《Geek时间》-全球用户突破220W，马斯克的Starlink是干嘛的？

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Welcome back to 【Geek time】. This is Brad. How are you doing, Lulu?

Hi, Brad. I'm fine. And I can't wait to hear more about Elon Musk, last time we talked about Space X .

Aha. Now we're gonna talk about something that's tangential to Space X, it's called Starlink.

Star Link.

And Starlink isn't a space program in the sense that space rockets and things like that, it's actually satellites, and Space X uses their rockets to put these Starlink satellites into space.

嗯, 中文叫星链, which really created a buzz in all types of media, really.

Haha, yeah.

What is Starlink about? You said Starlink is all about satellites, and one of the jobs of Space X is to send Starlink satellites into space. What are they used for and what is the coverage?

Starlink is basically trying to cover the world with internet service. And so oftentimes there's a lot of cables that connect internet around people's homes. People at home have WiFi and they can use cell phone service. But Starlink is going to bring basically internet service and wireless service now to people around the world using satellites.

Emm. I heard that the expectation at least is that it offers better internet connection than 5G.

Yeah.

If you look at the connection, the internet connection, while in some cases it won't be as strong. It depends on line of sight and just how close you are to one of the satellites. But in general, it is faster than 5G.

However, if you live in a city, because you're so close to the cell phone towers and there's a lot of connections around the city, you're probably going to get better service with mobile service than you would with Starlink.

However, when you're in a van in the middle of nowhere, and there's no cell phone service around, you could easily get access to Starlink.

I see. I have a question though. Are there worries about, because obviously it's still... Elon Musk is a private company. Right? It's not really like, for example, state owned or something in... akin to that, then don't people worry about when Elon Musk controls the internet?

Yeah, well, of course, you know, people will always be afraid of who is in control of it. in the US, you have all the internet is controlled by private companies anyways.

The internet is not something like power or water that's government controlled. Even in some cases, power and water has been sent off to private companies and that's kind of scary. But yeah, companies in the US are kind of in some ways limiting what access people have to the internet.

Okay. But perhaps I should rephrase it, because Starlink is aiming to install or to build better internet connection than 5G, then obviously people would probably opt for the faster option.

Wouldn't that bring with it some sort of monopoly issue, like if he's monopolizing the fastest internet connection, that sort of worries?

Definitely. Because if other companies start wanting to put satellites into space, there's gonna be a lot of interruption. They're gonna possibly smack into each other. It will create a lot of problems. And so if there's probably going to be some sort of laws built around what he can and cannot do with the internet connection.

But not yet.

But not yet, right. Because this is still in the infancy. And so no one has really looked at it and go OK, we can see some problems here, but as of yet, there's not been anything to stop him from doing this. Yeah.

But talking about these satellites, they're not very big satellites, are they?

No. They're actually not that big. They might sound like they're quite big, but in comparison to a lot of the other satellites out there, they're quite small.

Most of the satellites are, there about it a little bit further away than the ISS the space station we talked about earlier. They're almost 600 kilometers away from the Earth.

But there are two hundred twelve hundred kilograms, while there are smaller satellites, they're not really all that