from Hacker News

Why SpaceX Is Making Starlink

by samcday on 6/16/19, 4:35 PM with 9 comments

• by hadsed on 6/16/19, 5:35 PM

  Well, a better video title would be "How Starlink Works".

  I think it's high time that communications gets disrupted. And this is Elon's brilliance yet again. Targeting the financial industry with a low-latency communications solution will put them on the best possible path to funding this for the masses.

  Curious to hear what the biggest technical risks are to this project.

• by pier25 on 6/16/19, 9:27 PM

  As someone who lives in Mexico, where connectivity outside of big cities is severely limited, I'm super excited about this.

  I lived 1 year in an off the grid cabin in the mountains of Veracruz and the biggest issue was by far the lack of connectivity.

• by PopeDotNinja on 6/16/19, 8:25 PM

  I am really impressed with the quality of the content of Real Engineering, the video's YouTube channel. And they pump out content like this every week. That sounds like a lot of work.

• by ncmncm on 6/16/19, 10:37 PM

  I like that several companies are competing to do this, so nobody will have monopoly power for long. Probably SpaceX will have lower operating costs, but Musk wants to siphon off ROI for his Mars, er, project.

  Probably the other players will be better capitalized, but have more pressure to get to break-even. Differences in peering arrangements could have big effects on usefulness, as will bandwidth capacity, which seems likely to be limited in SpaceX's first system. They will probably sell it, as the video suggests, on latency for low bandwidth traffic, meaning it is likely not to be cost-effective for video streaming. It is hard to guess whether any on-board cache would turn out to be useful.

  The first to deploy will be a dancing bear: it will matter less how good it is than that it works at all. But the first will also get the first hard experience needed for their second system.