Comment on US agency will not reinstate $900 mln subsidy for SpaceX Starlink unit
AlternateRoute@lemmy.ca 1 year agoCan’t really help the small islands and all the shipping traffic and aircraft that have started using it and can benefit from a high speed connection
Damage@feddit.it 1 year ago
Ships and planes aren’t rural
AlternateRoute@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
There are also a lot of rural communities in Alaska, Northern Canada etc where the whole communities only option is satellite internet.
Sure we should get it out to those areas NEAR major cities but there are huge amounts of users where the cost for that would be impractical.
LilB0kChoy@midwest.social 1 year ago
Northern Canada wouldn’t benefit from a US rural internet subsidy.
I’m not familiar with the areas in Alaska you’re referring too but are they completely isolated outside of satellite internet? If they have electric from the grid or cellular telephone service then there are other options using existing infrastructure.
A study from 2019 found national estimates ranged from 180,000 households to 750,000 that are not connected to the electrical grid. That’s out of 131.2 million households in the US. That means adding internet to power line runs as the entire grid infrastructure is updated and buried, which it should be, would mean .006 % of households wouldn’t benefit.
I don’t know what the best solution is but I question the practicality of 100s of millions in subsidies to any private company, not just Starlink.
In my opinion it’s time for internet to become a utility and tie it into the existing infrastructure.
alsimoneau@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
A geosynchronous satellite makes much more sense for those use cases.
br3d@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Those are much much higher up, which introduces a lot of signal latency. The Starlink types are low down, which makes the Comms faster (and also means they keep burning up in the atmosphere)
Damage@feddit.it 1 year ago
Yeah sure, but ships and planes don’t matter for rural subsidies