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Would Starlink break location based services?

2 points by sbayona573 ↗ HN
A lot of web app features and services depend on geo-locating the user. For example, I am physically located in South America at the moment. When I access Google sites, they all get customized for my location. Google news shows me local news instead of Atlanta region news which is where I live. A lot of apps adjust the language to Spanish automatically. Event e-commerce store adjust their shipping preferences based on my location. But the worse is, I cannot even access the home depot website. They purposely block it from requests coming from outside the US.

4 comments

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aurizon
This will become a factor, where there is a factor, a solution will be needed - Starlink may be able to geo-tie you to your location, and in fact, may also be able to offer selectable geo-tie locations, like many VPNs do, esp for foreign locations with dictatorships who want to clamp down what their people see. It could be an option with a fee, as it will be a network burden of some cost that you would have to bear - how much? How much of a profit motive will be there? If not, various VPNs may also be capable to doing this service, but that would need some cooperation with Skylink - which may be unreasonably withheld if it might cause Starlink problems in some manner?
newuser3398
In part I would welcome this, since some sites have become really annoying in that they think they know better than me which settings I want based on my regional IP.
phillipseamore
IIRC Starlink uses uplinks in the same region - this might change with sat-to-sat laser links. So a users traffic would actually go out to the internet in the same region. This is the main reason service is only offered in some regions right now even though the sats are flying over multiple regions/countries.
ev1
Satellite internet already breaks location services and geo randomly.

AFAIK, the entire country of Eritrea is uplinked solely by a Hong Kong based satellite ISP.