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US agency will not reinstate $900 mln subsidy for SpaceX Starlink unit
(www.reuters.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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I’m a little torn on this because every time I’ve seen this posted on Lemmy there’re people who praise it and point out how it’s often the only viable option if you’re rural.
However, as someone pointed out, the infrastructure is not really sustainable long term, and may not be very sustainable short term it sounds like either.
We need to bury our electrical anyway, I say start in these rural areas and bury internet right along with it.
I agree. Also the issue that I have with starlink is that an any given time, if musk throws a tantrum, you could get kicked out of the internet.
Can't really help the small islands and all the shipping traffic and aircraft that have started using it and can't benefit from a high speed connection with buried lines.
Ships and planes aren't rural
There are also a lot of rural communities in Alaska, Northern Canada etc where the whole communities only option is satellite internet.
Sure we should get it out to those areas NEAR major cities but there are huge amounts of users where the cost for that would be impractical.
A geosynchronous satellite makes much more sense for those use cases.
Those are much much higher up, which introduces a lot of signal latency. The Starlink types are low down, which makes the Comms faster (and also means they keep burning up in the atmosphere)
Yeah, but the cost of low latency is thousands of satellites that burn up in the atmosphere, need to be continuously launched, are a catastrophe for optical and radio astronomy and crowd LEO, reducing available space and increasing collision risk. All for a barely scalable system.
It's not worth it. If you want low latency get a cable run or talk to a ground based antenna.
Northern Canada wouldn’t benefit from a US rural internet subsidy.
I’m not familiar with the areas in Alaska you’re referring too but are they completely isolated outside of satellite internet? If they have electric from the grid or cellular telephone service then there are other options using existing infrastructure.
A study from 2019 found national estimates ranged from 180,000 households to 750,000 that are not connected to the electrical grid. That’s out of 131.2 million households in the US. That means adding internet to power line runs as the entire grid infrastructure is updated and buried, which it should be, would mean .006 % of households wouldn’t benefit.
I don’t know what the best solution is but I question the practicality of 100s of millions in subsidies to any private company, not just Starlink.
In my opinion it’s time for internet to become a utility and tie it into the existing infrastructure.
Yeah sure, but ships and planes don't matter for rural subsidies