[masraum]

Originally Posted by red-beard

On Space-X and Starlink, I believe that Space-X uses commercial electronics, not hardened stuff. They "anticipate" some will be lost to solar storms. Redundancy is cheaper than over-the-top space rated electronics.

I'll bet it hurts though to spend the money to send 46 new sats into orbit to have 40 of them blown out of orbit almost immediately.

I'm in a rural area. My location has no access to any wired Internet. I also have no possibility of access to the various wimax type offerings. My options are satellite (like Hughs), satellite (like starlink), or cellular. I'm familiar with traditional GEO satellite and Hughs and chose to give that a miss. Starlink wasn't quite available when I needed to setup Internet, so I skipped that but got on the list. I went Satellite. My proximity to I-10 means that I actually have decent access. I am almost equidistant between the two closest towers so my access could be better.

When starlink came available in my area, I checked them out. At the time the big problem for me was a statement to the effect of "starlink is still beta, so it can go down at any time for any length of time." Since I'm working over my connectivity, that was no good for me.

I hadn't even thought about the possibility of solar storms potentially causing outages. I would assume that while they use commercial electronics, they probably also add shielding to the packaging. And my guess is that the fact that they are in LEO may mean that they have more shielding from the planet than sets in GEO orbits.