Starlink and the problem of kittens: the antennae heat up and they use them as a kennel

Cats love the Internet, either maybe it’s the Internet that loves cats. No one knows, and frankly it doesn’t matter. What is known is that cats love a lot Starlink, the satellite connectivity service to the Net conceived by Elon Musk. More precisely: cats really love Starlink’s antennas and their Snow Melt Mode.

The function, introduced in 2020, warms the receivers to prevent snow from accumulating on them, blocking the signal: “It works very well, until cats discover that in winter they can use them instead of the kennel”, tweeted in recent days a certain Aaron Taylor. His photo of 5 cats perched on the Starlink antenna at home, some with a defiant look on him photographing them (they are cats, they do), has been retweeted over 36,000 times, it received over 190,000 likes and even ended up in the Guardian.

twitter: the cats on Aaron Taylor’s antenna

The choice of cats (and birds)
Also via Twitter, Taylor explained that those cats voluntarily go on the antenna despite having free access to his home, where the heating is obviously working: “When the sun comes up, they go out and go to position themselves there – he wrote – So the sun heats them from above and the antenna from below”.

And that creates the very problem that Snow Melt Mode was supposed to solve: Taylor said that in the presence of many cats, the connection to the Internet is quite slow, so much that it is practically impossible to watch a movie in streaming. Without considering the long-term effects that the weight of felines (especially domestic felines) could have on the stability of the antenna, which also costs 499 dollars.

twitter: birds also like antennas

From Starlink (and strangely not even from Musk, who seems to spend his days on Twitter) no answer on how to solve the problem, which seems to also affect other animals: the advice given to customers from the beginning remains, that is to “install the antennas in safe and difficult to reach places”. Evidently written by someone who has never had anything to do with cats, because one account is “hard to reach” for people, but another thing is “hard to reach” for a cat.