[francislavoie]

No it doesn't. To have a "stationary satellite", you need to put it in a geosynchronous orbit, which is 32,000km up. With starlink, it's at about 550km up. The latency difference is _huge_. With starlink, you can easily get 50-150ms ping times. With geo satellites, you get like 2 _seconds_. That's completely unusable for many usecases of the internet like video calls or online videogames.

[zekica]

You are correct, but the exact ping times (to the ground station) is 6.7ms for Starlink (if directly above) or 10-15ms just for the link.

For geostationary, it is 400ms if you are on the equator, and 450ms if you are north/south. Realistically it is about 600ms from what I have seen in Europe.

[nix23]

Well yeah that's true, but is ping really important when you live in the far north...is it so important that a whole part of a country is highly dependent on a private US company?

>That's completely unusable for many usecases of the internet like video calls or online videogames.

stationary is ~600, and it's absolutely possible for video-calls (from my own experience)...but yeah no good scores for your counter-strike...but then better go hunting/fishing irl when you up there.

And if you look at the map:

https://www.starlink.com/map

North Canada is not accessible...and probably never will (not enough customers)

[Tuna-Fish]

> Well yeah that's true, but is ping really important when you live in the far north...is it so important that a whole part of a country is highly dependent on a private US company?

In a word, yes. High ping isn't bad for just gaming, so much of the internet is written by people who assume that roundtrips are cheap that ~600ms internet connections are just painful for everyday use. If you feel that relying on Starlink gives SpaceX too much power, you need to start thinking about other LEO constellations, not substituting with GEOsats. Because they are simply inadequate.

> North Canada is not accessible...and probably never will (not enough customers)

Literally everywhere in the world will be accessible once they get enough intersat links and the polar sats up. Right now, they are limited by both the bent-pipe architecture they use for the first shell of sats (because intersat links were not ready), and because they launched the 53° shells first (because they get the most customers with the fewest sats operational the fastest).

And they need to do this even if they'd have only a single customer, because their FCC frequency allocation requires them to provide service in all 50 states, including the very northernmost parts of Alaska. They plan to achieve this with a 97.6° shell of 10 planes, which will provide service all the way to the pole.

[nix23]

>Literally everywhere in the world will be accessible once they get enough intersat links and the polar sats up.

Elon cultist....or dreamer

[Tuna-Fish]

Where does the scepticism come here?

They have demonstrated the intersat links, and have launched 867 satellites to working orbits with them since last September (excluding the ones that failed to deploy). Assuming they are launching the shells in sequence, if they maintain their current rate of ~4.5 sats per day on average, they will complete the 53.2° shell by the end of the year. After this, the next in line is the 70° shell. Assuming the same launch rate, it will complete in a bit over 5 months. It doesn't need to be entirely complete for service to start, but the sats will also need a few months to drift into position before they are usable. So about this time next year, Starlink will be usable in all of Canada below the ~72° line. The remaining islands will get service about 5 months after that.

And none of that requires any of their more speculative projects to work, but just for the things they are already doing to continue at current pace.

[nix23]

>Where does the scepticism come here?

From Space-stations, Vans, and hyper-speed-vacuum tunnels.

And even if they have 867 satellites up it's still not really good, there was a good article here recently. But that's how Elon collect's his money, make big promises deliver nothing "Big" but something that already exists.

[monsieurbanana]

> is it so important that a whole part of a country is highly dependent on a private US company?

Sure, fine, that's something worrisome. But be honest with your arguments from the get-go, instead of saying a stationary satellite would be better. I'll pass on the weird condescending gaming tone.

[amelius]

Perhaps Netflix and large downloads over stationary satellite, and all the rest over starlink?