to funding
this for the masses.

Curious to hear what the biggest technical risks are to this project.

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sieabahlpark
Probably colliding satellites

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ShorsHammer
There's very little at that altitude except other starlink satellites.

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pier25
As someone who lives in Mexico, where connectivity outside of big cities is
severely limited, I'm super excited about this.

I lived 1 year in an off the grid cabin in the mountains of Veracruz and the
biggest issue was by far the lack of connectivity.

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proee
Do current satellite internet services not work?

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pier25
Depends on the definition of working.

The current services are expensive and you are sharing your very limited and
precious bandwidth with many other users.

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PopeDotNinja
I am really impressed with the quality of the content of Real Engineering, the
video's YouTube channel. And they pump out content like this every week. That
sounds like a lot of work.

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ncmncm
I like that several companies are competing to do this, so nobody will have
monopoly power for long. Probably SpaceX will have lower operating costs, but
Musk wants to siphon off ROI for his Mars, er, project.

Probably the other players will be better capitalized, but have more pressure
to get to break-even. Differences in peering arrangements could have big
effects on usefulness, as will bandwidth capacity, which seems likely to be
limited in SpaceX's first system. They will probably sell it, as the video
suggests, on latency for low bandwidth traffic, meaning it is likely not to be
cost-effective for video streaming. It is hard to guess whether any on-board
cache would turn out to be useful.

The first to deploy will be a dancing bear: it will matter less how good it is
than that it works at all. But the first will also get the first hard
experience needed for their second system.

