When you're traveling on a train through the middle of nowhere,
chances are your internet is spotty or just plain disappears. What if your connection is not only
stable but it's just as good as it is in a big city? Ever since 2019, SpaceX has been launching
batches of about 60 Starlink satellites at a time. You can see the Starlink satellites gently
floating away. Enough are now in orbit to start its plan to connect nearly every inch of the world
A Native American tribe that lives in a remote part of Washington State is one of the first to
try out the new internet. Before the Hoh Tribe got Starlink as part of a private beta test
their internet wasn't great and that's putting it lightly. They've had to deal with astonishing
rates of 0.3 to 0.7 megabits per second. They can't even stream a YouTube video in standard 480p
which requires at least a megabit a second. The global average for broadband connection
is 84 megabits per second. SpaceX just came up and just catapulted us into the 21st century.
Our youth are able to do education online. Initial tests of Starlink show it can download
greater than 100 megabits a second according to SpaceX. Another advantage is supposed to be low
latency which measures delay. For example, the time it takes between clicking on a web page
and when the page is displayed. SpaceX says the lag is around 20 milliseconds - good enough to
play the fastest games online and on par with ground-based services like fiber-optic broadband.
Low latency is achieved because the satellites are much closer to Earth, with most sitting
550 km or 340 miles above the planet's surface whereas many others are at least 1,000 km out.
But there are disadvantages to sitting at a lower altitude. The satellites will see less of the
planet so a lot more are needed to cover an area. That's why SpaceX plans to put 12,000 into orbit
and possibly as many as 42,000 one day. Considering only 9,000 satellites have ever been
launched in all of history, this is astounding and not going unnoticed when you look up at the sky.
The latest ones have a visor to make them less shiny than these but astronomers doubt this will
make them completely invisible to the eye. Besides the impact on observations, questions have been
raised about how this will add to debris in space commonly called space junk, defined as any object
that no longer has a purpose. SpaceX had to show the FCC it has a plan to address the debris issue
before getting approval to launch in the US. The company says satellites that fail or are old will
intentionally deorbit with their thrusters and burn up in the atmosphere so they won't
become debris. A benefit of flying low is rapid re-entry. Avoiding collisions is another pressing
matter. The satellites are equipped with tracking technology from the U.S. military to dodge debris
or spacecraft - although a European satellite did have to maneuver out of the way of a Starlink last
year. SpaceX then fixed a computer glitch it said led to a communication breakdown with the
European Space Agency. These are concerns SpaceX is facing as it launches rapidly.
Over 700 satellites are now in orbit enough to start rolling at public beta tests in the
Northern U.S. and in southern Canada. Users will connect to the constellation with a terminal the
size of a small or medium pizza. Apparently, it doesn't require special expertise to install.
You plug it in and aim it to get a clear view of the sky. While it might be easy to use,
the difficulty may be getting your hands on the device because governments could ban them.
In my previous video about Starlink, I talked about internet censorship in countries like China
and what would happen if SpaceX gave citizens unfiltered internet access without permission.
Here's what Elon Musk once said. If they get they get upset with us, they can blow our
satellites up, which wouldn't be good. China can do that, so probably we shouldn't broadcast there.
Another market Starlink is unlikely to touch is high-density areas because it doesn't have
sufficient bandwidth - meaning the volume of information it can handle at a given time.
But that doesn't mean those living in cities won't be impacted. Musk has confirmed Starlink
can work on moving objects like trains and people can potentially use it no matter where
they are at sea. SpaceX wants to test it out on its drone ships used to help land the boosters of
the Falcon 9 rockets. There is a more substantial impact for people who already have good internet.
As more of the world comes online, this will change the demographics of the web,
the languages that dominate, where the advertising dollars flow,
what businesses emerge to cater to new users. 40% of the population doesn't have internet access.
If billions of people come online, the world wide web will look like a very different place.
And it could happen very soon. SpaceX wants to roll at coverage globally by 2021 or
2022. As life-changing as it could be, a global internet is actually a step toward a bigger goal.
That goal is building a city on Mars. SpaceX is banking on Starlink to eventually bring in 30
billion dollars a year - 10 times more than what it makes launching payloads to the International
Space Station. We don't yet know how much Starlink will cost but SpaceX's president and COO Gwynne
Shotwell did point out in an interview million of people in the U.S. pay 80 bucks a month for crappy
service, in her words. SpaceX claims hundreds of thousands of people have already expressed
interest. If starlink fulfills its promise of connecting the most remote locations on earth,
if it replaces a poor connection with a good one, if it's relatively affordable,
then a massive disruption is about to happen. Hey guys, I hope you enjoyed the story. Thanks so
much for watching, I'm Cindy Pom. So what's the most that you'd be willing to pay for Starlink
or do you have any concerns about it? Let me know your thoughts. If you like what you saw,
give it a like, and don't forget to subscribe to my channel. A big thank you goes out to
my Patrons including my Patreon Producer Nino Gjoni. I will see you all very soon.