If I understand correctly, the only reason they're in such low orbit, and thus why there needs to be so fucking many of them, is to have much lower latency compared to geostationary satellites. You know, in case you need to play Quake on your satellite connection.

@V0ldek @techtakes If you want high latency, nothing beats telnet from the UK to a server in California via a comsat in GEO back in the early 90s when the trans-Atlantic cable circuit was down. A three-phase TCP exchange has to crawl up to GEO, 35,000km above the equator, and back down three times, never mind the surface level routing.Gave me a strong appreciation for Berkeley vi's designed-in ability to cope with slow modems.

I'm told it's good for satellite internet, if you only have satellite internet.

every time I've used it, it had massive issues with the connection hitching and with delivering anywhere near the promised amount of bandwidth

my experience is my own, etc etc, but it reminded me a lot of how every time I've been in a self-driving tesla the only person impressed (and not terrified) of the thing was the owner

We use starlink at work for communicating with some remote customer sites, and it’s been entirely adequate. As a super-subjective latency benchmark, i didn’t notice any particular difference in interactive ssh sessions to the starlink sites, and to the 4g lte sites in the same country. It’s been easier to set up and more reliable that some of the 4g links.

I don’t like the fact that we’e paying elon money, but in the absence of a non-evil, non-ecologically disastrous, reasonably priced alternative, I don’t really have anything to offer management as a replacement. Everything else is either much worse, or more expensive and still worse, or vastly more expensive.