What Is Starlink? SpaceX’s Much-Hyped Satellite Internet Service Explained
Are you curious about Starlink and whether Elon Musk’s satellite internet technology is right for you? We answer the most pressing questions about the system that’s currently shaking up the ISP market.
Installing fiber in a city, and bringing Gigabit broadband to million of customers is certainly lucrative, but not so much in a rural area home to only a few hundred people.
The satellite internet system from SpaceX is capable of delivering 150Mbps internet speeds to theoretically any place on the planet. All the customer needs is a clear view of the sky.
Starlink currently costs $99 a month. You’ll also have to pay a one-time $499 fee for the Starlink satellite dish and Wi-Fi router, which the company will ship to your home.
Starlink is currently delivering 80Mbps to 150Mbps in download speeds and about 30Mbps in upload speeds, according to users. Meanwhile, latency comes in at around 30 milliseconds, which is on par with ground-based internet. Later this year, SpaceX plans on bumping up the download speeds to 300Mbps, while bringing down the latency to 20ms.
Firefox-maker Mozilla is leading a push for the Federal Communications Commission to swiftly reinstate net neutrality rules stripped away under the Trump administration.
In a letter to FCC Acting Chair Jessica Rosenworcel Friday, ADT, Dropbox, Eventbrite, Reddit, Vimeo and Wikimedia joined Mozilla in calling net neutrality “critical for preserving the internet as a free and open medium that promotes innovation and spurs economic growth.”
Net neutrality is the idea that internet service providers (ISPs) should not be allowed to favor or throttle service for websites that rely on it.
“Our America” and four other projects will evenly split $125,000 from Unity, the company announced Tuesday at the Game Developers Conference, which runs online through Friday. Each project may also get technical, marketing, and fundraising support from Unity.
Ahi Kā Rangers: An ecological mobile game with development led by Māori creators.
Dot’s Home: A game that explores historical housing injustices faced by Black and brown home buyers.
Future Aleppo: A VR experience for children to rebuild homes and cities destroyed by war.
Samudra: A children’s environmental puzzle game that takes the player across a polluted sea to learn about pollution and plastic waste.
Cathcart: Let me be very clear: We cannot read your messages, we cannot listen to your calls. When you send your location over WhatsApp, we do not know where you are.
DER SPIEGEL: But you do save data about your users like the device ID, the phone model, the WhatsApp user name, the phone book and thereby also the numbers of all their contacts, right?
DER SPIEGEL: Apple has recently introduced privacy labels that resemble nutritional labels about what kind of data an app collects and what it doesn’t. Why don’t you do something similar?
DER SPIEGEL: A new German law, if passed, would mean that WhatsApp would have to hand over account data to law enforcement. Do you hand over data about your customers to government agencies?
Researchers are working on a cabling system that could provide data transfer speeds multiple times faster than existing USB connections using an extremely thin polymer cable, in a system that echoes the design path of Thunderbolt.
While the “increasingly bulky and costly” copper could be replaced by fiber optic cables, that introduces its own issues. As silicon chips have difficulty dealing with photons, this makes the interconnection between the cable and the computers more challenging to optimize.
The polymer can also use sub-terahertz electromagnetic signals, which is more energy-efficient than copper at high data loads. It is believed this efficiency brings it close to that of fiber optic systems, but crucially with better compatibility with silicon chips.
It seems plausible that such a system could be employed for a future Thunderbolt-style connection, allowing it to go far beyond the current 40Gbps upper limit.
The use of AR/VR in educational settings is on the rise, paving the way for new careers and a workforce trained to embrace technology.
If projections stay on track, the global spending on educational AR/VR is expected to rise from $1.8 billion to $12.6 billion over the next four years.
the International Data Corporation (IDC) released a report indicating that the pandemic has fueled an impressive forecast of worldwide expenditures on AR/VR, which are expected to grow from $12 billion in 2020 to $72.8 billion by 2024.
rom completing spinal surgery to training at a high-tech facility, such as the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s Davis Global Center, which has AR/VR and holographic technologies among its many offerings.
A minimal-data practice will enable several AI-driven industries — including cyber security, which is my own area of focus — to become more efficient, accessible, independent, and disruptive.
1. AI has a compute addiction. The growing fear is that new advancements in experimental AI research, which frequently require formidable datasets supported by an appropriate compute infrastructure, might be stemmed due to compute and memory constraints, not to mention the financial and environmental costs of higher compute needs.
MIT researchers estimated that “three years of algorithmic improvement is equivalent to a 10 times increase in computing power.”
