But what can save astronomy from Starlink?
The same people and programs that got every other network to every household?
That doesn’t remove Starlink. And there are unfortunately quite a lot of households that do not have network wires. There is quite a lot of the planet that has no hardwired solution.
I wasn’t clear. My fault. I was referring to power, landline, natural gas, and water networks.
Virtually every developed country has managed to get power and landline service to the vast majority of those who live outside urban centres, including farmers and ranchers. In addition, places like Saskatchewan managed to do likewise with natural gas and, occasionally, with water suitable for inexpensive municipal and even in-home treatment.
I’m not a telecommunications engineer, so I could be way, way off base, but it strikes me that a similar project could get real broadband into every household that is hooked up to the power grid.
It doesn’t have to be wire or fibre to the home. Modern terrestrial wireless technologies can probably get the job done quicker and simpler in many cases. Although I think it’s worth pointing out that SaskTel was laying so much fiber in the 1980s to support its own production facility. If short-sighted government hadn’t killed that project, I’d probably have had fibre a decade ago instead of waiting on appropriate terrestrial wireless technologies that still show no sign of getting here. We don’t have any cell service and we’re actually getting further away in a sense, since every upgrade has reduced range and new towers are not being built to fill the gaps. Instead we’ve been stuck with crap like ExploreNet and now Starlink.
Developing countries and truly remote areas are already leapfrogging physical connections to go direct to wireless.
My cousin has a farm in Saskatchewan that is 5 km from the nearest neighbour, 20 km from the nearest village, 60 km from the nearest town, and 150 km from the nearest city. That farmhouse had power before WW2, telephone by 1950, and natural gas by 1970. They still don’t have proper broadband, despite having had dial-up internet at the same time and for the same price as anyone in our largest cities.
Just want to put it out there that adding GPS to all street lighting is not a ‘simple hack’. Sure, it’s entirely doable with enough will, but adding complexity and cost will make it entirely non-trivial to achieve.
