Communication is and has always been an important element in human organisation. Imagine if corrupt governments could no longer shut down the internet and cell service. Even a world war probably wouldn't disrupt this. People will be really empowered by this technology, we just need more competition in this space. But one step at a time.
Also: simmer down Elon fans and haters, this is not only about Elon. Look at the bigger, global picture.
Ham radio will live on!
As for jamming, is it feasible or practical to jam very large parts of the world? I can't imagine it would be. It seems to me like jamming would probably be used for specific military purposes and people would be left alone to communicate with each other otherwise.
It's not that I'm saying this could not be done. It could. But this is not the most likely scenario in my head. The immense benefit to all humanity is a very likely scenario, in contrast.
LoRa is another equally exciting technology that has a lot of potential in all the spaces I mentioned. I just can't currently imagine a reason it would go mass-market.
Is there sufficient capacity?
For broadband Starlink has an upper limit on the density of its customers. By density I mean number of customers per km^2 rather than some prohibition against dumb people using Starlink :-)
Estimates of this limit vary. When I did a back of the envelope calculation a couple assuming all 12000 planned satellites get deployed I got 4.4 simultaneous people doing full speed downloads per km^2. I had to make some guesses for that, in particular the number of satellites visible. If the satellites were spread uniformly around the Earth then at any one time about 360 would be visible from any given location. But they aren't uniform. They have orbits that favor spending more time over the mid latitudes than the high latitudes. That increases the number visible from the mid and low latitudes and lowers the number visible from high latitudes. I just assumed an even 1000 at any one time in mid latitudes.
Others estimates are as high as 30 simultaneous people using full speed per km^2.
This is why providers of wired/fiber or terrestrial wireless broadband in decent sizes cities aren't worried about Starlink.
I'd expect Starlink LTE to have the same kind of limitation, albeit with very different numbers. The bandwidth needed for one 100 Mbps download would be enough for at least 1000 telephone quality voice streams, but I doubt the satellites have the same amount of bandwidth available over LTE as they do over whatever they are using for the internet stuff, so I don't see any way to get a good estimate.
Global picture doesn't work with people in charge of this. If someone shows substantial evidence of mental decline, would you want them anywhere near anything that has to do with global communications?
That’s quite naive, to believe a private company is not under political influence.
https://ofac.treasury.gov/sanctions-programs-and-country-inf...
LEO satellites need constant replacement.
This doesn't change anything for aircraft because aviation has had this capability for decades.
Even light aircraft have ELTs and ADS-B, and larger aircraft operating in oceanic airspace also have real time position reporting via datalink over VHF radio and SATCOM.
> Imagine if corrupt governments could no longer shut down the internet and cell service.
Satellite operators will continue deny service to particular areas whenever they're told to, just as they do today.
Even in the parts of the world where this occurs it has been shown to be nothing more than a surface level inconvenience.
> Communication is and has always been an important element in human organisation.
Precisely. We don't exactly need the internet or cell service. We've got techniques and historical methods going back to the beginning of, unsurprisingly, recorded history.
> People will be really empowered by this technology
They're already empowered. This will mostly just convenience them.
>Even in the parts of the world where this occurs it has been shown to be nothing more than a surface level inconvenience.
"Internet shutdowns" like the ones in Kashmir involves all internet being shut down, not just a few sites being blocked on the ISP's DNS servers. That's hardly a "surface level inconvenience".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_India#I...
And as the other user mentioned, no country at the moment has the kind of stockpile of ASAT weapons needed to wipe the constellation (plus, due to orbital dynamics, there's a limit to how quickly they can take out satellites).
Between trying to wipe the constellation and jamming it, it'd be far more cost effective to jam even accounting for the higher power requirements/lower jamming range.
There would also be other interesting options like capturing and using enough terminals to force the entire cell to be disabled. That has been one of the challenges SpaceX has had to deal with near the frontlines in Ukraine.
My guess is that the truth is somewhere in the middle. All else equal, adding more cell towers to an area will increase interference and decrease performance for existing networks, but I doubt it will be as bad as AT&T claims. Also T-Mobile made a deal with SpaceX to be the sole network with direct-to-cell for the first year after rollout. It seems more likely than not that AT&T is trying to hurt their competition using the FCC. If a different cell network had gotten an exclusive contract, I'm sure it would be T-Mobile petitioning the FCC to block direct-to-cell rollout.
No branch of the US government keeps statistics on how many people get lost in the wilderness and die each year, but it's definitely in the hundreds and possibly over 1,000.[3] Considering how often a working cell phone could save them, I think it's worth enabling direct-to-cell everywhere.
1. https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1081242986780/1
2. https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1021391547062/1
3. https://nypost.com/2020/07/04/why-hundreds-of-people-vanish-...
SpaceX lobbied for radio regulatory changes to hamper competitors, the competitors (AST Spacemobile) overcame that and has their own satellite system that comply with the agreed upon regulations, Verizon and AT&T are customers in the US, then SpaceX wanted its now non-regulatory compliant satellite cluster to do the same thing but the FCC just points to SpaceX’s own contribution to the standards as reason not to change it - which seem like good reasons, power level, interference, the usual
This emergency authorization is a raison d’etre to justify what SpaceX is now trying to do
I’m glad the infrastructure is there for the affected area, the politics behind it are amusing and should be scrutinized
If you're going to write this type of post you should clarify whether you have stock ownership in the company as many people have HUGE conflicts of interest on this given ASTS's rapid rise and meme stock status.
For other readers I suggest looking at their subreddit to see the type of delusional post that is common. https://old.reddit.com/r/ASTSpaceMobile/
If not, was there some kind TMobile-signed-starlink's-key situation?
It's an interesting interplay between preferring user consent versus wanting things to just start working when they need to.
GSM remains vulnerable to all kinds of bad things since it only authenticates the phone/SIM to the network but not otherwise).
More practically for civil defense, national guard will have their own radios, and the amateur radio guys all said they've been prepping for this role? Have they succeeded in that goal?
It requires larger antennas. Starlink had to launch the V2 satellites which are larger and have new, big antenna for Direct-to-cell. They were meant for Starship, but that was delayed so they developed V2 Mini for Falcon 9. The version with antenna started launching beginning of year. My understanding is that are close to numbers for providing global coverage.
Just query "spacex mike griffin", and it's exactly these accounts (and people who reply to them).
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=spacex%20mike%20griffin&type=c...
but also he's a xenophobic, transphobic asshole who supports politicians eroding really basic rights and liberties for people, so fuck em
Yea, coincident with money.
I'm guessing if he actually lived the beliefs he said he used to have more people with support him.
We are used to living this relatively cushy life, where we think that everyone is entitled to the political opinion, and we seem to take it for granted like its never going to change. But in reality, if Trump wins, it may very well be the end of American democratic experiment, and set us on the path towards a much lower standard of life. If EU and other markets start losing faith in US economy because we have a dictator in power, you better believe you are going to feel that, cause nobody will give a shit about the tech sector.
Like, its REALLY fucking bad right now with how close the polls are, and its scary that many peoplendont realize this fact.
So I dont think that at this point and time, its wise to chalk up all the hate rhetoric as just online outrage. People should be outraged. Vote blue downballot in November, and maybe once MAGA movement dies, we can go back to some form of normalicy.
People aren't just outraged. Millions are terrified.
There's a 50% chance come November 9th that my girlfriend and I have to have a very serious discussion about how we will protect her rights and literal safety, that we have to make serious sacrifices to go somewhere safer, including leaving family.
I have friends that would have to go into literal hiding, living fake lives to not get systemically harmed and targeted.
Project 2025 damn near calls for my execution, and the execution of people I love, for things that no well adjusted people consider wrong.
America had a blatant and clear taste for actual full blown Nazism in the early 1900s, and people don't seem to realize that it was never rooted out, just made quiet for a few decades. We LOVE eugenics.
The GOP has destroyed the trust involved in elections, purely on the ego of trump, and thrown away the peaceful transfer of power.
GOP state members have stated that they will discard the result of the election, sending their own picked electors. That will inevitably fall under the purview of the supreme court of the USA, who have shown themselves to be partisan and who will hand the election to trump. What happens after that is anybody's guess. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/republicans-set-stage-... + https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/08/supreme...
Musk is also spreading the "this might be the last election you ever vote in" meme, which is pure projection from the extreme right wing that has taken over so much of the USA. So I have a large amount of derision for provocateurs like Musk, who can simply fly his private jet to another country if the USA becomes embroiled in civil war. https://www.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-claims-during-trump-081...
I utterly loathe the people that would cause violence and stolen elections, and musk is one of them.
And, to the people that would back the extreme right: they will turn on you the very nanosecond it becomes convenient to them.
It’s hilarious that you’re spreading the left version of that meme and can’t even tell.
To be fair the left is saying the same, because Trump will end democracy, this time for real.
I am not American, so often only the crazy/extremist views reach me over the ocean, but I did read over the past years the hope in leftist circles, that migrants will make Florida and Texas first a purple and then blue.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/twitter-elon-musk-dom-lucre-...
https://www.salon.com/2024/09/27/misinformation-superspreade...
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-...
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/18/media/elon-musk-trump-rally-b...
For less-polarizing examples: https://elonmusk.today
In this particular topic, Musk has a history of being... opportunistic to disasters and tries to 'help out' to various degrees of success (see his weird mini-sub saga for the thai cave rescue, and Starlink's involvement in Ukraine/Russia war).
Personally, I think he's a terrible human being who uses his platform to spread vile hate which is incompatible with a modern world, and I tend not to separate the art from the artist (if you could call either of them that). But otherwise I'm not brigading out here.
Why is that in the same statement as the sub thing? Starlink has been absolutely instrumental to the success of Ukraine.
Inevitable consequence of the two party system and/or fptp election system
We could be looking at these developments with excitement, instead many of us think about how he is going to use this tech to fuck more things up and justify more immoral behaviour. He is a real life Bond villain.
Read this case document by Aaron Jacob Greenspan, it’s fascinating and a good read: https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/download.html?id=332879335...
5. Defendant Musk has openly admitted that his leadership philosophy is that the ends—here, Tesla’s mission of “accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy”—justify the means, or fraudulent and unlawful business practices, so long as they keep a company afloat.
He also tweeted this two years ago…
For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally Apr 28, 2022
It makes me nervous such a guy is in control of so many things…
Russia having starlink to use drones to bomb Ukrainian soldiers, for example. Buying Twitter to spread lies and conspiracies is another. Calling a hero a “pedo guy” because he didn’t agree with his approach.
The guy is an asshat, period.
They would need the funds and talent.
SpaceX have been able to do it on this scale due to reusable rockets
