• LesserAbe@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    I think what has made starlink possible at all has been that musk also owns SpaceX so he can launch a shit ton of satellites. No other launch provider can match their cadence, so I’d guess that will be a limiting factor

    • MDCCCLV
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      23 hours ago

      Oneweb is medium altitude unlike starlink which is low altitude, so you don’t need as many. It doesn’t have as much capability but it’s fine. But when starship is operational there will be plenty of capacity to launch a lot more sats and get more capacity.

      • dustyData@lemmy.world
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        22 hours ago

        NGL, I’ve always hated starlink’s proposal. They last so little time and polute the sky making astronomy harder and raising risks of collision. It’s LEO littering for a product that could be substituted with existing infrastructure tech at a fraction of the cost.

        • MDCCCLV
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          12 hours ago

          The current amount is only about a third of the total planned amount.

            • MDCCCLV
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              4 hours ago

              It will be the largest number though. They’re the only ones that are bothering to do such a low orbit, because that gives you lower latency but means you have to have a lot more in orbit for the same coverage and they don’t last as long before the orbit decays. They can do that because the launches are basically free

    • Zwiebel@feddit.org
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      1 day ago

      They only need to cover the band that orbits over Ukraine for now tho, not the entire world right

      • Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de
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        6 hours ago

        That’s still a lot since those satellites aren’t geostationary. To guarantee a stable, permanent connection in all of Ukraine and the adjacent Sea I’d assume you might need up to 3 of those bands of satellites. Now, fortunately, Ukraine doesn’t necessarily require a lot of bandwidth. It just has to be a reliable few mbps that can be easily set up everywhere.