do they know what competing is? fiber is much cheaper, stablier, offers less latency and more speed.
SpaceX says states should dump fiber plans, give all grant money to Starlink
Submitted 7 months ago by tonytins@pawb.social to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
aliser@lemmy.world 7 months ago
foggenbooty@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Fibre is an investment that can be used and upgraded for decades. Starlink is a subscription service forever to a private company.
DemBoSain@midwest.social 7 months ago
We should also dump passenger trains for…electric car tunnels?
sepi@piefed.social 7 months ago
SpaceX can suck my ass
pivot_root@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Here’s a better idea: nationalize SpaceX and tell Musk to go fuck himself first. Not going to happen? Then no grant money.
paraphrand@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Weird, that sounds anti-competitive.
uss_entrepreneur@startrek.website 7 months ago
A bunch starlink modems in an area can overload or whatever the nearby satellite. This is not feasible in its current form.
yaroto98@lemmy.world 7 months ago
The tech behind starlink is good. LEO satellites play a purpose. Upsides are they have less latency than GEO satellites. Speeds are the same though.
Downside is you have to deploy them evenly as a constellation or else you get service inturruption. Which means if you look at any population map 90% of your constellation is going to be underutilized, and the other 10% is going to be full.
The real target audience should be mobile broadband. Airplanes, ships, RVs, cars, phones, etc.
But what do you do in the meantime? Fill in the unutilized constillation with rural residential. You can’t compete with fiber tech, so you sue the govt for free money.
cole@lemdro.id 7 months ago
Starlink is definitely faster than all but the most expensive GEO services (and those require specialized hardware)
yaroto98@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Sorry, I was referring to the underlying tech and bands. The physics behind LEO doesn’t automatically grant it the ability to be faster than GEO. It’s faster because the sattelites are brand new not 10 years old.
captainastronaut@seattlelunarsociety.org 7 months ago
Not only do you have to deploy them in a constellation, you have to deploy them in a descending constellation. They are constantly burning up all the time and you have to keep launching new ones forever just to maintain current capacity. It’s the perfect business plan to make SpaceX look better on paper.
yaroto98@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Heh yep, in fact they’re not lasting as long as they were supposed to.
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Yeah, I can’t imagine a medium sized town all using Starlink at once without issues.
MangoCats@feddit.it 7 months ago
Read this quick before the people selling generators get it buried: wtsp.com/…/67-144d70da-bb27-496c-8928-ab7e61a53b0…
The gas company finally figured out how to deflect their responsibility in the matter: they say that the generator owners “didn’t register” their generators, but… now that it has been a year, has the gas company done anything to improve service capacity?
Anyway: the tie-in with Starlink is, anything like this works great until everybody tries to use it all at once at high capacity. When all 53,000 residents of Grand Island Nebraska decide to stream different high definition videos all at once? A good fiber system can handle that, Starlink? I’m curious…
yaroto98@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Companies like Viasat with GEO sattelites have the advantage of one mololithic sattelite with massive coverage. They have a ton of little antennas on each sattelite that they can adjust as demand changes. Need more coverage in an area due to demand? They can task an antenna not doing anything over there.
Latency is a B though. Minimum 500ms each way. Which is minimum 1sec round trip just physics not actual. What’s interesting is the layperson doesn’t notice much. It’s not abnormal for a rando website to take a few seconds to load on my wifi. Or for a netflix stream to take a few seconds before it starts buffering. The biggest problem a company like viasat has is old tech in the sky. They can’t handle the load of everyone watching netflix. So, they have to data cap everyone. It’ll be interesting to see if their new sattelites later this year fix that or if they keep the caps on.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 7 months ago
Gee, I wonder why they would do that.
PunnyName@lemmy.world 7 months ago
No
cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 7 months ago
katy says spacex should go fuck themselves and go bankrupt
Blackfeathr@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Business owned by greedy manbaby says to give money to business also owned by greedy manbaby. Hmmm…
HootinNHollerin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
Don’t forget Nazi
Brkdncr@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I’m a starlink customer and think it’s one of the best advancements in the past decade as it provides real access to rural addresses. The side effects of this is nearly immeasurable.
Spacex needs to STFU about this though. Fiber should continue to be deployed where possible.
Lectral@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
The side effects include filling orbit with space junk, crashing satellites to Earth, and blinding our ability to see meteors with a collision course for Earth. The side effects may not be predictable, but they’re definitely measurable.
REDACTED@infosec.pub 7 months ago
What’s wrong with 4g? I live in a rural region and have been using it for years
Brkdncr@lemmy.world 7 months ago
For me? 40/5 was about the best I could get. Mountains between me and the towers.
sefra1@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
Unreliable, high latency, slow bandwidth and data caps?
cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 7 months ago
Starlink has been much better than every other option where I am, but I will switch to fiber as soon as it gets here.
They’ve been promising fiber here for over a decade, but I can finally see them installing it two miles up the road now. Hopefully it will actually be available sometime soon.
MangoCats@feddit.it 7 months ago
Seriously, this is in the “well, we know you want all the free money you can get, but: no. Now go do your thing on your own dime.”
Fiber in the ground is infrastructure like paved roads. Satellites? One counter-orbiting frag bomb can take out a satellite constellation in less than a day.
MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 months ago
Fiber also has far better performance that satellite can never match.
cole@lemdro.id 7 months ago
there’s no fundamental physics limitation that makes this true
AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today 7 months ago
Fiber should be deployed to rural addresses like yours (and should’ve been a long time ago). Instead, that money was funneled to the likes of Time Warner and Comcast who never even followed through on their part of the deal. Now, SpaceX is getting funneled the cash.
I’m super thankful that WA State supports and gives assistance to counties building out public LUDs for fiber access, many paying attention to rural communities first. I escaped Comcast two years ago because of it.
Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Fiber should be deployed to rural addresses like yours
I don’t disagree, it should be deployed to rural areas. It’s never going to happen though, it’s just not profitable.
Sure, electrical infrastructure was deployed to the whole country, but it doesn’t need to be replaced and upgraded as frequently as Internet infrastructure does. Even if some rural areas do get fiber at some point, don’t expect the infrastructure to be upgraded regularly enough to stay comparable to denser areas.
You’re never going to find a company willing to do that job. We could do it at the national level, but I have my doubts that the country is headed in that direction.
Brkdncr@lemmy.world 7 months ago
It can’t, and the taxes you would pay to support fiber to my home would be extreme.
But fiber to a local wireless solution? Sure. But even that’s not possible for everyone, and they were expensive and unreliable until starlink started showing up. LEO internet has its benefits.
MangoCats@feddit.it 7 months ago
Time Warner and Comcast need to have all that grant money clawed back. They contracted with the taxpayers to deliver a service and they didn’t even make a good faith effort to start.
Bluefruit@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I say this as someone who actively pays for starlink out of necessity.
Fuck you, no. Fiber is much better for everyone. Eat shit muskrat.
GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
I had Starlink for over 2 years while waiting for my fiber to be installed. Worlds better than the marginal DSL I had available before (5 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up), but I’m far happier with the fiber I have now.
Bluefruit@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I feel that man. Right now I load balance between tmobile and starlink cause the towers near me suck. I work from home so having consistent internet is really important and in my area, the fiber build out is really slow and expensive. Luckily I’m moving here soon but its been a pain in the ass to say the least.
Starlink is great for what it is. Very important tech but yea, I’m sure most everyone would be happier with fiber.
MoreFPSmorebetter@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
Remember when our government spent billions of our taxes on getting high speed internet out to as many Americans as possible? Remember how literally nothing happened and they just shrugged when we asked where the money went?
This was during the Obama years too if memory serves correctly.
It doesn’t matter what they decide to do. The money will magically vanish and we will all get left holding the bag once more.
PunnyName@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Clinton era Telecommunications Act of 1996 was where it all started.
Thanks to corporations for pocketing the money, and the Republicans for blocking Democrats from providing consequences.
MoreFPSmorebetter@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
You know I’m starting to suspect that maybe corporations don’t have our best interests in mind…
SacredHeartAttack@lemmy.world 7 months ago
While you’re correct and I agree, they REALLY shouldn’t do whatever Elon wants.
MoreFPSmorebetter@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
Oh absolutely. He can pull himself up by his velcro straps and make his business work without government subsidies for once in his life.
That being said I don’t have any faith in our government to actually improve anything for general americans when it comes to internet access. Even if the federal government somehow did everything right the states would find a way to regulate and fuck it up.
Stillwater@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
This country is so cooked
originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 7 months ago
all you can eat latency and an oversaturated network on devices with a limited lifespan.. what else could you ask for!
ubergeek@lemmy.today 7 months ago
Well, to be fair, the dishes do make great outdoor cat beds!
Guidy@lemmy.world 7 months ago
A subscription that somehow still manages to use surge pricing? I’m assuming that’s the next logical step.
pennomi@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Starlink has much better latency than most satellites, but still 10 to 50 times as much as fiber.
paraphrand@lemmy.world 7 months ago
So if my ping is currently 90ms, it’ll become 900ms - 4.5s?
originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 7 months ago
ha yeah... not having to make a 340 mile round trip instead of the hundreds of feet to the nearest router will do that
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Just for reference, I get about 45-50 ping playing Marvel Rivals on Starlink.
frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
Basic physics says satellites using Ku-band or whatever they use can’t compete with fibre.
Satellite internet has its uses like for ships at sea.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Or rural and remote areas. I think it would be a ton of fun to go backpacking with a foldable solar panel and an antenna.
frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
4G towers can have 100km radius
_cryptagion@anarchist.nexus 7 months ago
I wish there was a way for the average person to shoot down starlink satellites.
sefra1@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
Don’t worry, the way things are going the star link satellites are going to shoot themselves. Unfortunately together with everything else in the low orbit.