EU signs $11B deal for sovereign satellite constellation to rival Musk's Starlink

My guess is that the EU is preparing for war. Satellites are harder to destroy than wire.

But I too think its incredibly stupid.

I've recently gotten into astrophotography and I already can't take go more than 10 minutes without a satellite ruining an exposure... I was showing a friend the telescope I got over the weekend and when looking up I just started pointing them out to him...

"And there's a satellite, and there's a satellite, oh look that way another satellite, hey look one more, and another and another and another..." It's absurd :(

Just sign in this site as a guest and be disgusted as you see how starlink has dominated the sky... All the blue are starlink: https://tarot.saberastro.com/

Starlink has been used a lot in Ukraine. For communications between soldiers, but even more importantly to communicate with drones. Having a constellation like that in place is extremely usefull for that and having it partly paid for from private money is a big advantage.

This is fairly wrong on a lot of layers:

• Fiber does not make sense for sparsely populated areas - which the EU has,despite what people think. Lappland, parts of Romania, Spain, Italy, etc. are often so sparsely populated that neither Fiber nor 5G are a good option. And maritime and aviation use is also a big point. (And funnily enough even in some fairly populated areas of Germany the availability of Starlink was the cause for the long fiber network extension. After all telco's were happy to only provide minimal DSL for decades in a neighbouring village here, after half the town switched to Starlink all of a sudden two different telco's offered to install Fiber)
• Another big point is redundancy. We are facing an increasing amount of disasters, due to climate change alone. These tend to destroy fiber infrastructure - and cellular networks as well. (See: Valencia, Spain; Lower Austria, Austria; Emilia Romagna, Italy - all cases just from this year) And sadly civil defence/disaster management is relying on communication more than before, for their own functions as well as to keep the population informed. It is nearly impossible to do this without SATCOM options and especially when you want to keep the population informed (which makes your jobs much easier) you need a star link-like system atm. (And yes we tried other options like directed radio networks -complicated as you need multiple relays in exactly the right spot-, geostationary SATCOM -bandwith and latency to low-, portable 4g/5G towers-not cost effective, huge issue to get installed) For civil defence/disaster management matters sadly Starlink-like technology is currently the optimum in terms of what it offers for the cost. While we use SATCOM for two decades now, it once was so expensive that we only were able to procur two handsets per shire - a major issue. For the same price I can distribute Starlink sets to all my units.
• (Hybrid)warfare/defence: There is a huge amount of Hybrid warfare going on and Fiber has one large drawback: It is a centralised infrastructure that is easily sabotaged. Starlink like technology can be made fairly redundant and resilient. While Starlink has been jammed by the Russians in Ukraine, it is not as easy as people thought. The Ukrainians showed everyone the true worth of these systems. There is a lot of use for these systems in warfare like situations,even more so for smaller nations that do not operate their own defence communication satellites.

Don't get me wrong: I am a fan of what Starlink offers. I hate how it's done (basically polluting the sky) and who does it (Elmo).There is a urgent need for a system that is not managed by a Putin-associated Fascist like Elmo. So unless someone comes up with another good technological alternative I sadly don't see any alternative to the current EU project.

Becomes foreign agents keep cutting out fiber cables. It’s basically for military reasons. If we ever get invaded the first thing the invaders do is try to sabotage our communication systems. Satellites are much harder to destroy. And we shouldn’t rely on outsiders to provide us with internet. It’s for the same reason why the EU has developed its own GPS system.

Satellite internet can actually have better ping over very long distances, compared to fiber. The uplink to Leo in 500km only ads 4ms delay, but the laser link between satellites works at light speed which is 33% faster than the signal speed in fiber cables. I have to connect to servers in Singapore and central US daily, and while the (theoretical) download speed might be half, the response times would be twice as good.

Don't forget the GHG's that are produced when they eventually burn up in the atmosphere! We get to ruin the night sky AND the environment at the same time! Two birds with one stone. Simple choice really.