Because as we know, the only way for companies owned by the richest person on Earth to do business is if they get hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money first.
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.
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.
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 😂
two hours is waaaay out there guys!
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.
No offense, but true European rural doesn't exist.
Bro, come to northern Sweden and say that again lol
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Guys, please be nice to Elon. He's having a bad day, his attempted cover story to boost TSLA isn't working, and he's coming down.
Its simple like many Musk projects he over promises and under delivers.
Starlink performance is slow and unreliable. Sometimes you get 100 Mbps and sometimes you get < 1 Mbps with the average being around 25. So it cant even really be considered broadband.
Doesn't match my experience. The worst thing about it is ping, but download is mostly always around 100-200.
trying to get another one of his boondoggles financed by Congress i see.. nothing but charlatan under those robes..
musk is one of the richest man alive, why does he need subsidies to do his job??
clearly you’re not rich. the rich stay rich by spendng other people’s money.
This isn't really a great argument. Subsidies are there to promote the things we want to come to fruition. Want your people to have solar? Subsidies for putting one on your roof. You want more electric cars on the road even though more expensive? Subsidies.
You want a billionaire to help a new technology reach people he wouldn't bother with? Subsidies.
Aside from the bit of personal enjoyment I get from seeing Elon take an L… Starlink only meets the classification as “broadband internet” in optimal conditions. The average experience just plain doesn’t qualify and it is openly acknowledged that performance will get worse with more traffic. It may be better than nothing for some, but it is clearly not sustainable. The money would be better spent running lines because at least that would be consistent and long lasting even if it is more expensive.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The money would have come from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund program (RDOF), but the FCC writes that Starlink wasn’t able to “demonstrate that it could deliver the promised service” and that giving the subsidy to it wouldn’t be “the best use of limited Universal Service Fund dollars.”
That was the same reason the FCC gave when it rejected Starlink’s bid last year, which led to this appeal.
SpaceX had previously won the bidding to roll out 100Mbps download and 20Mbps upload “low-latency internet to 642,925 locations in 35 states,” funded by the RDOF.
“This applicant had failed to meet its burden to be entitled to nearly $900 million in universal service funds for almost a decade.” FCC commissioner Brendan Carr dissented, writing that “the FCC did not require — and has never required — any other award winner to show that it met its service obligation years ahead of time.”
But his funding plan was slashed by the time it became law, with the final version offering no money for locally-run internet service.
Christopher Cardaci, head of legal at SpaceX, writes in a letter to the FCC that “Starlink is arguably the only viable option to immediately connect many of the Americans who live and work in the rural and remote areas of the country where high-speed, low-latency internet has been unreliable, unaffordable, or completely unavailable, the very people RDOF was supposed to connect.”
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