Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
1 Like
Great show as always, I always learn something. You have had people asking about Starlink internet. We just got it in March. We live in central Kansas and were on the end of a DSL line with speeds of only 10MB down so Starlink has been fabulous for us. We are only paying 4 dollars more per month than we were for the DSL so with the increase in speed, it has been quite worthwhile. Because of the Starlink and the speed we are able to switch to streaming TV and will be able to save at least 100 dollars a month so the equipment will have paid for itself in no longer than 5 months. We do have outages of a few seconds every now and then but as more satellites are launched that will improve and it really hasn’t caused any problems so far. For the streaming TV the picture just loses quality for a few moments. We do not work from home so that isn’t a factor. Just thought you might like some input from a user. Our average download speed is at least 170MB.
4 Likes
Most people download mostly all the time, so download speeds are most important, but I am curious if you have anything to report about upload speeds?
1 Like
Wow that’s actually very fast. I’m so glad it’s working well for you, and with newer satellites in even closer orbits, I think it’s safe to say Starlink is living up to its promise.
1 Like
Sorry @PHolder I meant to put that in there as well. About 30MB avg which was much better than our 2 or 3 if we were lucky with DSL.
Thanks @Leo ! Yes, it will be a game changer and internet use changer for people like us with very slow speeds and little options or those with none at all which there are in my area. We had to give out hotspots to teachers when Covid shut everything down because some had no internet where they lived. Now some are switching to Starlink. I work for a school district and my husband is one of the Tech Managers, I am the Food Service Director.
2 Likes
I was never bullish on StarLink (I am very concerned about the impacts to astronomy, the race to fill our skies (as other companies and countries want to compete) and the subsequent risk of a mistake eventually leading to a Kessler Syndrome catastrophe.) In any case, this article certainly should tame some enthusiasm, at least for now, during the “beta.”
1 Like
I always wondered about that - at some point we won’t be able to track all the space junk and how robust are these things especially with their solar sails? Can they detect and avoid collisions from all angles?
As for The Verge article, Floss Weekly’s Jonathan Bennett has had a different experience and is seeing sub-20s ping times now.
EDIT: I will say, though, that Patel is spot on with this take (censorship by me):
And lastly, if you are a telecom executive or regulator in the United States, you have no choice but to see Starlink, its execution, and the unrestrained excitement and hype around it as a direct indictment of your rhetoric and efforts to properly connect this country to the internet over the past two decades. Dishy McFlatface is a sign that reads YOU ****** UP AND EVERYONE HATES YOU. Read the sign. This is your fault.
Well I am not as much worried about what we are already aware of as I am some unpredictable event. Let’s say the odds of a cosmic ray hitting a single satellite in any given microsecond in such a way as to make no longer controllable are one in quadrillion. ( 1 × 10^-13% or 0.000000000000001% ) Over a year, that would mean that a single satellite would have the odds of 0.0000315576% of having this incident occur. Those are pretty long odds… but now if you have 3 companies each with 30,000 or so satellites all simultaneously in operation, now you have 100,000 additional targets. Multiply that out, and now you have 3.15576% chance of it happening in any given year… yikes!
Now that is a made up odds to begin with, but more targets are just more things that can have a failure. Now as soon as one has a serious enough failure, it can become uncontrollable enough to hit something else, and break into billions of high speed parts, all of which can cause more failures, more parts… the Kessler Syndrome. And the smaller parts will stay in orbit longer because of their lower mass and less gravitational attraction to earth. It only takes one unplanned collision to potentially trap us on the planet “forever.” (Or until we figure out how to clean up the mess surrounding the planet.)