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Starlink loses out on $886 million in rural broadband subsidies::The FCC reaffirmed a decision not to award Starlink a nearly $900 million subsidy for offering 100Mbps/20Mbps low-latency internet service in 35 states.
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Reminder that Starlink is the internet equivalent to the Hyperloop.
There are untold billions that the government gave out as subsidies to increase internet speeds across the nation and bring internet to everyone across the U.S. Which mysteriously vanished.
All the while now Elon has been promising vaporware and bullshit, as he usually does while Tech Bros, billionaires and the media gobble it up.
Eh, starlink at least works by all accounts. I guess the jury is still out if it’s sustainable as a business because the satellites are deorbiting like crazy.
If your business plan involves firing out infinite rockets full of cell towers forever. You should probably just spend the money on copper instead.
I don’t think you quite understand just how remote some people are. Besides, Starlink is also being used on vessels and aircraft, good luck getting copper out to them.
Also, fibre optic is how the cool people Internet these days.
I don’t think you understand that a lot of copper is still less than infinite rockets forever
This is the kind of dumb statement that really gives this platform a bad name. I know people who were quoted a six figure sum to get mains power to their property, fibre would have been a similar cost. And this is people who are at a fixed location, we also have those who are mobile to consider.
There are people for whom a wired connection to anything is out of the question.
If only someone like a government would subsidise the installation just like the subsidised starlink because that also isn’t profitable. But a lot of money today is cheaper than an infinite amount of money from launching infinite rockets forever.
How do you think everything got built thus far? Only in America do you get this logic repeated. Everyone else just builds infrastructure. Yes, even in places with very remote peoples.
First, I’m not in America.
Second, I don’t think you comprehend just how remote some people are. I live in New Zealand, where over 90% of the country has fibre broadband thanks to a government initiative to get everyone connected, and we still have a large number of people using Starlink or other systems to get online, because it is simply not cost effective to wire them in.
Reality does not align with your smug one-liners.
Still doesn’t help ships
The issue with starlink is the choice to be in LEO instead of using geosats. It lowers the latency but it makes the whole project completely unsustainable.
I suspect they’ll eventually move to a slightly higher orbit, where their satellites can last a decade or so, once the technology is more mature.
Ships don’t need infinite rockets full of infinite cell towers launched forever.
Maybe when we have fusion power and don’t have to waste the resources. We don’t. We have to choose what we want to use. I say that launching infinite rockets with infinite cell towers forever is not worth being able to watch tiktok in the middle of the Atlantic.
There’s always actual satellite internet for the needed communications.
Maybe we should just wait for the subsidies and the investor money that’s actually paying for starlink to run out and see where things quite literally fall.
infinite rockets full of infinite cell towers
They need 12,000 of them, which isn’t a huge amount considering you’re covering the entire globe.
A lot of glass is much better than a lot of copper.
This makes zero sense. If that was profitable it would have been done already.
It’s not, neither is starlink. That’s the whole point. You have two things, you can either launch infinite rockets forever or lay some infrastructure that we can benefit from forever.
Why America chooses not to lay infrastructure is beyond me. More so why Americans justify it so often. This shit is why America doesn’t have trains.
Preach the truth brother. The single most effective way to spread more internet is more cable and towers.
Bundle it all together! We have tons of electrical that should be moved underground. Throw internet lines into that pool too and put it all under the ground and run the network cables everywhere the power goes.
The fact that you’re talk about laying copper for Internet access shows just how little you know.
I use it because it makes people mad and I think that’s funny, obviously fibre is better. Good for digestion
Also yes copper is still more cost efficient than infinite rockets with infinite cell towers forever
They aren’t sustainable because they are de-orbiting but they’re also supposed to be low-cost and high speed.
If the prices aren’t low-cost, and the speeds continue to decrease, it’s entire purpose is defeated.
Not vaporware. It actually works very well. And if you live in the sticks you thank your blessed angels for it.
Starlink, as a service for those that have it, is not Vaporware. It functions, pretty well.
Starlink as a government subsidized, nationally impactful program is Vaporware
Hyperloop should be halted and replaced with high speed rail, and starlink should be nationalized. Musk keeps rinsing and repeating his grand privatized infrastructure projects where he essentially embezzles public funds.
In this thread. A bunch of people who’ve never had to use the prior remote internet solutions that existed prior to Starlink. For a good chunk of the world, Starlink is actually game changing.
I spent the better part of the last decade working in remote locations, including the high arctic and and rural indigenous communities. Starlink is both fast and affordable compared to the prior solutions. Hell, I even personally worked on hundred million dollar fibre optic line projects, that were hundreds of millions over budget, trying to get these communities connected. Starlink is hands down the better choice, unless you really wanted to put your data centre in Fort Good Hope for some unknown reason.
If Elon wasn’t attached to this project, I’d bet the ratio of negative comments would be lower.
some people think reality is a cartoon. Black and white. Good guys and bad guys. Some people are dumb that way. And they get played like a piano because of it.
There’s also a bunch who have never left the city, and have no comprehension of just how remote some communities are.
I’m 15 miles away from a major city of 150,000 people and they don’t run anything out “this far”. I can use Starlink, 4G internet, or pound sand.
I am hardly ‘remote’. Cable companies suck dick.
My last apartment was within the city but for whatever reason we didn’t have any companies run cable to the building. The neighbor complex got it but we didn’t for years. That was a city of 200,000.
Wow! Been there, done that, in BOTH scenarios. Starlink came along well after my ISP days, no idea what it’s like, but it’s gotta beat hell out of 56K and old-school satellite.
Anything beats out old-school satellites. I don’t understand how they have not evolved even a little bit.
50GB Data Cap and that’s it. You might as well not have any Internet after that because it will be so slow.
That’s not even enough for me to work from home for 30 days. No streaming, no Netflix, no gaming.
4G Internet implies that there’s a fiber connection to that tower, and that tower can’t be far away. This is more like an intentional decision by the providers.
The tower is less than half a mile away. I can see the FAA light at night from my front porch.
That’s great to hear 😭
who have never left the city
Weird seeing this as a country-fried liberal. City people seem to have no comprehension of the issues facing us. And when confronting them about it, “Fuck all you conservative rednecks! You get what you deserve!”
And yet they have no idea why the countryside hates them and votes Trump. Self-defeating to say the least. Which is what they say of us! Rinse and repeat.
In the rural areas near where I am, gigabit fiber in underfunded areas is being installed, but sadly a vocal minority of residents keep burning up and sawing down the new fiber internet poles.
Of course we don’t hear about the good news from areas where it’s installed drama free, but the bad news where something goes terribly wrong is the one that sticks, and affects the general public’s impressions of a particular area or stereotype 😒
Admittedly the pole installation method for this is quite odd though, maybe a cost saving measure as usually it’s done underground
Yep. You’ll see it here on Lemmy all the time. I’ve been told I should sell my car and bike to work 15miles down a road that has no sidewalk, no shoulder, and a speed limit of 60mph. If I don’t like that then I can walk the 17miles and take a bus inside the city - doesn’t matter where - none of them go to or from where I’m going.
Fuck FuckCars
This only really happens when fuckcars posts show up on /all IMO, where some of the more extreme opinion holders are more vocal.
Fuck cars means fuck car dependency, i.e. places designed specifically for cars: no sidewalks, no bus, no train, no safe bicycle or light motorized assistive vehicle infrastructure available - you need a car for everything, or stay trapped at home.
It doesn’t mean fuck cars literally.
It’s pretty well known that rural areas, by design, require cars and motorbikes to travel out of them - a train is ideal, but good luck convincing anyone to finance that kind of project. A bicycle could work well for moving around town though depending on how safe it is, saving some wear and tear from your vehicle
About 87% of the population in my country live in an urban environment, many of them will just have no idea how it is even just a few miles out of a city. There’s just no alternative to personal transportation, and bikes don’t cut it.
I’m still pretty much on board with the fuck cars crowd though - it’s bizarre to me that despite so many people living in our cities that our transit seems even worse than what the US has. It’s just so much nicer being in places with fewer cars around.
I mean, fuckcars aren’t representative of the average liberal by any means, so I don’t think that’s entirely fair.
You have no God-given obligation to live in bumfuck nowhere. Don’t be surprised if you’re inconvenienced by your choice of location.
The people that live in buttfuck Egypt are the ones who make city life possible.
You think they make your veggies within the city limits?
I’m not complaining bout living out here. I’m complaining that most of them can’t seem to fathom that the entire world cannot live in New York City working an office job right off a subway renting an apartment, and owning zero personal modes of transportation.
Hillary was a classic example of that effect actually, no attempt to empathise, understand, or try to gain the support of half the country.
Nope, better to just insult them.
I own property in a very rural place and I don’t want it messing up our night sky view.
Guess what, we also have great internet in this very rural place already, too, because they ran cable and put cell towers out there. That’s all it takes.
Sure, but there are many places where this is the only option, and that’s not likely to change any time soon.
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That’s not “very rural”, in that case.
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You are the very definition of privileged, compared to most remote users. And your comment is as close to textbook NIMBY as I’ve ever seen. Plus a healthy dose of “fuck em, I got mine”.
What I’m saying is the most cost effective way to get internet to rural folks is to run cables, it works. You don’t have to put thousands of satellites up, it isn’t easier or better.
You sound like you’ve never been anywhere truly remote. For a lot of people in the world, it would be cheaper for the governmet to buy their rural property, bulldoze it, and then buy them a house in a town with internet service – than it is to run a line to their property.
For a lot of people in the world, it would be cheaper for the governmet to buy their rural property, bulldoze it, and then buy them a house in a town with internet service – than it is to run a line to their property.
of course that would be cheaper if the government is paying for it…That would also be cheaper than just buying comcast for someone even in suburbs of the US…
You’re coming off as something of an out of touch asshole, to be honest. I know people for who getting mains power out to their house would cost them more than the property was worth. And there was mains available at the boundary. THAT’S what remote means, not what you’re describing.
well when your backyard is the night sky for the entire globe you can call me a NIMBY when it comes to starlink’s glowing sattelite trains
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I don’t like Elon but starlink has allowed me and my best friend to play battlefield 1 together, even though he’s in the middle of nowhere in Arizona. I do hope they continue reducing the reflectivity of their satellites, as I am also into astrophotography.
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.”
The original article contains 296 words, the summary contains 235 words. Saved 21%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I live at a place where I needed Starlink so I feel entitled to comment.
Ordered, and it took 6-7mo to allow me to start. In the meantime T-Mobile Home Internet let me start immediately. I kept both because when one had issues the other would be better (storms, updates, tower maintenance, downtime, Russian attacks, etc). But I noticed that Starlink kept getting worse. Lower speed, worse jitter/ping/bufferbloat/etc. it would routinely fail to hit 100mbps down with good sky view, mounted to a pergola. TMHI would routinely be above 250mbps, and I move to using it more often. Eventually a local ISP got a grant to roll out FttH in my area and I got rid of both.
It’s been a bit over a year since then, maybe things got better. But I noticed Starlink overselling their nodes, being non-communicative for support issues, and missing these easily attainable FCC goals to people that often have much less options than I did. There’s no reason for them to get absolutely wiped by a cell phone tower. Hope they made enough by packing on customers, because they just lost $900m
Oh no! Now what will the multi billion dollar corporation do without taxpayer subsidies?
If you need subsidies to do business, your business fucking sucks and you suck.
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Another dumbass fucking hunk of shit radio system doesn’t deliver on its promises? Oh my god, what a gigantic fucking surprise! People are gonna have a stroke when they see that shit!
Elon sure does bring out the REEEEE in people, doesn’t he?
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I disagree actually, I find it very easy to not hate him. In fact it requires no effort whatsoever.
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Imagine getting this angry at an Internet stranger. Go outside.
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Lol.
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