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Comment on Starlink loses out on $886 million in rural broadband subsidies

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.

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Patches@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
You don’t even have to go extremely rural to get no internet choices.

I am 20 minutes from a town of 150,000 people and without cellular or starlink we would have nothing.

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- guacupado@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Right, but the point is, instead of going to Starlink that taxpayer money could be used to get access to where you’re at.
  
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  - thoughts3rased@sopuli.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - SupraMario@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    They already did that…we gave the telecoms almost 1 trillion dollars…we do not need to be giving them more.
    
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kattenluik@feddit.nl ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- brenticus@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  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.
  
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  - kattenluik@feddit.nl ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I said shouldn’t.
    
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- CmdrShepard@lemmy.one ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - kattenluik@feddit.nl ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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    CmdrShepard@lemmy.one ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’ll leave it to Canada to fund it then

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