French court pulls SpaceX's Starlink license France's Conseil d'Etat court is revoking the license [PDF] authorizing Elon Musk's Starlink outfit to use two frequency bands to provide satellite internet in France. SpaceX reportedly has only one ground station left in France, in Villenave-d'Ornon, Girond. The other two Gateways – which were authorized between July and …
Yes, we're talking about people who set fire to electricity cables supplying a chip fabrication plant because it's damaging the environment by "using too much electricity", oblivious to the fact that if they didn't have redundant supplies in place said plant would then have to be fed from hugely polluting diesel generators while the cables are repaired. Instead they just caused massive inconvenience to the locals in the area because the bridge carrying the burnt cables was damaged & is now closed. Dumb as rocks doesn't even begin to cover it.
"But at the same time they are laughing at your 40% energy bill hike."
They're not laughing now
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/French-Power-Prices-Spike-To-3000-Per-Megawatt-Hour-Following-Cold-Snap.html
An increase in heating demand added extra stress to France’s electricity grid, forcing power prices to climb to a shocking €3,000 per megawatt-hour.
3000 Euros per MWh!
A perfect storm
- [DEMAND] A cold snap swept across France Monday morning, forcing the country's electricity grid manager to request businesses and households to reduce power consumption as energy prices spiked.
- [SUPPLY]
The severe power crunch comes as 25 of Electricite de France SA's 56 nuclear reactors are offline. For some context, France's primary power source is nuclear, contributing at least 70% of total production.
Bloomberg's commodity analyst Javier Blas reminds people, "Europe's energy problems predate Russia's invasion of Ukraine."
France and other European countries have been struggling with an energy crisis that appears to be continuing and may last through summer as energy supplies from Russia decline. The conflict in Ukraine has exacerbated energy disruptions as European countries plan to reduce their dependency on Russian gas (we suspect this will be a hard transition, if not, impossible).
Renewables are looking very attractive in the medium term, particularly with increases in the cost of coal and gas
I don't know about France. But in the UK this is a myth. According to the most recent data (Table2), 2.5% of FTSE100 companies are owned by pension funds and 1.5% by insurers. A whopping 58% are owned by foreign investors (here's looking at you, Vladimire and Mohammon).
Not really.
In that case so-called 'ecologists' and another obscurantist association complain because you know, technology is bad and dangerous. They found a flaw in the procedure and exploit it. It will be probably temporary.In France there are tons and tons of regulations, and each year there are more. It keeps parliament members and administrations occupied.
This kind of association is a PITA. Afraid of everything, they can just say 'no' to any project, because change is dangerous.
IMHO, in this (one) case, good luck to them. We're sleepwalking into a future where we have tens of thousands of satellites in LEO, which are certainly at least sometimes visible, just to provide internet access to a tiny number of people who can't use other infrastructure *and* who are rich enough to get a receiver and a contract. Seriously, how is this ever going to be cheaper, or more environmentally friendly, than laying cables to remote villages in Africa? And, once you've got your cable down, you can use it for all your other comms, which is certainly not the case with satellite internet. Who exactly is going to benefit from this? Is it just the bankers?
You clearly know nothing at all about it. Just look at the costs of laying fibre/copper, compared with satellite. Satellites are WAY cheaper in remote areas. They also don't suffer from people digging up cables and selling them....Also more environmental friendly. A few satellite launches, vs digging up hundreds of thousands of of miles of trenches with oil driven excavators.
Put it like this. Musk is not stupid. He is not going to be doing this unless he knows it's going to make money when compared with all the other systems available.
As for "sky pollution", AIUI, these satellites are not visible to the naked eye once at altitude, or at least, very faint.
"As for "sky pollution", AIUI, these satellites are not visible to the naked eye once at altitude, or at least, very faint."
Sadly, not quite true...even with their new "dark paint finish", Starlink satellites are still posing a threat to astronomers and asteroid-watchers as well as causing significant "interference" with the view of the night sky.
Just look at the Starlink Overpass photo here:
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/04/world/satellite-pollution-night-sky-view-scn/index.html
Starlink do not have anywhere near their full complement of 42,000 satellites in orbit yet, and Amazon plan to send up another 3500+ satellites.
Then add in the OneWeb constellation and no doubt a few others from other countries will soon be in orbit...and very soon, the chances of a "Kessler Syndrome" event occurring are far more likely...
If there is a requirement for a public consultation, why wasnt a public consultation held? Who authorised there not being a public consultation in this case? And who signed off on the approvals knowing that the public consultation was not held?
And what sort of punishment will each receive for not doing their job properly? Oh wait, we're talking civil servants, (and french ones at that!), they never have to answer for their actions. No matter how much they refuse to follow procedures...
"In many parts of the US that's legal."
No, it is not. According to Federal Law, pot is still a Schedule I drug, and is illegal, even for medical reasons.
Federal Law trumps State Law in this case. At some point, the Feds are probably going to feel free to crack down on pot growers, dealers and users unless the law is changed. It may be a multi-billion dollar industry (and growing fast), but I have no intention of investing in it until this issue is resolved.
The Republicans (probably still heavily traumatized by seeing "Reefer Madness" in their mid-teens, the poor, poor dears) are just biding their time ... They would have done it during the Trump Administration, but the hypocrites know damn-day well that a large percentage of Trump supporters are red-neck pot-heads. Even losing a few percent of that vote would have lost him the first election.
The US Feds are currently mulling walking away from the whole mess. The war on drugs was lost a long time ago and the only ones benefitting from its current form are the dealers
(It's a Forever war because you're attacking a symptom (usage), not the cause (WHY people are falling into addiction). A "war on sneezing" would be just as effective if you wanted to eliminate the common cold)
10GHz will affect the cattle?
That there is Rookie level crazy.
My Japanese, former NHK newsroom wife believes that Corona was spread downstream by 5G and received by people with 5G compliant smartphones and spread to their neigbours... Then vaccines facilitated the upstream return via the injected bluetooth antennae in order to transmit you bio data back to Bill Gates, helped by government mandated tracking apps...
This level of fear is tame in comparison.
Let's do the "well, actually" of pointing out that it is the theory of relativity.
Also, that the general public has for a while been mixing up the words "theory" and "hypothesis", and uses the former as a synonym of the latter, which it is not.
https://www.thoughtco.com/definition-of-theory-in-chemistry-605932
I will only say, that here in the Tarn area, our ADSL from a colorful fruity company is pitiful, but the 4G from another is more than acceptable. We have two 4G routers here in this big house, separate networks, and only €40 for the two, and the whole family of 5 has acceptable speeds for their needs. My son games on XboX with my brother who is in the US midwest, and it works just fine, never a peep about performance, about being fragged, I hear a lot! LOL
So is it worth it to pollute space with more satellites?
https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/04/sentinel_1a/
"So is it worth it to pollute space with more satellites?"
For you, Starlink isn't worth it. Of course, you are bright enough to realize that your experience doesn't mean that everyone has the same Internet options that you have, right?
Speaking for myself, I had crappy DSL and no realistic 4G oprions before getting Starlink. I have friends and family not far away who can't get DSL, and who have to stand on a certain spot in the yard to get enough cell signal to send a text.
Just throwing in my tuppence worth, I live about 10 minutes outside of town, in a semi-rural location, and when I bought this house I was careful to check with the seller that he had ADSL.
Unfortunately, after I had bought the house, it transpired that there's a weird quirk of the ADSL rules in this part of the world that neither the seller nor my buyer's agent knew about. If the property is more than X miles from the DSLAM, but has been provisioned with ADSL in the past, it can continue to use the ADSL connection - but only until the property is sold, at which point the ADSL link has to be yanked and cannot ever be re-provisioned. Because it's too far, you see, and can't possibly work at sufficient speed/quality. Even if it was. And even if removing it leaves you with NO options whatsoever.
So I'm forbidden to continue using a perfectly functional 25/4Mbps link, and have to settle for a 16/8Mbps microwave relay that is bounced via a dish on the house to the next valley over, all for an eyewatering $125/month, with a pathetic 400GB cap. Grrrr.
On the plus side, I have 4 mountains on the horizon as I look out of my living room windows, so can't really complain too much!
Starlink provides for a fraction of the cost what would be a massively expensive, government funded project, not to mention long term money loser for any provider to implement using cables/fiber. Providing high speed internet to the rural central US plains Would be an extremely expensive project, not to mention the cost of maintenance. To recoup that cost even with government finding would mean those customer would pay higher rates. Repairs to damaged cabling over that vast area would either required a large investment in technicians or long wait times for customers.
Starlink and projects like it solves these problems. We need to just tell all the conspiracy theory people to just "go away"! No, not censer them, they have a right to be idiots, just tell them to "go away, fool!"
Starlink provides for a fraction of the cost ...
I very much doubt that: Earth's surface is mostly ocean, and the rest is half desert or mountains or forest which is mostly empty. Which means that the satellites spend 90% of their time doing nothing. You can follow a live map of StarLink satellites: right now, there are 3 (three) satellites above France, and 2 above Great Britain: how is this supposed to be useful for anything, let alone "cheap ".
What surface – land patch – does a single satellite cover ? Imagine the density you need to cover an area where people actually live, and imagine the same density above the oceans ? Add to it that the satellites have a limited lifetime, which means that they'll have to launch rockets all the time !
It's a ridiculous waste of resources.
Yes, it's expensive. But I think you need to actually put all the numbers on the table - Starlink *and* high-speed internet build-out to every customer it services. Just because it's expensive doesn't mean that it's more expensive than the alternative. At a certain scale, all you are saying is "but, big numbers are big!"
If you take a closer look you'll notice that Starlink is now capable of providing service to large chunks of the atlantic and pacific oceans. With V2's laser linking it gets even easier
marineised dishes aren't a thing (yet) but they'll happen. As will aviation-specialised ones
The income stream is there, and not where you assume it's coming from.
Apart from the massive potential for Ships at Sea and Aircraft in Flight (both currently playing eye-watering fees to Inmarsat, etc) there's the wee issue that they can provide intercontinental linking of financial centres (particularly asia-EU/asia-USA) at lower latencies than any terrestrial cable) and the income from THAT could pay the entire constellation all by itself once it comes onstream
I've been asked to provide a report on the feasibility of using Starlink for providing linking to hundreds of remote villages in a very deprived country and at first glance I can't see any particular obstacle. Until I suggested it the proponents were looking at commitments of billions of dollars for worse bandwidth and being beholden to the possibility of authoritarian local governments cutting off connectivity
Terrestrial IS cheaper where the population density supports it but there are large chunks of the planet where you simply can't put infrastructure (water, mountains) or there aren't enough people to justify it.
I spent a good part of the 1980s-90s on the end of a geostationary satellite link and know how frustrating that is. LEO birds are a godsend. I get that the French are doing this for various "because we're french" reasons but they're probably going about it the wrong way
Yep, that argument is a bit strange.
But I don't think this has anything to do with "cancelling" a potential foreign competitor, because a) Starlink is mostly aimed at people who can't get any other existing coverage, WiMAX, ADSL, 4G/5G, fibre, at least not with decent throughputs and b) the monthly subscription is/was 99€, which is way above what the "traditional" competitors charge.
I may be naive but I really believe that the Conseil d'Etat thought those two associations had a point, and chose to apply the almighty "principe de précaution" which is one of our lovely local peculiarities.
I've checked, and Priartem is an association against anything electro-magnetic or which could be linked to EM waves in a way or another : smart meters, 5G, etc... Not sure how much lobbying power they have but they are a bit extreme for sure. To their credit I couldn't find any signs of a campaign against sunlight.
As for the "pitch forks and peasants" caricatures I could read in some comments, yes, it's true french farmers tend to be a pain when they're not happy, but besides the big and rich ones there are many who struggle making ends meet, with way too many suicides and/or bankruptcies. The thing is they feed us and work hard, so give them some slack and please excuse me if I don't want to end up buying Vladimir's wheat.
But I digress.
About chivo's argument (space pollution), well, whether France authorizes Starlink or not it won't change the fact the satellites are already up there, right ?
I see the subject woke up some good ol' french-bashing commentards. But this is a Brit site (with typical funny and witty comments most of the time), so fair enough ;-)
"About chivo's argument (space pollution), well, whether France authorizes Starlink or not it won't change the fact the satellites are already up there, right ?"
Musk needs to start a new industry, "Space Junkers"! Powered orbital space vessels with large nets!* Coordinate with Earth space agencies so they don't scoop up active satellites. Establish orbital processing centers to extract vital materials from the space junk (i.e. gold, platinum, silicon, anything that is viable to be reused. Return the reusable materials to earth, vent any toxic gases produced by the separation process into space, place any solid waste into containers if send them into the sun! You could even then send electronic waste from earth to these processing centers. Saving earth from the very dangerous processing of this waste.
Not sure if this could at all be profitable but hay, it sounds cool!
*All these vessels and processing centers are operated by humans not automated robotics. Thus giving humans jobs!
"About chivo's argument (space pollution), well, whether France authorizes Starlink or not it won't change the fact the satellites are already up there, right ?"
Sure it will. Starlink has designed their satellite coverage based on assumptions about which locations and to how many people they'll be able to sell their service. Given that France is one of the larger and richer countries around, presumably they're hoping to do a decent amount of business there. Given that there are already questions about how profitable Starlink can be, even before any competition starts showing up, losing a significantly sized country full of customers can't be a good thing. It won't make the existing satellites suddenly drop out of the sky, but they're only going to be up there for a few years anyway and there will certainly be an impact on how viable it is to replace them, or on how much larger the constellation needs to be.
Of course, the point is largely moot because there's essentially zero chance that France will actually ban Starlink. This is a mix of local politics and bureaucrats requiring the proper amount of hoop-jumping, not a serious effort to have them thrown out the country entirely.
Starlink has designed their satellite coverage based on assumptions about which locations and to how many people they'll be able to sell their service.
It won't make the existing satellites suddenly drop out of the sky, but they're only going to be up there for a few years anyway and there will certainly be an impact on how viable it is to replace them, or on how much larger the constellation needs to be.
Replacement satellites won't cover France any more unless their orbit for coverage of other parts of the globe makes it necessary. Battling French bureaucracy is never profitable.
"Starlink has designed their satellite coverage based on assumptions about which locations and to how many people they'll be able to sell their service"
Those assumptions didn't include much coverage in Europe because terrestrial coverage is good and there's decent local competition
The USA is an entirely different market which is only possible because of massive local manipulation and monpolisation - you can see how the telcos have been trying (and failing) to get Starlink shut out of their cozy income streams. What is likely to actually happen is that they'll suddenly find that all the "too hard" places to provide service to suddenly became possible after all - at a reasonable price - but customers won't care after 20+ years of being shafted
Africa is a massive market which hasn't even been touched yet (dozens of countries), as is most of Asia. If you look at starlink.sx you'll see that South America has grabbed it with both hands as most of the countries there are taking advantage of an opportunity to connect citizens in ways previously unattainable
I've checked, and Priartem is an association against anything electro-magnetic or which could be linked to EM waves in a way or another : smart meters, 5G, etc... Not sure how much lobbying power they have but they are a bit extreme for sure. To their credit I couldn't find any signs of a campaign against sunlight.
Well that simply underlines how anti-scientific they are. Those artefactual smart meters and 5G don't use ionising radiation. Pure, natural, unfiltered sunlight, at ground level, has sufficient UVA and UVB to give you melanomas.
I suppose at sufficient RF power levels people could get RF burns, but the whole point about restricting RF power and measuring absorption is to make sure that thermal effects are kept so far below the threshold of significance that it isn't funny.
And of course, the idiots campaigning against phone masts are campaigning for them to be located 'not in my back yard', which means the transmitters in their mobile phones have to increase the power levels to talk to the mast that is further away. So having a non-local mast increases the radiation absorbed locally by their heads when they use a mobile phone. You could not make it up.
People suffering from electrosensitivity definitely have symptoms, and for some their lives are very challenged. Whatever the cause is, they need help.
https://ltatabm.wordpress.com/2021/03/11/discussion-on-provocation-tests-for-electrosensitivity/
https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4072
Once upon a time, you could order a Tesla Model 3 for under $40K. Then Elon saw the light and started to raise prices and make himself even wealthier than he was.
He'll do the same with Starlink. The early adopters get a good deal but then the prices start to go up well beyond levels of inflation or taxation.
US Economic Pricing 101. Get them hooked and then... [you fill in the blanks]
You don't understand economics at all, do you. Statistically, early adopters pay more, as costs will come down as volumes increase. For Tesla, the recent price rises are a direct result of increasing material costs due to the GLOBAL supply chain problems. Not something Musk has any control over.
But you don't care about that because COMMUNISM!
there'sa huge difference between USA and France when it comes to broadband... and FTTH.
The main one is the fact that to keep their licenses the operators have a requirement to cover a percentage of the population in a given timeframe AND to cover a percentage of the territory in the same timeframe.
The numbers are updated at every renewal of trhe license. This is valid for ISPs and Mobile operators
( which are usually both )
In some cases, as mentionned by others, the ISP doesn't bother with DSL and just provide a triple play box with a 4G SIM as a broadband access ( my brother has that setup... and pay as if he had a DSL line )
"Hmm. "most people". For some of us from before the Sky TV, etc, era, a "satellite dish" was something about the size of a small car."
When the words "satellite dish" impinges on my awareness, my first mental image is Arthur or Jodrell Bank :-)
One takes a dish of tea.
Mark you, if Jodrell sized, it goes cool before I can finish it.
Now there's an idea. if we fit every cow in the world with a network transmitter. And we make inter-cow data exchange using line of sight lasers. No need to shoot stuff into space. Easy to maintain : grab the cow , replace transmitter. Use the horns as antenna masts.
The Cow Network.
"if we fit every cow in the world with a network transmitter"
We're almost there. A neighbour is a cow farmer [*] (in rural France, no less!). His herd have some sort of embedded RFID gizmo so the automatic milking system can track which cow gave what milk when. Hell, the bloody thing even runs a bunch of tests on the milk as it's being sucked out of the nipple to partition any cow that is "suspect" for whatever reason, and to know which cow to do it automatically from that point on (until manually reset by the farmer following a vet visit). There's probably loads more but by this point the explanation was coming at me in rapid fire French. Suffice to say, all he needs to do is train the cows to cross the road by themselves and not wander off because oh shiny and then he can stay in bed and let them milk themselves.
* - Note: don't call a farmer a farmer in France, it's quite a class based system and "farmer" is near the bottom of the heap, so this guy is actually a... let me see if I can get this right - éleveur-exploitant. Or something like that. But to me, a dumb Brit, a guy in a tractor is a farmer. ;)
Hey, my sense of humour was formed decades ago, and dad jokes are all I got now.
I'm an incorrigible punster. So don't incorrige me.
(On a serious note, one of the wonderful things about having moved to the USA a few years ago is that very, very few of our Beano level schoolboy jokes have made it to this side of the pond. So I can regale friends and family here with the stalest of knock-knock jokes etc., and they react like I'm the reincarnation of Oscar Wilde...)
Here at the Ranch, all the critters are chipped. Not to run the automatic milker (I don't have/need one), but rather because I'd like to get them back if they are lost, stolen, or strayed.
"so this guy is actually a... let me see if I can get this right - éleveur-exploitant. Or something like that."
Here in the States, the phrase is "pretentious twat" for people like that. They usually call themselves "gentleman farmers". I'm just a farmer. Or Rancher, depending on the mood the IRS is in this year.
The Starlink plan is to use the ion drive to bring satellites down quickly just before they run out of propellant. That way they can still dodge if a collision is possible. I would expect Kuiper to have the same plan but I have not seen (or looked for) a definitive statement from them so far.
Kuiper and Starlink are below the sweet spot for a Kessler cascade: fragments from a collision are likely to de-orbit before they hit anything else. There is also an upper limit: too high and everything is too spaced out for a secondary collision. For a cascade the best bet is a mummy-bear orbit like OneWeb.
Interestingly, I learned the other day that France has the largest economic zone of any country.
That's mainland France, French Guiana, and god knows how many islands dotted around the globe. And obviously the sea extending out from each of those dots on the map, which is the clincher.
And I would guess many of those remote little outpost would find Starlink a God send.
Many of those outposts don't have any people on them, as France enjoyed collecting islands that aren't really suitable for people to live on. One of their territories often doesn't count as land as it's underwater at high tide, but it gives them a massive patch of the Indian ocean that they can claim to own.
Some of the ones with people won't have a problem because the small populations mean that a small amount of connectivity goes a long way. For example, Réunion is one of the most connected parts of France despite its remoteness because the existing fiber connections cover the local area well already. French Polynesia isn't as advanced, but they've already completed the project of connecting fiber lines to each of the smaller islands (the big ones already have links). Each of the small islands is small enough that they don't need a lot of connections in order to have satisfactory bandwidth. Many other overseas French territories are in the Caribbean, where there are a lot of islands that are building networks.
This isn't to say that satellite is never needed, but just that remoteness doesn't always mean it is relevant.
To be fair to the French (and I say this as a Brit, so you can envisage the gritted teeth), a nation that came up with the Citroen DS (La Déesse) plainly knows a thing or two about making cars, and should be credited accordingly. A vintage DS, or a modern Tesla? No contest, pass the mineral-oil suspension fluid...
It was not the farmiers... it's fringe ecologist groups against radio communications or such.
PRIATEM : Pour Rassembler et Agir sur les Risques liées aux Technologies ElectroMangétiques
( to assemble and act on the electromagnetic technologies risks. )
Just the name says it all... Fringe group that sees mobile phone and wifi as something more dangerous than nuclear radiations. ( thought for whatever reasons they don't seems to parse that radio and TV are also electromagnetic technologies )
Agir pour l'environnement is just a hippie fringe ecologist group that would love to bring back France to the caveman age ( so that the impact on the environment would be limited, no nuke power plant, no water storage for agriculture, no fertilizers, no <name whatever you think is bad> )
I've had this discussion with a couple of UK loonies. They see a dish on the horizon and think 5G, etc etc.
Explaining inverse square laws, how the phone in their pocket is giving them millions of times higher doses and how that's nothing compared to laying on an electric blanket is amusing
Kinda like the recent shenanigans at Chernobyl. Soldiers shouldn't have been digging in the Red Forest but readings 50 times higher than normal aren't anything to write home about (they're normal in some parts of the world). Sure you don't want to live there for an extended period (years) but even a few months is fine and I speculated that soldiers had been either doing something extremely stupid or up to no good (or both), such as selfies at the Elephant's Foot or attempting to steal items they shouldn't be going anywhere near with someone else's 10-foot bargepole.
Sure enough, it came out that dolts were doing things like handling Cobalt-60 sources without protection and attempting to steal various radiologically red hot items
Back on the antenna front: One of the fun things back in my telco days was to put up antennas and wait for the objections to roll in - only then would we attempt to connect them to equipment, having "calibrated the local loony brigade".
In a few cases we put up painted wooden/plastic replicas at one location whilst having disguised ones elsewhere. In no instances whatsoever were there evere complaints about the non-visible ones, but the wooden ones upset a lot of chakras
I was once on the receiving end of opposition from a bitter orange in a telecommunications project. Very nasty, fortunately I'd developed a good customer relationship and he saw the rotten fruit for what it was. It seems like Elon is suffering a pelting on a larger scale. No doubt the Third Estate living in the Bocage will get used to 700ms.
Actually, while the result is what PRIARTEM and Agir pour l'environnement wanted, it's not for the reason they made the request.
( basically radio waves are bad for people and environment... nobody told them that radio and TV are also radiowaves and have been all around in the ambiant air for decades now. )
The reason found by the Conseil d'état is that it could distort the French Internet market, and would especially damage the FTTH deployment by the existing ISPs.
( they have hard numbers to meet every years in the deployment of the FTTH if they want to keep their licenses )
1. Radio waves ARE NOT particle radiation. The 2 are not even close to the same thing. Radio waves below the level of microwaves are perfectly safe to life! You receive far more damage by the ultra-violet light emitted by the sun that you will from any radio waves.
2. CO2 WILL NOT destroy the world. The Earth had CO2 levels as high as 700-900 ppm and life on this planet flourished. We are currently at 400 ppm. Even if humans had unrestricted burning of fossil fuel we could not reach that level in a millennia, not even in 10 millennia! Even with unrestricted deforestation* it would still take millions of years to reach those levels.
3. Runaway greenhouse effect will never occur on Earth. earth IS NOT Venus. Venus is in the inner third of the habitable zone, earth is near the outer third of the habitable zone. Venus rotational day is only slightly less than its orbital year. 1 square mile of Venus' surface spends approximately 1/2 the year facing the sun! Tidal forces on Venus produce now and in the past massive volcanic activity contributing to the large concentration of CO2 and Sulfur in the atmosphere. Venus lacks something that Earth has, Life! Life is the great "energy consumer". Life consumes the energy produced by the sun, uses it and stores it.
When you allow the political charlatans of the world to convince you of absurdities then they have the power over you to make you commit atrocities!
*This is a problem that actually should be addressed but we are too focused on stopping humans from using the available energy we have to live normal lives for political reasons to be focused on REAL problems.
"The Earth had CO2 levels as high as 700-900 ppm and life on this planet flourished"
last time the planet went past ~850ppm, Very Bad Things Happened in a short period of time.
Look up the Permian Extinction event. Once it hit that kneepoint it was all over in less than a decade
World: not destroyed
Oxygen levels: substantially reduced and stayed that way for a long time
Extinction level: Extreme (93-95% by biomass or species count)
Flourishing life: Red Tides on Steroids (Ironically, producing much of the oil we're now burning), not much else on land or sea
Humans can't survive long-term in an atmospheric oxygen sea-level equivalent much less than 17% and it's a particularly nasty way to die (altitude sickness - you essentially drown in your own lungs)
This line is such crap:
"The coverage of each spacecraft is a narrow band around the whole world, meaning it faces global competition."
Starlink will face competition * because other companies want a slice of the action and nothing to do with the coverage of each of the thousands of satellites in the constellation. The coverage of each individual satellite is only relevant to the number of satellites needed.
* (somewhen - right now it faces none outside of a courtroom).
But, rant over, When Starlink comprised of V2 sats that don't need a local downlink will governments in the "free world" be able to stop customers using Starlink?
Eutelsat appears to be geo-stationary which means that a round trip takes almost a second, i.e. 750ms latency. That is more than an order of magnitude worse than the latency in Starlink and means the Eutelsat is useless for online meetings, gaming, or telecommuting VDI work. Apart from that it's totally 21st century. It's lucky people who live in rural areas never need or want any of these things.
It constantly amazes me that those in government that are responsible for regulating this stuff need this stuff explaining to them.
"It constantly amazes me that those in government that are responsible for regulating this stuff haven't the wit to understand even the basics of the reality of how it works, even with the world's foremost experts on any given subject patiently explaining it to them in words of as few syllables as possible."
FTFY
I would not give 2pence for Orange, we have an expression that Orange, france telecom could not organize a piss up in a brewery. We were disconnected for 7 months and they do not want to pay for our out of pocket expenses.If Orange has anything to do with it AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE! Terrible company and verging on corrupt. The previous ceo was done by French courts and he got amongst others 2 years suspended. Things have not changed. See French telecom company Orange and its former CEO were found guilty on Friday of “institutional moral harassment” that the court said contributed to a spate of suicides among employees.
Get space tel from anywhere not Orange, buy it in another country and import it to France. I have refused degroupee as in an emergency we have no phone in a power outage.
"France's biggest telecoms operator, Orange, inked a deal [PDF] with Eutelsat in 2020 under which it bought out all available capacity on Eutelsat's Konnect satellite to cover the entire French territory"
Back in the late 1990s, Telecom New Zealand did the same thing with all satelite and cable bandwidth into the country to prevent anyone else buying it - doing so allowed them to keep prices up. The cost of the unsused bandwidth was significantly lower than the profit hit they'd have taken by having to pricematch incoming competition
In other countries (Cook Islands, Fiji, Tonga, Philippines) the incumbents simply got the government to declare they were the only company allowed to offer international services - sometimes by the simple expedient of requiring a license to operate, which they would simply never ever issue
The Register 
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