Comment on US agency will not reinstate $900 mln subsidy for SpaceX Starlink unit

• AlternateRoute@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

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  • LilB0kChoy@midwest.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

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  • alsimoneau@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    A geosynchronous satellite makes much more sense for those use cases.

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    • br3d@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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)

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      • alsimoneau@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Yeah, but the cost of low latency is thousands of satellites that burn up in the atmosphere, need to be continuously launched, are a catastrophe for optical and radio astronomy and crowd LEO, reducing available space and increasing collision risk. All for a barely scalable system.

        It’s not worth it. If you want low latency get a cable run or talk to a ground based antenna.

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  • Damage@feddit.it ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah sure, but ships and planes don’t matter for rural subsidies

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