Post #3801774
2026-07-06 18:26 UTC
Replies (3)
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@captainlezbian@lemmy.world 2026-07-06 19:02
Satellite is better for remote people. I know a woman whose Alaskan village (indigenous, not colonizer) got significantly better internet once starlink was rolled out. Now you could say that nations with meaningful duties to remote peoples should band together and essentially jointly operate (maybe having the UN administer it) such a service for them and use it as the last resort akin to sat phones. And I’d be cool with that. But I so think such people should have internet, and this is probably cheaper than running and maintaining cables all across Alaska and northern Canada.
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@phoenixz@lemmy.ca 2026-07-06 19:05
And even then, why the everlasting fuck do you want low watch orbit satellites for this? Why do we need to pollute the shit out of our ecosystem, our LEO, and our night sky (fuck those moving blips) just to have latency low enough to play a game over na internet connection that shouldn’t be used for any of that… Everything about starlink is maddeningly stupid and it is negatively impacting so many people that want nothing to do with it but hey, it’s Elmo Musk, so just let him do that shit anyway!
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@AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml 2026-07-06 19:13
The latency and bandwidth are fundamental limitations of physics which are incredibly expensive to scale up compare to cable and cell towers. Latency is theoretically much better because the speed of light is much faster in the vacuum of space than fiber optics. So the ping from continent to continent is better using a satellite network that transmit data to each other using laser light. I suspect we could be moving the orbit of the satellites higher so we can reduce the insane number of them, while still have better ping. I don’t see a technical reason why bandwidth would be more limited in space than on the ground. It’s fundamentally easier to scale since you can just launch more satellites along certain orbits to add bandwidth. The fundamental problem is of course privatization and the inevitable monopoly. It will never really be cheaper than land based internet, and so both will continue to coexist, so it just adds additional resource waste for no real benefit except to make some guy rich.