[tyjen]

There's many isolated communities abroad that benefit from this coverage. Plus, when I begin my solo sailing adventure, I intend to use Starlink as my primary method to maintain contact, of course with traditional methods serving as backup.

[tasty_freeze]

The sailing-around-the-world (and similar) market is obviously miniscule. The isolated communities probably tend to be on the less affluent part of the world, so it doesn't seem to justify a 100x expansion.

[lumost]

I think the theory is that they can expand the infrastructure enough that conventional fiber etc. stops being competitive.

[lokar]

I don’t see how. Maybe someone here can attempt the napkin math. But the satellites have much shorter lifespans than fiber.

[hedora]

We have starlink. It’s better than a lot of ISPs we’ve had. I think of them as the new hughes.net. If you are worse than them, you go out of business.

They can’t remotely repeat with local ISPs now that fiber is being rolled out.

Starlink: I have spent 4-5 days debugging cables because in some ketamine fueled manic episode, elon thought he could do better than RJ-45.

Local ISP: “We’ll be happy to run fiber and new ethernet through your existing network conduits, trench to the curb, and help bodge in active poe ethernet repeaters for runs that are too long.”

Edit: As for satellite light pollution, yeah, that sucks, but it’s something like 0.001% (if that) of the problems we have because Silicon Valley tech campuses stay lit up like Christmas trees all night. (And those are probably dwarfed by porch lights, street lights, etc.).

We’re in one of the darkest spots in the region and can pretty much always walk around without lights at night. Seriously, how bright do you need unoccupied spaces in the cities to be at night?

[lukeschlather]

> Local ISP: “We’ll be happy to run fiber and new ethernet through your existing network conduits, trench to the curb, and help bodge in active poe ethernet repeaters for runs that are too long.”

I live in a major metro with a half a dozen apartments constructed within a block of me while I've lived here and this is very much not the case. I call them, they say they'll be happy too and then they ghost me. Of course I also can't get Starlink.

[vel0city]

> I live in a major metro with a half a dozen apartments constructed within a block of me

Good chance Starlink (or any satellite-based internet for that matter) probably won't do well for you either tbh. Too many clients in too tight of an area all fighting for such a small slice of bandwidth and birds overhead.

[lokar]

My area has both ATT fiber and the local cable service. Both fast and reasonably (for the US) priced.

My neighbor has starlink. Very weird.

[NetMageSCW]

How about the sea traffic and jet plane market?

[Ekaros]

About 36 thousand planes and 105 thousand of 100 tonnes ships (not a lot) or 57 thousand of over 1000 tonnes ships...

At what ever unit economic price... That is not exactly massive market globally.

[halfmatthalfcat]

What about them?

[bergie]

Starlink has worked great for us so far from Europe to Polynesia. Prices keep going up, so would be nice if the service had actual competition.

The backups are sadly becoming trickier, as fewer and fewer carry SSB radios or operate shore stations.

And yet we do have SSB, and also an Inreach as backups. You never know when Elon wakes up and decides he doesn't like sailors.

[Lomlioto]

This is great right? Lets pollute our sky for 8 Billion people that tyjen can send a whatsapp message to people while sailing.

Awesome!