If anyone from Starlink or SpaceX is reading these comments here’s what you want to do: Sell your own branded trail cam with solar charging and LTE from orbit. You can charge $25-$40 a month for unlimited pictures sent from the cam. This would open up hunters, nature enthusiasts, and researchers to be able to place their hardware anywhere in the field without worrying about connectivity. Here in SWVA we have deep hollows that can’t get LTE without dense tower coverage that we don’t have the population to justify, but you can grab a satellite connection.

After writing this out I’m beginning to doubt the market would be big enough but I know at least 20 people with 2 or more LTE cams for deer season.

I work with researchers that deploy all sorts of solar powered sensor equipment in remote parts of New Zealand. Realistically Starlink would need to support NB-IoT and LTE-M which is what these kinds of devices are moving towards (if they need cellular connectivity). These are low power variants of 4G and 5G.

Even if you have solar and a fixed platform, you usually want to deploy as little solar as possible. Especially if you need to carry the gear on foot. So minimising power consumption is really important.

> This would open up hunters,

Christ what more do you guys need to shoot a rabbit.

My in-laws live in your county, and Starlink is the only Internet that actually works. Thankfully the TN side runs fiber on the power poles.

Additionally, Starlink was a complete lifesaver during Helene.

In Finland, i get 5Mbps LTE uplink for EUR 4 per month, for a trailcam, with unlimited use (at least in principle). So $20 per month sounds expensive, but obviously there are places where one has no earthly LTE and then it could be justified.

In general, having low-bandwidth Starlink IoT connections globally accessible would be just great, I can see lots of usage.

Isn’t tree cover a problem for propagation of wavelengths used in satellite comms?

Interesting idea. I can build this and open source it. I imagine there is equivalent hardware over LTE already?

This could also be a hardware startup. If only there were some entrepreneur types around...

Presumably there's a market for this in other niches, e.g. weather monitoring, defense/border monitoring, etc... The question is whether the juice is worth the squeeze. Where's the really valuable data?

As long as it doesn't need near-real-time viewing (or if it does, said viewing can be billed for as a separate per-user fee), it wouldn't cost anything extra to SpaceX in the sense that those cameras could use free capacity, only transmitting when nothing else is.

Surf cam would be amazing too. Just tie a solar, starlink cam to a pier and check in.

Off grid cabins could use this too.

iot is coming next year so you can do all you want then

$25-$40 is insane. Spypoint offers 250 pics for free a month and 1000 for $6 a month. As long as you can connect to a cell tower (1 bar is enough). That probably covers 80 % of hunt properties.

https://www.spypoint.com/en/spypoint-experience/plans