A Second Look at Geolocation and Starlink

(potaroo.net)

29 points | by speckx 5 days ago ago

8 comments

  • wmf 6 hours ago

    Huston estimates 2.3M Starlink users worldwide while SpaceX reports 8M customers. That's a massive difference.

    • plugger 30 minutes ago

      I'm a Starlink user technically, but haven't had my service enabled for over 3 years. People like me might help account for this discrepancy.

    • wkat4242 6 hours ago

      Possibly a lot of those missing ones are military ones that don't want to be counted for security reasons? Just thinking

      • RealityVoid 5 hours ago

        Or, perhaps SpaceX fudged the nunbers so they look as if they have more users.

        Don't want to be a hater in this, I love what SpaceX is doing, but Musk has been known to play PR games, so he's an unreliable narrator at best.

        • gunalx 4 hours ago

          Wouldnt be suprised if they said, we have about 2M users, lets estimate a common household per user, to inflate the numbers.

    • CamperBob2 an hour ago

      Not really. A lot of Starlink installations, like mine, are strictly for emergency backup purposes. My account stays suspended 99% of the time, but it's reasonable for them to count me as a "customer."

    • Onavo 5 hours ago

      They are not evenly distributed though, so the density differences isn't that big for the purposes of regional geolocation.

  • daemonologist 6 hours ago

    If you have a wide monitor, the CSS can be fixed by removing the background-image from the body, or by adding background-repeat: repeat-y;. (For me there was a beige stripe running through the middle of the text.)