It is during a Starlink outage that one ought to cultivate the proper perspective about it, remembering to appreciate the technological miracle and marvel that it is.
This message beamed to space from an undisclosed location and distributed globally within a split second. (Now that service is restored.)
> This message beamed to space from an undisclosed location
Just as undisclosed as the location I posted this message from, also distributed globally. For Starlink, and therefore for the authorities, your position is well known.
LEO satellites will provide better internet experience than traditional satellites because they are closer to the earth.
Now, whether you want to blow smoke up Mr Musk's backside because he was the first to market with Starlink is a different subject. But it also not a subject worthy of the "miracle" or "marvel" title.
Personally I look forward to the day where there's a competitor product available, its merely a case of when not if.
Most Western countries are also busy improving fibre coverage to rural areas as old copper networks get decommissioned.
> Most Western countries are also busy improving fibre coverage to rural areas as old copper networks get decommissioned.
Ahaha, tell that to the UK countryside. I'm the last person who wants to stuff more money up Elmo's arse, but I have no other choice. Cannot wait for a competitor to show up, but just look at the head-start that Starlink has.
The UK countryside has already come a long way from where it was 5–10 years ago.
The problem with the UK is the regulatory/government environment.
The incumbent (BT) were given a large chunk of money 20 years ago for fibre deployment, but they were allowed to cherry-pick their deployments and so inevitably chose the low-hanging-fruit of the conurbations.
I would think 100% FTTC coverage will happen sooner than you think. FTTP clearly harder to forecast, most likely another 5–10 years, sadly.
You might see better 5G coverage sooner, of course.
I'm in rural UK. Blessed with fast fibre. However if the power goes out, it's a proper blackout. I'm slowly sorting out the ups situation along with nut
When the power goes out or fibre dies I cannot rely on 4/5G as they die also, so starlink is the only option
For how long and how often does your power go out? Living just across the channel in NL, I don’t know that I’ve ever had my power go out one time in the last 3 years that I’ve lived here.
They should always have had a second, back-up option, because relying on such a brittle a thing as satellite comms when fighting a military power like Russia was bound to have issues.
I'm pretty sure they know that. Especially as Starlink is brittle mostly because of its (rather disgusting at this point) founder figure and his ramblings. But this is armchair advice: what other options do they have and how do you fund them?
(most of Starlink for the Ukrainian army is being paid for by Poland)
Which is why they don't use it for that. Too susceptible to jamming and Elon's politics on a given day. All their drones will be fly by (fiber optic) wire now.
Many use cases are better served without fiber (as fiber causes limited range, limited payload and need for unhampered (not through tree branches for example) access to target
> You're just gonna have a kilometers long "wire" to control a drone?
Yup. Fiber optic cables are lightweight and thin, so you can stick 10 km+ in a spindle on the drone that unwinds as you fly.
> I'd much rather just lose some drones to jamming. They seem to be cheap and replaceable.
They *are* cheap and replaceable, but you don't send them out for the fun of it. If the drones don't hit the vehicles/soldiers/whatever that you send them at, those enemy assets are going to kill your own soldiers. Especially now that many vehicles on the front lines are equipped with jammers, have non-radio comms is super useful for making sure the drone actually gets where it needs to go.
That said only about 20% of FPV drones are fiber optic at the moment, because radio does have a lot of advantages when it comes to range and maneuverability.
In general, your notions of front-line combat strategy is wrong.
People on both sides used the fiber-optic platforms to target the RF Jammers/platforms first, and then deploy normal FPV platforms to chase down the soldiers.
Note, one may buy a fiber network link kit for drones for around $650 USD off China online stores. Try to be more precise if you don't know something. =3
The drone tactics are changing by the week, to not say by the day, as I just saw a video 3-4 days ago of an Ukrainian soldier who had just cut the wire on a Russia fiber-optic drone and then a second fiber-optic drone came and took his life. So making generalisations like that might not be always right on the spot.
Surprised that no-one posted the video of the UA drone ambushing three Russian drones that were sitting on the ground, ready for an ambush. Here it is [1]. This is really next-level warfare from both sides directly involved. Non-fiber optic, as far as I can tell, at least not the Russian ones.
You seem to sound dismissive, and it did sound wild to me too, yet that is indeed happening and well documented. The “wires” are kilometer long thin fiber optic cables that are spooled off the drones. See for example: https://www.businessinsider.com/unjammable-fiber-optic-drone...
Optical fiber have serious disadvantages, but it gives reliable and very high quality digital link, length depend on how much fiber drone could have onboard.
- For quadrocopters practical up to 30 km; for terrain drones (wheel or caterpillar), could be 60 km or even 90 km.
Sorry if I've misunderstood sarcasm and taken your comment at face value, but are you really unaware of current developments? There are fields literally covered with thick webs of optical fibre near front lines. "Fibre optic drone" even has its own Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_optic_drone
I understand that keeping track of news can be difficult, and staying out of that depressing information cycle has clear mental health benefits. However, when joining discussions about current conflicts, it's worth acknowledging any resulting knowledge gaps.
I had no idea. A kilometers long wire sounded completely infeasible to me, though clearly I underestimated the fiber optics.
I would have thought kilometers of wire would be too heavy to keep on a spool on the drone itself, and without the spool on the drone you probably can't have fly by wire. That's why I was dismissive, it sounded to me like a completely infeasible idea.
Fair enough, I remember being sceptical myself when I first read about that. Well, learnt something new today, at least. (In that WP article I see that wire-guided war devices are much older invention than I thought.)
Maybe I'm missinformed, but doesn't starlink have to comply with rules made by local authorities? Afaik, when the internet goes down, like it happened in Thailand, Starlink can't be used too, because it always roots traffic to a ground station near the source.
If this would not happen, I would agree that Starlink is the future. But as it is right now, I don't see the point, unless you are living in or travelling to remote places.
Personally, I think magic and miracle are terrible words to describe astounding technological achievements. The avoidance of the words in no way devalues the achievement. If anything, I feel their use devalues the achievement, assigning progress to luck or providence.
Solar flares are not anywhere near their peak. The NOAA indicates the peak activity was actually in August 2024 with a total of ~245 "flux units". Activity for this month is predicted to be only around 167 units, so almost a full third down from the peak. Total numbers of sunspots is also down dramatically from their peak in August 2024.
Indeed, we can't know the maxima for sure until passing through the entire peak prediction model period. The expectation of sun spot frequency and intensity only alluded to the average behavior rather than what we have partially observed in cycle 25 so far. Have fun =3
The funny thing with the community status page is that stations can't report they're down when they're down :P There's big holes in individual stations' history and it looks normal.
(Unrelated to main topic) Why is number of dead comments so high here? Do bots search for keywords that may increase views like "starlink" or something?
I choose to believe HN flame wars are still 100% organic. It is "just" immigration from Reddit. Ars Technica also has more trolls in comments under any Musk related topics.
You are right, 5 comments by 2 new users. But looking at "Why We Spiral", which has a similar number of comments, it has a single dead comment by an older account.
Because the fickleness and unreliability of the latter is a serious concern. Once other LEO constellations come online, who is going to stick with Starlink, knowing they may pull the plug at anytime on a whim of "Space Karen"?
... it's time to "pick one's poison" again. It's either Amazon which is US based (and thus vulnerable to the same kind of political pressure that Starlink is) or it's IRIS2 (which is good if you're European, but might not be that optimal if US-EU relations go catastrophically sour).
On top of that, Kuiper isn't live yet (IIRC scheduled until 2026 for minimal coverage) and IRIS2 is only predicted for 2029 (and everyone who knows a thing about European cooperation projects knows that this is a seriously optimistic example - we don't even have a flight proven cheap rocket yet).
Really, everyone I've talked to has loved it. Granted they've all either live or work in remote areas where it has completely changed their lives. Those who live in remote areas can now actually work from home reliably and those who work on ships or in remote parts of world can now call home daily.
It's probably down to your expectations. Starlink won't replace a fiber connection, but if you only have a satellite connection or dial up, I can't see it being anything other than an improvement.
One concern I do have is if Starlink is down, there aren't really any backup. On the other hand I also only have one fiber connection at home. It's just that I could get a COAX hookup by tomorrow.
I use starlink and find it fast and reliable - far more reliable than any cabled connection I ever had elsewhere, and faster than the fibre that’s available around me, which is contended to hell and back. Yes, it’s gigabit in theory, but in practice you get 20Mb/s, and any time there’s a power outage, which is often, it’s down.
A lot of countries still uses poles for cables, and fiber. It's always super weird to see when you're from an area that buries everything except high voltage powerlines.
For areas with frequent earthquakes I think poles are preferred because it's easier to fix broken cables.
From the part of the Europe where I am from power lines are rarely buried, however fiber is universally buried so I haven’t even considered it could not be.
Because that is not the general experience at all. For a service whose necessary parts (the satellites) move in a rather hostile space environment, Starlink doesn't have that many outages.
I am on a Vodafone backbone buried optic cable here in CZ and yet there are a few unplanned short outages each month. Sometimes as short as 10 seconds, but working on a remote screen like my wife does, you definitely notice it.
I don't think it's either? Internet outages are relatively common. I wouldn't want my pacemaker or ventilator to just stop working if there is an internet outage for example. So I agree with them, for anything important(or rather extremely high availability) you don't depend on the internet.
It is during a Starlink outage that one ought to cultivate the proper perspective about it, remembering to appreciate the technological miracle and marvel that it is.
This message beamed to space from an undisclosed location and distributed globally within a split second. (Now that service is restored.)
> This message beamed to space from an undisclosed location
Just as undisclosed as the location I posted this message from, also distributed globally. For Starlink, and therefore for the authorities, your position is well known.
> the technological miracle and marvel that it is
Its not a miracle or a marvel, its basic physics.
LEO satellites will provide better internet experience than traditional satellites because they are closer to the earth.
Now, whether you want to blow smoke up Mr Musk's backside because he was the first to market with Starlink is a different subject. But it also not a subject worthy of the "miracle" or "marvel" title.
Personally I look forward to the day where there's a competitor product available, its merely a case of when not if.
Most Western countries are also busy improving fibre coverage to rural areas as old copper networks get decommissioned.
> Most Western countries are also busy improving fibre coverage to rural areas as old copper networks get decommissioned.
Ahaha, tell that to the UK countryside. I'm the last person who wants to stuff more money up Elmo's arse, but I have no other choice. Cannot wait for a competitor to show up, but just look at the head-start that Starlink has.
> tell that to the UK countryside
The UK countryside has already come a long way from where it was 5–10 years ago.
The problem with the UK is the regulatory/government environment.
The incumbent (BT) were given a large chunk of money 20 years ago for fibre deployment, but they were allowed to cherry-pick their deployments and so inevitably chose the low-hanging-fruit of the conurbations.
I would think 100% FTTC coverage will happen sooner than you think. FTTP clearly harder to forecast, most likely another 5–10 years, sadly.
You might see better 5G coverage sooner, of course.
True.
I'm in rural UK. Blessed with fast fibre. However if the power goes out, it's a proper blackout. I'm slowly sorting out the ups situation along with nut
When the power goes out or fibre dies I cannot rely on 4/5G as they die also, so starlink is the only option
For how long and how often does your power go out? Living just across the channel in NL, I don’t know that I’ve ever had my power go out one time in the last 3 years that I’ve lived here.
Out of all countries the UK is pretty blessed regarding rural internet access. Definitely one of the best.... Just not specifically for you.
UK has about 70% fiber coverage. Sweden has 97% network gigabit-capable coverage and we have way lower population density.
> LEO satellites will provide better internet experience than traditional satellites because they are closer to the earth.
The physics is the easiest bit of what Starlink have done.
> The physics is the easiest bit of what Starlink have done.
In 2025 I don't think anybody should consider automated satellite tracking using an SDR software loop to be a miracle. ;)
Believe me, I admire your urbane "nothing's difficult" approach to analysing other people's achievements.
Not a time to get philosophical when your drone team on the zero line in Ukraine loses comms
They should always have had a second, back-up option, because relying on such a brittle a thing as satellite comms when fighting a military power like Russia was bound to have issues.
I'm pretty sure they know that. Especially as Starlink is brittle mostly because of its (rather disgusting at this point) founder figure and his ramblings. But this is armchair advice: what other options do they have and how do you fund them?
(most of Starlink for the Ukrainian army is being paid for by Poland)
Eutelsat OneWeb, I believe I read that it's already been deployed Ukraine. I might be wrong but I think I heard it on "Ukraine, the latest" podcast.
I think Ukraine is using military version of Starlink - Starshield, maybe it does not have issues.
Which is why they don't use it for that. Too susceptible to jamming and Elon's politics on a given day. All their drones will be fly by (fiber optic) wire now.
Many use cases are better served without fiber (as fiber causes limited range, limited payload and need for unhampered (not through tree branches for example) access to target
I think the latest Geran-2s either use starlink (suspect) or guowang (more likely). I can't find reliable confirmation of which one.
Geran? That's the Russian drones, right?
Yes. A variant of the Iranian Shahed 136 drone.
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> You're just gonna have a kilometers long "wire" to control a drone?
Yup. Fiber optic cables are lightweight and thin, so you can stick 10 km+ in a spindle on the drone that unwinds as you fly.
> I'd much rather just lose some drones to jamming. They seem to be cheap and replaceable.
They *are* cheap and replaceable, but you don't send them out for the fun of it. If the drones don't hit the vehicles/soldiers/whatever that you send them at, those enemy assets are going to kill your own soldiers. Especially now that many vehicles on the front lines are equipped with jammers, have non-radio comms is super useful for making sure the drone actually gets where it needs to go.
That said only about 20% of FPV drones are fiber optic at the moment, because radio does have a lot of advantages when it comes to range and maneuverability.
In general, your notions of front-line combat strategy is wrong.
People on both sides used the fiber-optic platforms to target the RF Jammers/platforms first, and then deploy normal FPV platforms to chase down the soldiers.
Note, one may buy a fiber network link kit for drones for around $650 USD off China online stores. Try to be more precise if you don't know something. =3
Your post doesn't address anything that I said but still complains I'm wrong. Try to be more precise too, thanks.
The drone tactics are changing by the week, to not say by the day, as I just saw a video 3-4 days ago of an Ukrainian soldier who had just cut the wire on a Russia fiber-optic drone and then a second fiber-optic drone came and took his life. So making generalisations like that might not be always right on the spot.
Yes, the fiber-units have also been used in ambush/trap setups, as they can sit dormant a lot longer.
Not a good time for all involved, that is for sure. =3
> can sit dormant a lot longer
Surprised that no-one posted the video of the UA drone ambushing three Russian drones that were sitting on the ground, ready for an ambush. Here it is [1]. This is really next-level warfare from both sides directly involved. Non-fiber optic, as far as I can tell, at least not the Russian ones.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/1neozv...
They use optical fibres several km long. Both the Russians and Ukrainians do this heavily now because short range jamming has become very effective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_optic_drone
You seem to sound dismissive, and it did sound wild to me too, yet that is indeed happening and well documented. The “wires” are kilometer long thin fiber optic cables that are spooled off the drones. See for example: https://www.businessinsider.com/unjammable-fiber-optic-drone...
Absurd as it sounds, yes, both Ukraine and Russia use wired drones to counter jamming.
Optical fiber have serious disadvantages, but it gives reliable and very high quality digital link, length depend on how much fiber drone could have onboard.
- For quadrocopters practical up to 30 km; for terrain drones (wheel or caterpillar), could be 60 km or even 90 km.
Sorry if I've misunderstood sarcasm and taken your comment at face value, but are you really unaware of current developments? There are fields literally covered with thick webs of optical fibre near front lines. "Fibre optic drone" even has its own Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_optic_drone
I understand that keeping track of news can be difficult, and staying out of that depressing information cycle has clear mental health benefits. However, when joining discussions about current conflicts, it's worth acknowledging any resulting knowledge gaps.
I had no idea. A kilometers long wire sounded completely infeasible to me, though clearly I underestimated the fiber optics.
I would have thought kilometers of wire would be too heavy to keep on a spool on the drone itself, and without the spool on the drone you probably can't have fly by wire. That's why I was dismissive, it sounded to me like a completely infeasible idea.
Fair enough, I remember being sceptical myself when I first read about that. Well, learnt something new today, at least. (In that WP article I see that wire-guided war devices are much older invention than I thought.)
Maybe apply something similar to the Chesterton Fence principle: don't be dismissive of an idea unless you really understand the ins and outs of it.
Typically they'll have a spindle that will give them 10KM+ distance. Some have significantly more.
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Maybe I'm missinformed, but doesn't starlink have to comply with rules made by local authorities? Afaik, when the internet goes down, like it happened in Thailand, Starlink can't be used too, because it always roots traffic to a ground station near the source.
If this would not happen, I would agree that Starlink is the future. But as it is right now, I don't see the point, unless you are living in or travelling to remote places.
I think lots more is routed through the satellite network now[0].
[0] https://hackaday.com/2024/02/05/starlinks-inter-satellite-la...
Or one could just not be weird about it.
> appreciate the technological miracle
What part of the solution is a technological miracle?
The whole possibility of it.
If you put yourself in a position “one foot from success”, then you will be able to devalue any achievement this way.
If you see from the point of “empty universe”, you will see magic everywhere. This is the real magic.
Personally, I think magic and miracle are terrible words to describe astounding technological achievements. The avoidance of the words in no way devalues the achievement. If anything, I feel their use devalues the achievement, assigning progress to luck or providence.
The Suns 11-year cycle is hitting the ionosphere hard right now.
Great for Ham Radio bounce contacts, but a lot of space equipment won't do well. =3
People are still unsure why the sun hasn't accidentally cooked us thus far:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r5ZCESOpP0
Which funds the dreams of a disgusting man-baby. No thanks.
I guess it's a branding problem more than anything.
what's supposed to be inferred from the link? I only see the homepage.
Looks like they restored service.
The solar flares in the 11-year cycle are at their peak activity.
There will be random outages for any space based equipment for awhile. =3
Solar flares are not anywhere near their peak. The NOAA indicates the peak activity was actually in August 2024 with a total of ~245 "flux units". Activity for this month is predicted to be only around 167 units, so almost a full third down from the peak. Total numbers of sunspots is also down dramatically from their peak in August 2024.
See the graphs of https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/solar-cycle-progression for more info.
Indeed, we can't know the maxima for sure until passing through the entire peak prediction model period. The expectation of sun spot frequency and intensity only alluded to the average behavior rather than what we have partially observed in cycle 25 so far. Have fun =3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle_25
Was the website the only thing down?
This community Starlink Status page doesn't seem to show any outage: https://starlinkstatus.space/
The funny thing with the community status page is that stations can't report they're down when they're down :P There's big holes in individual stations' history and it looks normal.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/ paints a different picture
Perhaps due to geomagnetic storms, though stronger ones have not caused outages. Possibly just because.
They don't have a status page?
(Unrelated to main topic) Why is number of dead comments so high here? Do bots search for keywords that may increase views like "starlink" or something?
I see just 2 users with dead comments at the moment, one of them (a brand new account) just spammed a bunch of posts.
I choose to believe HN flame wars are still 100% organic. It is "just" immigration from Reddit. Ars Technica also has more trolls in comments under any Musk related topics.
it's just 2 users, no?
You are right, 5 comments by 2 new users. But looking at "Why We Spiral", which has a similar number of comments, it has a single dead comment by an older account.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45240146
NextDNS gaming category filter blocks starlink.com. Bizarre.
I would have thought one could design such thing without a single point of failure.
Everything I heard about Starlink indicates that it's very fickle and unreliable.
The technology, or the business owner?
Because the fickleness and unreliability of the latter is a serious concern. Once other LEO constellations come online, who is going to stick with Starlink, knowing they may pull the plug at anytime on a whim of "Space Karen"?
> Once other LEO constellations come online
... it's time to "pick one's poison" again. It's either Amazon which is US based (and thus vulnerable to the same kind of political pressure that Starlink is) or it's IRIS2 (which is good if you're European, but might not be that optimal if US-EU relations go catastrophically sour).
On top of that, Kuiper isn't live yet (IIRC scheduled until 2026 for minimal coverage) and IRIS2 is only predicted for 2029 (and everyone who knows a thing about European cooperation projects knows that this is a seriously optimistic example - we don't even have a flight proven cheap rocket yet).
Really, everyone I've talked to has loved it. Granted they've all either live or work in remote areas where it has completely changed their lives. Those who live in remote areas can now actually work from home reliably and those who work on ships or in remote parts of world can now call home daily.
It's probably down to your expectations. Starlink won't replace a fiber connection, but if you only have a satellite connection or dial up, I can't see it being anything other than an improvement.
One concern I do have is if Starlink is down, there aren't really any backup. On the other hand I also only have one fiber connection at home. It's just that I could get a COAX hookup by tomorrow.
I use starlink and find it fast and reliable - far more reliable than any cabled connection I ever had elsewhere, and faster than the fibre that’s available around me, which is contended to hell and back. Yes, it’s gigabit in theory, but in practice you get 20Mb/s, and any time there’s a power outage, which is often, it’s down.
And if you live a rural, mostly wooded area like I do, fallen trees are constantly taking out the fiber services for days at a time.
They aren’t buried? Or do the roots tear the fibre?
A lot of countries still uses poles for cables, and fiber. It's always super weird to see when you're from an area that buries everything except high voltage powerlines.
For areas with frequent earthquakes I think poles are preferred because it's easier to fix broken cables.
From the part of the Europe where I am from power lines are rarely buried, however fiber is universally buried so I haven’t even considered it could not be.
Not my experience or people around me (rural area so it's common). WFH with no fibre and patchy mobile so starlink is a godsend.
The most common outage is a regular 3am reboot. Otherwise outages are infrequent and typically a few seconds.
Also the latency is surprisingly good, it's not fibre but can game FPS on it.
Maybe this is what you wanted to hear?
Because that is not the general experience at all. For a service whose necessary parts (the satellites) move in a rather hostile space environment, Starlink doesn't have that many outages.
I am on a Vodafone backbone buried optic cable here in CZ and yet there are a few unplanned short outages each month. Sometimes as short as 10 seconds, but working on a remote screen like my wife does, you definitely notice it.
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The propaganda machine is called X and he bought it to brainwash people, so don't feel to bad about it. Good that you realized!
Just an awkward hand movement.
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Not sure if sarcasm or flame bait.
I don't think it's either? Internet outages are relatively common. I wouldn't want my pacemaker or ventilator to just stop working if there is an internet outage for example. So I agree with them, for anything important(or rather extremely high availability) you don't depend on the internet.
I was curious if any aspect of local hospitals, required the internet to validate licenses, for example.
I wouldn't be surprised if stupidly, something important did.
Done
I like the Bladerunner reference in your about.
Yeah, but the Blade Runner Replicants lived longer than most FANG coders churn positions.
One of the best Sci-Fi movies of all time. =3
THE best.
same