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Starlink loses out on $886 million in rural broadband subsidies
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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TIL: The majority of Lemmys have never lived an hour from the nearest population center, down a dirt road, on a few hundred acres of wilderness. I fucking HATE musk and I still have an RV kit in my basement so when I'm traveling around hours from anywhere, Starlink works perfectly.
I live two hours from a city, waaaay up in the Alps and I have gigabit fibre for€40 a month lol
Your infrastructure sucks donkeyballs 😂
My sides are in orbit! Here is a side-by side of the Alps
next to a small section of the American Rockies,
which is still nothing compared to Canada (yes there are people in that big empty area).
No offense, but true European rural doesn't exist.
Bro, come to northern Sweden and say that again lol
Touche lol
Also if we're talking about the European continent as a whole finland, the urals, and maybe the west coast of ireland depending on definitions.
Yeah, I just get a bit peeved cuz I live up here, lol!
If I drive 250km to my grandparents I will not see much of buildings and people.
Come to the most uninhabitable place on the continent for some real rural living!
Shit, that picture outside Edmonton is hardly even distant, there are a bunch of communities in northern Alberta and BC that don't even have roads going to them because they're too far away.
I hear there's roads in the winter, lol.
Me -
You -
😂
You were being an ignorant dick and I called you on it. It's not my fault you can't handle a few hours on the road.
No where in Europe is "remote."
Come to the South West US where you can drive 100 miles in any direction and barely see another human.
You can easily drive 100 miles in northern Sweden and see nothing but trees lol
Or maybe don't go there and then complain about the obvious shortfalls of the place. The rural exodus happened for a reason.
The rural exodus happened for many reasons, none of which have to do with the availability of high-speed internet. People are born where they are born, and often live there too. Sometimes that place is densely populated and replete with amenities, such as the Alps, sometimes it's not. You don't have to be an uneducated dick.
"Haha stupid poor people. Why don't you just move somewhere else? Have you tried not being poor? Have you tried not being born in a impoverished remote or rural area? Did you even try to upgrade your parent's income bracket, or trade-in for better parents?”
Or maybe you meant, "Why don't you just abandon your grandparents who live at, or across the border? I'm sure the Mexican or American governments will pick up the slack when you move away. I'm sure familial cultural importance and dynamics are the same in Switzerland as they are around the Mexican border".
It's not a shortfall thanks to Starlink. Are you following along?
But taxes...
It's a difference between definitions of "city" and "middle of nowhere" between the US and Europe. The US is a massive place. Part of the reason the US appears to have such a crappy infrastructure is that when, say, mobile carriers want to improve it to upgrade something to 5G, they have to do so for the entire country, with many US states having an area the size of whole European countries. Texas itself is the size of Germany. That is a much bigger undertaking than improving it for a single European country or even a block of countries like western or central Europe. Things are so spread out here that "remote" can mean REALLY remote in some areas. Distances between reasonably sized cities in the US can be much larger than in Europe, and the US has more people in those more rural areas than some think, especially in states in the middle of the country. Local ISPs for internet in those areas can be good depending on the area, but a lot of people in the really rural areas would still be better and more easily served by a service like Starlink.
https://www.wideopencountry.com/map-shows-countries-fit-inside-texas/
This is far more hilarious to see that a good number of European countries fit inside of Texas.
Sounds wonderful tbh
Today you learned that the majority of people don't live in the middle of nowhere?
Of course they don't, by definition, if a bunch of people lived there, it wouldn't be the middle of nowhere.
Lmao you're being a pedantic dick bc you know what they meant.. and I'm cracking up enjoying everything about it
Yeah, Musk has gone insane, anyone can see that.
But Musk aside, LEO satellites are still really the only viable and economical solution to the problem of broadband in rural areas, and Starlink seems to work great.
Also, the objection that resulted in pulling this funding looks pretty bullshit. Several other broadband providers are getting these same funding deals for doing basically nothing.
No, he hasn't. He's just a bog-standard capitalist doing bog-standard capitalist things.
Explicitly not the point of my post...
My partner’s family lives on a dirt road between a corn field and cow pasture.. a full 1.5 hour drive from the nearest mid-sized city.. they have gigabit fiber..
Not saying that their situation is currently typical, but id argue it is indeed a sign that good internet is slowly but surely coming available to everyone.
That doesn't make any sense. Taxpayer money was supposed to fix this over a decade ago.
Middle of nowhere between fields: I have 5g router and 300+mbps
If you're pulling 5G you're not remote.
Brother, we have wildly different definitions of "nowhere" if you get 5G. When I lived in a rural shithole in the US, I had to drive 100 miles to start picking up 5G signals (though that was just before the pandemic, so maybe 5G coverage has improved greatly in the past 3 years).
Closest town is 55km away
Shit man, I used to commute almost that exact distance each way. Anything under triple digits is practically in-town in many places.
Yeah me too, untill COVID and the digital acceleration to WFH