- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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That’s completely wrong, for the ISPs it usually isn’t worth achieving and is why the government should step in.
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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.
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It’s not a scam. Satellite internet was extremely expensive and slow last time I checked a few years before starlink. Yeah , musk is garbage but starlink is actually helping a lot of people worldwide.
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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.”
The FCC decision sounds like a good thing in this case, also because Starlink isn’t being managed responsibly
The technology itself is cool, and I hope some other companies can build off that work to meet that need. There are a lot of existing companies that take advantage of those living in rural areas, many of which don’t have other options or much disposable income
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*billions
Yep almost a trillion dollars. Was 900 billion something.
We share your pain in Canada with our telecom companies
By competition surely you meant oligarchy.
Starlink is currently the only internet functioning for the Ukrainian army.
ITAR…go look it up. And the UA still uses it for good and so does everyone there, they just cannot use it as a direct weapon. Get off the musk hate dick… it’s clouding you and apparently a bunch of people’s judgement.
Like most people on the Internet they don’t want to hear about laws that cause outcomes different than what they want. The Musk hate over UA and StarLink is just another example of it. ITAR has been around a long time and for DAMN good reasons.
I can’t stand the guy either, but there are way more valid reasons to hate on him than what people love to bitch about.
It’s probably the most wasteful way of providing internet imaginable since they have to send satellites up by the dozen every year for them to burn in the atmosphere only several years lates. Yeah I don’t think it’s a good business model at all, especially considering they haven’t been able to turn a profit and rely on subsidies.
Yet many towns where I live saw broadband, yes, broadband, not fiber, for the first time in their life thanks to Starlink. It’s easy to talk when coming from a place of privilege.
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I would not be able to live where I am without starlink. There isn’t even cell signal for 14 km…
I don’t like that some portion of the money I’m paying goes towards his insanity. But I put up with it to live in a peaceful forest and continue my job.
Demand more of your local government instead of pulling the privilege card.
The government keeps giving money to traditionally ISPs to expand broadband and they simply lie and say they did to take the money. It’s private industry fucking us just as much.
I’m not disagreeing, but who can stand up against corporate bullying? The government. Make the government do it. The corporate world gets away with it because the politicians turn a blind eye because they’re not held accountable because not enough people stand together. People have bled for the rights that “privileged” people have, it didn’t come free.
It’s it really a privilege to live in a city? Sounds more like a choice than privilege. Your choice has consequences and the further you live from the other people, the more problems you’ll have with certain infrastructure like water, power, internet.
But I can build my own power and water infra. And I have. I can’t build my own connection to the internet, which I need to have in order to make money to do the rest of what it takes to live.
What’s your point?
That starlink solves the remaining piece of missing infra that a normal person needs, regardless of the choice to live in a city or not. Even if the CEO is a blight on our species.
If ISPs weren’t greedy bastards that don’t care the slightest about their users and gave everyone fiber then yeah, it’s wasteful. Sadly, for a lot of people in rural and inaccessible areas and on sea, it’s the only way to access internet.
Oh no! It’s expensive! Wait. Isn’t he the chairman of a vertically integrated space shuttle and satellite international conglomerate? Why are Americans footing the bill for any of this?
You might go back and reread the comment you replied to. They stated that legacy satellite internet was expensive to the tune of $200/mo for 2mbps speeds and a 20GB monthly data cap.
But he can pay for it.
it absolutely is a scam… you WANT it to not be a scam, but you are incorrect…
I think it’s the other way around…you WANT everything he touches to be a scam.
I don’t like the guy either, but Starlink is a real, actual product that tons of people are using just fine right now. Also, his rockets are allowing the US to continue to send personnel to the space station without relying on Russia. That is not a scam either.
by trying to go with “i know you are but what am i”, you just prove how childish your belief in him is
Actually, failing to address any of my points and just hammering on the “Musk bad” seems childish to me.
you have no points… i’ve seen their numbers… the subscriber growth is non-existent… revenue is abysmal… the costs are exactly exorbitant… there is nothing to hide… it is a failure hoping for a rescue… think what you like…
That’s what Starship is for. A giant, cheap, stainless steel space truck built by blue collar welders that will vomit out hundreds of them before returning to Earth intact to pick up some more.
The whole Mars thing is just for PR. He has a different use for it. That thing ain’t ever making it to Mars.
the subscriber growth is non-existent
WTF are you on about?
In January of 2022 SL had about 245,000 subscribers. In January of 2023 they had 1,000,000 subscribers. In September of 2023 SL had over 2,000,000 subscribers. They’ve increased by a factor of 10 in less than 24 months and doubled in the last 9!
Musk is an ass but what your saying about SL just isn’t true.
Why would I want it to not be a scam ? I don’t even use it. Years ago, I heard about internet satellite and got curious, so I searched a bit about it and found out it was really expensive. I don’t remember exactly but it was more or less in the 100s of dollars monthly for an abysmal speed like " up to 8mb" or something.
If anyone used internet satellite a few years before starlink was launched please correct me if I am wrong.
You’re not far off, my parents have a 5gb data cap, about 1-2mbps down, and pings in the 500s.
I don’t know how much they’re charged, but Starlink is cheaper and better in all aspects
I had a neighbor ask me about my Starlink. They said they had ViaSat and were posting $180 a month for a 2gb data cap with 2-3mb speeds and would have to purchase more for overages. Internet was a requirement because she worked from home. I used to have Hughesnet and they have the same structure.
Yes, Musk sucks, but Starlink has been a game changer for us rural folk.
So it’s far worse than I remember. Honestly, I can see the 1-2 mb limit be enough for very casual use but a 5gb data cap for a month is beyond a joke.
Huges internet has categorically been a fucking robbery scheme since inception.
How about that CGI car in orbit in front of a swim screen? There are still a lot of people who haven’t figured that one out yet.
What it accomplished is manifold, but mainly to get investors to pony up, and creditors to extend credit, and the fan boys to fan the flames.
CC: @misk@sopuli.xyz
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
Touche lol
Also if we’re talking about the European continent as a whole finland, the urals, and maybe the west coast of ireland depending on definitions.
Yeah, I just get a bit peeved cuz I live up here, lol!
If I drive 250km to my grandparents I will not see much of buildings and people.
Come to the most uninhabitable place on the continent for some real rural living!
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.
I hear there’s roads in the winter, lol.
Me -
Your infrastructure is shit
You -
Here, I will demonstrate how correct you are
😂
You were being an ignorant dick and I called you on it. It’s not my fault you can’t handle a few hours on the road.
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.
You can easily drive 100 miles in northern Sweden and see nothing but trees lol
Or maybe don’t go there and then complain about the obvious shortfalls of the place. The rural exodus happened for a reason.
The rural exodus happened for many reasons, none of which have to do with the availability of high-speed internet. People are born where they are born, and often live there too. Sometimes that place is densely populated and replete with amenities, such as the Alps, sometimes it’s not. You don’t have to be an uneducated dick.
"Haha stupid poor people. Why don’t you just move somewhere else? Have you tried not being poor? Have you tried not being born in a impoverished remote or rural area? Did you even try to upgrade your parent’s income bracket, or trade-in for better parents?”
Or maybe you meant, “Why don’t you just abandon your grandparents who live at, or across the border? I’m sure the Mexican or American governments will pick up the slack when you move away. I’m sure familial cultural importance and dynamics are the same in Switzerland as they are around the Mexican border”.
It’s not a shortfall thanks to Starlink. Are you following along?
But taxes…
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.
https://www.wideopencountry.com/map-shows-countries-fit-inside-texas/
This is far more hilarious to see that a good number of European countries fit inside of Texas.
Sounds wonderful tbh
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.
Lmao you’re being a pedantic dick bc you know what they meant… and I’m cracking up enjoying everything about it
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.
Musk has gone insane
No, he hasn’t. He’s just a bog-standard capitalist doing bog-standard capitalist things.
Explicitly not the point of my post…
My partner’s family lives on a dirt road between a corn field and cow pasture… a full 1.5 hour drive from the nearest mid-sized city… they have gigabit fiber…
Not saying that their situation is currently typical, but id argue it is indeed a sign that good internet is slowly but surely coming available to everyone.
Don’t blame the people because the private sector doesn’t gain any money from this investment in this infrastructure.
That doesn’t make any sense. Taxpayer money was supposed to fix this over a decade ago.
Middle of nowhere between fields: I have 5g router and 300+mbps
If you’re pulling 5G you’re not remote.
