Wow this is one of those instances where I’m simultaneously surprised something still exists and also find it to make a lot of sense that it still exists.
Yeah. Increasingly reliable satellite internet really killed their bottom line over the last few years.
Any alternatives to the Starlink?
The other satellite players (Hughesnet, Viasat), the fixed 5G boxes (although places sufficiently rural to seriously consider dialup may not have 5G), probably some smaller boutique dialup ISPs.
I read months ago that Amazon was stepping into the game but I haven’t heard anything since then.
What we really need to compete against Starlink’s network full of small satellites threatening a Kessler syndrome incident is a second network full of small satellites threatening s Kessler syndrome incident. And a third and a fourth.
Or put fiber everywhere.
Starlink satellites are in low Earth orbit. They could still cause Kessler syndrome, but aren’t as much of a concern as higher orbits.
Here are some quotes regarding this from and Aerospace America article
Regarding satellite proliferation, while there are many more satellites, the company responsible for most of them, SpaceX, places its Starlink satellites in a low orbit so they can naturally deorbit relatively soon — within five or six years, per SpaceX — if they fail.
At around 400 kilometers and into the 500-km realm — home to ISS and the SpaceX Starlink satellites among others — atmospheric drag plays a major role. Dead satellites and debris usually slow and burn up in the atmosphere in just a few years. This natural cleansing process accelerates when the sun becomes more active and solar coronal mass ejections strike Earth and cause the atmosphere to swell. “In those altitudes, we can probably do a lot and we will be forgiven,” Linares says.
That’s just “the worst possible consequences won’t happen”. The danger at higher orbits is that things wouldn’t come down, and we couldn’t safely launch rockets past that orbit. That wouldn’t happen here, but destroying everything in LEO would still be pretty bad. Astronauts would likely die.
FFS will people ever use “it’s” and “its” correctly ?
“Could of” and similar phonetic replacements making no sense whatsoever irritate me more.
Here at least the logic is arbitrary, “Anna’s apartment” and “school’s leadership” vs “Anna’s waiting” and “school’s empty”, but “its tail” vs “it’s cold”.
OK, I’m not a native speaker as it may be clear.
The one that kills me is the positive use of “anymore,” which I’ve come to learn is colloquial to Northern Ireland and the midwest US, but good lord it just doesn’t sound right when people say stuff like “everybody’s cool anymore” instead of “everybody’s cool now.” For some reason I felt like it was becoming more common but now I’m thinking it might just be my exposure to midwest.social.
Huh; never heard that use, before. Sounds incredibly wrong to be, as well.
