2y ago

Starlink

link to toot

link to article

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Spoiler: It's 0.1 tonnes of CO2e per subscriber per year. This is not mentioned in the article.
This includes for example the emissions generated in the course of constructing the rockets that launch the satellites. So far it's unclear to me whether, when comparing to terrestrial telecom, they include e.g. the emissions produced when manufacturing the trucks that deploy the infrastructure.
- This also means the amount of emissions per user will go down the more users they get. It’s not very fair to compare something new to something that’s been around for decades in something that is based solely on the amount of users they have. I hate starlink, but this report is trash.
- Additionally, existing users are mostly in urban centers with very efficient infrastructure, starlink gives high bandwidth internet everywhere.
  I'd like to see the CO2e cost of giving a user in the middle of Idaho or Montana a 100Mbps connection.
- Thank you, I was wondering how high the emissions could possibly be for Internet access from the customer's perspective. I figured simply owning a car probably smashed even "30x as much" as other ISPs
- They almost certainly do not. Embodied energy is conveniently ignored 99% of the time because a) awareness of how much carbon goes into everything could result in consumers consuming less — couldn't possibly do the almighty economy dirty like that — and b) it's extremely difficult to calculate with any reasonable degree of accuracy.

It's like giving billionaires access to do reckless shit that can literally impact humanity's future may be problematic.
Wow
- But come on, think about all the jobs it created!
  
  A handjob is still a job, officer!

I'd like you all to consider that places where you'd use starlink are also significantly more than 30x farther away from civilization than the average land-based internet user.
- Out in middle of nowhere Ohio, the only options are satellite and I'll be damned if I'm doing to give Dish or Hughes net more money for worse speeds. Starlink is it until they actually run fiber out here.
- Are those places connected to the power grid? If yes then there is no reason they can't have fiber Internet. If we can electrify we can internetify.
  
  Definitely, that's what we should do. But that will have a decent carbon footprint and more importantly our government (at least in the US) has utterly failed rural Americans (and more!) in terms of internet roll out.
  
  That's one of the problems with Internet access being provided by private corporations. They're never going to service those people, because it's not profitable to run a hundred miles of fiber for one guy in Wyoming, unless he's crazy rich and pays for it himself. It's the same issue the mail has, one of the many reasons the USPS is so important
  
  No, many are not on the power grid.
  
  We tried to run fiber everywhere in the US, spent billions of dollars, but it still didn't get built.

Fact is, satellite internet from low earth orbit is the best solution in some parts of the world, and the ones to blame are literally the exact ISPs it's competing with by providing service to the underserved. It's a necessary option in providing the constant connectivity out society expects and relies upon (whether or not intermittent outages should be acceptable is a different discussion)
I would love to see some legislation requiring satellite ISPs to share infrastructure so we don't have 3 incompatible competing services with duplicated but not necessarily redundant infrastructure. That would be a far more useful goal to push for

So I don't really like the idea of defending anything related to Musk, but it's kind of poor form to compare emissions between Starlink and land-based internet imo. Although they are the same product, they are targeted at completely different users, from what I understand.
Starlink should always be a more expensive and slower technology just because of communication distance, so it shouldnt really be able to compete with land-based solutions (except where telecom is reeeeeally fucking people on price). Starlink is really meant more for edge-cases where telecorps refuse to build infrastructure.
- Not only this, but StarLink is a new and rapidly growing service so the number of subscribers is still on a steep upward trend. Comparing carbon/subscriber is going to be inaccurate right now due to the low number of starlink subscribers compared to a more established utility with a stable number of users. StarLink also has more new infrastructure needed than an established utility.
- Use cases and costs aside, we should still be open to discussing the pros and cons of these business ventures on the planet. Musk isn't going to pay up to clean up any mess caused by this, it would be taxes and price hikes around the world in the name of going green and reducing climate impact that get paid by plebs like us.
- Starlink should always be a more expensive and slower technology just because of communication distance
  That is not correct. The target of Starlink is satellite-to-satellite data routing in as close to a straight line as possible between point A and point B. Even adding the 500Km up and 500Km down, starting at several 1000Kms that's less distance than going through the network of ground fiber cables.
  The speed of light in optic fiber cables is also only 2/3 the speed of light in vacuum (aka: space).
  Starlink's end form is meant to get billions from charging intercontinental high frequency traders for a split second advantage.
- Starlink isn't meant for the edge cases, the edge cases can not make it profitable. The edge cases are edge cases.
  Also blotting out the sky with wasteful satalites isn't a good solution to "the free market wont build infrastructure because its broken." Its just another aspect of it being broken and the entire planet has to suffer from it.
  
  I am not super well-researched on this, so I might be mistaken, but their market is people who don't have access to telecom infrastructure, no? I guess it's not an edge-case just because there are that many people without access? Because I don't see how they'd be able to compete on price/value with traditional internet providers.
  
  The government is also broken, the US invested billions of dollars for nation wide fiber, and it still didn't get built.
  
  "blotting out the sky" is hyperbole and not reality. Those pics of the trains of dots in the sky are temporary and only present in the handful of days after a launch.

Okay then how come the internet isn't wired up globally. 2023 and there are still places without

Seems like we can't go a week between inaccurate posts complaining about Starlink getting traction
- It's almost as if a small percentage of Lemmy posts are generated with chatGPT to supply content.
  
  Still better than the not-so-small percentage on Reddit... 🤷

I'm actually surprised internet takes 3% the amount of energy it takes to get to space just to run some internet wires. I'd have thought it would be much much lower than that.
But also, starlink completes with geostationary satellite and home cellular connection more than internet over wires. Or even people who didn't have an option before.
- It also says per subscriber of which I assume there are significantly more regular internet users than Starlink
- Did your intuition consider the energy required to dig a trench to bury the cale in? Or putting up posts to lift the cable off the ground? I didn't consider it at first, but neither is done with climate neutral machinery.
  The operational requirements are probably pretty similar, the satellites are obviously exclusively solar powered, so no contribution there.
  
  Yeah I did, but cities where most of the internet users are have very short runs, and the cabling is usually installed with the building. Also, I think I've usually seen internet run with the telephone wires in rural areas rather than in trenches.

It looks like the study they linked only addresses the CO2 produced by the satellites, and not the land based providers.
Another interesting thing is that OneWeb and Kuiper (competing satellite internet services) are estimated to have significantly more per-user emissions than Starlink (40-200% more emissions!) (keep in mind that Starlink is predicted to have the most users) while also being estimated to provide a worse service and be more expensive per user. (all taken from the charts on page 6)
They also mention that Starship will likely lower carbon emissions of later Starlink launches significantly.
I'm not quite sure how the much larger Starlink V2 design factors in to all of this, or if they even took it into account.
- So you don't know either?
  How do the other satellite competitors even matter here?
  
  They produce similar amounts of carbon, have similar bandwidth, similar # of satellites, and are for a similar demographic.
  Edit: they're just not owned by Elon Musk so no one talks about them.

In order to do what Starlink does, it would take laying millions of miles of cable or hundreds of thousands of cell towers. People need Internet options with better than a couple of Mb of bandwidth, and without draconian usage caps of a few tens of gigabytes. Without space-based systems, it's economically unfeasible to service large areas with few customers. What do you think the carbon footprint of laying cable to a few remote islands is? Who is going to pay for that boondoggle? Starlink makes it economically possible.
- You're saying we have to fuck up the Earth one way or another so we might as well use rockets to do it?
  
  "We" have no say in it, the guys with private islands who want to "work from home" while forcing their employees into useless offices, are going to fuck up the Earth... so this way they do it a tiny bit less.
- It's not economically possible unless it's environmentally conscience as well

You know, I would think a progressive community would want to expand internet access to all (which is what Starlink does), so I’m kinda surprised there’s resistance every time it’s brought up.
- First, you really need to look at the definition of progressive, because its for sure not: "being in favour of bringing tech to more people people even if it has disastrous consequences for everyone else". Second, there are other people doing way better job at expanding internet access to everyone, for example in spain: https://conectate35.es/ where they have internet for 35 euros a month, in any part of the territory with 100mbps download speed without needing to clog the space with new satellites for Elon's personal reasons, without needing to be constantly building new rockets, without making the pockets of Elon even larger. That is something that is actually bringing internet to actual people that needs it at a reasonable price, with the state paying for the equipment and installation in most cases. Obviously could be even better, but its actually helping real people.
  
  Spain isn’t the market for Starlink.
  Try something a little more rural.

They just don't care. If they could earn a trillion knowing that the gain would destroy the planet in 10 years, they would. They're out of control, and the states on their knees to beg their money.

It's hilarious watching lemmy's hatred for elon musk turn them into luddites

I hate Elon maybe even more than the next guy, but there are some major exaggerations here:
Starlink makes tons of maneuvers to avoid collisions: https://www.space.com/starlink-satellite-conjunction-increase-threatens-space-sustainability
Starlink is at an orbit that they are quickly returning to Earth and burning up on re-entry: https://cybernews.com/news/starlink-lost-200-satellites/

My Internet here is like 1-3 Mbps if I'm lucky because I have 2 shitty options. Launch some more of these fuckers up there so I can have useful Internet.
- How about we encourage more competition or make it state owned instead?
  
  Starling isn’t competing with terrestrial ISPs, it’s competing with other sat-isps and WISPs which will never get better internet otherwise.
  
  Make it owned by the people responsible for us having shit Internet to start with. Brilliant, what could go wrong?
  
  Make it owned by the people responsible for us having shit Internet to start with. Brilliant, what could go wrong?

Hm that's pretty misleading. 4G is an order of magnitude more power hungry than your wifi, and nobody blames them for it?
Why suddenly Muskrat is the problem?

This sub needs a fuckin identity already.

68 comments