I used to be skeptical about harmful starlink was to our night sky, but after spending this summer camping, I have to say that @sundogplanets has a point.

when you do dispersed camping in the middle of nowhere, you can see starlink satellites all over the place moving around with the naked eye.

it is actually kind of distressing. I don't know what to do about it.

on one side of it, capital has utterly failed to bring broadband to rural locations in any form

on the other side of it, you can't go more than a few minutes without seeing a starlink fly by now

@ariadne with amazon launching their constellation, china launching 2 of their own, russia trying to get one going, the eu probably doing one...

it feels like a thing we can't undo at this point. 😞

@ariadne @sundogplanets

I was out in the high desert, New Mexico...we had to be a hundred miles from any city lights, it was amazing sky...amazing, and the amount of visible satellites is really distracting. The kid who grew up reading her dad's stash of 1950s scifi, it's a thing I thought I wanted, and the ability to bring communications to areas where otherwise it is unreachable is literally world changing for millions of people, but there has to be a better way.

@sundogplanets @MissConstrue there is a better way: install 5G towers using public funds in places where capital can't justify them

@ariadne @sundogplanets @MissConstrue the resources spent building multiple redundant 5G networks probably outstrip how much it would take to fill in the coverage holes in many less vast countries

@charlotte @sundogplanets @ariadne

The very real problem is that there is no infrastructure in place that would allow for towers to be a functional alternative.

For example, let's take Colorado. I want fairly remote and treed, but relatively (2hr) access to Co Springs and Denver. Given those parameters, you would start at the NM border, and follow 25 north to about an hour south of Pueblo, and look west of 25. If you go more than about 10 miles from the architecture of the roadway, there is no internet.

When I bought my current place, I paid to laid fiber out here, and then convinced my neighbors to join in. I was less than 1.5 miles from a junction and the price had more than one number in front of a comma. Going up a mountain? No voter would bond it. No county commission would suggest it. It's a mountain without electricity or infrastructure for repairs, like roads built for heavy trucks.

Hence the dominance of sats.

@ariadne I was thinking about this recently, and how it felt during the early days of covid when flights stopped and there were no contrails. It was so nice for the sky to seem clean.

No escape night or day now, though. At least the satellites are silent.

@MissConstrue @sundogplanets @ariadne hence my specifier “in less vast countries”

I’d reckon you could still do a lot better than what the US does if there was one national network with the full channel allocation and the same total budget

@charlotte I mean...maybe, but you still face the issue of infrastructure. There are no roads to places that need communication. At least not roads traversable by equipment trucks.

@rodolphe @sundogplanets @MissConstrue yes. the whole point of going camping in the wilderness is to get *away* from the internet. hence why 5G is a good solution for rural homesteaders: they aren't living in the untamed wilderness. at least, not normally.

@PKYo @charlotte @sundogplanets @ariadne To quote Crazy People (a prescient weird 80s movie) ATT, fuck with us and you’ll have no damn phone.

@charlotte @ariadne @sundogplanets @MissConstrue Eh, maybe, but probably not. It’s the approach India took to bring broadband to most of its population (instead of building out cables/fiber), and India 1) is not a small country 2) has a lot of challenging terrain 3) had less developed electricity and transportation infrastructure than the U.S., when they did their cell tower buildout.

@MisuseCase @ariadne @sundogplanets @MissConstrue i encourage you to read my post in full

@charlotte @ariadne @sundogplanets @MissConstrue Oh yeah sorry. I absolutely failed to parse that.

In that case, this is just another item on the long list of reasons to have nationalized broadband infrastructure and maybe let companies rent it, instead of what we currently have.

@MissConstrue @charlotte What about using off-road-capable vehicles?

Edit: Plenty of pickup trucks are off-road capable. If you need more than what a pickup truck can hold, the army has off-road trucks that can carry 10 tons.

@MissConstrue @charlotte I still think we could do better with balloons than with satellites. They could be mostly stationary over areas with insufficient infrastructure for towers, but fly back to where there’s infrastructure for maintenance, at lower speeds it wouldn’t need to be as many as satellites, overall they’d be much less costly and disruptive, and lower latency too

@ShadSterling @charlotte

I'd never thought of balloons. Have there been tests, that you know of?

@MissConstrue @charlotte the only thing I know of at all is that shortly after Google reorganized as Alphabet they had Project Loon working on the idea. AFAIK they abandoned it without publishing any findings