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points by gkanai 1 day ago | 0 comments

How does Globalstar's offering compare to Starlink?

Globalstar flies highest, with orbits at ~1400 km. Starlink is at ~340-550 km. Per satellite, a higher altitude sees a larger portion and provides greater angular visibility of the Earth's surface at any one time. Globalstar is suited for low-power devices, emergency sat messaging, and IoT, not broadband speed. One reason they made a good fit with the iPhone. Also the valuable spectrum.

[–] nonethewiser 1 day ago

9.6Kbps

Not a joke

[–] cj 1 day ago

That's their legacy product.

2nd gen is 256 Kbps

[–] kotaKat 1 day ago

2nd gen was 72kbps, never got to 256. Apple stepped in and got them to write the whole 2nd gen Duplex network off before it got that far.

[–] AdamN 1 day ago

Does it also make modem sounds??

[–] jandrese 1 day ago

Au Contraire, that bandwidth is definitely a joke.

[–] jmcqk6 1 day ago

They are serving different needs.

[–] hylaride 1 day ago

The spectrum and various other rights are probably worth more than the current kit.

[–] cmiles8 1 day ago

Well that’s more than most people can get out of Leo today so it’s a start!

[–] gizajob 1 day ago

9600bps ought to be enough for anyone.

[–] noumenon1111 1 day ago

Thanks, Bill.

[–] fred_is_fred 1 day ago

That's enough bandwidth to play Trade Wars and SRE so it's good enough for me.

[–] amitp 1 day ago

:-)

Tangent: SRE was very color-heavy and that led to some long ANSI sequences. From the recently decompiled source [1] you can see that I tried to pick shorter ANSI sequences when I could. In particular, going from color 0x0* to 0x1* we could save 1 byte, and going back to the default white on black we could save between 1 and 4 bytes. But if you're bandwidth limited there's also an option to turn off color entirely.

[1] https://github.com/joeshaw/sre-reconstructed/blob/main/src/s...

[–] lossyalgo 1 day ago

Why no Legend of the Red Dragon? :(

[–] treebeard901 1 day ago

Waiting on a "vibe coded" but modern LORD or TW2002...

Could make the games a lot more dynamic with the use of LLMs and maybe get people interested in writing scripts for text games again.

[–] quietsegfault 1 day ago

What about LORD?

[–] amelius 1 day ago

And starlink?

[–] toolcocoon 1 day ago

i would think that globalstar is specialised in IoT and Starlink more as an extention of the cellular coverage.