Give up wired Internet? Starlink will have to work harder to convince me

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Pretend for a moment that for a satellite, the only thing that matters is what it does while in orbit. From that view, the news about Starlink’s amped-up new V3 satellites is pretty astounding—as reported by my former colleague Michael Kan, these hulking contraptions will not only dramatically expand download capacity for customers, but also support gigabit speeds.

This development definitely piques my interest. And I’m diehard fan of wired internet.

Wireless technology captures the heart—it always feels futuristic, no matter how mundane the application. Or how rudimentary the tech. I remember when satellite internet was synonymous with slow. Practically speaking, you signed up for such a service only because nothing better existed. But emotionally? It was comforting to have the option available. And also, as a child of the 90s (when connecting to the web happened via whining beeps and boops), knowing the internet could be beamed to you from the sky was super cool.

Heck, even spoiled now by always-connected pocketable computers (aka smartphones), I still feel joy whenever I use a basic wireless keyboard. Something about breaking free of tethers is wondrous—for me, it represents freedom. Infinite possibility. When you can connect without physical contact, the sky is the limit. 

(Now literally so, thanks to hardware in literal space, blasting internet into homes at the same theoretical rates as earth-bound services.)

Still, the pragmatist in me wants to see more. Not more satellites, per se—that’s actually a potential risk, given how at least one Starlink satellite burns up each day, and such debris could add to the severity (and resulting consequences) of climate change. I’m hoping to see an even tighter closing of the gap between wireless and wired technologies.

Because as good as it’s become, wireless still has one main weakness. It remains bound by physics. Signal interference will always give wired connections a leg up when rock-solid dependability matters. Starlink’s improved a lot. But heck, even the wireless keyboard I’m currently reviewing acts up if I put its receiver behind the PC.

If the technology could become resilient enough to trust through thick and thin, I’d consider abandoning my wired internet. (Or at least, trusting I don’t have to have wireless access points connected via Ethernet backhaul.) Maybe my other wired tech, too. I’m hoping it will.

Because even though I am a hard sell on this point, I love that we have options. I love alternatives. I love that a bunch of smart folks decided to trade one set of limitations (physical linking as a requirement) for a different set, so that you can choose what best fits your situation.

I love someone asked, “Isn’t this a neat idea?” Because yeah, it is.

In this episode of The Full Nerd

In this episode of The Full Nerd, Adam Patrick Murray, Brad Chacos, Will Smith, and special guest Tom Peterson, Fellow at Intel, dive deep into Xe3 gaming, making a better GPU, and much more. As always when TAP visits us, he guides everyone through an incredible amount of detailed, insightful information—for over two hours!

Plus, Tom adds yet again to The Full Nerd cookbook with two mouth-watering suggestions—chicken ballotine and “the best brownie ever.” In his words, these brownies are not chewy but cakey, and “very, very nice.”

(Also, I’m hereby proposing that for every guest we have on the show, we ask for a recipe contribution so we can put it into a TFN Cookbook collection at each year’s end.)

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This week’s wild nerd news

So apparently, I should take vacation more often—I was not expecting to come back to word of an itty bitty PCs housing a desktop 5060 Ti 16GB chip, much less a report on butt-breathing could become an actual medical treatment (yes, you read that correctly).

• ‘Butt-breathing might soon be a real medical treatment’: Look, I can’t summarize this article better than its headline, so I’ll just once again tip my hat in respect to the fine writers at Ars Technica. Also, what clever science.

• This takes me back: This week’s dose of 90s nostalgia comes courtesy of a Microsoft devblog post, which digs into Windows 95’s most iconic icons. Seeing that desktop computer PC icon hit me hard.

• Never change, Japan: I sincerely hope Japan never loses its love for physical media—books, discs, and the like. I love the charm of disc drives and calculators (yep, a whole bin full of basic, desk-sized ones) stocked alongside $1,000 AM5 motherboards in Akihabara stores. Fingers crossed mini-disc players have a revival.

• It doesn’t snow where I live, but I want one: OK, this smart snow blower isn’t computer hardware. It’s also $5,000. But you control it with a dupe of an Xbox controller and it looks like one of my favorite construction toys from when I was a kid. I’m in.

• Mini but mighty: I built a big PC just a few weeks ago, but I love tiny gaming PCs. And Zotac’s sub-3L offering with a desktop 5060 Ti stuffed inside is delightful.

• Turns out, enshittification has nuance: At least, Cory Doctorow (the original inventor of the term enshittification) takes this approach to the concept. After reading this interview, I can’t wait to get my hands on his full book.

• Battlefield 6 blinding you? The fine folks over at PCGamer have you covered—try their suggestion for adjusting the brightness settings.

• Or I guess you could just play Battlefield 6 this way instead: I’m betting on a screen that small, it won’t blind you. Well, not from brightness.

• I’m not the only one: When an astoundingly broad range of people sign an open letter asking for AI development to be paused until it can be done safely—and with large public buy-in—it seems like maybe the tech industry is ignoring how problematic the current approach is.

• GoG Games has some crazy tales: I think none of us appreciate enough the lengths GoG has gone to preserve gaming—at least, I feel I didn’t after reading about this particular tale. Wow.

• Well, it was a good run while it lasted: I like how the earth gets a finite end date, but the calculus for humanity’s survival is generalized to, “Well, definitely not as long as earth’s lifespan.”

• More lucky thrift shopping: On a more cheerful note—$500 for a PC with a 2080 Ti inside. Hot dang.

Catch you all next week—I believe the whole TFN crew will be celebrating Halloween in full style. At least, we will be if Adam has anything to say about it.

~Alaina

This newsletter is dedicated to the memory of Gordon Mah Ung, founder and host of The Full Nerd, and executive editor of hardware at PCWorld.