We bought a Starlink Mini for the use case of frequent travel to far-off (international) places with limited mobile service, where we occasionally need to get online for high-priority work tasks or meetings. For $55 / month for 100GB and flexible usage in many countries, it was extremely useful.
Then, recently, SpaceX changed the terms such that the 100GB and 300GB subscriptions are no longer usable internationally (technically outside of North America). You have to pay for the unlimited service tier and even then can only use it for 30 days before returning to the home region.
A huge decrease in utility and a tripling in cost. A new device with a built-in battery is definitely not going to make up for that.
(Still a great service when it works, am posting this from remote western Mongolia.)
Starlink isn't allowed in South Africa because South Africa has laws that require companies operating in South Africa have least at least 30% of the company owned by locals. Namibia a country if ever there was one that needed Starlink it is Namibia but Starlink is banned in Namibia. I am not making excuses for the price changes but I imagine Starlink is getting all sorts of push back from incumbent ISPs across the world.
Many countries are trying to protect the jobs in their telecoms sector. I can imagine the revenue impact it'll have on the mobile network operatrs if a lot of their high value customers migrate to starlink.
I think in practice this isn’t great. You get a bunch of little companies which represent foreign firms employing a few connected people. Maybe a few sales people that take orders. The net impact a few people get cushy jobs and the customers get more expensive and worse service.
There is Google and all the other online media companies. Now sure how Google has handled it, perhaps setting up a subsidiary. I think one of the issues with Starlink is that it has physical hardware and will compete with mobile providers and ISPs. It is very complicated.
As a consequence, South Africa has a flowering space industry and their own satellite internet network, deployed by their own space shuttles. Turns out that when you give the right incentives and protect your local businesses, they have no problem competing with predatory international firms.
I'm thinking of getting one myself. Even with those annoyances, internet is so unreliable and sh1tty in some of the countries I visit regularly - or in many areas in my home country - that the value proposition is still very compelling.
It's also not a massive up-front risk at current prices (~£180 for the mini). Considering the no-minimum period policy, it's worth a shot even if it's just for redundancy that you can roam with.
Now, I wonder if adding a battery to it isn't actually a drawback when you want to travel with it, as I suppose you won't be able to put it in checked-in luggage, and it's large enough that it will take over your cabin backpack.
I love the concept and technology, marvellous, but all ruined by the erratic and arrogantly offensive behaviour of this overgrown narcotic child. Their mentality is repelling and the approaches are unreliable enough for feeling nauseous by the thought of giving them money. It is good I have choice (i.e. not in some connectivity black spot with urgency to connect).
Over the long term surely StarlinK capital costs scale fairly linearly with the user base. And the benefit to the user of space layers is marginal when they are already paying for a specific level of bandwidth.
I used Starlink for the first time the other week on a Narrowboat holiday in remote (at least by UK standards) South Wales. I was honestly pretty impressed.
We're considering buying a motorhome in the next couple of years and my experience with Starlink made me think it was a practical necessity going forward.
This kind of constant meddling in the pricing structure makes me want to not touch it with a barge pole though. Yes, satellites are expensive, but that's not an excuse for not coming up with a viable business plan and pricing structure that you can stick with over a reasonable term.
I mean picked from thin air, but if you're down some weird spur road and they have to put extra poles in to run the cable it's of that order of magnitude.
I'm thinking of getting it in the wilds of central London where I have an "Openreach Stop Sell order for traditional copper services" but no fiber or a date for getting that.
Not get people to pay a lot of money for the hardware based on decent plans and quotas, and then jack up pricing and restrict features almost immediately. It's a bait and switch.
In fairness to Musk (not a phrase I say often) it also sounds like just about every internet provider out there. As soon as you get used to your plan there’s a new fee or restriction out of nowhere.
Not just internet providers; nearly every corporation that exists or has ever existed. The rug pull is a well documented and practiced business strategy, and also the more fundamental driver behind things like enshittification and many of the other corporate-treatment crises we have been facing.
Why does market standard practice “whattaboutism” need to defend the despicable? This is hacker news, is it not? Let’s celebrate the bold and call out the lies. Not pander to the mediocre.
I feel like this is a false narrative I hear a lot. “Everyone” didn’t love Teslas, it was a niche product and then Musk exposed himself as one of the worst people on earth, and the market shrank even more. It’s a strawman to claim Teslas were loved by “everyone” (implicitly or explicitly often stated as people with a left wing bent).
As I remember things, a lot of people turned on Musk (or were already against him) in 2018 when he called the diver who rescued children trapped in a cave in Thailand (and "stole" a moment of glory from Musk and his mini-sub) a "pedophile".
Long before he announced he intended to vote Republican in 2022.
It's not only chronically online folks who have a strong distaste for Elon. For one thing, everyone knows what an epic and highly visible failure DOGE was. That's widely acknowledged and not even controversial as far as I'm aware.
Ah yes, the $30b (FY2024) a year that funded things like the World Bank, UN World Food Programme, Catholic Relief Services, Family Health International, and Gavi the Vaccine Alliance.
Yeah, USAID was the real problem. 0.3 - 0.5% of federal spending.
1. Evolution of Musk promised cuts to federal expenses:
- October 2024 - $2 trillion per year
- March 2025 - $1 trillion per year
- April 2025 - $150 billion per year
Independent sources put the savings around $10 billion per year (the target shrunk 200-fold!).
2. Very important example of conflict of interest AND harm to the government: independent sources expect IRS workforce cuts to <<reduce>> federal revenue by <<$198 billion over a decade>>.
3. To your direct point
- most of USAID’s money was spent through American organisations, not sent abroad directly (>80% of companies holding USAID contracts were American)
- in practice USAID ran important early-warning systems: famine warnings and perhaps even more importantly disease surveillance (ever heard of... pandemics?)
Cut the nose to spite the face.
Did Musk/DOGE cut military spending (13% of budget; Musk's sponsored admin wants to double it)? Healthcare spending (27%)? Social security (23%)?
He went after politically convenient, and even worse, personally convenient targets.
It's like that joke about looking for the wallet not where you lost it in the dark, but where the light is better...
You'd think the average well educated HN commenter wouldn't fall for such easy to sport propaganda (and also spot obvious conflicts of interest). But I guess ideology beats everything and it's more important to win against "the other team".
I see you posting this same opinion again and again, week after week. People keep explaining their issues with Musk which go far beyond "he votes differently!", yet you keep insisting there's literally no good reason to dislike him.
Have you ever considered that you might just be part of the terminally online right?
Yes, low-effort spam should be censored, because it makes insightful discussions much harder.
This site isn't your personal far-right soap box. If you want to keep posting the same low-effort takes again and again without meaningfully engaging with counter-arguments, platforms like Substack are a much better address.
I’m quite sure his overt white supremacy and fascism is considered far-right extremism by everyone who is also not on the far-right. Ironic since he’s quite possibly the biggest welfare recipient of all time.
Yeah, it’s super funny that the richest person in the world believes in replacement theory and spreads white supremacy propaganda everyday. Do you realize how normal people view this?
So it's not OK to compare things in relative terms, but we should only compare them in an absolute sense? Pretty lofty ideal. (The appeal to emotion is very inspiring though, not gonna lie.)
That’s the thing about kleptocracy, Musk has artificial barriers constructed by the government, making competition nearly, if not literally, impossible.
If one appears, one of the reasons will be that people complained about the existing one, signalling the market.
This "just eat your gruel and be grateful" attitude on Hacker News is becoming very common now but remains surprising. This is the attitude of serfs, not hackers.
Except that SpaceX relies on government handouts and regulatory moats. Pretty much the opposite of capitalism, not that there aren’t myriad of problems with that too.
Gov't handouts and moats are provided to lots of companies. All over the world. Especially in the rocket & satellite biz, which are seen as top priorities for national prestige/security/infrastructure.
But somehow, those handouts and moats have produced exactly zero credible competitors for SpaceX and Starlink.
If you hate Magnus Carlsen, you can talk about how much time he gets to practice playing chess, and imply that is cheating and the secret of how he beats all his competition at chess championships.
Just don't expect anyone who knows much about chess to be convinced.
I have always thought we'd eventually regret allowing half the internet to flow through a private network owned and operated by the world's most powerful 12 year old boy.
Yeah, Starlink got A LOT less useful for global with the recent change.
You can re-register in the country you’re in, but there are limits to how often you can do that, so still not great for driving around a continent like South America or Africa.
This has completely changed my industry (hard rock mining). A lot of the time drillers would be in the middle of nowhere looking for resources and would be sometimes days away from providing results (which also lead to lots of dodgy situations where drillers would know some results before market…) now it’s instant live feed. It’s made revising drilling plans trivial. Very cool
I work at a remote sub-arctic hard rock mine. Almost a decade ago when I started there was a single a 25mbps downlink shared between the business and 800 on-site people's personal rooms. I oftentimes couldn't get a message to family to send during the evening fury. Starlink was an incredible change in quality of life.
Ironically I'd bet a lot of that traffic wasn't necessary. I knew a guy once, worked in ops but used to work for the military, setting up the sattelite internet connection of a base in Afghanistan. 90% or more of the bandwidth used was porn, he said it would've been so much cheaper to send a container full of DVDs instead.
I just hope they're not relying on the internet for anything tactical.
Also in mining - Iron Ore - and yeah they are an absolute game changer in our remote sites.
I've got deep concerns about the politics side of the company, and the future implications of them being able to decide where and who gets coverage. But from a technology perspective it's doing things I didn't really think were possible a decade ago. Having signal in the bottom of the pit, or way out the back of the Pilbara is just crazy.
The un/expected uses for Starlink are interesting, especially because of how primitive the pre-Starlink work-arounds were (and because some things simply weren't possible).
When most of the Earth's surface has internet, it will be hard to imagine what life was like when it didn't.
Clay Shirky said “Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.”
I recently had a gig collecting soil samples in rural Alberta, and we relied on Starlink to upload the data as we worked.[0]
It was surreal trundling through a remote farmer’s field in a skid-steer with a funny-looking square dish on top, surrounded by a herd of bison or cattle.
Stepping outside of the machine to take a piss on a tree and hearing the motors in the dish whir as it repositions itself to get a better connection was startling and neat. It’s one thing to read about the dishes having that functionality but another to experience it while you’re doing something as mundane as a basic bodily function.
Pulling the dish and the mount off the skid-steer and tossing it in the back of the truck, and seeing the off-the-shelf Ryobi battery and inverter that powered it, all scuffed up and covered in dirt, makes you realize that as magical as it is right now, it’s just a machine. People thought that transistor radios were pretty magical when they came out but eventually they just became an everyday thing.
Soon enough these things won’t be so big and expensive, and there will be a market of providers offering even better service. What comes then will be scary from a privacy perspective, but it may also enable so many positive things that we can’t yet imagine.
“The most profound technologies are those that disappear.”
I’ll remember it fondly. The primitive workarounds were often a fun challenge even as an individual. But I’m glad more people can get connected so easily, and with more options on the way. The world will never be the same
> When most of the Earth's surface has internet, it will be hard to imagine what life was like when it didn't.
I think we'll miss it. I've known both the "pre-connected" and "post-connected" eras. There's a lot to love about being "connected".. and a lot to not like. Constant connectivity kind of sucks and we'd all do better to detox/disconnect meaningfully every so often.
I think that's mostly a "you" problem. Connectivity gives you an option, not a requirement. Rather than being dictated by external forces now it's on you to make decisions that work for you. If constant connectivity is causing problems for you then it's on you to learn to silence your phone or close your email client or what have you and to simply not care about the resulting missed calls or delayed messages.
In general my phone doesn't ring. I respond to written messages every few hours. That works for me but it might not work for you.
I wish it was always my choice. The introduction of internet to the underground in London, has allowed others the choice of holding their conversations loudly within close proximity to me. I have no wish to know why you have fell out with your best friend, I'd prefer silence.
We are putting these on forester pickup trucks. The most blue collar, white collar jobs out there (if that makes sense). Now, instead of having to organize their day around a Teams call with corporate, they can just log in from the landing on the logging side. It's epic.
did your industry not have access to satellite radio/internet prior to this for some reason? I was working on "cloud connectivity for remote mining sites" at least twelve years ago, and we were late to enter the market.
You would get generic feedback but now we get super high resolution imagery of core samples and live telemetry of drilling status. Based on that we can have teams here review and redo entire drill plans on the fly.
Starlink is profitable. It is not unsustainable at all when you own the rockets and the satellite manufacturing. Read the audited financials if you don’t believe it. Other parts of SpaceX are a different story.
It's profitable if you don't pay for the rockets. The audited financials say the launch cost is $0 for Starlink (and -$whatever for Space [the launch business] but as depreciation over five years and not as direct costs).
So it's almost certainly the case that Starlink itself would not be profitable if it had to pay for its own launches. If Starlink paid for its own launches, the launch business would be closer to profitability but still not profitable, i.e. you'd have two unprofitable businesses instead of one.
It's profitable if you pay for the rockets. Starlink is a massive business now and it keeps getting larger, and it has good margins. It can trivially pay for the rocket business over time.
... if it pays for the launches, it has negative margins. I'm not sure what's hard to understand here.
It might be the case that once you get enough satellites up and replace them consistently enough that margins go positive, and then you can start paying back the cost of "the rocket business" (i.e. more than the marginal cost of launch) but... it's not at all clear that's even theoretically possible. At least not without launch costs coming down significantly from where they are today, which Starship is not clearly en route to achieving.
Unless I’m misunderstanding something OP is saying that the only reason Starlink is profitable is because they don’t pay for the rocket launches. But the rocket launches still cost money, it’s just that SpaceX pays for it. But given they’re part of the same overall organization it just seems like an accounting trick.
This is correct. I’m not an accountant so not qualified to say the degree to which it’s tricky, but it does add an addendum to “Starlink is profitable [if you completely exclude the primary source of variable cost by burying it into a different business segment].”
Starlink is already showing net income and has shown net income for at least 3 years.
There's always people out there to minimize success of others.
It's not first. It's nothing new. It's not innovative.
There's an old article in WSJ that claimed SpaceX told investors that starlink was profitable if you excluded certain costs. We found out from the IPO that that was nonsense. SpaceX was charging starlink the internal cost of launch. Not the public pricing that everyone else charges.
That makes sense if you're not trying to split the company.
Starlink is a profitable business segment. The majority of revenue comes from consumers, a minority comes from a combination of enterprise and government customers. Saying it’s subsidized or dependent on golden dome is simply not true.
I think the core issue is that even if the subsidy you are saying got it this far ended, they’ve reached a point where they could keep going without it. So even if what you are saying is true, it’s still wrong.
I have a satellite dish as backup and it is definitely usable. Even had to do remote interactive ssh and while it's not as good as fiber obviously, it's definitely not in the unusable category.
I wanted to get one so bad because I’m a very frequent travelled and the idea of Starlink sounded so interesting
I just checked a few weeks ago and “Roam” does no longer include international coverage at all. Only “Roam unlimited” does, and only for 30 days at a time which entirely defeats the purpose for me. Also no way to replenish this quota or buy additional, you have to go back to your country for it to reset.
My SIM card already gives me 14 days of roaming included, so Starlink is just marginally better for my use case.
I’m sure it’s regulations related but still a bummer :(
There are lots of places international eSIM's are a pain. Either they only connect to a tiny mobile network that doesn't even cover some cities, or they require you to get some "mobile telephone licence" before they work, or speeds are 0.1 Mbps only, or they just won't work because the esim provider never tested them in Uzbekistan etc.
Buying a local SIM at the airport is equally a pain, but by combining both techniques you have more chance of a working connection.
The Silent Link esim is kind of a handy thing. Can use most networks in most countries, the credit doesn't expire even if you don't use it for years. It's pay as you go per MB. Not as cheap per MB as a local sim though.
I’ve bought local SIMs in three dozen countries and while it sometimes takes 30 minutes of photocopying my passport and whatever, they’ve always worked flawlessly. Around $1/GB.
Yes there is, that's what "global priority" is for. It's much more expensive but allows you to go to any country where service isn't blocked for any length of time.
Mostly because now it requires doxxing yourself to SpaceX; I assume they have been told that they are not allowed to sell global service to unidentified users as their government does not wish for Russians to use it to blow up Ukrainians.
Recently, I've been watching ultramarathon races (Western States, UTMB, Javalina Jundred, etc.) live online. All of them have been doing live video shots of the race leaders with a camera man on a mountain bike using a Starlink Mini on the back (with networking gear and batteries in a backpack). This new Starlink Mini 2 will be a more compact solution for the cameraman and possibly give the producers of the live broadcast more options and maybe more interesting shots.
I want so badly for starlink to offer a sensible well priced self-service B2B offering with fleet management. Any kind of fixed, high bandwidth IoT device that currently has a SIM card could easily use a starlink. As it stands SMBs who want this have to screw around with residential starlink and live in fear that they’ll get banned.
Not sure if this would cover the use cases you're thinking of, but they have significantly improved management for business customers in the past year or so.
Last year, you couldn't get API access at all unless you went through one of their distributors or spent $1M+/year on Starlink, but now you can use the API [0] as a normal business customer. It's got pretty good telemetry and management features.
Starlink 'Business' and 'Enterprise' plans are fundamentally different [1]. 1M/yr spend to qualify [1]. A lot of features you expect [3] are not included in normal business plans (or are exclusive to certain units). The segmentation is strange as offering this as 'up-sell' is 100% businesses would pay for. You don't have to take my word on it, as there is a validated market of 'resellers' [2] where you functionally join the reseller's enterprise plan. Paying the 'reseller' a tax to gain access to features starlink fully supports, but simply will not 'sell' to smaller customers, through the reseller's API gateway. It is absurd.
3. where is my ground station, defer updates to a ground station, de/re-activate a ground station remotely, pool usage for all ground stations, remote reboot, all traffic is through a corporate VPN, bound multiple ground stations automatically.
Wow, I really thought there'd be some kind of piecemeal offering that businesses could pay for, but it looks like the most Starlink offers is a flat rate for more data if you burn through your current usage allotment.
My company has been trying to get T-Mobile to return our calls for nearly a year now regarding any information on their promised IoT solution. Nothing so far.
I could be wrong, but I remember T-Mobile used to have an IoT page that actually led you to a place to order the SIM cards, my guess is they've discontinued it?
A reasonably priced routing via satellite links is my dream. I work from NZ on various Salesforce projects (aka enterprise web apps). Ping is usually 200ms or so to the US. Laser interlinks could possibly cut that in half.
all cruise lines extensively search everything and you are required to be away from your bags for extended periods of time during boarding. most cruise lines also explicitly ban things like all cybersecurity equipment (flippers were particularly looked for, they seemingly consider this anything not obviously personal use electronic) power strips etc.
Royal caribbean got my friend pulled into security and questioned for hours for a RPI, and they permitted it but held it locked away separately until you deboard at the end of trip (theres ''you cannot board at all with this item, figure it out or throw it away'' and theres ''we hold it until end of voyage'')
you usually spend 4+ hours away until you see your bag again at boarding time - you might board in morning and don't get access to your room/bag until 1-4pm
The bans on "all cyber security equipment" just show how little they understand. A regular laptop with cheap dongles is just as capable as a Flipper, if not more. And you don't even need dongles if you're just messing with WiFi/Bluetooth. The NFC part can partially be done via phone apps.
The lists are rather intriguing. I am assuming total router/switch bans are to prevent people from sharing a single paid connection since they charge per day per device
=====
Royal: Electrical items and electronic equipment not designed for personal grooming—including baby monitors, clothing irons, garment steamers, extension cords, power strips, multi‑plug outlets, HAM radios, cybersecurity devices, and electronic‑crime equipment—are prohibited.
Cunard: Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons (EPIRB), amateur (ham) radios, communication scanners, wide-band receivers, satellite phones, satellite receivers and transmitters, transformers, lasers and laser pointers, network devices (wired and wireless) including routers, switches, and scanners.
Virgins: Satellite phones, networking gear such as Starlink or routers, EPIRBs, HAM radios and any device that can be used for deliberate electronic or cybersecurity interference or criminal activity.
Disney: (This sentence is listed under weapons) Satellite receivers, emergency position indicating radio beacons (EPIRB), communication scanners, wideband receivers and walkie-talkies
(The following is listed under electronics) Extension cords, power strips, multi-plugs and surge protectors Ham radios Streaming devices (Amazon Fire Stick, Apple TV, Google Chromecast, Roku, etc.)
Norwegian: Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons (EPIRB), ham radios, satellite phones, transformers, lasers and laser pointers, Any form of radio/ telephone signal jamming equipment, Portable Modems, Walkie-talkies, Any multi-functional device developed for interaction with access control systems onboard the ship
Seabourn: Communication Devices including Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons (EPIRB) ham radios, communication scanners, wide-band receivers, satellite phones, personal satellite dish/receivers, routers, and transformers.
I honestly don't understand people accept this kind of treatment and even pay for it. I've also heard stories of room searches where everything is torn apart because they suspect you might have a bottle of alcohol somewhere.
It's like going to a prison and paying for it. A pretty gilded one sure but still.
If there were real safety concerns I could understand but usually it's just because they want you to buy their overpriced drinks and internet service. After already paying a fortune for the trip.
I guess you might also find when people start getting ill the ship mysteriously has an outage of internet. I bet much like on an airplane, the Captain gets to decide if it's on or off for the passengers. Having a Starlink is a bypass. When you don't want people seeing CNN reporting the latest about which countries and ports turned you away, you want to turn off the internet to prevent the potential for mass hysteria?
Right as if that happens a lot. I'm sure it's just about their bottom line.
And you can't keep information secret anyway. In case of a quarantine people would be locked in their cabins. Better to have them have the information.
Besides, I'm extremely anti-authoritiarian, I would be the first to start a mutiny. It's another reason I wouldn't want to go on a boat, I don't take orders.
And it seems to have a normal USB-C port now! Excellent, having to order that old weird cable of theirs was a pain, especially when one broke out in the wild.
I consider this to be a bit of a downgrade - the Mini 1 would accept anything from 12-48 V without negotiation, which made it really easy to power from a vehicle battery or DC wall power (if you have off-grid solar). If you did want to supply it via USB you just needed a small and cheap "dummy load" to negotiate for a voltage in that range. Now, you have to use a PD supply, and those are very hard to find at 36/48 V (in fact, this is the only single one I'm aware of that will do 60 W: https://www.coolgear.com/product/chargeit-mini-82w-usb-type-... ).
As someone who just bought a mini, I looked at this with trepidation, but yeah, I prefer the v1. The v1 comes with a 50ft cable, and I setup a 12v-48v up-converter connected to the LiFePo4 battery in my system, so I could easily run it. I wonder how long of a cable you could get with the USB-C power cable? Sometimes I use a shorter 10ft cable and mount the mini on the roof of my camper, but I do frequently setup under shade at times, and need to be able to run my mini and my solar quite a distance from vehicle. And honestly, the built in battery doesn't really buy me anything since I have a 280ah battery with 400w of solar to keep it charged, and I never need the mini to work without that power supply.
36 volts is common on ebikes, especially fleet bikes (Citi, Divvy, Lime, etc.) and other class 1's which comply with the 250 W limit, which means there's a lot of cheap cycled-out (ahaha) equipment floating around. It is otherwise unusual though for sure; fortunately a lot of 48 V stuff is happy on 36 V.
I run my Mini on my truck at LFP voltage and it does fine at about 10 feet. Before I cut and shortened the provided Mini power cable, I tried it at full length, and the voltage drop was too much.
~14 AWG Adaptors run less than a foot, would be nv or mv voltage drop range
Main point though was the PSU requirements should be specific enough that consumers are forced to use proper PSUs (or at least research into how to properly adapt to their system), not just whatever they have on hand
It's cool but 4.5 hours feels low for what you'd want. Between sometimes not fully charged, degradation, not wanting to fully deplete the battery your average comfortable use-time is going to be more like 2.5-3 hours. A burst of work but an entire half day of work is pushing it. It also competes with your phone hotspot, and is more of an advantage where you dont have cell coverage (more remote - where you are more sensitive to lower battery life because you cant recharge as easily).
Let me reiterate. I think this is actually awesome and I'm sure 4.5hrs is a big accomplishment. Starlink is awesome. I just think for any product you need to discount the stated battery life significantly.
I wouldn't look at the battery as a way of powering the day. Look at it as a way of getting temporary service up and running without having to hunt down a power source. Or seamlessly moving between power sources. Or something that can help buffer from fluctuations in solar output.
I love my mini 1 but occasionally I have to move it around and it's annoying to wait minutes for reconnect if the power cable is adjusted.
Mini 1 absolutely does not require 100W. I used mine off a 60W battery just fine and as others mentioned, it's ~45W during startup and more like 25 average during normal use.
I think the reason it states 100 is that it also has a heater built in. It is supposed to turn on when the top surface gets covered by snow or ice to melt it.
15 W is the Mini 1's rated "idle" power draw [0], so it's hard to tell if they're just being very generous with the "up to" figure (assuming the dish isn't being used at all) or if efficiency is improved. You'd think they'd mention if it was.
My mini draws about 40-50w at start then stabilizes at 25w-30w at steady state. I put mini in my backpack next to my laptop with a 86Wh power brick and go hiking.
Phone now has satellite that makes me reachable. In case of emergency I bust out the mini and the laptop and I join the bridge.
This is not in theory, I actually joined emergency calls a few times.
Probably don’t need mini2 at this time. It only removes the power brick for me.
You need a fair bit of solar. Doable with foldable panels but you need multiple. Haven't done the math on modern ones, probably looks reasonable-ish now.
Starlink Mini averages around 20W during operation. I have one mounted on my truck, and use a foldable 200W panel when in remote areas (to also charge the aux battery and power other electronics). When folded it's about the size of a briefcase/small backpack. A smaller panel would certainly be enough for just the Mini.
Those numbers are with full sunlight. You will not get those numbers in practice for most of the year in most places. First few reviews seem to say they were getting around 4 watts from the panel. I'd expect closer to 10W-12W assuming hte manufacturer is honest.
Solar is so fucking bad unless you're staying in one exact spot for weeks. For overland setups it's usually one of the first things people get rid of or just stop using.
That’s only true if you have a bad setup (has to be manually setup and torn down)
Permanently mount the panels on your roof and you’ll never spend a single second dealing with them, and you’ll be getting power every second the sun is up. Driving, camping, filling gas tank, at grocery store, waiting at border, etc etc.
A bad setup is junk. A good setup is indispensable.
Removable battery is cool. Does "quick-swap" mean you can switch the battery while it's operating? I always thought it would be a good idea for devices like this to have a tiny secondary battery or large capacitor in the main unit that would let it keep going for a few seconds while you swap the main battery.
Also curious about this; I'm not much of a tinkerer but I did see their battery has a USB-C port. Is there some efficiency loss in using a spare battery as a power bank rather than actually replacing the battery where it lives?
Starlink Mini 1st has been on 'clearance' for $149 for a while. Wonder if this is a worthwhile upgrade for truck camping or if the Mini 1 is still a good deal. No indication on price yet?
I don't see anything here that would meaningfully improve it assuming your truck has a reasonable power situation when it's not running. Mine runs off house batteries in the camper. And for whatever the price difference is from $150 you can buy a much more versatile power bank for camping.
I think now is the best time to buy Starlink mini 1.
I keep mine on the roof as a backup line most of the time and take it with me when i travel.
This new version is basically limited to the mobile use only.
At least I see no way of mounting it on a roof safely. Mini 1 also can melt snow. I doubt this new model can.
There are plenty of adapters for drill batteries for Mini 1.
For truck camping it feels like the main upgrade to this version, the built in battery, is unnecessary because you can power it off the vehicle when you need to or have a separate little battery pack power the Mini.
That's exactly how I'm reading it as well. I've got an EV and an auxiliary 3kWh battery and at $149 for the hardware that still seems like a great deal. I'm interested to read about the use cases folks have for the battery to be integrated.
Got a lot of usage with my Mini when traveling across the southwestern US and Mexico, but they no longer allow travel usage outside US/Canada which is a huge bummer and forced me to switch back to cell coverage which isn’t nearly as good.
It seems too centralized. At that point why not use a VPS? I have a free vps from oracle I already use to relay some unimportant services to a static IP. But it's extra latency
I also run monerod, p2pool, i2pd and tord nodes, the purpose of which is defeated by central infrastructure.
But yeah friends have reccomended tailscale I have just never gotten fuzzy feelings whenever I revisit it. If we want to build a NAT-less world then everyone needs to get a static ipv6 and run an eepsite or onion service, and we can just use pubkeys for addressing.
Not quite sure what your specific use case it if you've already got a VPS @ OCI (I do too, its great, and super low latency from home to it).
That said, another option not mentioned is cloudflare tunnels. I run cloudflared on a proxmox'd tiny PC. My internal services are accessible to me externally, but secure. Easy to set up the security layer (sign in through your google account, github account, IP restrictions, WARP and lots more).
> the purpose of which is defeated by central infrastructure
Any ISP you use will also qualify as central infrastructure. You aren't making any sense. Just rent something that lives in a datacenter and get on with life.
I'm a long time network admin and Tailscale is my favorite network tool ever. It just magically lets you connect servers in a very secure way. The tools you mention are great for learning but miserable to actually use.
> Starlink offers two IPv4 policies, "default" and "public". The default IPv4 configuration uses Carrier-Grade Network Address Translation (CGNAT) using private address space from the 100.64.0.0/10 prefix assigned to Starlink clients via DHCP. Network Address Translation (NAT) translates between private and Starlink public IPv4 Addresses. Starlink supports native IPv6 across all Starlink routers, kit versions, and service plans. All IPv6 compatible Starlink router clients are assigned IPv6 addresses.
> The Starlink public IPv4 policy is an optional configuration available to Local and Global Priority customers. A public IPv4 is reachable from any device on the Internet and is assigned to Starlink network clients using DHCP. Although truly static IPs are not available, a reservation system retains the public IPv4 address and IPv6 prefix even when the system is off or rebooted. However, relocating the Starlink or software updates may change these addresses. Public IPv4 addresses are available to the Local and Global Priority service plans. The public IPv4 option can be enabled from the account dashboard, see instructions here. Note: Starlink WiFi routers do not support port forwarding or firewall rules for IPv4 or IPv6.
That last bit means you need to use your own router plugged into the ethernet port of the transceiver.
Also, 99%+ of RV internet users get by without static/public IPs, and millions of home internet users do too. I'm a hacker and network administrator, it's not a big deal for me. They give public routable v6 /56 everywhere, so if it's a huge issue for you, you could set up dyndns and use v6, or run an overlay network.
It seems like the launch requires purchasing it with a bundled 1 year subscription for $999. I hope they sell it standalone like the old Mini. I'm planning to pick one up to have as primarily backup internet and just pay the standby fee to have it paused as needed.
They gave me a free mini as a promotion to residential customers. It worked for them, I now have it mounted in my daily driver and pay them ~$27/month more. That's half the price of a mini-only subscription. Standby would be enough for me except that it doesn't work while in motion.
Because this is so useful to several industries, governments absolutely cannot let Elon maintain a monopoly on what may become fundamental infrastructure. We've already seen what happened in Ukraine.
He has created something that didn't exist a few years ago, and now governments "absolutely cannot let Elon maintain a monopoly" are you saying they need to subsidize competitors or they need to ban Starlink or they need to nationalize Starlink?
Those are the three options for your mandate.
the non-government intervention option is just for Starlink to prove the market, and others can move in. SpaceX is willing to sell them the ride for a decent price, in relative terms.
The problem is that the CEO can just unilaterally decide that "no Starlink unit in Ukraine can go over 100km/h", effectively making it impossible to defend against an imperialist attacker.
Fundamentally, I am in the Camp that I fucking hate Musk, I didn't use to. But its undeniable, how influential he is in SpaceX and Starlink in particular.
I remember all the podcasts and haters shitting on him in, I think 2016, when the complete Starlink leadship was fired. We don't know all the details, but it's said that they wanted to do a whole other round of test sats and so on. Musk wanted to push harder on go live sooner. That' seems to have turned out quite well with no major issues in the first generation.
So SpaceX and Musk most certainty deserve a big reward for that. I agree that just rushing into 'its monopoly we must destroy the monopoly' isn't the right approach.
> Those are the three options for your mandate.
Those are not actually the only 3 only options. That's an incredibly narrow minded approach.
I have some idea but I'm sure there are more.
For example, what often works with infrastructure like this is open access rights. What if we can decouple the ground and sats infrastructure.
Allow anybody to build terminals for it. And then potentially eventually even have terminals that can use multiple such systems. I'm not an expert on these systems and how exactly they connect but long term I assume this would be possible. Because that's exactly what "GPS" does today, it connects to like 6 different systems. You could pay SpaceX a one-time fee for that. Or a license per terminal.
Or you could start to establish some standard for laser connectivity in space that eventually everybody can connect to a waste laser data network in space.
You can also make other rules. Like net neutrality, SpaceX isn't allowed to block certain things or do certain things.
Government could also chance its mentality to spectrum and maybe the buy to own spectrum model isn't fantastic.
That said, nationalization is on the table as well. One can make the argument that having multiple such system isn't really worth it. Having one and then giving it out in a different way isn't crazy. SpaceX could still be a transport provider.
Also less controversially, I think the 'monopoly' thing is way worse when it comes to the Ukraine. That is a situation where the government should be clear about how to handle it. We can't have Musk doing his own foreign policy.
Best I can tell the only time the US has nationalized businesses is temporarily during wars, and critical businesses that were failing.
“Nationalize SpaceX” is a Musk-haters’ fantasy.
And Elon/SpaceX doesn’t get to decide foreign policy via Starlink, at least not since Starshield. Maybe he has influence with Trump, but not direct control of how the government does or doesn’t use Starshield.
I never said it was 'likely' as politics stand in the US.
But people act as if this was some crazy thing to nationalise infrastructure are silly. The US has less history of that then others but the exception you made are pretty fucking big. And of course other countries then the US exists.
Penn Central is bigger Starlink ever was. Yes it was failing, but it could have been sold for parts.
> And Elon/SpaceX doesn’t get to decide foreign policy via Starlink, at least not since Starshield. Maybe he has influence with Trump, but not direct control of how the government does or doesn’t use Starshield.
Pretty sure the Ukranians are using both Starshild and normal Starlink.
> Maybe he has influence with Trump
And a big reason he has influence is that he controls critical infrastructure. That will always get him a seat at the desk. Not sure why this is hard to understand.
The level of intervention you're proposing is unironically fascistic as well. You're explicitly suggesting something the very thing you're implicitly accusing Musk of.
So forcing 'open access' on infrastructure providers is facism?
If that is facism to you then you need to go back and read some political science.
Neither regulation nor nationalisation are 'facism'. In fact facism is well known for not nationalizing and instead forming a tight government-cooperation integration.
Social democratic and socialist regimes have done more nationalisation.
Like when my country, Switzerland, nationalised the railways 1898:
Considering he's personally responsible for the deaths of over a million people across Africa and Asia, most of them children, and that his motives largely seem to have been 1) preventing legitimate investigations into his companies and 2) white supremacist domination, I'd say that his voting pattern is the least of my concerns.
Perhaps it had more to do with, erm, you know, his history of attacking people, mistreating workers, spreading misinformation, promoting far-right conspiracy theories, misleading investors, and using his power to interfere in politics and even international conflicts ...
And that's just clearing my throat ... horse trading? disowned by his own children? comments by his ex-wives, the list is endless, actually ...
The guy's evidentially a twat.
Fool you once, shame on him, fool you 25,429 times ... shame on you.
> In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a counterattack on a Crimean port; providing service would have violated US sanctions.[13] Media reports erroneously characterized it as Musk "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.[14][15]
It wasn't fake news, it was a direct quote from Musk's biographer Walter Isaacson:
> Throughout the evening and into the night, he personally took charge of the situation. Allowing the use of Starlink for the attack, he concluded, could be a disaster for the world. So he secretly told his engineers to turn off coverage within 100 kilometers of the Crimean coast. As a result, when the Ukrainian drone subs got near the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, they lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly.
He then said he was "mistaken".
Does Isaacson make stuff up like "secretly asking engineers to turn it off" or was he asked to change it?
Also, why didn't you include the next sentence from your Wikipedia link?
> In October 2026, Starlink restricted Ukrainian access by imposing a speed limit of 160 km/h, disrupting several combat missions and preventing its use to intercept jet-powered Russian drones, in an attempt to get Ukraine to stop long-range strikes on Russia’s oil industry.[18][19][20]
That's... really wild. I'm amazed at how the characterization is basically a lie. I go to Planet Fitness where there are 10 TVs with different channels in a row and sometimes all the networks have the exact same story in the exact same light within minutes with each other. It's almost creepy how lockstep they are.
I bought the Starlink Gen 2 out of curiosity and used it for a couple of months, it was too expensive to justify the limited 100Mb/s speed so I packed it and switched to fiber optic. But I do see myself buying a Mini when I do retire and travel the world...
Smart. Everywhere we take the Mini we also haul a portable battery. A fun thing we did a few times was that we took the whole thing on a weekday to Golden Gate Park and my wife and I worked while my daughter and grandparents played around and saw things and then they came back and we ate lunch and they went back around to see stuff. Lots of fun.
Park was practically empty and it was a bright and sunny day.
Not the person you're replying to, but I have a mini in the Jeep (shoots right through the fiberglass roof!) and it's a godsend on long drives through rural areas where cell service is spotty at best, often nonexistent for 20-30 minutes at a time.
At least for me, with my job and lifestyle, it means I can be on the road at times I would previously have been stuck at home/work waiting on that one last call.
Rural areas make sense. Golden Gate Park is inside of San Francisco sandwiched between two residential neighborhoods. I’ve never lost mobile reception inside the park. I guess if you have starlink service already it makes sense to use it vs tethering.
Starlink Direct-to-Cell fills that use case better than Starlink Mini. It works with existing cell phones. Unlike the iPhone's built in satellite feature, it doesn't require pointing your phone at the satellite, and it supports WhatsApp, Google Maps, and several other apps in addition to RCS and SMS.
Probably not. If it is certified for emergency purposes, it would have say so because that would expand the market quite a lot e.g. military operation, emergency services.
Maybe it's just me, but the heart of going camping, adventuring, out into the wild, going to the beach, etc (essentially, getting away from it all), seems in nearly direct opposition to having internet at every single one of these places.
I often work from campsites. I no longer have to rely on if there is 4/5G signal, and can borrow a family members Mini (and pay for a month of service).
That means I can now head out on Wednesday after work, drive 3-5 hours to the middle of no-where, and work Thursday and Friday. But each of those days, I am able to be done working and then at a camping site with my family. Go on hikes, fish, swim, etc.
So now my whole family can enjoy being in the wild, and I don't have to burn up vacation days. And we don't have to try to jam it all into a weekend were you feel like your just travelling the whole time.
Side note.. Having no signal on the west coast can actually be extremely dangerous, with how fast some wild-fires have spread. You can have one 10 miles away and not know it with the wind blowing the other way, and if it shifts direction, you can have a very limited time and path to get away.
Being able to check tools like WatchDuty and weather reports from the middle of nowhere is a safety feature.
Long before Starlink I actually tried something similar: book a hotel or airbnb in a place with good natural beauty. Work remote for the day, log off promptly at 5pm and then go on a hike or bike ride. I felt that I did not enjoy it at all. Work is emotionally draining enough that the quality of an after-work hike is far below a hike on a weekend. I stopped doing that.
I feel the same. But doing a half day each works great for me.
Ski 8-noon, then work in the warm.
Desert hike 6-10 then work in the cool.
That way if work is engaging - maybe you get into a nice flow state - you can keep going into the evening and your body already got the outdoors it likes.
I have done a variation on this. Take a vacation, drive to a national park, and go camping. Then go to an airbnb with good natural beauty, work thursday and friday, go hiking on the weekend, then take a travel day to come home.
This allowed me to take a longer vacation while still separating work time from hiking time. The emotionally draining work days coincided with much-needed recharge time in between the strenuous camping/hiking days and the weekend of more hiking.
I had coworkers who worked east coast hours but lived on the west coast, so they were off at 2 every day. A lot of them initially had all kinds of plans for what they would do with their free afternoons, but in the end, seemingly all of them did about what those of us who work til 5 do after work, just with an earlier bedtime.
I worked with the reverse! Boss was on the west coast and I on the east. Honestly much preferred it. Having the open morning and starting work after a no-rush breakfast, some exercise, etc. was divine.
I am not a morning person, and I have dreamed of that setup. I think I would choose to sleep in until 10 or 10:30 most days and I would use my late evenings to enjoy that last bit of open time at the climbing gym where it's a bit quieter. I really like night time, but when I have a regular work schedule I have to go to bed a couple hours before I would really like to.
Different strokes for different folks. One of my favorite vacations involved working out of hotels during the day and driving around the Colorado Rockies in the afternoon/evening.
Sure, but in the parent's post, the family is able to enjoy the camp time, and they're able to somewhat enjoy the time, not have to drive 3-5h on Friday during rush hour when everyone else is doing the same, and not have to turn around and pack up camp <48h later.
I've had good and bad remote work vacations. My best was when I was able to link together 11 days out of town and only have to work 2 of them.
Same. I've done what parent post said with much success, but when I try to make it my own vacation, it's always short. It is nice to let the family enjoy it though
But you know what I’m gonna call this for what it is. Greed. Everyone wants everything all the time. But what cost are we paying for that? Astronomers can’t view the night sky anymore. And not to mention the power we give an oligarch.
Does your partner not work or do you got additional care? Who is taking care of the kids or are they old enough to mind themselves while you’re working?
This sounds ideal but my kid is too young to not require me not working. Maybe in the future for me.
The family aspect is the crux here for me...it's great to get the family out enjoying things while us poor saps left back at the campsite just enjoy a slightly different view behind our laptop screen for most the day.
That's what I was thinking. Enjoyment is often benchmarked more by sharing the experience with other people. While I begrudgingly must admit this as an introvert, my introversion makes it no less true!
Better than not, I guess. But it would better still to have more vacation days (if you're American, then most of the world probably has twice as many as you do)
There are approximately ~250 weekdays in a year (so excluding weekends). 250/30 =
~8.3% of the days. So if you had 30 days PTO a year, that's be an 8.3% difference vs. having 0 days PTO. I find it hard to believe that an 8.3% difference in working days would make a huge difference to overall productivity.
I know yall pride yourself on this point but it’s simply tradeoffs. I have no bone to pick like you do in this argument but you have to admit part of the innovation success in markets like the US is that companies can make riskier bets because they know they won’t be saddled with large redundancy loads of it fails.
Again it’s just tradeoffs mixed with cultural differences. It’s ok.
Trade-offs? Like better quality of life? I was amazed 30 years ago when I went to Italy and all these Germans were lounging around for a month on Sardinia imagine getting a month vacation every year and spending that quality time with your family instead of being stuck behind a computer why your family is often enjoying itself?
Starlink is only extending work time when it should be vacation time
Yes trade offs. Labor market is generally better for employees in markets like Europe. You pay for it with less innovation and risk bets by companies. Employees benefit by more safety nets, some of the trade off is less optionally in companies and jobs available.
I do agree when comparing developed wealthy nations the US ranks poorly on average vacation days per worker.
But on a global standard across all peoples, even those in the informal economies? US probably works out better.
Not that being a bit better off than subsistence farmers in extreme poverty is a high standard to cross, it's still a pretty low bar. I'd still recommend scoping your claims accurately.
The next time a company tells me I have unlimited vacation, I will ask them the minimum number of days I need to take off a year. If they can't answer, then their "unlimited vacation" is just an accounting trick to take the financial liability of PTO off their books.
I go truck camping and do a lot of day trips to places where there probably will never be traditional cell phone service. I was against taking a starlink out for a while, but on a couple of weeklong trips over the last couple of years I started to dread my phone coming back online as I was driving out of the woods and all the attendant notificiations. For better or worse I would rather get online and go through all my texts and any emergency work stuff once a day than have to sift through 7 days of catching up on context. It's easy to say "just don't catch up" but it's difficult in practice.
I spend enough time in these places that I'm happy with the balance. I don't run the dish mounted all the time. I don't go out to watch movies, though that could be nice when you are north of the 45th in winter and nights feel like they are 16 hours long. Also it's nice if you forgot to check if your offline maps are still downloaded.
You need to take care of yourself and learn to switch off man. It's quite liberating to tell your colleagues "my laptop is going in the closet for 2 weeks and I'm uninstalling teams from my phone." If my team cannot survive without me for a week, then we have a huge problem.
To clarify, I have never pulled the starlink + laptop out to address anything and I would never bring a laptop on, say, a canoe camping trip with the starlink. Some light guidance here and there via the phone. I'm pretty happy with the arrangement.
Add to that, I take my work laptop when out on trips, not to work. But if I get stuck I don't need to call in sick and can still get something done if I need to wait out a snowstorm or road closure.
These days with AI it's a lot easier to come back after missing several days. It can often do a good job distilling things, especially if it already knows the kinds of things you'll really care to hone in on and prioritize.
Not even just mentions in a chat platform, but all the chat history I've missed out on. All the emails I've missed. All the meeting notes for the meetings I didn't attend. Read it all. Give the agent(s) what kinds of things you're likely to be interested in knowing about, if a certain project you were working on got mentioned or if they made progress on some problem.
A lot of folks here making arguments for safety and convenience, but ultimately for me the issue is around what I might call "plausibility of unreachableness": basically whether being genuinely offline and unreachable is normal and socially expected when you're doing certain activities, the number of which has dwindled over time.
It's obviously possible to say "I'm going to be unreachable", but people don't really like that, and it becomes a push-pull unless you're doing something where you genuinely have no service or connection. For a long time, being on an airplane allowed this sort of ability to disconnect: even if there were $5/minute in-seat phones, nobody reasonably expected to be able to reach you if you said you'd be on a flight. A few hours where you could fully tune out the noise of the world, no questions asked.
Wilderness backpacking trips have maintained this sort of unreachableness fairly well–I've had a Garmin inReach for years, and used it to keep family apprised of our movements, and once to coordinate a fairly serious situation where a large wildfire kicked up near our exit, but ultimately the slow messaging and short length limits prevent any real communication. Cell phones have also started getting satellite functionality, but it doesn't work very well, yet, at least as far as I've seen.
I see this march towards internet everywhere all the time as ultimately leading to expectations of connectivity, even in the most remote places–then "will you have made camp by 6pm on Tuesday? If so can you join this quick call?" becomes a real question people feel entitled to ask, notifications start coming through when you turn it on to check the weather, "I'm going back to my tent to check a few emails before bed" might be something you hear around the campfire...
I do a fair bit of wilderness backpacking, and I always put my phone on airplane mode as soon as I walk into the woods, and take it off airplane mode when I get back to civilization. No Garmin InReach, but I do have a PLB for safety (here in NZ land SAR advises everybody who is in the backcountry to carry a PLB), but it has no functionality beyond "press this in case of emergency."
I once had a hiking partner on a classic hut to hut hike on the north island (Tongariro Northern Circuit, it's where they filmed mount doom and mordor) who walked out of the hut at night to find a ridge to get service to do a job interview with a company in the UK.
The disconnection from real life is a huge part of why I like to wander off into the woods, and I pray that I will never be expected to have internet in these remote places.
You shouldn't have to, sure, but I think we've seen a monotonic progression towards the expectation of work-related availability outside of working hours for decades now.
We introduced "Right to disconnect" laws in Australia years ago:
> Employees have the right to refuse contact outside their working hours unless that refusal is unreasonable. This means an employee can refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact from an employer or a third party.
We don't have "at-will employment", so you can't be fired for arbitrary reasons. And if you were to treat someone poorly or fire them for refusing to be available for free after hours, you would end up in serious trouble in front of the Fair Work Commission.
This is the main value of governments, have them regulate these things for your protection!
Not in Europe, in some countries like France it's a specific right. Some companies even turn off the systems after working hours so you can't send or receive email.
To be devils advocate - do you expect your employer send flowers and give vacation days when your parents pass away? Or advance your salary if you short? Or tons of other forms of flexibility in return?
In societies where all of this is encoded in law they seem to be doing worse off than where these things are based on trust.
Australia's doing fine and we have bereavement days. Somehow our employers find the capacity to still provide flexibility. No, it would be unreasonable to expect those things from your employer and yes it's better to have employee protections actioned within the law.
The other day I sat on a bench at sunset at Albany Bulb and watched as San Francisco slowly turned on the lights and day gave way to night. After some photography and quiet moments with the view, I took a few minutes to test the latest rev of my mobile webapp. Then I used voice mode to give feedback to my coding agent, and it started working up fixes. I looked up from the phone and was struck with the beauty of the view once again.
Products like Apple Vision Pro promised working on productivity apps with beautiful views of Yosemite displayed behind the virtual computer screens. But now with a cell phone and voice mode (I don’t have starlink but I have enjoyed it in the past), I can work on my app while I’m taking a break in the middle of a bike ride.
I often say I love the work that I do but I don’t like being at the computer. Specifically that the best work I’ve done is sitting at a desktop in one place for hours at a day for years on end. To me, things like voice mode on mobile is a revelation. I long dreamed of doing productive work on the go, and this is a way I can do that. I’m not sure I want starlink personally, but I can certainly see the appeal of setting up at a park and getting a few hours of work done before putting it all away and doing a hike to the summit.
A co-worker of mine is traveling to parks all around the country and basically camping full-time. StarLink on his fifth wheel allows him to work during business hours and then walk off into a forest at 5pm.
I've thought about doing something like that but having to file personal taxes in those states and triggering some kind of issue for my employer who only has a presence in two states has stopped me from doing it.
Am I misunderstanding something or are people just less risk averse than me when it comes to taxes?
This is a great example. As long as you have internet you can put outside, this is very useful.
Of course, a mobile hotspot will work both indoors and outdoors, but not have the Coverage.
There's no shortage of people that work in extremely remote areas that are effectively isolated or cut off or Reliant on Wi-Fi wherever they can find it in between cellular covers that might be spotty at best.
We have to remember that there's more land in the world that people don't heavily occupy compared to the land where people do heavily occupy it.
When I worked remotely, I liked going camping for weeks at a time during the summer and working from the campsite. At the time all I had available to me was shitty mobile data, which made it challenging but not impossible. Starlink would have been a godsend.
It's not just you. I am deeply saddened that there will no longer be any true wilderness anymore. If I stumble across someone on a work call or prompting their agents 30 miles from the trailhead in the Sierra I think I will go mad.
Technological changes are always ecological, never purely optional. They change expectations, mores, etc.
You are free to feel sadness however you want, but please don’t talk on behalf of others?
For me, PERSONALLY, I love having connectivity just for the peace of mind. And no, I didn’t carry work laptop on vacation. After a day outdoor, I loved to be able to retreat to a corner for online activities at night. I don’t want to stare at the dark night the whole night, every night.
You said others would drive you mad if they used a phone in the wild. What??!?!?!
You are also sad that .... spinning the wheel ... the optionality exists.
It's optional. You don't have to use that option. But nooo that's not acceptable. You want the option to not exist at all for you and everyone. Otherwise, you will continue being "deeply saddened" ??!?!?
Being bothered by the behavior of other people is not speaking for them.
Optionality is never truly optionality when it comes to technology. I would think that people on Hacker News would understand this, even if they disagree with my opinion on this specific issue.
You might want to consider reflecting more on how technology changes the world far beyond personal choices.
Behaviors that were opt-in become opt-out. Behaviors that were opt-out become mandatory.
Think about how cell phones or social media changed social etiquette. Even if you opt out of those things personally, you're still living with the changes.
Admittedly this won't have an effect so widespread, but for those of us who spend a lot of time out in the mountains, deserts and forests where there is no service, I'm certain we'll see an effect.
I'm not sad because some guy somewhere will check his Slack messages on a hike. I'm sad because of how this will change the world.
It’s the opposite for me and my family, but more so because of safety. I bought my mom a Starlink mini and portable battery because she does a lot of road trips and camping in remote places. Many times there’s no cell reception. If she needed to look anything up or communicate with anyone in those places, there are limited options.
Yes there’s satphones, but then might as well have the entire internet for the same price or less. The $10/mo Starlink standby plan seems well worth it for insurance
There are many many uses that aren't camping. People work in places with no cell or wifi doing jobs that require driving or walking or helicoptering in. Then they want access to data to look something up. Geology / oil industry for example.
Me too. But Starlink definitely makes our group more confident when we go camping deep in the forest or mountain. If you are discipline enough to just treat it as a much more capable emergency satellite phone then it's a great addition to your camping kit.
Going into the wild and having internet is awesome. You can enjoy the wild, internet, and alternate. It's not like you have to enjoy the wild for 24 hours straight.
If nothing else it means you can ditch the $20/mo Garmin Inreach plan, which got you PITA text messages at best. All the people going on about the virtues of disconnecting have never been so disconnected that they have to think about medical emergencies or rescue from weather / mechanical trouble / etc.
Yea also, a few years ago I traveled around the entire US with a 4g hotspot and had service in nearly every place I visited, even in many remote national parks. With 5g being significantly faster than starlink, it does seem that this is an incredibly niche product.
Cell service requires radio connectivity to a cell tower, which depends on distance and local terrain. It's quite common to have connectivity on a ridge or mountaintop, but lose it in a valley. Starlink works as long as you can see the sky.
Also 5g speeds in a suburban or urban area are significantly different from the wilderness. I have some property an hour drive from Portland. While some people can get a signal and their phone says "5G", the distance to the cell towers is great enough that actual connectivity is extremely spotty. It takes minutes to download a single photo. Starlink is much more consistent. You actually get better performance if you're farther from civilization.
National parks in the US are pretty well developed, and often crowded. You and I may just travel differently; my preferred camp sites are usually far away from cell coverage.
Indeed. There's plenty of National Forests (not National Parks) with near zero cell service, and often even less once you start venturing into undeveloped BLM land.
oh i absolutely was in BLM land and Forest Service land all over Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Oregon - with the right cell network service is fine in most places - just look at a coverage map - its pretty ubiquitous at this point.
I don’t trust coverage maps. Just driving around southern Indiana, something I do dozens of times a year, I regularly find large dead spots in cell coverage. I’m surprised it’s better in the much sparser west.
To me, it's nice to know if you had to connect and get a message out you can. There's also the drive out there and the drive back which can be boring for a passenger with no signal.
Considering glamping is getting traction a lot over the last few years, there's probably a lot of people who want to watch movies and such while outdoors.
I have left jobs that required me to do work that impacted my time with my family. I quit one job while on vacation because my immediate supervisor kept calling me and giving me directions to a hotel business center an hour away from where we were camping.
Unless you run a business that literally requires 24/7 connectivity, it's healthy and fine to step away. If your employer won't respect your time with your family, they don't respect you.
It's up to you to decide if you can live with that. I could not.
I've been contracting for nearly 10 years which means going on holiday costs you a lot more than the actual flights and accommodation. I'll be going camping with my kids for 3 weeks this summer (New Zealand). Starlink is like $350 NZD, absolute no brainer.
But I also agree with parent OPs sentiment - going offline, putting your phone away really connects you back to real world and family. This has been studied ad nauseam. Same as food, substance or any indulgent abuse - it's up to you to control yourself.
For the first question, op talked about work commitments. So that's not a stretch to assume.
For the second, I get it. Not everyone can. I shouldn't have when I did, but it worked out okay for me after a few months of pain. And I'd do it again in a heartbeat. We had to downsize our lives and I switched to a field I never thought I'd work in. Turns out I love it, and have way more time for my family, even if we can't do massive vacations now.
I found disconnection to be a factor creating hesitation to spend a weekend at a campground out in the north woods. The things I do online are a big part of who I am, and being able to do those things and also go paddling / hiking in the same weekend is wonderful. I don’t think people should worry about the purity of their nature experiences. If someone wants to go full bushcraft, or if they want to blog from a canoe, I wish them the most out of whatever experience they seek. Except generators, I hope they all blow a head gasket.
If you live close to nature, but with an Internet connection, isn't that closer to the heart than living far from nature and going camping every once in a while with no connection?
I saw a video recently about a silicon valley tech bro who goes hiking with a starlink receiver on his backpack so that he can prompt his agents while he hikes and never lose a single second of vibe coding productivity. It made me want to throw my laptop out of the window.
I've taken an Iridium phone when I've been truly off grid (e.g., hundreds of miles from a road, hundreds of miles from cellular service), for me I just liked having a lifeline in an actual emergency.
I agree with you. As a homeless person who spends a lot of time in these natural places and campgrounds all I see now are people stuck in their vans and RVs with a Starlink antenna on their roof.
I’m going to say this with the knowledge that I will be attacked for it, but since Starlink came to these natural places, I’ve had a more difficult time sleeping. Plus my tinnitus is worse every time it’s around me. I know I am sensitive to electromagnetic fields. They caused me insomnia, tinnitus, and increase my anxiety and episodes of psychosis. I believe this is due to genetic changes I have in my calcium, potassium and sodium ion channels.
I’ve done all the double blind test on this I could and these KU bands really affect me. They spread out over 13 mile hexagonal shape whenever someone has a Starlink running.
When I’m in these places my phone has its data connection turned off, unless I’m doing something like posting on HN complaining about electromagnetic radiation.
That's because you view those activities as separate from your "normal" life, and those events for you are so short that you can put your entire life on hold to do them
Every year we go to campsites for about 3 weeks. Every year i have the dream to leave my phone at home. I am way too much into tech. Cant live without it. At least not at this point of life.
For me also, and for camping, it's not just for disconnection from work, etc.
There's a very different psychology when you're completely self-reliant, with no communication with civilization. It's hard to express precisely, but it's powerfully liberating and a much more immersive alternative from everyday civilization. The door is shut on other options for a few days, at least.
(Yes, there's risk - though that can be greatly overemphasized and there's risk in everything - and you need to rely on yourself (and your group) to mitigate those risks and respond effectively to them, not on others. One leading trainer I read said that, once you're out of harm's way, the first thing is think. Nothing is going to happen immediately; the ambulance isn't going to be there in 5 minutes; the doctors won't see you for days, at least.)
The risk isn't the focus. It's just you and world around you.
Not everyone can do that - they have responsibilities they can't turn off, they have health challenges, they may want a compromise, like one of those emergency pager devices. I'm saying the effect of actually being disconnected is real, powerful, and valuable.
While I generally agree, there is something magical/cool about being in remote wilderness without any signs of civilization, and writing code (or working on somethi technical) in that setting.
I agree. I carry only two things for off-grid camping:
1. My iPhone, which has exactly the right amount of satellite communication for me: SOS and simple two-way texting, only when I actively point it at the right place in the sky, and
2. Aviation band handheld radio as a true last resort. Have one anyway as a pilot, and I figure it's unlikely I'll go more than a few hours without seeing some airliner I can talk to. Illegal to use those bands for this? Technically. Am I worried about the FCC putting me in jail if I'm down to my last fallback to get a critical message out? Nope.
Amazing mindset, so you’d rather risk distracting a pilot and causing an accident than buy a PLB or other emergency beacon for a few hundred bucks as a backup for your phone?
Let's face it, does anyone get rescued on Delta's company frequency? ;)
Half the time I expect when someone throws a genuine emergency out on 121.5 the peanut gallery will all light up screaming that THEY'RE ON GUUUUAAAAARRRRRRDDDDDDD instead of realizing they should shut up and help the poor guy calling for it.
Nearly spit out my airplane coffee and biscoffs reading this. Good to know there are others in the industry on this forum who know about the guard police. Thanks for the laugh!
Not really, if the goals is to maximise getting away, being able to be productive _wile_ on location means you can go, work a bit there, and then be on the trail immediately, you can spend much more time in the mountains than otherwise.
Plus actually working in a nice place like that is in itself a luxury worth the price.
If only this incredible technical achievement could not be linked to such a toxic individual… eh one can only dream, maybe greatness requires a bit of madness.
Au contraire, if you are in general aviation, the last thing you want is to be caught with no radio contact whatsoever while you are stranded. Communication keeps you alive.
I've done every kind of camping, all over the world. I take a little Garmin puck with me to ensure I'm never ever stranded in an emergency. I suspect you don't actually go camping.
Agreed. I live in NZ where the rule of thumb is to keep a PLB on your person at all times and time from pulling the PLB to having a SAR helicopter overhead can be as low as two hours (it can be significantly longer depending on weather).
Most people I know who spend significant time outdoors here have one and keep it on our person whenever we're on something more intense than a well marked day hike. This is true of everybody I know from those of us who do 2-3 night backpacking trips between marked campsites to backcountry skiing to mountaineering. It's one of the first things that is advised to tourists here is to borrow one from a gear shop or visitor centre before going into the backcountry.
Here at least it is viewed as common sense safety on the same level as carrying layers and water.
Do you have data on this? I suspect opinions on this are over the map, and I doubt any of us have enough information to claim that someone else’s opinion on camping is rare.
I spend well north of 100 days a year in the backcountry in some capacity or another, from day hikes and skis to week+ trips on glaciers in Alaska in the winter being dropped off by plane and where the pickup time/day is "when we can get weather to get back in there" and that would be the same timeline for any kind of SAR response.
I couldn't disagree more with being stranded without communication being the heart of camping. Satellite comms have absolutely increased safety, and allowed for bigger expeditions to be handled. I have multiple mentors a few decades older than me who had friends die in situations that would have likely been recoverable today. I'm not planning on taking a starlink backpacking, but the one on my truck camper has been a transformative tool in how I'm able to recreate.
I use Starlink on my small boat near shore in PNW - where there is no mobile network, works perfect, DC cable is inconvinience, battery is much more useful imo. Great upgrade
The upside of Starlink is it’s not easily blockable by a terrestrial nation state; the downside of Starlink is it’s easily blockable by a single fickle trillionaire. That first problem’s been a bear to work around for the entire Internet era, that second one’s gonna be the challenge going forward.
There is no way nationalized SpaceX or Starlink wouldn't immediately get it's budget cut to nothing. Then a few years/decades later maybe the government would host a commercial LEO satellite program to try to revive its fledgling capabilities.
Maybe? But it doesn't really matter. SpaceX and Starlink only work because they keep pouring huge amounts of capital into it. Once that becomes a budget item to fight over then it gets stuck in a deathspiral of no investment, bad service, and running at a deficit.
People keep saying this, how do you guarantee that Starlink doesn't turn to crap after it is nationalized? No one who calls for nationalization ever has an answer to this.
Frankly, there is the argument that all of this tech and optimization was there for others to develop but no one cared that much and its only now after you and others realize how good it is that you want to just go in and take it "because its so vital to national security".
Furthermore why can't someone just copy them? Drop a ton of money on poaching their engineers and just copy whatever the government needs?
Clearly leadership at SpaceX including Musk are a driving force behind this being so good...just look at the trash all the other companies are peddling. The magic might just go away if its nationalized and if it does then you probably can't just go "oh sorry bro heres your company back pls give us more magic".
> how do you guarantee that Starlink doesn't turn to crap after it is nationalized
How do you guarantee that Starlink doesn't turn to crap if you don't nationalize it?
Its a silly question. Governments have successfully operated various telecommunication systems for a long time.
Lots of modern telecommunications and sat tech comes out of the government.
But this will depend on each countries experience. I think one can make a solid argument that the denationalization of telco systems in the 90s was a mistake.
Same goes for the breakup of AT&T. The better option would have been to just nationalize the baby bells. And make AT&T focus on long distance competition and the technology. Maybe also nationalize Bell Labs and keep it operating financed from a the income of the Baby Bells.
Because what actually happened is that these Baby Bells simply got massive monopolies, made gigantic profits and were then able to do lots of other infrastructure plays and then mostly glob back together.
> take it "because its so vital to national security".
I think for that you don't need to take it. If you take (forced sale) it, it would be because you want to provide universal access subsidized without lining Musk pockets even more. But you would need a real long term vision for this to be worth it.
> Furthermore why can't someone just copy them? Drop a ton of money on poaching their engineers and just copy whatever the government needs?
Because the system is already built and working, why spend the capital on building the same thing again.
For me some kind of open access law would make more then nationalization. But the suggestion to nationalize isn't crazy.
I just can’t fathom the logic here. You say that you don’t want to line Musk’s pockets, but seizing SpaceX/Starlink would cost a trillion dollars or more and all of that money would go to Elon Musk! The government would have to issue a trillion dollars of bonds, agreeing to pay interest on them for decades, and then hand all of the money over to Elon Musk who then doesn’t have to pay that interest.
You’re deluding yourself to think that it’s even feasible. And it’s also a bad idea just on general principles.
I agree that the breakup of AT&T was a mistake though.
if a government just seizes a multi trillion corporation, that government has just signed its economic death warrant. no one will ever trust it again and everyone will start examining jumping ship options.
it will actually lose more economic value the very next day than the value of the corporation it seized. probably in just the bond market alone.
and this even ignores the court challenges that will follow and likely undo the action but not the damage.
I call it the toaster fucker problem. Man wakes up in 1980, tells his friends “I want to fuck a toaster” Friends quite rightly berate and laugh at him, guy deals with it, maybe gets some therapy and goes on a bit better adjusted.
Guy in 2021 tells his friends that he wants to fuck a toaster, gets laughed at, immediately jumps on facebook and finds “Toaster Fucker Support group” where he reads that he’s actually oppressed and he needs to cut out everyone around him and should only listen to his fellow toaster fuckers.
The argument is that fundamental infrastructure has long run returns and should be controlled by the government. Not sure why this is hard to understand.
And the government should have that assets so it can use it how it wants, subsidise it, deploy it for military reasons, restrict it and soo n.
Yes, Musk would make a lot of money in a one time payment, but he would lose control over the asset and not continue to profit of new subsidies and other ways the government might want to use it.
And it wouldn't cost 'a trillion'.
> agreeing to pay interest on them for decades
Starlink returns are higher then the interest on bonds.
So you are essentially returning future profits to the government.
The government can raise the capital and buy the assets, just like google or amazon could. The logic is the exact same.
> Elon Musk who then doesn’t have to pay that interest.
Not sure what you are talking about.
Musk would have to pay income and capital gains tax, so government would get it pretty cheap.
> You’re deluding yourself to think that it’s even feasible.
Government have nationalised much bigger infrastructure before. Even the US government let alone many others.
The problem is it's already crap. The DoD and all the civil operators are currently freaking the fuck out because Elon in his infinite wisdom is prematurely ending production of the proven and human rated F9 in favor of the unproven starship.
In addition to this he's literally exercising his own foreign policy goals over those of the US. I normally wouldn't have an issue with this if he was actually standing up for something reasonable instead of nazi shit but the company has already been built entirely off of government dollars. If Lockheed Martin came along and said they wouldn't build F-35s for someone Congress offered them to everyone would absolutely lose their minds but it's Elon so apparently this is fine.
I urge you to think through the consequences of what you are complaining about.
Do you think that Elon should have unilateral, unchecked ability to export military weapons communications systems? Even to Ukraine? I expect the answer to that is no, for you and most people.
But all SpaceX has done is enforce the terms of Starlink licensing. Terms that were there from the beginning that disallowed them from using it for weapons, and ones that are required by ITAR.
Ukrainians are of course very clever and are fighting for their country, and found workarounds to the limits that SpaceX put in. SpaceX then found how to block those. I don't begrudge the Ukrainians this, but at the same time SpaceX cannot allow their civilian network to be used for military purposes. It would be blatantly illegal for SpaceX not to block these uses when possible.
If you think Elon should not be allowed to make these decisions, then you should support precisely what they've done: unconditionally disallow any non-civilian use of Starlink. The military can use Starshield, which is under control of the military and for which the commander in chief decides the rules.
Excited to see how the huge cottage industry of people trying to package minis into weapons systems react to this. It looks like it'll be slightly more of a pain in the ass than the previous version but maybe Elon threw the MIC a bone and made them disassemble-able
Yes, this is really a thing, yes, I'm being sarcastic.
I don't think SpaceX offers a bare/stripped OEM version at all. Afaik everyone is just using minis which is fucking insane.
Every other tactical comms vendor offers some sort of bare module/modem assembly for system integration, usually just a modded PCB that's inside their existing offerings with a few different JST connectors instead of whatever giant $500 amphenol twist lock they use.
There's a standby functionality at $10/mo that gives you low bandwidth connectivity. There's no bandwidth block mode except for priority which also has a subscription fee.
You want it pointed roughly towards where there are lots of satellites, most of which have an orbital inclination of 53 or 43 degrees. This tends to mean angling it towards the poles a bit. (Or at least Starlink would prefer you did this, to free up capacity on the birds directly overhead. The old dishes had motors to point where they pleased.)
4.5 hours for any terrestrial based satcom solution is insane. At this point, the battery tech alone with these power requirements is stuff that Garmin, Viasat and Honeywell could only dream of obtaining in the same quantities.
Distance alone isn’t the real issue (newer Pixel phones can talk to GEO, which is 100 times farther out than Starlink in LEO!), data rate over distance is.
It's not inherently because of space, it's because phased array antennas are just very power hungry. Most of the link budget is coming from the satellites huge antenna, the mini has a comparatively tiny aperture
This is false. SpaceX still plans to launch commercial payloads, but it is shifting these missions from Falcon 9 to Starship. SpaceX has already sold commercial missions for Starship.
This is questionable. Yes that's the assumption but I wouldn't rule it out to be honest.
> SpaceX has already sold commercial missions for Starship.
A few maybe, we don't know how many. And just because they did, in the past, doesn't mean they will in the future.
Frankly, from monetary perspective its really not that relevant anymore. They need to launch far more for Starlink and future Starlink Mobile.
The whole commercial launch market is tiny in comparison. The only thing that could be volume would be a competitor to Starlink, or data centers. SpaceX want's to do both themselves.
If SpaceX says 'no' only to Starlink competitors, people can claim 'anti trust' but if they say 'no' to literally everything, that's harder to do.
They did in the past, this isn't prove that they will continue to do it. Superbird should have been launched 2024. We know they signed some early contracts, but for a while we have not heard anything new.
Must we do the tribal political affiliation signalling on every HN post that vaguely involves Elon Musk?
We're left wing. Elon's right wing. We've got our knickers in a twist because an influential person dares to have a worldview different from our own. But must we broadcast this? Every time?
To be fair, putting satellites in space is very expensive so the chances of it not being owned by some billionaire asshole is zero. But some billionaire assholes are better than others.
Amazon Leo is currently launching satellites. They have 396 in orbit but haven't started service. The constellation is going to be lots smaller than Starlink with 3236 total.
AST SpaceMobile is planning cellular in space. I think it is supposed to be faster than Starlink Direct-to-Cell but slower than regular Starlink. It uses fewer, 12 currently, 45 in 2027, and 248 total, larger and higher satellites.
China has two large 10,000+ constellations planned with hundreds already launched.
Amazon needs to move faster, do they have good people? Other legacy sat companies seem hopeless, too much cruft. Attended a talk at Bsides a year or two ago with one of them talking about ways they have tried to improve security and I was aghast at how behind the curve they were.
I heard Amazon is actually launching their stuff on Falcon 9 right? Putting side the embarrassment, it is more expensive base cost if you have to piggyback on your main competitor. They will never reach cost parity.
China will likely catch up. They are motivated. But I assume that wont be available to Americans?
Amazon is working on their own constellation (which they renamed LEO for some reason); it's looking like it will have some availability ~next year. There are lots of others (Qianfan, OneWeb, AST SpaceMobile) somewhere along in development/deployment but none of those seem likely to offer consumer internet any time soon.
Funny how everyone said Starlink would fail, that it couldn't be done. Elon took the risk and it's so successful that you want to reward someone else for achieving it.
I think the other poster just does not want to support the dude (take your pick of reasons); that's the end of the story and that's fine; you don't need to invent stories around them just to get yourself mad.
Did they? I don't recall any significant voices saying it couldn't be done. Mostly doubts about the commercial and financial viability, but that comes with every venture not just Elon's.
They sure did. They said it wasn't possible/economically feasible to launch that many times. Reusability still wasn't a thing, and people here said that wasn't possible as well. They said even 600 sats would be too many. That everyone that had tried satellite constellations before had gone bankrupt, which was true. The deck was stacked against SpaceX. Everyone thought Elon was lying as usual. That he was trying to pump up the valuation for false promises.
Hindsight is now 20/20 that Starlink is a huge success. I guess all you guys forgot, and now think that the success of Starlink was obvious all along. Bitcoin and TypeScript are also things I remember HN being dismissive of at first that have both been very successful since.
I do not remember anyone saying Starlink would fail.
I really really despite Elon Musk for plenty of things but i don't think Space-X is not successful, i just think its not worth its share price.
But i'm for sure not liking that one person can just decide to put stuff into our space and disrupt research and my view without paying for it somehow.
And the biggest issue ish Elon Musks behaviour: he is for sure no one who would take something like atmospheric poisening serious until its too late or someone forced him to do so.
Everyone did because Iridium and Teledesic went bankrupt attempting it. To the geniuses here, global satellite constellations had been tried and failed multiple times. Elon was a con-man only putting it out there to pump up the valuation for investors. Sound familiar? Same with his crazy charlatan act of claiming rockets could be made reusable. The users of HN were smarter than that.
Whether people want to do business with Elon Musk seems entirely separate from whether some people in the past were able to correctly predict the success of Starlink.
Who said it couldn't be done? I think the confusion has been over how viable of a business it would be which is a surprise. Also Elon has doubled down on being reprehensible.
Hater here, hoping to clarify: I never said Starlink would fail, however I did say repeatedly I was rooting and hoping for their failure.
The reason I gave, and am still giving for rooting against this technology is that it gives local politicians an excuse to skimp out on building out traditional infrastructure which I still think is superior by a wide margin. I believed back then, and I still believe that as long as local governments fail to deliver traditional infrastructure then Starlink might succeed, and it would be worse for everyone except SpaceX. I just hope they don’t succeed.
But they had years to build out that infra. Other countries actually did more than the US in this area. Its entirely on the US politicians and subsequently on the people that elected them. You can't expect others to just sit by doing nothing while what you want is stalled due to who is in charge.
* It was Starlink, and putting it on offensive weaponry is against the T&Cs. That's not Musk's whim. That's just the rules.
* It was Starshield, in which case it was the Pentagon that throttled its access, since Starshield is controlled by the Pentagon not Elon Musk
Then, recently, SpaceX changed the terms such that the 100GB and 300GB subscriptions are no longer usable internationally (technically outside of North America). You have to pay for the unlimited service tier and even then can only use it for 30 days before returning to the home region.
A huge decrease in utility and a tripling in cost. A new device with a built-in battery is definitely not going to make up for that.
(Still a great service when it works, am posting this from remote western Mongolia.)
Wow, that's crazy (in a good way). They have no Google either?
It's also not a massive up-front risk at current prices (~£180 for the mini). Considering the no-minimum period policy, it's worth a shot even if it's just for redundancy that you can roam with.
Now, I wonder if adding a battery to it isn't actually a drawback when you want to travel with it, as I suppose you won't be able to put it in checked-in luggage, and it's large enough that it will take over your cabin backpack.
I love the concept and technology, marvellous, but all ruined by the erratic and arrogantly offensive behaviour of this overgrown narcotic child. Their mentality is repelling and the approaches are unreliable enough for feeling nauseous by the thought of giving them money. It is good I have choice (i.e. not in some connectivity black spot with urgency to connect).
We're considering buying a motorhome in the next couple of years and my experience with Starlink made me think it was a practical necessity going forward.
This kind of constant meddling in the pricing structure makes me want to not touch it with a barge pole though. Yes, satellites are expensive, but that's not an excuse for not coming up with a viable business plan and pricing structure that you can stick with over a reasonable term.
Not get people to pay a lot of money for the hardware based on decent plans and quotas, and then jack up pricing and restrict features almost immediately. It's a bait and switch.
Long before he announced he intended to vote Republican in 2022.
If by "moved to the right" you mean "he fell off the far end and if he were a politician his politics would be considered radical extremism", sure.
In the New York Times, maybe. Everyone seems pretty pleased that USAID isn't wasting taxpayer money.
Do you know what soft power is?
1. Evolution of Musk promised cuts to federal expenses:
- October 2024 - $2 trillion per year
- March 2025 - $1 trillion per year
- April 2025 - $150 billion per year
Independent sources put the savings around $10 billion per year (the target shrunk 200-fold!).
2. Very important example of conflict of interest AND harm to the government: independent sources expect IRS workforce cuts to <<reduce>> federal revenue by <<$198 billion over a decade>>.
3. To your direct point
- most of USAID’s money was spent through American organisations, not sent abroad directly (>80% of companies holding USAID contracts were American)
- in practice USAID ran important early-warning systems: famine warnings and perhaps even more importantly disease surveillance (ever heard of... pandemics?)
Cut the nose to spite the face.
Did Musk/DOGE cut military spending (13% of budget; Musk's sponsored admin wants to double it)? Healthcare spending (27%)? Social security (23%)?
He went after politically convenient, and even worse, personally convenient targets.
It's like that joke about looking for the wallet not where you lost it in the dark, but where the light is better...
You'd think the average well educated HN commenter wouldn't fall for such easy to sport propaganda (and also spot obvious conflicts of interest). But I guess ideology beats everything and it's more important to win against "the other team".
Have you ever considered that you might just be part of the terminally online right?
This site isn't your personal far-right soap box. If you want to keep posting the same low-effort takes again and again without meaningfully engaging with counter-arguments, platforms like Substack are a much better address.
We are witnessing the death of irony: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=gadders
Lol.
What does the competition even offer here?
This "just eat your gruel and be grateful" attitude on Hacker News is becoming very common now but remains surprising. This is the attitude of serfs, not hackers.
It's so weird to me the attribution of collective efforts to a single individual.
> his company used to offer an even better option
Yes, it's a degradation in service not unlike a bait-and-switch.
I just don't understand how you can hold your mental model of the world.
Yeah, totally never happened with Steve Jobs and Apple.
Why didn't you reply to the guy blaming Musk personally for the plan changes?
So what, nobody is allowed to launch any product unless it also has a competitor?
I meant that Starlink adjusting prices shouldn't be surprising, if anything it is still cheap (IOM).
I got a mini on sale at HD for ~200, paid 0/mo -> 5/mo now $10/mo to keep online as a backup. Amazing tech IMO and cheap.
But somehow, those handouts and moats have produced exactly zero credible competitors for SpaceX and Starlink.
If you hate Magnus Carlsen, you can talk about how much time he gets to practice playing chess, and imply that is cheating and the secret of how he beats all his competition at chess championships.
Just don't expect anyone who knows much about chess to be convinced.
Short story at least, please. What's a day over there like for you?
I just hope they're not relying on the internet for anything tactical.
I've got deep concerns about the politics side of the company, and the future implications of them being able to decide where and who gets coverage. But from a technology perspective it's doing things I didn't really think were possible a decade ago. Having signal in the bottom of the pit, or way out the back of the Pilbara is just crazy.
When most of the Earth's surface has internet, it will be hard to imagine what life was like when it didn't.
I recently had a gig collecting soil samples in rural Alberta, and we relied on Starlink to upload the data as we worked.[0]
It was surreal trundling through a remote farmer’s field in a skid-steer with a funny-looking square dish on top, surrounded by a herd of bison or cattle.
Stepping outside of the machine to take a piss on a tree and hearing the motors in the dish whir as it repositions itself to get a better connection was startling and neat. It’s one thing to read about the dishes having that functionality but another to experience it while you’re doing something as mundane as a basic bodily function.
Pulling the dish and the mount off the skid-steer and tossing it in the back of the truck, and seeing the off-the-shelf Ryobi battery and inverter that powered it, all scuffed up and covered in dirt, makes you realize that as magical as it is right now, it’s just a machine. People thought that transistor radios were pretty magical when they came out but eventually they just became an everyday thing.
Soon enough these things won’t be so big and expensive, and there will be a market of providers offering even better service. What comes then will be scary from a privacy perspective, but it may also enable so many positive things that we can’t yet imagine.
“The most profound technologies are those that disappear.”
[0] https://imgur.com/a/gkUAHOn
There is a certain beauty in these moments, isn't there? Watching the machines do their jobs.
I think we'll miss it. I've known both the "pre-connected" and "post-connected" eras. There's a lot to love about being "connected".. and a lot to not like. Constant connectivity kind of sucks and we'd all do better to detox/disconnect meaningfully every so often.
In general my phone doesn't ring. I respond to written messages every few hours. That works for me but it might not work for you.
I'm joking, but it's also kind of true, isn't it?
So it's almost certainly the case that Starlink itself would not be profitable if it had to pay for its own launches. If Starlink paid for its own launches, the launch business would be closer to profitability but still not profitable, i.e. you'd have two unprofitable businesses instead of one.
It might be the case that once you get enough satellites up and replace them consistently enough that margins go positive, and then you can start paying back the cost of "the rocket business" (i.e. more than the marginal cost of launch) but... it's not at all clear that's even theoretically possible. At least not without launch costs coming down significantly from where they are today, which Starship is not clearly en route to achieving.
By now, Starlink is profitable even if launched with Falcon 9 - and Starship is coming online.
Starlink could be seen as a 'fire sale' of launch capacity rather than a sound business move.
Claims are based on nonsense.
Launch 20 million satellites at 600k is clear from reading the financials
Seems within the realm of possibility at this point in the company’s growth cycle?
There's always people out there to minimize success of others.
It's not first. It's nothing new. It's not innovative.
There's an old article in WSJ that claimed SpaceX told investors that starlink was profitable if you excluded certain costs. We found out from the IPO that that was nonsense. SpaceX was charging starlink the internal cost of launch. Not the public pricing that everyone else charges.
That makes sense if you're not trying to split the company.
That's a sentence I wasn't expecting, lol
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kidme5
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=georgeg23
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=forgot-im-old
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=infinitewars
I just checked a few weeks ago and “Roam” does no longer include international coverage at all. Only “Roam unlimited” does, and only for 30 days at a time which entirely defeats the purpose for me. Also no way to replenish this quota or buy additional, you have to go back to your country for it to reset.
My SIM card already gives me 14 days of roaming included, so Starlink is just marginally better for my use case.
I’m sure it’s regulations related but still a bummer :(
Buying a local SIM at the airport is equally a pain, but by combining both techniques you have more chance of a working connection.
Last year, you couldn't get API access at all unless you went through one of their distributors or spent $1M+/year on Starlink, but now you can use the API [0] as a normal business customer. It's got pretty good telemetry and management features.
[0] https://starlink.readme.io/docs/getting-started
1. https://starlink.com/en-cw/support/article/babe863c-25ec-9df...
2. Peedcast, Marlink, or Peplink
3. where is my ground station, defer updates to a ground station, de/re-activate a ground station remotely, pool usage for all ground stations, remote reboot, all traffic is through a corporate VPN, bound multiple ground stations automatically.
https://www.t-mobile.com/business/solutions/iot/connectivity...
Royal caribbean got my friend pulled into security and questioned for hours for a RPI, and they permitted it but held it locked away separately until you deboard at the end of trip (theres ''you cannot board at all with this item, figure it out or throw it away'' and theres ''we hold it until end of voyage'')
you usually spend 4+ hours away until you see your bag again at boarding time - you might board in morning and don't get access to your room/bag until 1-4pm
=====
Royal: Electrical items and electronic equipment not designed for personal grooming—including baby monitors, clothing irons, garment steamers, extension cords, power strips, multi‑plug outlets, HAM radios, cybersecurity devices, and electronic‑crime equipment—are prohibited.
Cunard: Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons (EPIRB), amateur (ham) radios, communication scanners, wide-band receivers, satellite phones, satellite receivers and transmitters, transformers, lasers and laser pointers, network devices (wired and wireless) including routers, switches, and scanners.
Virgins: Satellite phones, networking gear such as Starlink or routers, EPIRBs, HAM radios and any device that can be used for deliberate electronic or cybersecurity interference or criminal activity.
Disney: (This sentence is listed under weapons) Satellite receivers, emergency position indicating radio beacons (EPIRB), communication scanners, wideband receivers and walkie-talkies (The following is listed under electronics) Extension cords, power strips, multi-plugs and surge protectors Ham radios Streaming devices (Amazon Fire Stick, Apple TV, Google Chromecast, Roku, etc.)
Norwegian: Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons (EPIRB), ham radios, satellite phones, transformers, lasers and laser pointers, Any form of radio/ telephone signal jamming equipment, Portable Modems, Walkie-talkies, Any multi-functional device developed for interaction with access control systems onboard the ship
Seabourn: Communication Devices including Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons (EPIRB) ham radios, communication scanners, wide-band receivers, satellite phones, personal satellite dish/receivers, routers, and transformers.
It's like going to a prison and paying for it. A pretty gilded one sure but still.
If there were real safety concerns I could understand but usually it's just because they want you to buy their overpriced drinks and internet service. After already paying a fortune for the trip.
And you can't keep information secret anyway. In case of a quarantine people would be locked in their cabins. Better to have them have the information.
Besides, I'm extremely anti-authoritiarian, I would be the first to start a mutiny. It's another reason I wouldn't want to go on a boat, I don't take orders.
Edit: also, this supply is a little strange. The specs say input voltage can range from 24-48V, but the image they have shows an input of 24-28V.
They’re almost universally returned
If it were me I’d just bite the bullet and make it a 48V only device to simplify things
Current arrangement is just a headache for non-technical consumers
I’m agnostic to the connector but really frustrated with consumers expecting any old 12-24 volt source will work
I run my Mini on my truck at LFP voltage and it does fine at about 10 feet. Before I cut and shortened the provided Mini power cable, I tried it at full length, and the voltage drop was too much.
Main point though was the PSU requirements should be specific enough that consumers are forced to use proper PSUs (or at least research into how to properly adapt to their system), not just whatever they have on hand
I read elsewhere the battery has 71Wh and lasts 4.5h. That's 15.77W/h if it indeed uses 100% of the battery's capacity.
Let me reiterate. I think this is actually awesome and I'm sure 4.5hrs is a big accomplishment. Starlink is awesome. I just think for any product you need to discount the stated battery life significantly.
I love my mini 1 but occasionally I have to move it around and it's annoying to wait minutes for reconnect if the power cable is adjusted.
If it's 71Wh and it lasts 4.5h, the h cancels out and it just becomes 15.78W.
[0] - https://starlink.com/support/article/18836c7e-2d97-6153-fe67...
Phone now has satellite that makes me reachable. In case of emergency I bust out the mini and the laptop and I join the bridge.
This is not in theory, I actually joined emergency calls a few times.
Probably don’t need mini2 at this time. It only removes the power brick for me.
Then there this guy who hiking with a laptop, a big ass powerbank and a starlink lol.
The 200W panel: https://www.renogy.com/products/renogy-400w-solar-panel-blan...
Prices vary from just $40 to $80. It's certainly possible.
Or buy double the power one.. they still comes in pretty much the same form-factor. Example: https://www.amazon.com/FlexSolar-Portable-Waterproof-Emergen...
^ This one is 100 watts.. still costs less than $100.
A 100W foldable would likely give you enough power.
Permanently mount the panels on your roof and you’ll never spend a single second dealing with them, and you’ll be getting power every second the sun is up. Driving, camping, filling gas tank, at grocery store, waiting at border, etc etc.
A bad setup is junk. A good setup is indispensable.
I don't see anything here that would meaningfully improve it assuming your truck has a reasonable power situation when it's not running. Mine runs off house batteries in the camper. And for whatever the price difference is from $150 you can buy a much more versatile power bank for camping.
There are plenty of adapters for drill batteries for Mini 1.
I also run monerod, p2pool, i2pd and tord nodes, the purpose of which is defeated by central infrastructure.
But yeah friends have reccomended tailscale I have just never gotten fuzzy feelings whenever I revisit it. If we want to build a NAT-less world then everyone needs to get a static ipv6 and run an eepsite or onion service, and we can just use pubkeys for addressing.
That said, another option not mentioned is cloudflare tunnels. I run cloudflared on a proxmox'd tiny PC. My internal services are accessible to me externally, but secure. Easy to set up the security layer (sign in through your google account, github account, IP restrictions, WARP and lots more).
Any ISP you use will also qualify as central infrastructure. You aren't making any sense. Just rent something that lives in a datacenter and get on with life.
https://starlink.com/support/article/1192f3ef-2a17-31d9-261a...
> Starlink offers two IPv4 policies, "default" and "public". The default IPv4 configuration uses Carrier-Grade Network Address Translation (CGNAT) using private address space from the 100.64.0.0/10 prefix assigned to Starlink clients via DHCP. Network Address Translation (NAT) translates between private and Starlink public IPv4 Addresses. Starlink supports native IPv6 across all Starlink routers, kit versions, and service plans. All IPv6 compatible Starlink router clients are assigned IPv6 addresses.
> The Starlink public IPv4 policy is an optional configuration available to Local and Global Priority customers. A public IPv4 is reachable from any device on the Internet and is assigned to Starlink network clients using DHCP. Although truly static IPs are not available, a reservation system retains the public IPv4 address and IPv6 prefix even when the system is off or rebooted. However, relocating the Starlink or software updates may change these addresses. Public IPv4 addresses are available to the Local and Global Priority service plans. The public IPv4 option can be enabled from the account dashboard, see instructions here. Note: Starlink WiFi routers do not support port forwarding or firewall rules for IPv4 or IPv6.
That last bit means you need to use your own router plugged into the ethernet port of the transceiver.
Also, 99%+ of RV internet users get by without static/public IPs, and millions of home internet users do too. I'm a hacker and network administrator, it's not a big deal for me. They give public routable v6 /56 everywhere, so if it's a huge issue for you, you could set up dyndns and use v6, or run an overlay network.
Those are the three options for your mandate.
the non-government intervention option is just for Starlink to prove the market, and others can move in. SpaceX is willing to sell them the ride for a decent price, in relative terms.
There are milder options too such as making sure enough frequency allocations remain for competitors.
Fundamentally, I am in the Camp that I fucking hate Musk, I didn't use to. But its undeniable, how influential he is in SpaceX and Starlink in particular.
I remember all the podcasts and haters shitting on him in, I think 2016, when the complete Starlink leadship was fired. We don't know all the details, but it's said that they wanted to do a whole other round of test sats and so on. Musk wanted to push harder on go live sooner. That' seems to have turned out quite well with no major issues in the first generation.
So SpaceX and Musk most certainty deserve a big reward for that. I agree that just rushing into 'its monopoly we must destroy the monopoly' isn't the right approach.
> Those are the three options for your mandate.
Those are not actually the only 3 only options. That's an incredibly narrow minded approach.
I have some idea but I'm sure there are more.
For example, what often works with infrastructure like this is open access rights. What if we can decouple the ground and sats infrastructure.
Allow anybody to build terminals for it. And then potentially eventually even have terminals that can use multiple such systems. I'm not an expert on these systems and how exactly they connect but long term I assume this would be possible. Because that's exactly what "GPS" does today, it connects to like 6 different systems. You could pay SpaceX a one-time fee for that. Or a license per terminal.
Or you could start to establish some standard for laser connectivity in space that eventually everybody can connect to a waste laser data network in space.
You can also make other rules. Like net neutrality, SpaceX isn't allowed to block certain things or do certain things.
Government could also chance its mentality to spectrum and maybe the buy to own spectrum model isn't fantastic.
That said, nationalization is on the table as well. One can make the argument that having multiple such system isn't really worth it. Having one and then giving it out in a different way isn't crazy. SpaceX could still be a transport provider.
Also less controversially, I think the 'monopoly' thing is way worse when it comes to the Ukraine. That is a situation where the government should be clear about how to handle it. We can't have Musk doing his own foreign policy.
“Nationalize SpaceX” is a Musk-haters’ fantasy.
And Elon/SpaceX doesn’t get to decide foreign policy via Starlink, at least not since Starshield. Maybe he has influence with Trump, but not direct control of how the government does or doesn’t use Starshield.
But people act as if this was some crazy thing to nationalise infrastructure are silly. The US has less history of that then others but the exception you made are pretty fucking big. And of course other countries then the US exists.
Penn Central is bigger Starlink ever was. Yes it was failing, but it could have been sold for parts.
> And Elon/SpaceX doesn’t get to decide foreign policy via Starlink, at least not since Starshield. Maybe he has influence with Trump, but not direct control of how the government does or doesn’t use Starshield.
Pretty sure the Ukranians are using both Starshild and normal Starlink.
> Maybe he has influence with Trump
And a big reason he has influence is that he controls critical infrastructure. That will always get him a seat at the desk. Not sure why this is hard to understand.
If that is facism to you then you need to go back and read some political science.
Neither regulation nor nationalisation are 'facism'. In fact facism is well known for not nationalizing and instead forming a tight government-cooperation integration.
Social democratic and socialist regimes have done more nationalisation.
Like when my country, Switzerland, nationalised the railways 1898:
https://sbbhistoric.ch/wp-content/uploads/S-048_VARIA_338-sc...
Is this Switzerland facist?
Yeah no shit. You started hating him when you learned that he voted differently than you lol
Perhaps it had more to do with, erm, you know, his history of attacking people, mistreating workers, spreading misinformation, promoting far-right conspiracy theories, misleading investors, and using his power to interfere in politics and even international conflicts ...
And that's just clearing my throat ... horse trading? disowned by his own children? comments by his ex-wives, the list is endless, actually ...
The guy's evidentially a twat.
Fool you once, shame on him, fool you 25,429 times ... shame on you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russo-Ukrainia...
> In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a counterattack on a Crimean port; providing service would have violated US sanctions.[13] Media reports erroneously characterized it as Musk "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.[14][15]
> Throughout the evening and into the night, he personally took charge of the situation. Allowing the use of Starlink for the attack, he concluded, could be a disaster for the world. So he secretly told his engineers to turn off coverage within 100 kilometers of the Crimean coast. As a result, when the Ukrainian drone subs got near the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, they lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly.
He then said he was "mistaken".
Does Isaacson make stuff up like "secretly asking engineers to turn it off" or was he asked to change it?
https://www.businessinsider.com/walter-isaacson-biography-el...
Also, why didn't you include the next sentence from your Wikipedia link?
> In October 2026, Starlink restricted Ukrainian access by imposing a speed limit of 160 km/h, disrupting several combat missions and preventing its use to intercept jet-powered Russian drones, in an attempt to get Ukraine to stop long-range strikes on Russia’s oil industry.[18][19][20]
Park was practically empty and it was a bright and sunny day.
(Not to mention - parks are much better enjoyed if you just don't work when you're there)
At least for me, with my job and lifestyle, it means I can be on the road at times I would previously have been stuck at home/work waiting on that one last call.
(All Apple has is the license for the radio bands they use to communicate with the satellites.)
That means I can now head out on Wednesday after work, drive 3-5 hours to the middle of no-where, and work Thursday and Friday. But each of those days, I am able to be done working and then at a camping site with my family. Go on hikes, fish, swim, etc.
So now my whole family can enjoy being in the wild, and I don't have to burn up vacation days. And we don't have to try to jam it all into a weekend were you feel like your just travelling the whole time.
Side note.. Having no signal on the west coast can actually be extremely dangerous, with how fast some wild-fires have spread. You can have one 10 miles away and not know it with the wind blowing the other way, and if it shifts direction, you can have a very limited time and path to get away.
Being able to check tools like WatchDuty and weather reports from the middle of nowhere is a safety feature.
Ski 8-noon, then work in the warm.
Desert hike 6-10 then work in the cool.
That way if work is engaging - maybe you get into a nice flow state - you can keep going into the evening and your body already got the outdoors it likes.
I really like this mode a lot.
This allowed me to take a longer vacation while still separating work time from hiking time. The emotionally draining work days coincided with much-needed recharge time in between the strenuous camping/hiking days and the weekend of more hiking.
I've had good and bad remote work vacations. My best was when I was able to link together 11 days out of town and only have to work 2 of them.
This sounds ideal but my kid is too young to not require me not working. Maybe in the future for me.
Again it’s just tradeoffs mixed with cultural differences. It’s ok.
Starlink is only extending work time when it should be vacation time
It is just tradeoffs. It’s ok to have those.
But broadly speaking, life is better in most first world countries that aren't the US.
But on a global standard across all peoples, even those in the informal economies? US probably works out better.
Not that being a bit better off than subsistence farmers in extreme poverty is a high standard to cross, it's still a pretty low bar. I'd still recommend scoping your claims accurately.
I spend enough time in these places that I'm happy with the balance. I don't run the dish mounted all the time. I don't go out to watch movies, though that could be nice when you are north of the 45th in winter and nights feel like they are 16 hours long. Also it's nice if you forgot to check if your offline maps are still downloaded.
Cries in Ireland
Even if we think about trackers that people will wear when going hiking and things like that for help, they have their utility in their place.
It's a similar to if we take a work laptop home and whether it can stay in the bag or not.
Its just different if you can look at your phone or turn it on or not.
It's obviously possible to say "I'm going to be unreachable", but people don't really like that, and it becomes a push-pull unless you're doing something where you genuinely have no service or connection. For a long time, being on an airplane allowed this sort of ability to disconnect: even if there were $5/minute in-seat phones, nobody reasonably expected to be able to reach you if you said you'd be on a flight. A few hours where you could fully tune out the noise of the world, no questions asked.
Wilderness backpacking trips have maintained this sort of unreachableness fairly well–I've had a Garmin inReach for years, and used it to keep family apprised of our movements, and once to coordinate a fairly serious situation where a large wildfire kicked up near our exit, but ultimately the slow messaging and short length limits prevent any real communication. Cell phones have also started getting satellite functionality, but it doesn't work very well, yet, at least as far as I've seen.
I see this march towards internet everywhere all the time as ultimately leading to expectations of connectivity, even in the most remote places–then "will you have made camp by 6pm on Tuesday? If so can you join this quick call?" becomes a real question people feel entitled to ask, notifications start coming through when you turn it on to check the weather, "I'm going back to my tent to check a few emails before bed" might be something you hear around the campfire...
I once had a hiking partner on a classic hut to hut hike on the north island (Tongariro Northern Circuit, it's where they filmed mount doom and mordor) who walked out of the hut at night to find a ridge to get service to do a job interview with a company in the UK.
The disconnection from real life is a huge part of why I like to wander off into the woods, and I pray that I will never be expected to have internet in these remote places.
> Employees have the right to refuse contact outside their working hours unless that refusal is unreasonable. This means an employee can refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact from an employer or a third party.
We don't have "at-will employment", so you can't be fired for arbitrary reasons. And if you were to treat someone poorly or fire them for refusing to be available for free after hours, you would end up in serious trouble in front of the Fair Work Commission.
This is the main value of governments, have them regulate these things for your protection!
In societies where all of this is encoded in law they seem to be doing worse off than where these things are based on trust.
Frankly in Switzerland, we already have connectivity everywhere, and people don't expect that.
Also its up to yourself putting up boundaries.
Products like Apple Vision Pro promised working on productivity apps with beautiful views of Yosemite displayed behind the virtual computer screens. But now with a cell phone and voice mode (I don’t have starlink but I have enjoyed it in the past), I can work on my app while I’m taking a break in the middle of a bike ride.
I often say I love the work that I do but I don’t like being at the computer. Specifically that the best work I’ve done is sitting at a desktop in one place for hours at a day for years on end. To me, things like voice mode on mobile is a revelation. I long dreamed of doing productive work on the go, and this is a way I can do that. I’m not sure I want starlink personally, but I can certainly see the appeal of setting up at a park and getting a few hours of work done before putting it all away and doing a hike to the summit.
I've thought about doing something like that but having to file personal taxes in those states and triggering some kind of issue for my employer who only has a presence in two states has stopped me from doing it.
Am I misunderstanding something or are people just less risk averse than me when it comes to taxes?
Of course, a mobile hotspot will work both indoors and outdoors, but not have the Coverage.
There's no shortage of people that work in extremely remote areas that are effectively isolated or cut off or Reliant on Wi-Fi wherever they can find it in between cellular covers that might be spotty at best.
We have to remember that there's more land in the world that people don't heavily occupy compared to the land where people do heavily occupy it.
Technological changes are always ecological, never purely optional. They change expectations, mores, etc.
For me, PERSONALLY, I love having connectivity just for the peace of mind. And no, I didn’t carry work laptop on vacation. After a day outdoor, I loved to be able to retreat to a corner for online activities at night. I don’t want to stare at the dark night the whole night, every night.
Where was I speaking on behalf of others?
You are also sad that .... spinning the wheel ... the optionality exists.
It's optional. You don't have to use that option. But nooo that's not acceptable. You want the option to not exist at all for you and everyone. Otherwise, you will continue being "deeply saddened" ??!?!?
Optionality is never truly optionality when it comes to technology. I would think that people on Hacker News would understand this, even if they disagree with my opinion on this specific issue.
If a complete stranger's personal choices about internet access deeply sadden you, you might want to consider some therapy.
Behaviors that were opt-in become opt-out. Behaviors that were opt-out become mandatory.
Think about how cell phones or social media changed social etiquette. Even if you opt out of those things personally, you're still living with the changes.
Admittedly this won't have an effect so widespread, but for those of us who spend a lot of time out in the mountains, deserts and forests where there is no service, I'm certain we'll see an effect.
I'm not sad because some guy somewhere will check his Slack messages on a hike. I'm sad because of how this will change the world.
Eh. You still have free will. It's about costs. If something truly matters to you, you'll find a way.
Starlink + 60w foldable solar + battery bank in the sidebag of an adventure bike is the meta.
But yes - leave it at home when "getting away from it all".
Yes there’s satphones, but then might as well have the entire internet for the same price or less. The $10/mo Starlink standby plan seems well worth it for insurance
Going into the wild and having internet is awesome. You can enjoy the wild, internet, and alternate. It's not like you have to enjoy the wild for 24 hours straight.
Also 5g speeds in a suburban or urban area are significantly different from the wilderness. I have some property an hour drive from Portland. While some people can get a signal and their phone says "5G", the distance to the cell towers is great enough that actual connectivity is extremely spotty. It takes minutes to download a single photo. Starlink is much more consistent. You actually get better performance if you're farther from civilization.
I think a lot of folks underestimate both how large the US is, and how bad high speed cell coverage is, in many of those areas
Unless you run a business that literally requires 24/7 connectivity, it's healthy and fine to step away. If your employer won't respect your time with your family, they don't respect you.
It's up to you to decide if you can live with that. I could not.
But I also agree with parent OPs sentiment - going offline, putting your phone away really connects you back to real world and family. This has been studied ad nauseam. Same as food, substance or any indulgent abuse - it's up to you to control yourself.
Why do you assume that OP's employed? And if they are, why do you assume that they can afford to just walk away?
For the second, I get it. Not everyone can. I shouldn't have when I did, but it worked out okay for me after a few months of pain. And I'd do it again in a heartbeat. We had to downsize our lives and I switched to a field I never thought I'd work in. Turns out I love it, and have way more time for my family, even if we can't do massive vacations now.
If they're working outside of their 9-5, shame on them.
You don't need to use it. But nice to have.
I’m going to say this with the knowledge that I will be attacked for it, but since Starlink came to these natural places, I’ve had a more difficult time sleeping. Plus my tinnitus is worse every time it’s around me. I know I am sensitive to electromagnetic fields. They caused me insomnia, tinnitus, and increase my anxiety and episodes of psychosis. I believe this is due to genetic changes I have in my calcium, potassium and sodium ion channels.
I’ve done all the double blind test on this I could and these KU bands really affect me. They spread out over 13 mile hexagonal shape whenever someone has a Starlink running.
When I’m in these places my phone has its data connection turned off, unless I’m doing something like posting on HN complaining about electromagnetic radiation.
What would you do if you went camping 5x as much?
There's a very different psychology when you're completely self-reliant, with no communication with civilization. It's hard to express precisely, but it's powerfully liberating and a much more immersive alternative from everyday civilization. The door is shut on other options for a few days, at least.
(Yes, there's risk - though that can be greatly overemphasized and there's risk in everything - and you need to rely on yourself (and your group) to mitigate those risks and respond effectively to them, not on others. One leading trainer I read said that, once you're out of harm's way, the first thing is think. Nothing is going to happen immediately; the ambulance isn't going to be there in 5 minutes; the doctors won't see you for days, at least.)
The risk isn't the focus. It's just you and world around you.
Not everyone can do that - they have responsibilities they can't turn off, they have health challenges, they may want a compromise, like one of those emergency pager devices. I'm saying the effect of actually being disconnected is real, powerful, and valuable.
Connectivity, when and where it's useful, it can be really extremely helpful. [BLANK_AUDIO]
1. My iPhone, which has exactly the right amount of satellite communication for me: SOS and simple two-way texting, only when I actively point it at the right place in the sky, and
2. Aviation band handheld radio as a true last resort. Have one anyway as a pilot, and I figure it's unlikely I'll go more than a few hours without seeing some airliner I can talk to. Illegal to use those bands for this? Technically. Am I worried about the FCC putting me in jail if I'm down to my last fallback to get a critical message out? Nope.
Half the time I expect when someone throws a genuine emergency out on 121.5 the peanut gallery will all light up screaming that THEY'RE ON GUUUUAAAAARRRRRRDDDDDDD instead of realizing they should shut up and help the poor guy calling for it.
Plus actually working in a nice place like that is in itself a luxury worth the price.
If only this incredible technical achievement could not be linked to such a toxic individual… eh one can only dream, maybe greatness requires a bit of madness.
Most people I know who spend significant time outdoors here have one and keep it on our person whenever we're on something more intense than a well marked day hike. This is true of everybody I know from those of us who do 2-3 night backpacking trips between marked campsites to backcountry skiing to mountaineering. It's one of the first things that is advised to tourists here is to borrow one from a gear shop or visitor centre before going into the backcountry.
Here at least it is viewed as common sense safety on the same level as carrying layers and water.
I couldn't disagree more with being stranded without communication being the heart of camping. Satellite comms have absolutely increased safety, and allowed for bigger expeditions to be handled. I have multiple mentors a few decades older than me who had friends die in situations that would have likely been recoverable today. I'm not planning on taking a starlink backpacking, but the one on my truck camper has been a transformative tool in how I'm able to recreate.
And don’t forget who most of that cash would go to.
Frankly, there is the argument that all of this tech and optimization was there for others to develop but no one cared that much and its only now after you and others realize how good it is that you want to just go in and take it "because its so vital to national security".
Furthermore why can't someone just copy them? Drop a ton of money on poaching their engineers and just copy whatever the government needs?
Clearly leadership at SpaceX including Musk are a driving force behind this being so good...just look at the trash all the other companies are peddling. The magic might just go away if its nationalized and if it does then you probably can't just go "oh sorry bro heres your company back pls give us more magic".
How do you guarantee that Starlink doesn't turn to crap if you don't nationalize it?
Its a silly question. Governments have successfully operated various telecommunication systems for a long time.
Lots of modern telecommunications and sat tech comes out of the government.
But this will depend on each countries experience. I think one can make a solid argument that the denationalization of telco systems in the 90s was a mistake.
Same goes for the breakup of AT&T. The better option would have been to just nationalize the baby bells. And make AT&T focus on long distance competition and the technology. Maybe also nationalize Bell Labs and keep it operating financed from a the income of the Baby Bells.
Because what actually happened is that these Baby Bells simply got massive monopolies, made gigantic profits and were then able to do lots of other infrastructure plays and then mostly glob back together.
> take it "because its so vital to national security".
I think for that you don't need to take it. If you take (forced sale) it, it would be because you want to provide universal access subsidized without lining Musk pockets even more. But you would need a real long term vision for this to be worth it.
> Furthermore why can't someone just copy them? Drop a ton of money on poaching their engineers and just copy whatever the government needs?
Because the system is already built and working, why spend the capital on building the same thing again.
For me some kind of open access law would make more then nationalization. But the suggestion to nationalize isn't crazy.
I just can’t fathom the logic here. You say that you don’t want to line Musk’s pockets, but seizing SpaceX/Starlink would cost a trillion dollars or more and all of that money would go to Elon Musk! The government would have to issue a trillion dollars of bonds, agreeing to pay interest on them for decades, and then hand all of the money over to Elon Musk who then doesn’t have to pay that interest.
You’re deluding yourself to think that it’s even feasible. And it’s also a bad idea just on general principles.
I agree that the breakup of AT&T was a mistake though.
if a government just seizes a multi trillion corporation, that government has just signed its economic death warrant. no one will ever trust it again and everyone will start examining jumping ship options.
it will actually lose more economic value the very next day than the value of the corporation it seized. probably in just the bond market alone.
and this even ignores the court challenges that will follow and likely undo the action but not the damage.
in the echochambers like reddit and bluesky.
I call it the toaster fucker problem. Man wakes up in 1980, tells his friends “I want to fuck a toaster” Friends quite rightly berate and laugh at him, guy deals with it, maybe gets some therapy and goes on a bit better adjusted.
Guy in 2021 tells his friends that he wants to fuck a toaster, gets laughed at, immediately jumps on facebook and finds “Toaster Fucker Support group” where he reads that he’s actually oppressed and he needs to cut out everyone around him and should only listen to his fellow toaster fuckers.
Please do not put me into the same group, I never mentioned seizing.
And the government should have that assets so it can use it how it wants, subsidise it, deploy it for military reasons, restrict it and soo n.
Yes, Musk would make a lot of money in a one time payment, but he would lose control over the asset and not continue to profit of new subsidies and other ways the government might want to use it.
And it wouldn't cost 'a trillion'.
> agreeing to pay interest on them for decades
Starlink returns are higher then the interest on bonds.
So you are essentially returning future profits to the government.
The government can raise the capital and buy the assets, just like google or amazon could. The logic is the exact same.
> Elon Musk who then doesn’t have to pay that interest.
Not sure what you are talking about.
Musk would have to pay income and capital gains tax, so government would get it pretty cheap.
> You’re deluding yourself to think that it’s even feasible.
Government have nationalised much bigger infrastructure before. Even the US government let alone many others.
Seems like you have a case of US recency bias.
In addition to this he's literally exercising his own foreign policy goals over those of the US. I normally wouldn't have an issue with this if he was actually standing up for something reasonable instead of nazi shit but the company has already been built entirely off of government dollars. If Lockheed Martin came along and said they wouldn't build F-35s for someone Congress offered them to everyone would absolutely lose their minds but it's Elon so apparently this is fine.
Do you think that Elon should have unilateral, unchecked ability to export military weapons communications systems? Even to Ukraine? I expect the answer to that is no, for you and most people.
But all SpaceX has done is enforce the terms of Starlink licensing. Terms that were there from the beginning that disallowed them from using it for weapons, and ones that are required by ITAR.
Ukrainians are of course very clever and are fighting for their country, and found workarounds to the limits that SpaceX put in. SpaceX then found how to block those. I don't begrudge the Ukrainians this, but at the same time SpaceX cannot allow their civilian network to be used for military purposes. It would be blatantly illegal for SpaceX not to block these uses when possible.
If you think Elon should not be allowed to make these decisions, then you should support precisely what they've done: unconditionally disallow any non-civilian use of Starlink. The military can use Starshield, which is under control of the military and for which the commander in chief decides the rules.
Yes, this is really a thing, yes, I'm being sarcastic.
Every other tactical comms vendor offers some sort of bare module/modem assembly for system integration, usually just a modded PCB that's inside their existing offerings with a few different JST connectors instead of whatever giant $500 amphenol twist lock they use.
Do you know if they offer a sort of pay as you need it plan like when you go out of town you can just buy bandwidth in blocks and use as needed?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratnik_(program)
I guess it makes sense, space is a long way away after all...
> SpaceX has already sold commercial missions for Starship.
A few maybe, we don't know how many. And just because they did, in the past, doesn't mean they will in the future.
Frankly, from monetary perspective its really not that relevant anymore. They need to launch far more for Starlink and future Starlink Mobile.
The whole commercial launch market is tiny in comparison. The only thing that could be volume would be a competitor to Starlink, or data centers. SpaceX want's to do both themselves.
If SpaceX says 'no' only to Starlink competitors, people can claim 'anti trust' but if they say 'no' to literally everything, that's harder to do.
SATCOM isn't new.
We're left wing. Elon's right wing. We've got our knickers in a twist because an influential person dares to have a worldview different from our own. But must we broadcast this? Every time?
They have about 400 satellites already in orbit. It's not available for public sale yet but I believe they're close.
AST SpaceMobile is planning cellular in space. I think it is supposed to be faster than Starlink Direct-to-Cell but slower than regular Starlink. It uses fewer, 12 currently, 45 in 2027, and 248 total, larger and higher satellites.
China has two large 10,000+ constellations planned with hundreds already launched.
I heard Amazon is actually launching their stuff on Falcon 9 right? Putting side the embarrassment, it is more expensive base cost if you have to piggyback on your main competitor. They will never reach cost parity.
China will likely catch up. They are motivated. But I assume that wont be available to Americans?
Hindsight is now 20/20 that Starlink is a huge success. I guess all you guys forgot, and now think that the success of Starlink was obvious all along. Bitcoin and TypeScript are also things I remember HN being dismissive of at first that have both been very successful since.
I really really despite Elon Musk for plenty of things but i don't think Space-X is not successful, i just think its not worth its share price.
But i'm for sure not liking that one person can just decide to put stuff into our space and disrupt research and my view without paying for it somehow.
And the biggest issue ish Elon Musks behaviour: he is for sure no one who would take something like atmospheric poisening serious until its too late or someone forced him to do so.
The reason I gave, and am still giving for rooting against this technology is that it gives local politicians an excuse to skimp out on building out traditional infrastructure which I still think is superior by a wide margin. I believed back then, and I still believe that as long as local governments fail to deliver traditional infrastructure then Starlink might succeed, and it would be worse for everyone except SpaceX. I just hope they don’t succeed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/22/us/politics/starshield-ou...