Traditional geostationary satellite latency really causes problems with real time communication which this is trying to help with. You end up in a situation where you talk over each other frequently unless you go into radio style communication of always waiting for the other person to clearly be done talking with a long pause which hampers fluid conversations. Reactions to things you hear or say become delayed making for a jarring experience.

You can do it yes, but it's subpar.

Edit: Imagine a lawyer not being able to interject properly during a court case or read non verbal queues of whats going on in court in real time.

Where are you going on about emergency use? The article is talking about how this is going to impact northern first nations communities who were going to use the service for virtual court appearances which require good bandwidth and low latency.

Satellites that have to communicate with a ground station, unless they want to do all the traffic in a region over the laser links, but those links will have their own limitations.

I'm not sure what the ground infrastructure is specifically, is it spacex hardware that connects to local ISP stuff or is it their own ground based infrastructure. That ground infrastructure is usually what part of getting approved in a country involves. Doing only laser links for a whole country would be too much. (Edit: I mean it'd technically be doable, but it'd greatly reduce their network bandwidth vs having a closer ground station, so fewer users and lower speeds)

The other option would be a hybrid situation where starlink backhauls one of our telecos internet but the local infrastructure is built and owned by them. In the future you could then backhaul with another satellite network in theory. Basically drop a 4g/5g tower in the middle of nowhere and connect it to Starlink.

In Dare Devil they touch this topic and the guy getting arrested for stealing some popcorn or something like that says they want to spend thousands of dollars to jail me for a month, rather than feed me for thousands less.

They have the dealers do it because paper work is annoying as fuck and they want to make it easier on the consumer to help adoption. The dealer has the incentive to file it and the consumer gets the discount.

Ah yes, a satellite network that predates Starlink's announcement and only has 2 satellites in orbit, is going to be competitive with Starlink in 2 years when they launch using SpaceX's Falcon 9 at a for profit rate (edit: and others who are even more expensive than SpaceX)

Their expected bandwidth in the network once complete is 10tbps for all 198 satellites.

The current Starlink network bandwidth is over 350tbps. A single v2 mini dish is 96gbps, and a single Falcon 9 launch adds 2.592 tbps to the network. A single gen 3 satellite if Starship is successful is 1tbps and they'll launch 60 at a time.

Edit: Oh and even better, Telesat is going to try and NOT compete with Starlink, but I wouldn't expect Starlink to stay out of that.

Rather than compete with Starlink, Telesat is focused on being a wholesale satellite connectivity provider, explained Glenn Katz, the company's CCO. Meaning, Telesat will sell its services to carriers, enterprises and others, not directly to consumers like Starlink does.

Edit: i just wanted to add, those gen 3 starlink satellites are designed and ready to go. They just need Starship to work and then they would heavily ramp production.

Latency is the critical piece those networks are missing, and they are expensive. Low latency is what allows real-time connection with people, which is a big part of what's difficult with any internet in remote areas other than Starlink today.

You can only solve latency by being closer, and being closer means a lot more smaller satellites as they'll come down faster and will have a smaller field of view. We can't beat the speed of light.

SpaceX is also launching cellular satellites now and will provide cellular coverage to phones globally in participating countries (canada is on Rogers) for use in dead zones, but the bandwidth is tiny compared to using their dish internet network.

Edit: sorry forgot the part where bandwidth then becomes the competing value of the LEO constellation. If someone else does it, maybe they are only 100mbs, but spacex is cheaper and offers 200mbs for example.

Nothing is ever going to be able to compete with starlink on price and speeds until there's another launch provider with reusable rockets.

The sheer amount of satellites you need in LEO to get proper coverage requires an assembly line mass producing them like starlink does.

To launch those satellites you then need a launch provider. SpaceX does it for cost. Anyone else will need to pay SpaceX the for profit rate.

SpaceX also uses most of its capacity for itself. They can only launch so often. There isn't enough launch capacity (today) to further launch another large competing constellation.

So that means they can't mass produce them and get economies of scale like Starlink, and they pay high cost per launch.

Anything anyone else comes out with will be at a huge disadvantage to Starlink.

SpaceX will then leapfrog everyone with Starships launch capabilities and push starlink even further on that.

Theoretically once Starship has a really high launch cadence maybe someone could build a competitive service while using it by mass producing satellites cheaper, but that's very far away still.

If Blue Origin can make their rocket reuse work, Kupier might have a chance, but at their pace, that's a very long ways away as well, and only BO will be able to compete, not some other 3rd party.

You should also pay everyone 2 million dollars a year. The company will do great and your employees will be happy. I don't have the data to back it up, but I know it's better!

He's not suing the advertisers, he's suing a watchdog who's pointing out all the antisemitism and whatnot, which causes the advertisers to flee because in his world, none of it is bad.

Draw a single unconditional map, you lose the right to draw it and it goes to an independent group who'll do it properly.

Don't give these fascists another chance when they do something unconstitutional.