Because as we know, the only way for companies owned by the richest person on Earth to do business is if they get hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money first.
Starlink loses out on $886 million in rural broadband subsidies
Submitted 1 year ago by misk@sopuli.xyz to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
CmdrShepard@lemmy.one 1 year ago
As if giving it all to Comcast and Spectrum for the 47th time will make things any better? Starlink is actually something accessible for a lot of these people, while legacy ISPs just pocket the money and claim its too hard to serve rural customers.
Squizzy@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s great that there is variety and all but let’s not pretend the CEO isn’t dangerous, see starling/Ukraine issue and that the company isn’t filling the sky with consumer shite designed to be burned up.
Infrastructure should be publicly owned and strong competitive regulation.
kattenluik@feddit.nl 1 year ago
Anything is better than Starlink, Starlink is just extreme useless pollution for something that normal ISPs can achieve.
The government needs to step in and make internet more of a utility like in like every other successful country.
aniki@lemm.ee 1 year ago
TIL: The majority of Lemmys have never lived an hour from the nearest population center, down a dirt road, on a few hundred acres of wilderness. I fucking HATE musk and I still have an RV kit in my basement so when I’m traveling around hours from anywhere, Starlink works perfectly.
Mr_Blott@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I live two hours from a city, waaaay up in the Alps and I have gigabit fibre lol
Your infrastructure sucks donkeyballs 😂
PRUSSIA_x86@lemmy.world 1 year ago
aniki@lemm.ee 1 year ago
No where in Europe is “remote.”
Come to the South West US where you can drive 100 miles in any direction and barely see another human.
Grangle1@lemm.ee 1 year ago
It’s a difference between definitions of “city” and “middle of nowhere” between the US and Europe. The US is a massive place. Part of the reason the US appears to have such a crappy infrastructure is that when, say, mobile carriers want to improve it to upgrade something to 5G, they have to do so for the entire country, with many US states having an area the size of whole European countries. Texas itself is the size of Germany. That is a much bigger undertaking than improving it for a single European country or even a block of countries like western or central Europe. Things are so spread out here that “remote” can mean REALLY remote in some areas. Distances between reasonably sized cities in the US can be much larger than in Europe, and the US has more people in those more rural areas than some think, especially in states in the middle of the country. Local ISPs for internet in those areas can be good depending on the area, but a lot of people in the really rural areas would still be better and more easily served by a service like Starlink.
time_fo_that@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Sounds wonderful tbh
Takumidesh@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Today you learned that the majority of people don’t live in the middle of nowhere?
Of course they don’t, by definition, if a bunch of people lived there, it wouldn’t be the middle of nowhere.
blazeknave@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Lmao you’re being a pedantic dick bc you know what they meant… and I’m cracking up enjoying everything about it
Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yeah, Musk has gone insane, anyone can see that.
But Musk aside, LEO satellites are still really the only viable and economical solution to the problem of broadband in rural areas, and Starlink seems to work great.
masquenox@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Musk has gone insane
No, he hasn’t. He’s just a bog-standard capitalist doing bog-standard capitalist things.
JeffKerman1999@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Middle of nowhere between fields: I have 5g router and 300+mbps
aniki@lemm.ee 1 year ago
If you’re pulling 5G you’re not remote.
misophist@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Brother, we have wildly different definitions of “nowhere” if you get 5G. When I lived in a rural shithole in the US, I had to drive 100 miles to start picking up 5G signals (though that was just before the pandemic, so maybe 5G coverage has improved greatly in the past 3 years).
Salad_Fries@lemmy.world 1 year ago
My partner’s family lives on a dirt road between a corn field and cow pasture… a full 1.5 hour drive from the nearest mid-sized city… they have gigabit fiber…
Not saying that their situation is currently typical, but id argue it is indeed a sign that good internet is slowly but surely coming available to everyone.
Melco@lemmy.world 1 year ago
[deleted]dannym@lemmy.escapebigtech.info 1 year ago
Doesn’t match my experience. The worst thing about it is ping, but download is mostly always around 100-200.
limelight79@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Yeah, I’ve always seen at least 20 down, never as low as 1 Mbps the grandparent comment claimed. I usually see roughly 100 Mbps down, though.
That’s based on using it in a few different places in our RV over the summer, some with obstructions from trees in some spots. Regardless of the actual speed, my wife and I were both able to telework and hold conference calls simultaneously without an issue - and my wife would use video (I kept it off, but she used it).
rab@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
My parents have starlink and I’m really impressed with it. It’s very reliable
Yoz@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Really? Shit. I was planning to move to starlink but let me do some research.
namelessdread@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I had Starlink too and it was definitely unreliable. It’s also absolutely atrocious in any kind of weather like heavy rain or snow.
It’s better than nothing for sure, but definitely look into it more, especially if you’ll be relying on it for work.
JoJoGAH@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I was shocked when he got a gov’t contract after he admitted to all that fuckery in Ukraine. Wtf is happening in gov’t???
Joelk111@lemmy.world 1 year ago
My parents had it. Average was about 40mbps over a 60gb download, minimums were in the low 20s, and it topped out at around 80-100mbps. A fuck of a lot better than 10mbps down 750kbps up, their only other option. I hate Elon as much as the next guy, but starlink is awesome.
nutsack@lemmy.world 1 year ago
i imagine that’s a product of the technology and not so much the company. satellite internet does not sound great compared to something like fiber, but maybe better than alternatives in some parts of the world
theodewere@kbin.social 1 year ago
trying to get another one of his boondoggles financed by Congress i see.. nothing but charlatan under those robes..
notannpc@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Aside from the bit of personal enjoyment I get from seeing Elon take an L… Starlink only meets the classification as “broadband internet” in optimal conditions. The average experience just plain doesn’t qualify and it is openly acknowledged that performance will get worse with more traffic. It may be better than nothing for some, but it is clearly not sustainable. The money would be better spent running lines because at least that would be consistent and long lasting even if it is more expensive.
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 1 year ago
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!
SCB@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Quite excited to see what some competition will do in this space (no pun intended) with Amazon’s upcoming deployment.
MotoAsh@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Further ruin the night sky.
CmdrShepard@lemmy.one 1 year ago
Yeah it’s totally ruined. I can’t even see the sky anymore at night.
SCB@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That’s significantly less of a concern than assisting in elevating a few billion people out of poverty
dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
I imagine Amazon will be the one taking your tax dollars to do business. They famously have no money and need American tax dollars generated by working class labor in order to survive.
Rapidcreek@reddthat.com 1 year ago
For an operating company that’s the kiss of death. I predict Starlink will be bought by the US government and there won’t be a he’ll 9f a lot of 0rofit.
SoylentBlake@lemm.ee 1 year ago
When Musk cut off Ukraine, the Pentagon informed him that they were immediately purchasing a minor controlling stake in the, currently, private company. Service to Ukraine was restored the next day.
That’s how “capitalism” works apparently.
I also assume that’s why NVidia did it’s sudden about face and fell right in line when the generals threatened to own them the next day.
It’s all just rich people getting reminded they’re only rich, or alive, because the government allows them to be.
Buelldozer@lemmy.today 1 year ago
Jesus, the absolute state of misinformation in your post…
circuscritic@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
I’m honestly at a loss with trying to discern whether you just honestly don’t understand the situation and how corporations and government work, if you’re repeating a source of genuine intentional disinformation, or if you’re actually maliciously trying to pump some counterfactual narrative.
I think it’s a mixture of the first two, which is unfortunate because the word count that is required to correct all of that bad information is a lot more then I’m willing to type out on my phone screen.
So, I’ll just point out you can own a controlling stake, or a minor stake, but the two are mutually exclusive, and at no point was either on the table for purchase from the Pentagon.
SupraMario@lemmy.world 1 year ago
They didn’t cut off Internet to Ukraine. They had to stop the military from using it in an offensive way, which is ITAR, it wasn’t even musk who pulled the plug, it was a bunch of lawyers that had to make that call.
Rapidcreek@reddthat.com 1 year ago
I don’t know that Iridium is still working. I think it’s been decommissioned. But, the US military has been looking for its replacement for years. Now, they could launch their own, or buy a network. Musk not getting RUS funds and losing a thousand satellites from orbit a year makes Starlink a prime candidate.
circuscritic@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Unlikely, but the death kiss was actually when he held coverage of Ukrainian soldiers hostage while they were engaged in a hot war.
I can pretty much guarantee you that the Pentagon immediately started a lot of conversations with established contractors about rapidly expediting their own LEO constellations, and promising help on the regulatory side.
It may not have been immediately apparent, but it was there. It honestly wouldn’t have mattered as much, except for the fact that SpaceX is entirely dependent upon government contracts, the military is a huge part of that.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 1 year ago
He didn’t hold it hostage.
He didn’t turn it off, it was never on. He didn’t intervene in an attack, he just did nothing.
It’s even questionable if he can legally allow Ukraine to drop one on a boat and use it as a weapon.
The DoD failed to sign an agreement with SpaceX which left them in that awkward position. The DoD has now done so and it’s a non issue now.
deletes_their_posts@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
It’s not a scam. Satellite internet was extremely expensive and slow last time I checked a few years before starlink. Yeah , musk is garbage but starlink is actually helping a lot of people worldwide.
deletes_their_posts@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Scrof@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
It’s probably the most wasteful way of providing internet imaginable since they have to send satellites up by the dozen every year for them to burn in the atmosphere only several years lates.
dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
Oh no! It’s expensive! Wait. Isn’t he the chairman of a vertically integrated space shuttle and satellite international conglomerate? Why are Americans footing the bill for any of this?
theodewere@kbin.social 1 year ago
it absolutely is a scam.. you WANT it to not be a scam, but you are incorrect..
IHadTwoCows@lemm.ee 1 year ago
But he can pay for it.