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this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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Me. I am a sysadmin/architect and I live an hour from any broadband. And 20 minutes from any cellular signal.
Without starlink I'd be stuck in a city. I hate musk with a burning passion. But I hate living within spitting distance of other people even more.
Also - I'd hardly call 200(CAD) up-front and 130/mth expensive as hell. Some people are paying that for two cellphones that their kids carry.
This does not make it less expensive.
If anything that's arguments in favor of expanding the cable network, its cheaper, more reliable, and most importantly a order of magnitude better for the climate.
But i understand you wanting internet at home. My country is just so densely populated that the furthest from anyone's house would be in a coal mine, like there is people living in a 20 km radius at furthest everywhere, so everyone has cable, even on top of mountains. Our problem is replacing old phone wires with Fiber optic cables and having better mobile coverage everywhere.
But i personally pay 100€ for a 1GB/s parallel plan with TV and Landline. And most here think that's expensive... Starlink is from what i know a lot slower than what i get and has a limit if im not out of date regarding that.
What about the other argument?
Cable will never come here. There are 4 people living within 10km of me. Yes, you read that right, four. We won't even get analog phone service here. Forget cable/fiber/cell.
This really isn't about simple wants. Without internet I don't have a job.
It is all very expensive here in Canada because we have tons of habitable/arable land that is very sparsely populated.
This is not the case here. I have been using it for almost 2 years now and I am a bit of a high-seas type of media enjoyer.
Right but filling LEO with trash, plus the pollution generated to make and send them there, plus endangering earth based astronomy on a global scale is not worth giving internet to 4 people per 100 squared kilometers.
I agree it is not a good thing. I just think that there is some balance. There are areas that will grow in population due to the availability of internet and jobs, which can alleviate some of the housing pressure in cities, reduce commutes, and make for more economic opportunities outside of the downtown cores that should die as more office work is made remote.
And I think a lot of the remote areas that LEO-based internet access is giving internet to are much more populated than my special case in the middle of a forest in Canada.
But even when I lived in more populated areas like small towns out West - There were hundreds of people commuting 1.5 to 2 hours each direction to get to work. Whole towns with 3 or 4k people, but only 4 or 5 businesses to get jobs at. The removal of some of that driving probably has a measurable positive effect.
Again - I want to be clear. I also think there are better ways. And will support those better ways in their early development. But right now I don't think the balance lies on the side of decommissioning or kneecapping of these services as the right choice.
Hm, i still see it critically as said starlink and its competitors launch thousands of satellites into low earth orbit, if things go badly once this might make space travel impossible for decades and they fuck with earth bound telescopes majorly as well. I get you needing internet, but there should be better options.
Space is really really big. We have so much space junk out at further orbits that the 5 or 6k starlink satellites just doesn't concern me.
I feel some guilt in how badly this LEO type of constellation will impact astronomy and astro-photography as more companies try to get some profits out of the sky. But again, I think that internet access for those who live in remote areas is one of the tools we will use to improve as a species. - as long as the current disinformation and hateclicking is reined in within the coming 10 or 20 years.
I've linked a video explaining it, please watch it, its a actual issue and "space is big" doesn't mean earth orbit being a cloud of shrapnel is ok.
I get it. And I am not saying this is the optimal solution. I am saying that out of the 30000 objects big enough to track in orbit, 5000 of those being internet providing satellites seems, to me, like a worthwhile trade-off until something better comes along to not leave every rural person on earth out of the information economy that they are all subservient to, to some extent.