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Starlink direct-to-cell enabled for hurricane helene emergency messaging
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- georgeg23 2y ago[flagged]
- kidme5 2y ago[flagged]
- postepowanieadm 2y agoThat's an anonymous post. It's not even conspiracy theory.
- ranger_danger 2y agodoes it matter as long as people believe it?
- caseyy 2y agoOkay, but this political stuff is unrelated to the topic at hand.
- ranger_danger 2y agoeverything is political to someone, whether we like it or not
- whaaaaat 2y agoI can't see the flagged post, but if you think "Elon Musk owns communications infrastructure he can turn off selectively" isn't political, I think you might need to reconsider what's in bounds for political. He's already done it to interfere with a war and he's widely meddled with what "free" speech he'll permit on his X platform. His ownership of cellular signal is deeply intertwined with politics.
- Jtsummers 2y agoThe commenter removed the content of their flagged post, that's why it shows the way it does even if you have showdead on in your profile. If you mean you generally can't see flagged posts, go to your profile and check the "showdead" option.
- concordDance 2y ago> He's already done it to interfere with a war One of the many Musk myths that continue to float around. There are dozens of them at this point. The turning off did not happen, it was a misunderstanding by a biographer that he later corrected. (Naturally the correction got a tiny fraction of the reach of the original)
- kidme5 2y ago[flagged]
- kortilla 2y agoThat’s not what that link says at all. Additionally, direct-to-cell has already been enabled in a bunch of places for them to do the validation where they were demonstrating text messages etc and showing off on Twitter.
- samegene321 2y ago[flagged]
- caseyy 2y agoThis is what the future of communication looks like. It's really a massive step forward. No one will have to die from exposure when their cars break down, no planes will go missing, and no more black spots in natural disasters. It is also quite dignified and civilised that we are using this technology first to help the most vulnerable. Communication is and has always been an important element in human organisation. Imagine if corrupt governments could no longer shut down the internet and cell service. Even a world war probably wouldn't disrupt this. People will be really empowered by this technology, we just need more competition in this space. But one step at a time. Also: simmer down Elon fans and haters, this is not only about Elon. Look at the bigger, global picture.
- asynchronous 2y agoI agree with the sentiment but LEO constellations like Starlink can and have been disrupted, via sub-orbital jamming. Not to mention that in actual large conflict surface to LEO missiles will simply destroy large amounts of satellite constellations.
- panick21_ 2y agoNo government currently exists that has nearly enough rockets to impact Starlink. There is a big difference between doing individual tests and taking down a constellation of 1000s.
- verzali 2y agoYou don't need to hit every satellite. You only need to create a lot of debris, and that'll do it for you. Alternatively the radiation from a nuclear blast could take out a big chunk of the network, which is presumably why Russia is working on orbiting nuclear weapons.
- panick21_ 2y agoActually its not that easy even if you did create some debris. Orbit is much bigger then people think. And these sats are much smaller then people think. Without propulsion lots of that stuff quickly drops below the level of the sats. Sats can also raise their orbit in response and fly corrections. Even modest investment in better tracking could massively improve crash avoidance. It would take far more then a handful of sats to truly impact the functioning of the network. And even more to complete take it out. Russia is working on everything if you believe their marketing. I seriously question if any work on 'orbital nuclear weapons' is anything other then marketing. And its questionable how effective that would actually be. This isn't as easy as people think. A country like Russia might have some readiness of nuclear weapons. And maybe a small readiness of anti-sat weapons, but not anywhere close to enough to attack a network like Starlink. Preparing for something like that simply wasn't a thing anybody considered necessary until 2020 and Russia certainly hasn't invested huge amounts of money in that since then and given their recent success with rocket development, I not sure how effective it would have been even if they had.
- lopkeny12ko 2y agoOff topic: what is up with the persistent anti-Musk crusading in this thread (and on HN in general)?
- erichocean 2y agoHe bought Twitter. The hate precisely coincides with that event.
- ausbah 2y agohe had to buy twitter
- madeofpalk 2y agowhy?
- razakel 2y agoBecause he signed a contract saying he would.
- madeofpalk 2y agohe did not have to buy twitter. he chose to buy it, signed a contract saying he wanted to buy it, and then tried to get out of the contract
- concordDance 2y agoPredates it by many years. It actually even predates the cave submarine, but strongly intensified then and increased roughly constantly until the present day.
- Jtsummers 2y agoIf you look at the kidme5, samegene321, and george23 accounts in this discussion you'll note that they predominantly comment about Musk in Musk-related threads (usually SpaceX, it seems), often sporadically with large delays between when they make comments (weeks and months). They also post the same things as each other (though this is non-obvious, kidme3 deleted the content of one of their dead comments, but it's verbatim what samegene321 posted). It's either an individual or a coincidentally very narrowly-focused group of people who not only think the same, but write the same.
- 486sx33 2y ago[dead]
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoI wonder what the user experience was like. Did they have to select "Starlink" instead of "T-Mobile"? If not, was there some kind TMobile-signed-starlink's-key situation? It's an interesting interplay between preferring user consent versus wanting things to just start working when they need to.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wmf 2y agoRoaming is generally automatic with no "consent" involved.
- beeflet 2y agoTrue. This vid was a major eye opener for how insecure the current staus quo is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVyu7NB7W6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVyu7NB7W6Y
- TeMPOraL 2y agoIn the limit, security is opposed to everything that's good and nice, safety included.
- lxgr 2y agoYour phone provider definitely has to have a roaming agreement. Without that, your phone won’t attach to any 3G network and beyond (3G introduced mutual authentication). GSM remains vulnerable to all kinds of bad things since it only authenticates the phone/SIM to the network but not otherwise).
- diebeforei485 2y agoThis is for where there is no T-mobile coverage, so there is no need to choose satellite over a terrestrial station.
- ggreer 2y agoI was curious why direct-to-cell hasn't been enabled everywhere, and it looks like it's because AT&T claims it would cause them an 18% decrease in network throughput/capacity. AT&T petitioned the FCC to block direct-to-cell rollout because of this.[1] SpaceX responded that AT&T's estimates of interference are incorrect, and that AT&T fails to account for many factors. Also, SpaceX argues that the public good of having cell phone access in remote areas outweighs the slight reduction of network capacity in areas with existing coverage.[2] My guess is that the truth is somewhere in the middle. All else equal, adding more cell towers to an area will increase interference and decrease performance for existing networks, but I doubt it will be as bad as AT&T claims. Also T-Mobile made a deal with SpaceX to be the sole network with direct-to-cell for the first year after rollout. It seems more likely than not that AT&T is trying to hurt their competition using the FCC. If a different cell network had gotten an exclusive contract, I'm sure it would be T-Mobile petitioning the FCC to block direct-to-cell rollout. No branch of the US government keeps statistics on how many people get lost in the wilderness and die each year, but it's definitely in the hundreds and possibly over 1,000.[3] Considering how often a working cell phone could save them, I think it's worth enabling direct-to-cell everywhere. 1. https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1081242986780/1 https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1081242986780/1 2. https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1021391547062/1 https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1021391547062/1 3. https://nypost.com/2020/07/04/why-hundreds-of-people-vanish-into-the-american-wilderness/ https://nypost.com/2020/07/04/why-hundreds-of-people-vanish-...
- dotnet00 2y agoIt also hasn't been enabled everywhere yet because the associated constellation is not complete yet. Current service is probably going to be intermittent. Basically, it's just better than nothing when in an emergency like this.
- throwaway48476 2y agoIt's an excuse to establish 'facts on the ground' that the technology is useful which makes it harder to rollback via bureaucracy if it cuts into telco profits.
- stavros 2y agoDoes anyone know how this works? Do the satellites speak LTE/5G? Can cell phones really communicate with satellites directly without larger antennas?
- Jtsummers 2y agoThey're using T-Mobile's 1900MHz 5G band for this.
- ianburrell 2y agoIt works with any phone with LTE. It requires larger antennas. Starlink had to launch the V2 satellites which are larger and have new, big antenna for Direct-to-cell. They were meant for Starship, but that was delayed so they developed V2 Mini for Falcon 9. The version with antenna started launching beginning of year. My understanding is that are close to numbers for providing global coverage.
- stavros 2y agoThat's amazing, I'm having trouble believing that a mobile phone's antenna can talk to space, 500km away. Do you know what sort of bandwidth these will have?
- ianburrell 2y agoThe bandwidth will be small. I saw 2-5 Mbps for the whole cell covering a city. Devices will be limited to messages, small amounts of data, and voice.
- payrequest 2y ago[dead]
- jeffbee 2y agoStarlink is nice but does the US not possess an air platform that can loiter while providing mobile phone service? Seems like a useful thing to have for civil defense. Wasn't Project Loon supposedly capable of covering a state-sized area with 4G coverage?
- inemesitaffia 2y agoGoogle replaced loon with starlink and point to point laser tech
- kortilla 2y agoWhat weird phrasing. Loon just shutdown on its own and did not participate in any of the sat laser development for Starlink.
- inemesitaffia 2y agoThe laser tech is a different thing within GoogleX
- inemesitaffia 2y agoGoogle invested in SpaceX and exited loon at around the same time. Also at least one of Greg Wylers people at Google working on OneWeb left for Starlink
- jeffbee 2y agoI'm asking why the US doesn't own a blimp with a base station taped to the bottom.
- shrubble 2y agoThat would require the government to be innovative.
- mensetmanusman 2y agoHurricanes would blow it away
- tahoeskibum 2y agoI'm not surprised that China, Russia & UK have plans for their own constellations, and eventually India too.
- tremarley 2y agoI think they would if they could. They would need the funds and talent. SpaceX have been able to do it on this scale due to reusable rockets