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rmm | on: Starlink Mini 2
This has completely changed my industry (hard rock mining). A lot of the time drillers would be in the middle of nowhere looking for resources and would be sometimes days away from providing results (which also lead to lots of dodgy situations where drillers would know some results before market…) now it’s instant live feed. It’s made revising drilling plans trivial. Very cool
loufe | parent | next
I work at a remote sub-arctic hard rock mine. Almost a decade ago when I started there was a single a 25mbps downlink shared between the business and 800 on-site people's personal rooms. I oftentimes couldn't get a message to family to send during the evening fury. Starlink was an incredible change in quality of life.
Razengan | root | parent | next
It's amazing how you can find people from so wildly different lines of work and life here :)
Cthulhu_ | root | parent
Ironically I'd bet a lot of that traffic wasn't necessary. I knew a guy once, worked in ops but used to work for the military, setting up the sattelite internet connection of a base in Afghanistan. 90% or more of the bandwidth used was porn, he said it would've been so much cheaper to send a container full of DVDs instead.

I just hope they're not relying on the internet for anything tactical.

King-Aaron | parent | next
Also in mining - Iron Ore - and yeah they are an absolute game changer in our remote sites.

I've got deep concerns about the politics side of the company, and the future implications of them being able to decide where and who gets coverage. But from a technology perspective it's doing things I didn't really think were possible a decade ago. Having signal in the bottom of the pit, or way out the back of the Pilbara is just crazy.

nomilk | root | parent
The un/expected uses for Starlink are interesting, especially because of how primitive the pre-Starlink work-arounds were (and because some things simply weren't possible).

When most of the Earth's surface has internet, it will be hard to imagine what life was like when it didn't.

raised_hand | root | parent | next
I'd love to hear about some of the workarounds. Garmin?
Teever | root | parent | next
Clay Shirky said “Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.”

I recently had a gig collecting soil samples in rural Alberta, and we relied on Starlink to upload the data as we worked.[0]

It was surreal trundling through a remote farmer’s field in a skid-steer with a funny-looking square dish on top, surrounded by a herd of bison or cattle.

Stepping outside of the machine to take a piss on a tree and hearing the motors in the dish whir as it repositions itself to get a better connection was startling and neat. It’s one thing to read about the dishes having that functionality but another to experience it while you’re doing something as mundane as a basic bodily function.

Pulling the dish and the mount off the skid-steer and tossing it in the back of the truck, and seeing the off-the-shelf Ryobi battery and inverter that powered it, all scuffed up and covered in dirt, makes you realize that as magical as it is right now, it’s just a machine. People thought that transistor radios were pretty magical when they came out but eventually they just became an everyday thing.

Soon enough these things won’t be so big and expensive, and there will be a market of providers offering even better service. What comes then will be scary from a privacy perspective, but it may also enable so many positive things that we can’t yet imagine.

“The most profound technologies are those that disappear.”

[0] https://imgur.com/a/gkUAHOn

imp0cat | root | parent
> hearing the motors in the dish whir as it repositions itself to get a better connection was startling and neat

There is a certain beauty in these moments, isn't there? Watching the machines do their jobs.

jmbwell | root | parent | next
I’ll remember it fondly. The primitive workarounds were often a fun challenge even as an individual. But I’m glad more people can get connected so easily, and with more options on the way. The world will never be the same
SecretDreams | root | parent
> When most of the Earth's surface has internet, it will be hard to imagine what life was like when it didn't.

I think we'll miss it. I've known both the "pre-connected" and "post-connected" eras. There's a lot to love about being "connected".. and a lot to not like. Constant connectivity kind of sucks and we'd all do better to detox/disconnect meaningfully every so often.

fc417fc802 | root | parent
I think that's mostly a "you" problem. Connectivity gives you an option, not a requirement. Rather than being dictated by external forces now it's on you to make decisions that work for you. If constant connectivity is causing problems for you then it's on you to learn to silence your phone or close your email client or what have you and to simply not care about the resulting missed calls or delayed messages.

In general my phone doesn't ring. I respond to written messages every few hours. That works for me but it might not work for you.

RyanHamilton | root | parent
I wish it was always my choice. The introduction of internet to the underground in London, has allowed others the choice of holding their conversations loudly within close proximity to me. I have no wish to know why you have fell out with your best friend, I'd prefer silence.
hcurtiss | parent | next
We are putting these on forester pickup trucks. The most blue collar, white collar jobs out there (if that makes sense). Now, instead of having to organize their day around a Teams call with corporate, they can just log in from the landing on the logging side. It's epic.
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jknoepfler | parent
did your industry not have access to satellite radio/internet prior to this for some reason? I was working on "cloud connectivity for remote mining sites" at least twelve years ago, and we were late to enter the market.
rmm | root | parent | next
You would get generic feedback but now we get super high resolution imagery of core samples and live telemetry of drilling status. Based on that we can have teams here review and redo entire drill plans on the fly.
dannyw | root | parent | next
A decade ago, you’d be looking at 2mbps under good conditions, significant outages and reliability issues, and paying $50 to $100 per gigabyte.
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dools | root | parent | next
Yeah and the reason is that providing this kind of coverage is wildly unsustainable.
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MarsZebra | root | parent
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MarsZebra | root | parent
Someone explain the downvotes here. It's not popular among Musk fans to know the true history of the company?
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wyager | root | parent
Starlink is the first satellite internet that's actually usable for anything more bandwidth-intensive than email.
baruch | root | parent
I have a satellite dish as backup and it is definitely usable. Even had to do remote interactive ssh and while it's not as good as fiber obviously, it's definitely not in the unusable category.