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Elon Musk says SpaceX Starlink satellite broadband beta testing starts in a few months:
This week [SpaceX] launched another batch of 60 satellites to bring the total size of its growing Starlink broadband constellation to more than 400. While it has the go-ahead to launch more than 12,000 satellites in the coming years, Musk said Wednesday that a "private beta" test of the service will begin in about three months, followed by a public beta about three months later for testers at northern latitudes.
In response to a Twitter user, Musk said Germany qualifies as far enough north, which could mean that much of northern Europe, Canada and the northernmost parts of the US may be eligible to try the service.
There is only so much bandwidth per satellite, so your pizza-box-sized transceiver would experience more congestion and lower throughput in an urban area than it would in a rural setting.
How many Soylentils are interested in signing up?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday April 25 2020, @02:48PM
If you really want to help people, one of the the best things you can offer is education so they can better help themselves. They're the only ones that really know their problems and their priorities. And the internet gives you access to a big fraction of the total knowledge of humanity, much of the most useful stuff it in the form of instructional videos where you don't even need to know the language to get a lot of benefit.
Another great thing you can do is offer communication, so that they can collaborate more effectively.
Better roads don't do much good for people who mostly can't afford cars, so the return (benefit) on investment is abysmal. Communication is much cheaper to provide, and delivers immediate dividends. Being able to get word of how markets are doing is an incredible value to a farmer that's going to need to travel for hours or days to get there. A nicely paved road to walk on offers much less benefit for much greater cost. We've already seen that with cell phones in many places, but the infrastructure get too expensive to deploy effectively in mountains or canyonlands where the only long-distance line of sight is likely to be with the sky.