I think the bigger headline should be the huge conflict of interest between Musk being a megadonor and "advisor" / leader of DOGE (depending on if you ask Trump or his minions) and being the CEO of Starlink owner SpaceX.
Add it to the list including lease of Starlink services and kits to the FAA.
In a just world they would be publicly executed for blatantly grifting 300million+ people.
Since citizens united, the notion of this type of conflict of interest is a theoretical talking point
Conflicts of interest are no longer a concept that matter. American voters don't care.
Hooo it DOES matter yes, a lot, but only to employees.
As someone that lives in the rural US and has no option for internet besides Starlink, I'd much rather have fiber. Starlink isn't bad, but it's garbage compared to fiber.
Plus I don't want to give Elmo my money. I really wish I had other options.
You’re lucky you get any channels besides Fox News. Keep complaining and you’ll go back to dialup ;) ;) ;)
You straight up don't even get dial-up in some of these parts
Just tin cans and string?
Not even that really, you just don't get outside communication. That type of area is getting rarer (especially after satellite TV and internet) but in some places, like for example some parts of backwoods Louisiana where I grew up, you were really just cut off. You were lucky to have a phone line. We would drive most of an hour to town to get a bunch of blockbuster tapes to keep us entertained during the week.
Some of those places have been a bit modernized, but in a lot of areas like that across the southern and midwest USA I would not be at all surprised to hear that satellite TV and internet are still the only options available.
They probably don’t even know what’s going on 100 miles away from them. That…sounds wonderful.
Fun fact: dialup is much better than cable in many countries.
Edit: oh no thats cat3 on DSL. Not dialup
I only have one cat. But he’s fast.
Connect yourselves. Telecom Cooperatives have a long and successful history in developing rural telecommunications
My grandmother’s rural electric coop laid down fiber to most homes they service to. She has faster Internet than me in town.
It sucks to even be in partial agreement with the broligarchs, but as a rural American, I have zero sympathy for this fuckhead or anyone else involved in the broadband fund.
The government has been pouring money into broadband expansion for decades, and for decades, internet providers have been sopping up that money while doing exactly nothing to actually earn it.
I mean, we could tell them to pay back the money, or force them to make upgrades. But, its easier to just award contracts to starlink.
We certainly can't make them pay the money back. That could affect executive bonuses and stock plans as well corporate stock buybacks to drive up stock prices! Won't you think of the executives! ^/s^
Yeah there aren't any good guys to root for here.
There is absolutely a far lesser of two evils here, though.
Comcast sucks, but they’re not actively dismantling our institutions.
They're too busy masturbating to the sound of us groaning at their hold music and screaming at their reps.
It's not all a story of failure, because there are numerous rural areas that have fiber now that did not before those programs. Some states have added on programs that boost the fiber adoption, like letting local phone and power companies roll out fiber on utility poles along the power lines. For example, I'm in a rural area and have 2 good options for fiber for about $50/mo with higher tier plans available.
They've been doing the exact same thing in Canada.
Give us money to expand! Billions later, or we got 5 new houses connected and spent the rest upgrading other shit not for rural people.
There is absolutely no reason the US government shouldn't be launching their own public satellite internet.
Look at North Korea. People get killed for smuggling in flash drives with western media into the country. We could be streaming it from uninterruptible satellites. We could be fighting the global information war on a level most other countries could only dream of.
On the domestic end, if we get Internet access to every corner of the country, it opens up remote work to every American. That could bring an incredible economic boost to impoverished rural areas.
Trump shut down Radio Free Asia. And Radio Free Europe, and Voice of America. I don't think he cares about getting the message out there.
And as far as a public Internet? Have you met the US? We can't deliver electricity or water without someone making a profit on each unit of energy or water delivered. It's unamerican. Why would satellite Internet be any different?
Yeah amigo, I get that'd be amazing but you think the government would want highly educated populace here and everywhere? and with free access to all kinds of information?
Yeah right...
Sadly, I think it's been established that access to the internet doesn't make people more educated.
I would much rather see Europe doing it.
Starlink makes sense on the top of mountain. If you have electricity from the grid, you should get fiber.
And it totally won't be monitored or censored ... promise! /s
Regardless of the obvious moneygrab corruption, It's not like the fiber program was ever going to work in the first place as long as private ISP's were involved.
Fiber backbone got installed along 25 miles of rural county highway out in the valley my parents live in. The company paid to do it marks the area as "service coming soon".
That was in 2018. The fiber is still dark with all the distribution boxes empty and not hooked up to anything, the only other options being $110/mo DSL in a very few select spots, a local mountaintop microwave wireless service that is basically turned off from November until April, or Starlink... and I'm guessing it'll forever remain that way until the coming collapse of the USA.
Satellite internet is simply never going to best the throughput and stability of fiber. Just another corrupt action so this administration can line their pockets.
Wow I’m shocked. This is my shocked face.
I never expected the US to go down this way...
Really?? They have been shouting it from the topnof their lungs since Reagan
Yeah I thought it would be a lot more Robocop 2.
There were signs
Can starling even come close to the speed of fiber? I’m getting a gibabit a second for 50 bucks a month
Nowhere close. Wireless anything needs to share a band across multiple devices. With fiber, you can either have an exclusive run to the service provider or, at the very least, to a connection point shared with some neighbors.
It's not meant for that and won't really ever compete well against it if fiber can be run there cost effectively, although there are odd situations even in cities where it's useful.
Like maybe there's a warehouse in some part of a big city that somehow wasn't connected and the utilities wants 50k to connect it.
Realistically we can't run fiber everywhere, but there's many millions of more homes out there that could be but aren't, and the telcos keep taking money to do the upgrades and do jack all.
I've seen about 250mbps down on a friend's terminal. You can probably get faster.
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