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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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As if giving it all to Comcast and Spectrum for the 47th time will make things any better? Starlink is actually something accessible for a lot of these people, while legacy ISPs just pocket the money and claim its too hard to serve rural customers.
It's great that there is variety and all but let's not pretend the CEO isn't dangerous, see starling/Ukraine issue and that the company isn't filling the sky with consumer shite designed to be burned up.
Infrastructure should be publicly owned and strong competitive regulation.
I'll just add that "designed to be burned up" is the correct approach to these types of satellite constellations. SpaceX has that aspect correct, at least.
Agree with everything else. Musk is a batshit egomaniac, and letting him dictate use of large infrastructure is careless. Government subsidies should entail a certain public influence over the operation of the system.
I just don't think we need satellites clogging up the sky for something we can accomplish if we wanted to. Fiber is cheap.
Starlink could be deployed in emergencies just fine.
Clogging up...the sky...you do realize the size of space right? And the size of on of these SATs right?... it's like putting 800 washing machines in AZ and then telling people az is clogged with washing machines...do you randomly run into people's houses driving through your neighborhood?
https://www.nasa.gov/learning-resources/for-kids-and-students/what-is-orbital-debris-grades-5-8/
This is what people are referring to when they talk about junk in orbit.
Starlink doesn't produce any debris, only the satellites. Now they keep the tie rods attached so they don't float off. The reason the picture looks so bad is because each piece of debris in this picture is represented as miles and miles across.
Both of you are right. Space junk is an issue (Kessler syndrome), but that's for orbits which won't degrade by themselves, starlink satellites are supposed to be low enough that at time of crash they should mostly crash towards the earth and burn in the atmosphere.
Anything is better than Starlink, Starlink is just extreme useless pollution for something that normal ISPs can achieve.
The government needs to step in and make internet more of a utility like in like every other successful country.
There are actual use cases for satellite internet. I heard from an evacuee from the Northwest Territories in Canada here that he was basically only able to get updates on what was happening—i.e. what roads weren't on fire and where evacuation centers were—because of a couple of people with starlinks. There are huge areas up there with little to no internet infrastructure, and this summer much of that was damaged in the fires.
Ground infrastructure is expensive to run out to extreme rural areas, and it's also vulnerable in different ways from satellite infrastructure. In the US, yeah, it's dense enough that ISPs mostly need to get their shit together, but there are very large areas where running a cable has a lot of problems.
You don't even have to go extremely rural to get no internet choices.
I am 20 minutes, or 15 miles, from a town of 150,000 people down 1 of the 4 major roads leading out of town. Without cellular or starlink we would have nothing.
Right, but the point is, instead of going to Starlink that taxpayer money could be used to get access to where you're at.
Comcast will take the taxpayer money, run a shit 5mbps line to the rural area, charge you out the ass for it and pocket the difference from the subsidies.
They already did that....we gave the telecoms almost 1 trillion dollars...we do not need to be giving them more.
That makes sense, but Starlink is also extremely expensive and I don't see the price being comparable honestly.
For your first case while evacuation and such, there are alternatives and you shouldn't need full internet access for situations like that. (obviously this isn't the case right now)
From everything that has been posted on the US and what I've seen with ISPs and such, satellite internet is not necessary. I hate Starlink with a passion for what the consequences are, I hate looking up in a dark night and being able to see a giant row of Starlink satellites and I hate how much it pollutes even outside of the Earth. It's not necessary and I will always be for just other wireless communication or straight up wires.
People absolutely need internet access in evacuation situations. They need information to know where it's safe to go, where they can get help, what routes are still open, whether it's safe to return home, whether their home still exists... in some cases the only communication methods are either internet-based or literally flying a plane in, there aren't even roads to some communities that need to be evacuated. There is way too much information people need to be able to rely on local communication methods like radio.
And that's really one of the only other options in these situations. The fibre line (pretty much singular, because the cost to run fibre over thousands of kilometers is enormous) going through the NWT was destroyed in the fires as a fire was approaching Yellowknife. Cell towers can literally melt from the heat of some of these fires. Ground infrastructure is vulnerable to all of the climate disasters our world is currently facing. And that's ignoring it getting destroyed by actively hostile actors like in Ukraine.
Do Starlink and Musk suck? Absolutely. Fuck them. But satellite internet is increasingly showing itself to be a necessity, and to think otherwise really underestimates the size of our world and the vulnerability of our infrastructure. We need better management of it, but we definitely need it.
I said shouldn't.
It's not expensive compared to the alternatives. It costs exactly what I'm paying Comcast for my cable internet here in suburbia at $120. Companies like Hughesnet will charge you $200/mo for 20GB of data at 2Mbps if it isn't cloudy out.
My coworkers mother in rural SW Washington signed up after I recommended it for her to him. Previously, she couldn't even watch Netflix or YouTube with traditional satellite, and now she's getting 300Mbps for less money than she was paying before.
I meant comparable to wired up internet or proper wireless towers in infrastructure cost, the end user cost is absurd anywhere in the US and it's not worth talking about.
That's observably false, though. If infrastructure costs were really that much cheaper, ISPs would already be serving these people at a lower price point.
Which is why I didn't say it was factual, but rather that I didn't see it being comparable.
And no, my point has nothing to do with ISP companies and for a business it would be illogical to dig to more rural areas.
This is something Starlink avoids by being in space obviously, other existing ISPs wouldn't make much money off of it anywhere near as fast for example. This is why the government should handle all of it, like I said.
I'll leave it to Canada to fund it then
Can achieve but don't and won't. You might as well be arguing that rural people don't deserve access to the internet because that's the only legitimate alternative.
No, it's not and you need to read what I said in the second part of my comment.
And if you're going to be like that, I do believe rural people don't deserve access to the internet if it means severely polluting the sky, space and the earth while it's not necessary.
The US government can easily step in, it's just hard to imagine that ever happening.
Which is why it isn't a legitimate solution. Starlink exists now.
Why are you so concerned about pollution in LEO but not pollution from digging a million miles of wire and trenches or chopping down forests full of trees, all of which regularly sustain damage and need replacement?
That's why I said it's hard to imagine that ever happening currently, it doesn't mean it isn't a legitimate solution.
On Earth you can compensate for the pollution caused by laying in wires, and if this was done by the government it would probably be near or at powerlines (when they exist, which they should) and it could just be part of normal maintenance for example.
None of this can be done with LEO, it's getting polluted up there and these satellites just get burnt up. We're removing precious resources from our planet to burn them up for no reason and causing pollution on Earth and outside of it, it makes no sense.
That's completely wrong, for the ISPs it usually isn't worth achieving and is why the government should step in.
And also simply not necessary to have as many satellites as Starlink does needed to cover the ocean and the rare spots where wires can't go.
And we really need that 4K UHD porn to load faster on the hole planet, including the oceans.