202
US agency will not reinstate $900 mln subsidy for SpaceX Starlink unit
(www.reuters.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
202 points (97.2% liked)
Technology
59381 readers
1083 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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.
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.