As someone who splits their time between Thailand and the US, I cannot wait for satellite phones to become commercially viable.
Everyone in Thailand uses LINE for (data) messaging and calls. Everyone in the US uses (cell) SMS and calls. Having just a US number with satellite data would give me total coverage
Bandwidth is very hit and miss on these. I've tried such a service very recently and in the evening in the middle of Barcelona it was unusable with very sporadic bits of high-latency (+100ms ping) connectivity. Frankly I should chargeback the payment out of principle to discourage selling broken products/services.
This use case is already being solved in the boring way. T-Mobile and Google Fi offer free global data roaming. All other carriers have been pressured to lower roaming prices on their networks in recent years. There is more and more free wifi coverage available everywhere (and phones now have auto connect capability). People are switching away from SMS to other apps. This is really not a problem that needs an expensive satellite connection to solve anymore.
Not my experience at all. I use SMS more now than I did a few years ago. The aggregate hardly matters when it comes to individual choices.
> T-mobile and Google Fi
> free wifi coverage.
Ha! Where do you live? This doesn’t hold up to any place I’ve been that isn’t the flatlands. Cell coverage sucks any place with real terrain.
I live in California within 25 minutes of a major metro, but in the hills. I only get one provider, Verizon, at my house, and only a few bars of LTE, no 5g. Any other provider gets no service at all. There is no place with free wifi within a 5 minute drive that I know of.
Pretty sure free roaming is still very much a promotional offer and a loss leader, it's not meant to be used all the time: most carriers either limit the amount of time you can roam and/or implement separate data caps (often much lower than the main one).
GV requires an active and linked landline or mobile number to be functionally useful and some major services will prevent you from registering a VoIP number (eg: banking).
eg: LINE bars the use of GV numbers as does Discord. It used to be possible in GV's early years to make a call from your American GV number while in another country but seems to be no longer the case.
Or maybe I'm made a hasty generalization. I've used my GV number for years, including with line, and I still make calls from wherever with it, but maybe that's because of its age and that it was ported from a regular cell
I'd upvote this just for Musk finally being honest about something, i.e. its low bandwidth restrictions. Still it's going to be a godsend like me who does a lot of hiking in remote areas to have SMS.
Incoming monopoly. Already exists but it's now just gonna get worse. All your comms belong to starlink.
On one side yay Telstra and Optus can go jump as they finally have some competition. On the other hand their competition outperforms them so heavily we are gonna end up under a monopoly exporting fat gdp out of the nation via starlink. We're probably worse off in the long run with the monopoly.
I wonder if any one has contemplated how easy it would be to knock out a run of starlink sats and toss a region into comms blackout in future years as reliance grows? Probably could be don't with a semi trailer truckload of balloon drones.
Iridium, Globalstar, and Inmarsat aren’t falling out of the sky because of this, and they don’t even fight over the same spectrum. Not to mention terrestrial cellular deployments still continue to get cheaper, now including self contained remote units with solar+battery becoming reasonably priced.
As to the blowing up LEO stuff yea, at the minimum NATO and China have that capability. China caught a bunch of ire a few years back for demonstrating their capabilities.
It would be much easier to take out the current mobile carriers than a Starlink sat. The code that runs it is of terrible quality, maintained by incompetent companies with no incentive to deliver a quality service due to their oligopoly and the regulator being asleep at the wheel.
The reason nobody is doing it now is because it's a one-shot weapon. You fire it once and your target will wake up and actually do better (rather, the government will force them to on national security grounds).
However, non-disruptive attacks on mobile carriers are common. I'd wager any competent intelligence agency has a full view of worldwide SMS comms for example. Similarly, non-government bad actors also have insider access via malware or bribery.
There is a convenient sanity check these days: just look what is happening in Ukraine. One of the major lessons of the war has been that modern infrastructure is resilient.
Not an incoming monopoly, except maybe in a temporary sense for some remote areas. Ground-based internet continues to exist, and is getting better. OneWeb has over 600 satellites in orbit right now, with paying customers. Amazon's Kuiper constellation is planned to have over 3000 satellites; they've got regulatory approval and launch contracts signed, and their pockets are deep. Once those come online properly, it'll be hard for Starlink to charge anything like proper monopoly rents.
> OneWeb has over 600 satellites in orbit right now, with paying customers.
OneWeb is B2B only. I assume, but don't know that it's because they can't get the cost of their user terminals low enough.
> Amazon's Kuiper constellation is planned to have over 3000 satellites; they've got regulatory approval and launch contracts signed, and their pockets are deep. Once those come online properly, it'll be hard for Starlink to charge anything like proper monopoly rents.
It'll certainly be interesting to see how that goes. They went with the "hire everyone but SpaceX" launch strategy, which means that none of the rockets they've signed with are operational yet. And they have a looming FCC/ITU deadline. There's widespread belief that if they make a good effort, they can get a variance, but it's certainly not guaranteed.
In general, I agree with you, though. There's not much evidence that SpaceX is trying to squeeze customers. In part because there are often plenty of competing options, and in part because Elons companies tend to keep prices low even when they do have a defacto monopoly (like right now with space launch).
I think recently they've started talks with SpaceX to launch with them too, buying 3 launches from them for now, since they got sued by an investor for choosing the more expensive launch options.
In extremely rural environments? Possibly. Globally, as an alternative to traditional cellular service? Literally impossible as long as cost is the forcing factor. I'd recommend reading up on RF information theory and then thinking about the cost/bandwidth implications.
Satellite-based cellular is never ever ever going to be competitive with locally deployed terrestrial infrastructure in urban environments.
These things are so 'future' its crazy. Highly advanced phase array antennas. Multiple fucking space lasers. Advanced electric Argon thrusters. Its buzzword galore. That this thing is mass produced is pretty amazing, this isn't some research project.
Recently, I was halfway through explaining Neumann Space's new thruster to an interested but non-scientific friend when I realized that I probably sounded like I was speaking Klingon. "So their approach is to ionize TZM, a molybdenum alloy, and then use the resulting plasma the same way as a traditional ion drive."
Honestly when you talking about ion engines in any technical detail I also start to get lost very fast. People have some basic familiarity with normal rocket engine, its basically a car that caries its own ox. People understand fire and things going boom. These Ion engines just don't fit into any day-to-day mental models.
Luckily, my friend remembered the old Sharper Image Ion fan infomercials wherein they actually did a pretty good job explaining the science. Those fans have an anode array that gives the air a positive charge, and then large cathode blades that attract the charged air. Because of fluid dynamics, the air accelerates past the blades and keeps on going out the back.
Ion thrusters use the same general principle, but they need to carry their own source of ions into space. Most use tanks of compressed noble gas, but Neumann's new design turns solids into gas as part of the ionization process. This is great because noble gas containers are heavy for space applications, and the gasses themselves can be scarce and expensive.
Sorry for the naïve question, but shouldn't "cellphone towers in space" require phones to emit more powerful signal to reach the satellite than they do for terrestrial towers?
> shouldn't "cellphone towers in space" require phones to emit more powerful signal to reach the satellite than they do for terrestrial towers?
Ceteris paribus, yes. In practice, beam forming and the lack of vertical compared with horizontal obstacles reduce the distance. I'm not finding ready information for 5G terrestrial towers versus Starlink.
Cellphones are UHF which follows a line-of-sight propagation pattern. It transmits much better through an empty sky than across the ground where there are obstacles.
The Voyager spacecraft are billions of miles away and use 23 watt radios. The video streamed from the moon landing used a 20 watt radio to transmit a quarter-million miles.
These Starlink satellites have a large antenna to pick up cell signals. The antenna is a big part of the difference between V1 and V2 satellites.
Also, the bandwidth is pretty low. It tops out at 18Mbps per cell, but that is divided across all the users in the cell. Each person will get 100kbps.
Starlink is going to start with texting and add voice and data in 2025. They haven't indicated how fast data will I'm guessing 2G speeds. The service will basically be 2G, text, voice, and some data, everywhere.
I know it is inevitable, but I'm dreading the day when 100% of devices have fast broadband-level connectivity everywhere on the planet and there's truly nowhere you can go to just disconnect. Already in the last few years with satellite internet getting affordable you see people in remote RV camps or backcountry hikes or on boats in the middle of the ocean texting and video calling away, streaming the latest news and catching up on work emails. It's just going to keep getting worse.
> you see people in remote RV camps or backcountry hikes or on boats in the middle of the ocean texting and video calling away, streaming the latest news and catching up on work emails
They want to text and call and stream and email. You don't. They can. You don't have to. I get what you're saying. But lamenting advances on account of some folks' poor impulse control is neither here nor there.
Wise people tell social pressure to sincerely fuck off.
One of the biggest lessons in life is learning that you don't have to care what the fuck others think about you.
Your life is short, and less than 1% of 1% of all the people you would ever meet will be of any consequence to you, let alone the rest of humanity whom you will never even know existed.
So if you want to disconnect: Go for it. Pedal to the metal. Afterburners blazing. Who the fuck cares? It's your life, not their's. They can leave a voicemail and wait for you to get back at your leisure.
"you don't have to care what the fuck others think about you."
No, but there are still consequences.
"and catching up on work emails"
If everyone is doing this, there will be a expectation of you to do it. And if you don't - you will have to really shine somewhere else, to not get serious disadvantages.
Also I already had various big drama in my life for not being reachable (I still have a phone where I can put out the battery) - so yes, I know how to disconnect and I do. But there is an increasing pressure to be always reachable and when you don't live totally on your own - it is a real struggle to get away from it.
Getting poorer reviews. Not being seen as a team player.
Seriously? Have you ever worked where the expectation is you'll be on-call, even on your vacation?
If we're talking just socially, that will impact how the people you interact with perceive you. It's the same thing, as work, but with different stakes in terms of your ability to move among social groups that use texting constantly.
>Getting poorer reviews. Not being seen as a team player.
>If we're talking just socially, that will impact how the people you interact with perceive you.
I reiterate for emphasis: Stop caring what the fuck others think about you.
>Have you ever worked where the expectation is you'll be on-call, even on your vacation?
You are working at your choice of employment out of your own free will; you chose to work that job that demands you be on call even on vacation. If you don't like it, you have a right to quit and find other arrangements better suited to your lifestyle.
"If you don't like it, you have a right to quit and find other arrangements better suited to your lifestyle."
I suppose you do not have a family or other ties? When you are young and unbound, the possibilities are a big bigger, than when you are settled down and don't want to uproot everyone to get a new job.
> Seriously? Have you ever worked where the expectation is you'll be on-call, even on your vacation?
No, because that would be illegal in my country, as it is in many. One call to the relevant government department would launch an investigation and at minimum lead to hefty company fines and the practice stopping.
If that's normal to you, you should fix it or leave whatever country you live in. That would be laughable to most of us if it weren't so sad.
> If everyone is doing this, there will be a expectation of you to do it
Most people don't go to low- and no-connectivity areas to recreate. If you're bucking the trend by doing that now, it isn't much different to turn your phone off (or leave it at home).
"Most people don't go to low- and no-connectivity areas to recreate."
Well, those who do, are unfortunately often those who do it, so they don't catch Corona via the 5G waves ...
But my point was more that right now, it is still an acceptible excuse (in some areas) to not be reachable, to say you just had no reception. That is going away soon - and then it seems I will have to defend every time I turn off my phone and someone wanted to reach me with something "important". So yes, the problem is not the technology in my eyes, but the social expection. The result is still the same.
You don't exist in a vacuum. If people around you are connected then you are as well. You can still hear their cell phone pings. You can see that strangers gathering by your campfire and having conversations is happening less frequently. And "sorry I didn't have network" is no longer a convenient excuse when you are on these trips. It's never as simple as "oh just let them do their thing and you do yours" when talking about a broad cultural change.
I miss spending time in the evenings as a child with my grandparents at candle light, before electricity got brought to their remote village. They told us stories, we watched the flame flicker and we sang. It was a simpler, smaller world. But our modern world is an undeniable better one - they were the first to acknowledge, when they were still alive.
Is it? Honestly, global trade/capitalism has ravaged our planet - we have a fire season nearly everywhere now, ocean acidification/plastic gyre. The same engine that can give us global wireless broadband has polluted our planet beyond restoration.
Yes, medicine and technology is arguably better for most but increasing income inequality is making everything less available to all.
I would urge you to confirm your priors on whether the concept of "ongoing progress" is a state of nature, or a belief system.
I don't think that's fair, it's entirely dependant on where the person you're replying to lives.
Life quality in cities is still improving, assuming one can afford it. In more rural areas, often simultaneously subject to all kinds of attacks on nature and a lack of opportunities and essential services, I'm not so convinced...
Never in our civilisation history have we had so much available to so many.
Yes, nature and the planet are in a worse state but the humanity is in a much better one. And I am confident with time and technology we will improve them both. The engine of progress has already solved much harder problems than the current ones.
> The engine of progress has already solved much harder problems than the current ones.
I suspect the harder problems you're thinking of are all technological. The current ones we are facing are social and political more than anything, so I don't share your optimism...
Yes, there is a danger there, and it wasn't always an easy path, but anti-tech movements were always around. Call them luddites, de-growth, doomers, anti-tech, anti-nuclear greens, anti-development (or their e economic equivalent: anti-capitalists, marxists and communists) - historically they always lost to progress.
Humanity is huge and diverse - if a group of people decides to stop evolving and stagnate, another will gladly steal their place.
What you call "progress" is what led us here. Remains to be seen if "here" is a trap. You seem to think that everything is fine since everything will be fine, but that opinion doesn't have a consensus right now. I prefer to remain more doubtful.
I found out recently Switzerland doesn't use European SIM cards. Had WiFi in the rental, but as soon as we started walking around Luzern we were text message only. The experience was kind of like turning off the TV that's on all the time. Everything got quiet and I became more aware of the people I was with. I guess I can just turn my phone off, or turn data off, but so long as I have to WANT to do it, I wont. And that's maybe as human a conclusion I can draw. Candle light and wood smoke still exist, but unless we're kinda forced towards them, we'll always go towards the bright lights and warmer rooms.
This is valid. That said, if you're close enough to hear a cell phone ping, you've chosen proximity. You're close enough to hear a lot of other sounds. You retain the option to move away.
> "sorry I didn't have network" is no longer a convenient excuse when you are on these trips
To whom are you giving this excuse? Because if you were previously saying you were going somewhere without connectivity, you can still say you're going to reject connectivity.
I agree with you, with one proviso. I hope there is a proliferation of camp grounds and sites with rules forbidding things like projectors and speakers over a certain volume level.
The number of projectors I have seen in use at campgrounds in the last couple of years is just profoundly irritating.
I missed this projectors thing but I've not been camping for the last 4 years. What I hated last time was the needlessly super bright flashlights campers started to use to walk around the campsites. I understand the psychological and commercial call for brighter is better, but they are really harsh to the eyes to the other people. Any 1000 lumen light is more than enough to see where you're walking and its maybe more than what people use at home to lit their rooms. I used one of these lights to bike at night in the woods. My flashlights are less bright than that. I see lights with 3000 lumens on sale on Amazon now.
In the most material terms, they're probably more distracted than two people who are both present and chatting which isn't great for anybody's experience. People also tend to be shouting into the phone, worse if they're not using headphones so you get to hear the other person shouting back.
At a psychic level it also kind of sucks in ways that are harder to describe.
Not only that, the fact that the person on the other side of the conversation does not have any clues as to what is happening and as such is wont to keep on blathering while her conversation partner really needs to focus his attention on that slippery slope/crumbling ledge/onrushing traffic/deer jumping in front of the car/rushing river/person in distress/...(fill in the blanks)... makes telephone conversations much worse than those between two or more people in the same location.
The worst outcome will be that urban Californians will be able to buy houses anywhere and work remotely, driving up local prices and making every where look like orange county.
I think the bigger problem will be omnipresent HD audio and video real time surveillance by governments both directly and also indirectly via commercial devices like smart glasses.
It’s an odd social issue. You can obviously regulate your own access. So the issue distils to it being regrettable that other people aren’t behaving in a way that’s necessary to satisfy one’s desired ambience. Ie. enforcing behaviour of others for our benefit.
I imagine there may eventually be sufficient demand for private locations that ban devices?
Is there something about this that makes it distinct from a “kids these days” kind of lament?
Such a tryhard take. Look at me, I want everyone to know I'm not like other girls. Get over it. I probably spend 10x as much time outdoors as you but I can disconnect anywhere. Even here.
At Burning Man, I saw a woman getting accosted by a man for having her phone out, "ruining" the experience of the guy who came there to disconnect.
She was trying to talk to her relatives, because her house had caught on fire, while her kids and babysitter were home. She was freaking out and trying to find out if everyone was ok.
You don't like that other people are connected, when you want to disconnect. That's really a you problem, not a them problem.
When I was much younger I also felt a profound sense of loss when I found that the Iridium constellation covered the globe.
Thankfully our shared thought that you can't be away from everything is not true: caves, anything underwater or dense forests around the world are totally inaccessible for any satellite devices.
Also, not sure if you've used any satellite devices but even in most conditions you're still pretty away from things. You have to set up the device with a view of the open sky and wait several minutes for a text-only message of a handful of bytes. Using it in a Costa Rican rainforest was almost impossible.
For better or for worse, there are pretty large parts of the Earth where we will have no Internet for most likely our entire lifetimes.
Your problem isn't that you can get broadband everywhere, it's that you want to regulate the lives of the people around you for some reason.
You, yourself, are free to live more or less however you please. You are not free, in any way, to regulate the lives of people around you. If your happiness depends on the people around you behaving according to your rules/values/etc, then you'll be profoundly unhappy regardless of them checking their instagram.
Which is funny, because you can't manage to regulate yourself, but, you desire to regulate other people, as though you are at all qualified to do so. The reality is, you're only qualified to make people as miserable as you are.
And while I don't disagree that, people being overly connected is a huge problem, and a general cancer that's eating humanity itself, I understand that it's not my job to save the world, only myself, and once that's sorted out, I might be able to save a few people around me that I hold dear. Anything broader than that has one outcome, and that's failure, not just for myself, but also the people I care about the most.
What you need to do is disconnect-in-place, you don't need a forest or a mountain or an ocean to do that, you can do it right now, spin yourself down, feel yourself breathe, clear your head. You'll suck at it at first, as you have sucked at many things you're now good at, embrace the suck, and get to it, stop basing your wellbeing on things rightfully outside of your control.
Oh man, those crazy people on boats in the middle of the ocean. I mean why would you want to be connected to things like PredictWind [0] and other tools to make your trip safer, or be able to communicate with the manufacturer of your water maker, engine, or other systems if there is a problem, etc. PredictWind have had Irridium Go [1] support for years, but now that starlink is available, most are switching to get more than 2 times a day updates.
The fact that you see other people getting on with their lives as something that needs to be wrenched away from them lest they ruin your naturalist fantasy, deeply irks me to no end.
So what are we saying here? Nature parks should reject people who can't afford a radio, even if they have a phone which can be used for calling for help?
But you raise a good point: A hike being quiet or noisy depends much more on the social norms of your fellow hikers than their and your ubiquitous reachability.
I've been annoyed by large groups on narrow trails talking at the top of their lungs in order to be able to lead one big conversation, and at the same time I would not even notice somebody texting a few meters away from me as long as they have their phone on silent.
You are describing one of the most impactful achievements that humanity is making strides towards. 100% of devices having fast connectivity anywhere on the planet is a literal superpower.
We need to fix our browsing habits. Saying you dread the day when anyone anywhere can call for help because your poor impulse control might interrupt your disconnect is just ridiculous.
As someone that works on a boat in the middle of the ocean, I welcome more accessibility. Being able to talk to my wife and kids while at work is so much better than being cut off. Also the better availability of weather information or technical information if there is a problem can literally be life saving. I also sometimes miss the days when I would go to work and literally have email every few weeks. Things were simpler then but I was young, single without any real responsibilities. Unfortunately time has moved on and even checking my bank account has become impossible without being able to receive 2FA messages. [There was a period of time where I could get enough service to load the app/web site but they insisted on a text l or email which was loading so slowly it would take more than half an hour that the 2FA was good for.] During COVID I had a coworker from Mississippi whose wife had to drive to the school to get photo copies of school work because they didn’t even have internet at their house with cell phones. Modern government and society has made internet connection mandatory to participate. Some people don’t have a choice of being somewhere remote.
Unlikely. Planes with GoGo's (Intelsat's) gear connect to specially-equipped cell towers with antennas mounted to the fuselage. (As far as I understand it, these are regular cellular antennas that point up instead of to the side.) Since these sat towers will present themselves as terrestrial LTE-capable towers, theoretically, this equipment should be able to use them as-is. (Software might need to be updated though.)
I’m just curious how this will work in restrictive places like North Korea or China? Can the government jam the signals or will users be able to bypass local firewalls to access all the internet?
This is cool but I’m not clear on why this is needed, is spotty reception really that big of an issue? Or is it really to save lives under extreme circumstances in ultra remote areas? Anecdotally I can’t remember the last time I didn’t have a decent signal
You'd be surprised! I'm a politician in a rural county in the USA and Cell Phone coverage is one thing that people complain about the most. Probably only 30-40% of the county has good signal strength. I'm really excited about this because has the potential to make things so much safer for folks around here.
Well this will be fun. We already live in a world where law enforcement can easily spoof cell towers and ensnare anyone whose phone trusts said tower nearby, on a geographical basis. We are approaching a brave new world where any rogue nation's satellites could be overhead to provide cell service to anyone.
There is a certain area of town where I frequently go, and there is a conspicuously disguised cell tower across the street, and I've suddenly become suspicious of it. As you roam around the countryside, do you trust the cell tower that's providing service to you? What happens when a rogue tower begins to lie about the time of day, or begins to harvest your data traffic for later decryption, or simply analyzes your SMS traffic on behalf of organized crime threat actors?
It seems high time we need strong authentication mechanisms between handsets and towers, but on the consumer level, this is not a realistic goal. Have fun out there.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadEveryone in Thailand uses LINE for (data) messaging and calls. Everyone in the US uses (cell) SMS and calls. Having just a US number with satellite data would give me total coverage
Surely they won’t notice you teleporting around?
Hopefully the phone doesn’t mind the latency when talking to its SIM that’s supposed to be 3cm away.
being able to use SMS in a disaster area is a big deal.
Not my experience at all. I use SMS more now than I did a few years ago. The aggregate hardly matters when it comes to individual choices.
> T-mobile and Google Fi > free wifi coverage.
Ha! Where do you live? This doesn’t hold up to any place I’ve been that isn’t the flatlands. Cell coverage sucks any place with real terrain.
I live in California within 25 minutes of a major metro, but in the hills. I only get one provider, Verizon, at my house, and only a few bars of LTE, no 5g. Any other provider gets no service at all. There is no place with free wifi within a 5 minute drive that I know of.
On one side yay Telstra and Optus can go jump as they finally have some competition. On the other hand their competition outperforms them so heavily we are gonna end up under a monopoly exporting fat gdp out of the nation via starlink. We're probably worse off in the long run with the monopoly.
I wonder if any one has contemplated how easy it would be to knock out a run of starlink sats and toss a region into comms blackout in future years as reliance grows? Probably could be don't with a semi trailer truckload of balloon drones.
As to the blowing up LEO stuff yea, at the minimum NATO and China have that capability. China caught a bunch of ire a few years back for demonstrating their capabilities.
The reason nobody is doing it now is because it's a one-shot weapon. You fire it once and your target will wake up and actually do better (rather, the government will force them to on national security grounds).
However, non-disruptive attacks on mobile carriers are common. I'd wager any competent intelligence agency has a full view of worldwide SMS comms for example. Similarly, non-government bad actors also have insider access via malware or bribery.
OneWeb is B2B only. I assume, but don't know that it's because they can't get the cost of their user terminals low enough.
> Amazon's Kuiper constellation is planned to have over 3000 satellites; they've got regulatory approval and launch contracts signed, and their pockets are deep. Once those come online properly, it'll be hard for Starlink to charge anything like proper monopoly rents.
It'll certainly be interesting to see how that goes. They went with the "hire everyone but SpaceX" launch strategy, which means that none of the rockets they've signed with are operational yet. And they have a looming FCC/ITU deadline. There's widespread belief that if they make a good effort, they can get a variance, but it's certainly not guaranteed.
In general, I agree with you, though. There's not much evidence that SpaceX is trying to squeeze customers. In part because there are often plenty of competing options, and in part because Elons companies tend to keep prices low even when they do have a defacto monopoly (like right now with space launch).
Satellite-based cellular is never ever ever going to be competitive with locally deployed terrestrial infrastructure in urban environments.
https://twitter.com/MarcusHouse/status/1738839709508571291
Ion thrusters use the same general principle, but they need to carry their own source of ions into space. Most use tanks of compressed noble gas, but Neumann's new design turns solids into gas as part of the ionization process. This is great because noble gas containers are heavy for space applications, and the gasses themselves can be scarce and expensive.
Ceteris paribus, yes. In practice, beam forming and the lack of vertical compared with horizontal obstacles reduce the distance. I'm not finding ready information for 5G terrestrial towers versus Starlink.
The Voyager spacecraft are billions of miles away and use 23 watt radios. The video streamed from the moon landing used a 20 watt radio to transmit a quarter-million miles.
Starlink is just a couple hundred miles up.
Transmitting from a 3.6 meter wide parabolic antenna, received by 70 meter wide parabolics, at a rate of 160 bits per second...
Also, the bandwidth is pretty low. It tops out at 18Mbps per cell, but that is divided across all the users in the cell. Each person will get 100kbps.
Starlink is going to start with texting and add voice and data in 2025. They haven't indicated how fast data will I'm guessing 2G speeds. The service will basically be 2G, text, voice, and some data, everywhere.
And protip the people that actually do it as a hobby tend to call it caving not spelunking :)
Would love to hear HNer recs on caving spots
They want to text and call and stream and email. You don't. They can. You don't have to. I get what you're saying. But lamenting advances on account of some folks' poor impulse control is neither here nor there.
If something becomes the norm, it creates social pressure to do the same. Sometimes you can opt out, but not always and usually with a cost.
One of the biggest lessons in life is learning that you don't have to care what the fuck others think about you.
Your life is short, and less than 1% of 1% of all the people you would ever meet will be of any consequence to you, let alone the rest of humanity whom you will never even know existed.
So if you want to disconnect: Go for it. Pedal to the metal. Afterburners blazing. Who the fuck cares? It's your life, not their's. They can leave a voicemail and wait for you to get back at your leisure.
No, but there are still consequences.
"and catching up on work emails"
If everyone is doing this, there will be a expectation of you to do it. And if you don't - you will have to really shine somewhere else, to not get serious disadvantages.
Also I already had various big drama in my life for not being reachable (I still have a phone where I can put out the battery) - so yes, I know how to disconnect and I do. But there is an increasing pressure to be always reachable and when you don't live totally on your own - it is a real struggle to get away from it.
Can you name them?
Seriously? Have you ever worked where the expectation is you'll be on-call, even on your vacation?
If we're talking just socially, that will impact how the people you interact with perceive you. It's the same thing, as work, but with different stakes in terms of your ability to move among social groups that use texting constantly.
>If we're talking just socially, that will impact how the people you interact with perceive you.
I reiterate for emphasis: Stop caring what the fuck others think about you.
>Have you ever worked where the expectation is you'll be on-call, even on your vacation?
You are working at your choice of employment out of your own free will; you chose to work that job that demands you be on call even on vacation. If you don't like it, you have a right to quit and find other arrangements better suited to your lifestyle.
I suppose you do not have a family or other ties? When you are young and unbound, the possibilities are a big bigger, than when you are settled down and don't want to uproot everyone to get a new job.
No, because that would be illegal in my country, as it is in many. One call to the relevant government department would launch an investigation and at minimum lead to hefty company fines and the practice stopping.
If that's normal to you, you should fix it or leave whatever country you live in. That would be laughable to most of us if it weren't so sad.
Most people don't go to low- and no-connectivity areas to recreate. If you're bucking the trend by doing that now, it isn't much different to turn your phone off (or leave it at home).
Well, those who do, are unfortunately often those who do it, so they don't catch Corona via the 5G waves ...
But my point was more that right now, it is still an acceptible excuse (in some areas) to not be reachable, to say you just had no reception. That is going away soon - and then it seems I will have to defend every time I turn off my phone and someone wanted to reach me with something "important". So yes, the problem is not the technology in my eyes, but the social expection. The result is still the same.
Is it? Honestly, global trade/capitalism has ravaged our planet - we have a fire season nearly everywhere now, ocean acidification/plastic gyre. The same engine that can give us global wireless broadband has polluted our planet beyond restoration.
Yes, medicine and technology is arguably better for most but increasing income inequality is making everything less available to all.
I would urge you to confirm your priors on whether the concept of "ongoing progress" is a state of nature, or a belief system.
Life quality in cities is still improving, assuming one can afford it. In more rural areas, often simultaneously subject to all kinds of attacks on nature and a lack of opportunities and essential services, I'm not so convinced...
Yes, nature and the planet are in a worse state but the humanity is in a much better one. And I am confident with time and technology we will improve them both. The engine of progress has already solved much harder problems than the current ones.
I suspect the harder problems you're thinking of are all technological. The current ones we are facing are social and political more than anything, so I don't share your optimism...
Humanity is huge and diverse - if a group of people decides to stop evolving and stagnate, another will gladly steal their place.
What you call "progress" is what led us here. Remains to be seen if "here" is a trap. You seem to think that everything is fine since everything will be fine, but that opinion doesn't have a consensus right now. I prefer to remain more doubtful.
This is valid. That said, if you're close enough to hear a cell phone ping, you've chosen proximity. You're close enough to hear a lot of other sounds. You retain the option to move away.
> "sorry I didn't have network" is no longer a convenient excuse when you are on these trips
To whom are you giving this excuse? Because if you were previously saying you were going somewhere without connectivity, you can still say you're going to reject connectivity.
If there are other people around you at all, you're not really in the backcountry.
The number of projectors I have seen in use at campgrounds in the last couple of years is just profoundly irritating.
100% agree.
Is it so different from two hikers conversing?
At a psychic level it also kind of sucks in ways that are harder to describe.
I imagine there may eventually be sufficient demand for private locations that ban devices?
Is there something about this that makes it distinct from a “kids these days” kind of lament?
She was trying to talk to her relatives, because her house had caught on fire, while her kids and babysitter were home. She was freaking out and trying to find out if everyone was ok.
You don't like that other people are connected, when you want to disconnect. That's really a you problem, not a them problem.
When I was much younger I also felt a profound sense of loss when I found that the Iridium constellation covered the globe.
Thankfully our shared thought that you can't be away from everything is not true: caves, anything underwater or dense forests around the world are totally inaccessible for any satellite devices.
Also, not sure if you've used any satellite devices but even in most conditions you're still pretty away from things. You have to set up the device with a view of the open sky and wait several minutes for a text-only message of a handful of bytes. Using it in a Costa Rican rainforest was almost impossible.
For better or for worse, there are pretty large parts of the Earth where we will have no Internet for most likely our entire lifetimes.
You, yourself, are free to live more or less however you please. You are not free, in any way, to regulate the lives of people around you. If your happiness depends on the people around you behaving according to your rules/values/etc, then you'll be profoundly unhappy regardless of them checking their instagram.
Which is funny, because you can't manage to regulate yourself, but, you desire to regulate other people, as though you are at all qualified to do so. The reality is, you're only qualified to make people as miserable as you are.
And while I don't disagree that, people being overly connected is a huge problem, and a general cancer that's eating humanity itself, I understand that it's not my job to save the world, only myself, and once that's sorted out, I might be able to save a few people around me that I hold dear. Anything broader than that has one outcome, and that's failure, not just for myself, but also the people I care about the most.
What you need to do is disconnect-in-place, you don't need a forest or a mountain or an ocean to do that, you can do it right now, spin yourself down, feel yourself breathe, clear your head. You'll suck at it at first, as you have sucked at many things you're now good at, embrace the suck, and get to it, stop basing your wellbeing on things rightfully outside of your control.
[0] https://www.predictwind.com/?lang=en [1] https://www.predictwind.com/iridium-go
The fact that you see other people getting on with their lives as something that needs to be wrenched away from them lest they ruin your naturalist fantasy, deeply irks me to no end.
It’s perfectly reasonable for nature parks to have a no devices policy.
If anyone has any connections with the REI Board of Directors please ask them to stop selling that crap.
But you raise a good point: A hike being quiet or noisy depends much more on the social norms of your fellow hikers than their and your ubiquitous reachability.
I've been annoyed by large groups on narrow trails talking at the top of their lungs in order to be able to lead one big conversation, and at the same time I would not even notice somebody texting a few meters away from me as long as they have their phone on silent.
We need to fix our browsing habits. Saying you dread the day when anyone anywhere can call for help because your poor impulse control might interrupt your disconnect is just ridiculous.
Nah, it's just that Musk is the Emmanuel Goldstein du jour, and a Two Minutes Hate is mandatory any time he or one of his companies get mentioned.
There is a certain area of town where I frequently go, and there is a conspicuously disguised cell tower across the street, and I've suddenly become suspicious of it. As you roam around the countryside, do you trust the cell tower that's providing service to you? What happens when a rogue tower begins to lie about the time of day, or begins to harvest your data traffic for later decryption, or simply analyzes your SMS traffic on behalf of organized crime threat actors?
It seems high time we need strong authentication mechanisms between handsets and towers, but on the consumer level, this is not a realistic goal. Have fun out there.