[patrickwalton]

I think the networks actually get more reliable not less, because they're designed to be redundant and you have so many nodes one failure is tolerable. That's how it is for us at www.careweather.com.

I guarantee Starlink isn't using components from the 1990s.

[acdha]

Oh, I’m sure they’re big on redundancy. I mentioned correlated failures, however, because that has multiple failure modes and the one I was thinking about is something like physical degradation: redundancy doesn’t help if all of your redundant nodes have a component which fails at roughly the same time. There’s a reason why storage admins learned to mix hard drive brands and manufacturing batches in RAID arrays, and that problem is much harder to solve in space.