Reminder that an alternative for Starlink is needed, exchange between Musk and the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs
Reminder that an alternative for Starlink is needed, exchange between Musk and the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs
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137 comments
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Don't let the fascists fool you, there are alternatives to Starlink. Eutelsat in France, Telesat in Canada and Inmarsat in the UK, just to name a few examples.
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Why is starlink being used, do you know?
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Starlink has enough uplink to be able to handle live video streams and a latency low enough to do this with simple tools.
I’m not sure if that still happens, but I’ve seen some pictures of Ukrainian command bunkers literally getting drone feeds using discord screen share.
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It’s faster, cheaper, and on the tech side more reliable (definitely not politically reliable though).
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Now, I don't know, but I would assume its the latency. Starlink has a (impressively) low ping of < 100ms, while existing alternatives usually have 600ms+. Now, that's only relevant if they are using it for stuff like flying drones.
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I think you'd notice half a second even just browsing the Web.
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My guess is better coverage and latency with its sheer number of satellites.
They use low earth orbit, which require them to use more satellites, but lowered latency.
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Technically, and this is purely semantics, coverage is the major downside to starlink. They are faster, though.
The coverage of satellites has an exponential factor of the distance of that satellite to earth. If you had the satellite further out then its signal could reach a wider area before being cut off by the curvature of the earth. However, as the distance increases, so does latency.
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137 comments