Tonga Islands have internet again five weeks after volcanic eruption – IT Pro – News

Nobody would mind thousands of satellites being launched for something that could also be done with cables.

Thousands of satellites have not been launched for something that can also be done with cable.

Unless, for some people (yes, not you, you live in a densely populated country with very good internet coverage. But a lot of others), they are willing and able to spend tens of thousands of euros, or maybe even once or two in terms of size, to cable the Internet to its sparsely populated corner of the world.

I did not even mention the people on the road (eg at sea), for whom it is therefore impossible to lay a cable in any case.

In addition, you also have those people who are willing to pay tens of thousands of euros for milliseconds of response time. You can’t do that with a cable.

So: for some potential customers, the cable is technically impossible, for others it is economically impossible. And it would be possible to some extent, but they simply take advantage of it. Then there are those applications that suddenly become technically feasible and/or economically viable with such a network – for example, a cheap and fast backup connection that ensures that the primary connection does not fail.

I don’t like that viewing in space is too limited

In this regard, I share your concerns. Unfortunately, no one’s space belongs to anyone, so anyone can destroy it. It is called: the tragedy of the commons …

And catastrophe cannot be counted when an error occurs in several satellites, simply because it can.

Sometimes. Assuming it’s really that bad. Note that even the longest of Starlink satellites will return to Earth within a decade if they turn into space debris. This seems to me to be somewhat overlooked.

In any case, the disaster is also immeasurable if global warming continues. And there is a good chance that it will be impossible to do anything about it once the consequences are so obvious that there is enough support to do something about it. The consequences of a small amount of space debris are insignificant compared to, say, the consequences of tides at sea level of one metre. This doesn’t mean you don’t have to worry about space debris; But if we see that little or nothing is being done about much larger problems, it is unreasonable to expect/hope that smaller disasters will be averted before they happen…