SpaceX and Google have announced a deal that will see Starlink ground stations placed in Google data centre properties, with the first to switch on in the second half of the year.
Particular focus was placed on businesses being able to reach cloud services from rural and regional parts of the planet.
“Connectivity from Starlink’s constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites provides a path for these organisations to deliver data and applications to teams distributed across countries and continents, quickly and securely,” Google said.
Australian fibre provider, Vocus, recently put its hand up to host LEO ground stations.
“These low latencies are dependent on the deployment of extensive ground infrastructure with high-capacity fibre backhaul, so processing and storage can occur as close to the edge of the network as possible. This means having ground stations in regional areas close to where the end-users are located, to minimise round-trip time,” Vocus general manager for government and strategic projects Michael Ackland said.
“By now you should be starting to see why a fibre company is taking such a strong interest in LEO satellites.”
In other Elon-related news, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO tweeted earlier this week that the carmaker would stop accepting bitcoin payments.
Musk ostensibly said the shift was due to bitcoin’s energy usage, and the company was looking into cryptocurrencies that used less than 1% of bitcoin’s energy usage.
Bitcoin true believers jumped in to tell Musk he should also stop accepting fiat currency, or that eventually, fossil fuel consumption due to bitcoin would be negative, while pushing their favourite coin of choice.
