SpaceX says states should dump fiber plans, give all grant money to Starlink
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/starlink-keeps-trying-to-block-fiber-deployment-says-us-must-nix-louisiana-plan/Open linkView original on pawb.social757
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all you can eat latency and an oversaturated network on devices with a limited lifespan.. what else could you ask for!
Starlink has much better latency than most satellites, but still 10 to 50 times as much as fiber.
ha yeah... not having to make a 340 mile round trip instead of the hundreds of feet to the nearest router will do that
Uh, how often are you using the Internet to connect to a computer in your home town? Maybe 5% of the time?
I've never used Starlink, but with a basic understanding of geography and optics, I'm going to bet that in most scenarios the latency difference between Starlink and fiber is negligible, sometimes even being faster on Starlink, depending on the situation.
That said, I'm not suggesting Starlink is a realistic replacement for fiber, just that latency isn't the big issue. (It has other serious issues)
Much more frequently than you think with CDN endpoints.
Ok, so actual question, How useful are CDN endpoints these days with https everywhere? Because most encrypted content is unique to a single web user, caching isn't super useful. Also you can't cache live content like video calls or online games. I'd imagine the percentage of cacheable content is actually fairly low these days. But like I said, I don't actually know the answer to this, i'd be curious to hear your take.
Edit: it's weird to get down votes for a question.
HTTPS can in fact be cached, and most modern browsers will do so unless given a header or something to tell it not to.
Source: Devtools network tab + https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Guides/Caching
Browsers partition the cache by "origin" now though, so while it can cache HTTPS content, it can't effectively cache shared content (It'll store multiple independent copies).
So Youtube still works fine, but Google Fonts is pointless now.
Edit: Oh yeah, and any form of shared JavaScript/CSS/etc. CDN is now also useless and should be avoided, but that's always been the case.
HTTPS / TLS has little to do with it. Don't think of the endpoint as a cache between you and the origin. The DNS name given to the endpoint is the origin from your browser's perspective. How content gets cached on the backend is irrelevant to the browser. Live video that someone else in your area is also watching is cacheable. Images to load a page, very cacheable. The personal stuff is mostly HTML specific to you but that's quite small.
Netflix and Amazon Outpost makes it quite useful.
I live near DE-CIX and have fiber. So a decent chunk of web services I use is available with a latency of under 5ms. And everything else hosted in a European datacenter with under 20ms.
So almost all of my internet traffic has a lower latency than starlink has under ideal conditions
Living right near a massive CX that services the US-Canada border... most times.
Just for reference, I get about 45-50 ping playing Marvel Rivals on Starlink.
On fiber, while I don't play that game, I've never seen a ping longer than 10-13msecs.
The point is, unless you’re playing some hyper competitive game where a 30ms difference in reaction time is noticeable (this is less than 1 frame in a fighting game, for example) Starlink works perfectly well. Lower numbers are better, but for games you only need to compare that number to human reaction times (150-200ms) to see that both are small values less than the reaction time of any person.
Previous satellite Internet using satellites in geosynchronous orbit had 1500ms latency, for comparison.
You have some pretty bad understanding of how netcode works if you think a 30ms ping in an online multi-player game means your game or input is delayed by 30ms. It's a lot more complicated than that, and especially in games with bad netcode you will absolutely notice a difference between 10ms or 30ms ping
Oh, please explain the complexity to me like I’m a system administrator with only 25 years of experience. I didn’t realize that computers could connect to each other over a network until 3 days ago, imagine my surprise.
You could start with the fact that many online game servers (ex: Valorant, Apex, Overwatch) artificially increase everyone’s latency at the server, except for the people with higher network latency in order to compensate for lag through a technique called lag compensation. So having 10 ms ping and 50 ms ping just means the server introduces a 40ms delay on the player with 10ms ping so both players experience the same latency.
Or maybe you could explain how game state updates happen with a set frequency and the gap between the state updates can also be adjusted by the server for each client so that state updates are sent to higher latency users earlier in the update window. I mean this technique is essentially lag compensation as well, but it applies to how the client updates are sent instead of being applied to incoming packets.
Or, you could avoid all this and simply declare me incorrect by pointing at a game that doesn’t use lag compensation or otherwise move the goal posts so that you don’t actually have to explain the complexity that you were hinting at.
Yes, and are far more stable, not hyped, and are already at pretty much peak congestion. Starlink will get progressively worse, the more people use it. Right now, it's over provisioned.
Ever try a voice call with 30ms of latency?
Lol what? You're not gonna notice a 30ms delay in a voice call...
@[email protected] downvote with no reply even though you were painfully wrong. Sad.
Yeh, 30ms is still inside the haas delay.
If you are a professional listener (sound engineer, musician, dancer) then you can probably perceive it (in a similar way that eyes theoretically only need 25fps, but 60/120/144 is noticeably better).
In 30ms, sound can travel 10 meters.
So, if you've ever had a conversation with someone across a classroom, you've had a conversation with 30ms latency.
For data, 30ms is 8100 km for electricity over copper, or 6000km for light over fibre.
Meaning 30ms over fibre (considering no transmission delays) would be roughly the direct distance between US and UK.
So yeh, 30ms is nothing
And I'll downvote ya again, if I could :)
FWIW, I don't owe you a reply :)
They were not more stable. Any occlusion, including thick clouds, would degrade the signal to being unusable. I used Hughsnet for years, then swapped to cellular (100ms+ latency) and finally to Starlink. Starlink is a pretty solid 100Mb/s, with low jitter, packet loss and latency.
Yeah, I use voice chat every day, it's not noticeable.
You have the same issue with Starlink...
The people on the call do...
That’s basically perfect, with regards to online gaming.
I got better ping playing Quake multiplayer in 1996
Online and not LAN? I have doubts.
That used dedicated servers, right?
So if my ping is currently 90ms on fiber, it’ll become 900ms - 4.5s on starlink?
Probably no. Your ping is abnormally high for fiber, I’d expect a sub 10ms ping for you.
That makes a lot of assumptions about what I am pinging, and the networking context.
In my case I was quoting my average ping in VRChat.
How can you quote 10-50 times higher and then tell me no when I calculate what that means for me?
Is it because latency does not scale in that way?
Yes, your understanding is fundamentally flawed. Starlink adds a fixed latency on top, if you ping to a server was 2ms with fiber and 52ms with starlink, then your ping to a server that would be 100ms with fiber would be 150ms with starlink
tracerouteliketraceroute cnn comctrl-cat the third line.Don't try to ping UK.battle.net or your numbers will be skewed by everything in between.
About 5ms.
Based on the various replies, it sounds like the poster I was originally replying to does not mean pings in any context.
They just mean in this context. Along optimal routes. Right?
So then 10x makes 50ms; sounds about right
Of course they don't mean in every case. Yeah, if you have to go halfway around the world from two addresses that are very far away from hubs, Starlink might be better. 99.99999% of the time this isn't happening though and fiber will be better. There are situations for some people where it's worth it. Fiber is better for the average case though, and it's where money should be invested.
Of course. Still, an exception doesn’t disprove expected averages.
So you were only talking about when testing with ideal servers? Why is my example an exception? Are all games an exception?
Because we’re talking about the inherent latency of the connection, obviously.
You're probably really far away from the VR Chat server. Try pinging Google or Cloudflare, which will tell you ping to the nearest datacenter (a rough estimate of ping caused by your local ISP).
Based on their numbers, you could probably expect 50-100ms to Google, and then add an extra 90ms to get from there to your VR Chat server.
My personal fiber connection gets under 2ms ping on Speedtest
It depends on the instance (people can make them in 4 regions of the world) but 90ms is common for US west and east, for me.
That makes sense then. When people talk about their ISP ping, they're usually talking about how long it takes to get out of the ISP's network. So that 5ms Cloudflare ping is likely pretty close to what people would consider your internet's ping.
Speedtest.net is a really common tool for measuring this, since it will automatically check where the closest server is. For your connection, any ping above 5ms you can probably assume is based on your physical distance to the server, or latency on the server's end. I'm guessing Google doesn't have a server quite as close to you as Cloudflare
My average latency on Starlink over the past year is 32 ms. It varies throughout the day from around 20 to 40 ms.
If you are getting 90ms on fiber, you are either pinging a server that's a long ways away or something is very wrong.
If you look at the rest of the comments, you’ll see I was taking about my ping in a game. Not my shortest path to a nearby server.
A subscription that somehow still manages to use surge pricing? I’m assuming that’s the next logical step.
Well, to be fair, the dishes do make great outdoor cat beds!
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/outdoor-cats-are-using-500-starlink-satellite-dishes-as-self-heating-beds-180979401/
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's what the subsidies are for. Plus, fiber does not necessarily need to be upgraded after installation (especially rural, where there's less customers in general). It's not copper or coax, it doesn't have the same limits, and can usually handle huge amounts of data (the limit primarily being the transceivers at both ends). The costs of upgrading would also likely be lower than the initial install, something that couldn't be said about providers like Starlink. Fiber is about the most efficient, cost effective (especially in the long term), and future proof way to provide internet. Starlink is overall much more expensive to maintain.
But yes, without the local, state, and/or federal governments supporting it, people in rural areas won't have a choice.
Yeah I'm not in favor of that, not again. The US has provided funding to ISPs to be used explicitly in expanding rural broadband access, we've done it on multiple occasions. Every time ISPs simply pocket the money and do nothing.
Fool me once, twice, three times...
So hey, if the US wants to have the FCC do it themselves, just hire crews to lay fiber, then sure. It'll be inefficient and expensive, but it would at least get done. But I'm not in favor of giving a dime to the existing ISPs...
You miss my point. My original comment says as much, that the subsidies all went to big telecom, but it should have gone to local utility districts for local buildouts of fiber. I'm literally sending this message from my LUD-funded fiber that my state subsidized, and my ISP is a local company exclusive to my county's fiber network. It's fantastic, and what should be getting the funding instead of Comcast, Time Warner, and now SpaceX.
Most of the addresses my LUD serves are unincorporated, including mine. So, it actually is possible, if your state and county give enough of a shit.
Well you're absolutely right then, sorry for the confusion.
Nationalized fiber networks or locally managed municipal fiber has always been a winning proposition. I've heard so many success stories about those rollouts and the only opposition to them has come from big ISPs who are scared they'll be replaced (because they should be). Unfortunately, that's a really strong opposition... Those ISPs have so much money and so much power, they're managing to shift legislation, pass laws that make municipal fiber systems illegal (for the benefit of the consumers of course).
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.
Except that US ISPs have already been provided upwards of $80b to roll out a fiber optic backbone for rural connections, and have instead largely pocketed the funds and sat on their hands.
It has largely fallen to smaller communities to incorporate their own local ISPs and manage their own roll-outs, as such projects aren’t viewed as worthwhile for private companies.
Honestly, if Australia could roll out a national fiber backbone (almost a decade ago!) across the same approximate landmass as the contiguous 48 states at less than 10% of the overall population; there is no valid reason that the wealthiest nation to have ever existed can’t also do so.
Even if a Federal program (not under this administration, obviously) was to just run fibre parallel to the existing interstate highways, and leave the last (20) miles to local utilities - it would be cheaper, faster and more reliable than LEO - and without all the additional negatives that come with that!
Did Australia lay a national backbone as you said, or did they connect individual neighborhoods, or individual homes? Because all three of those are very different situations with very different costs associated.
I mean the US has had a national fiber backbone since 1995, but that doesn't really mean anything about fiber to the home. I'm not sure rolling out a fiber backbone 10 years ago is really anything to brag about. However, extending the backbone to connect neighborhoods would be extremely helpful in lowering the costs to get fiber to the home, if that's what they did in Australia, then that would indeed be laudable. If at the national level, they payed for fiber rollout to every home or every street... Well that would surprise me, but that would also be awesome!
So yeah, what did they do?
Edited to add: sorry, backbone was probably the wrong term to use.
The actual history of Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN) is actually needlessly complicated - primarily due to a (somewhat) successful sabotage attempt by our Conservative government in the early 2010s.
But basically, every single new home is built with Fiber to the Home, and every single metropolitan and suburban home either has Fiber to the Home (or Premises), or at the very least Fiber to the Curb through a remediation process to replace the Conservative-implemented Fiber to the Node boondoggle.
We also have a number of neighbourhoods stuck with HFC (again due to Conservstice sabotage) which while still delivering 100+ Mbit connections - are a bit of a technical dead end and will need to be remediated at some point in the future.
Basically, nbnCo serves as a national broadband wholesaler providing high speed connectivity (100, 250, 500, Gigabit) to something like >95% of the population.
The most remote communities are also serviced either through a fixed wireless option or satellite.
Basically though, unlike the US we don’t have a significant number of people still on dial-up and haven’t had so for a very long time.
We can definitely afford it, especially with LUDs plus federal subsidies. That's literally what they're for.
I’m sure we could afford it from muskrat’s government contracts ( our tax money )
Fiber also has far better performance that satellite can never match.
there's no fundamental physics limitation that makes this true. in fact, light in a vacuum travels faster than in glass fiber, so the theoretical latency of LEO internet is actually faster compared to fiber over a certain distance
For nieve signal distances, that can sometimes be true. That's not how starlink works however. It bounces the signal between satellites, each adding latency. Overall, fibre wins in almost every situation.
The bigger problem is saturation. Most things you can apply to radio waves can be applied to light in a fibre. The difference is you can have multiple fibres on the same run. This massively increases bandwidth, and so prevents congestion.
Just checked the numbers. Starlink is up at 550km. That means a minimum round trip of 1100km. In order to beat a fibre run, you are looking at over 2000km distance. Even halving that to (optimistically) account for angles, that's still a LONG run to an initial data center.
Satellites need to orbit at some distance above the planet though, so the round trip will always be fairly long even for ones with a pretty close orbit.
This makes no sense on the face of it. Let's say the satellites are 100 km (or miles) above the earth. If I was to connect to a server 10 km (or miles) away, my complete route over fiber is 10 km. My complete route over satellite is just over 200 km (assuming it's between those two points). Now, let's say the server is 500 km (we'll assume the earth is flat over this expanse, even though that's about 5° around the earth). So our fiber link has to go 500 km, more or less. Our satellite link has to go about 540 km, best case scenario. If we raise those satellites, it only gets worse (it's probably closer to 860, best case scenario, for satellites at 350 km).
I just did a quick check, and the curvature of the earth over that 500 km scenario is about 20 km (it won't be 20 miles for 500 miles).
Now, you might start to argue that were talking about straight lines, and that's true for satellites but not for fiber. And that might be true. But we've already shown that the hop to space and back is already increasing that distance by 60% or more. But those two or so straight lines are just til you get to the Starlink hub, so you aren't going to reduce this much more than the numbers above. And yes, fiber will have some extra distance due to following the grid rather than straight lines. But, again, that only matters to the ISP hub and then you're back to the same distances.
The other argument you listed is the speed of light in space/atmosphere vs. fiber, and it's a valid point. Not there are some interesting things done with guiding light to the center of the fiber, which is another way of saying there are multiple refractive indexes, but let's go with a refractive index of 1.5. That means the speed of light in glass is 2/3×c, or that light in space can go about 50% farther. And that's about the added distance for using LEO satellites.
tldr: All the benefits of transmitting through air or space are basically negated by the added distance, where the best-case scenario is only slightly better than the worst-case scenario for fiber.
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.
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.
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.
What's wrong with 4g? I live in a rural region and have been using it for years
Unreliable, high latency, slow bandwidth and data caps?
None of the issues you mentioned are 4G issues in itself. Do you realize the sarellite is much further away than 4g tower? It sounds like bad ISP. I have none of said issues. Even gaming is great, getting around 20-30ping on local country servers.
I'm not defending satellites, I'm saying fiber is much superior at all the things I mentioned above.
For me? 40/5 was about the best I could get. Mountains between me and the towers.
Hmmm ditch lightning fast and stable fiber for the mediocre speed and unstable micro satellite internet connection controlled by a petty asshole...
What to do, what to do?
Just think how much control he can have if he owns the medium which people access the internet.
And he'd only do good things with that power /s
I mean, you don’t have to guess. He’s interfered in a war and turned a social network into his personal bullhorn.
"Give me all your money" says world's richest person, in a fit of originality.
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.
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.
4G towers can have 100km radius
Maybe on flat ground under ideal circumstances, but there are plenty of times I go camping just a few km off the main road and the cell signal is completely gone.
Fibre is an investment that can be used and upgraded for decades. Starlink is a subscription service forever to a private company.
And upgrading is piss cheap. Just change transceivers.
Same fiber cable that does 1gbps can do 100tbps.
That's not true... There are different types of fiber with different throughputs depending on the class of the cable and the length of the installation.
It is true.
Multimode (what I think you're trying to reference) isn't used in distance applications at all, it’s only for short in-building links. Anything that your ISP would provide you would be single-mode. Carrier/Backbone is virtually 100% SMF as well. SMF (OS1 and OS2) don't really have a bandwidth cap. It's all transceivers not the fiber.
But the point is that fiber that ALREADY in the ground, you can upgrade simply by changing the transceivers. It doesn't matter the length, SMF/MMF, or anything else... you just get a transceiver rated for the length of run (power of the led/laser, and the optics). The length is irrelevant otherwise as the presumption is that the install in the ground has been shown to work in the past already.
Old standard ITU-G.652 single-mode has been made to push multi-petabit transfers in lab environments. The only change was the transceivers. And to be clear, ITU-G.652 was standardized in 1984. Nobody rips out the fiber from the ground (caveat is that the cable itself hasn't degraded). You just upgrade the optics/transceivers.
source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.01873
Your statement didn't specify an application!
The context of the discussion does...
SpaceX doesn't provide in rack or in-building connectivity.
SpaceX is an ISP. You wouldn't have an ISP running multimode.
ISP's absolutely run multimode. That's how you get fiber into a building or between buildings. Different types of fiber all play a role in a network deployment.
Broad statements are misleading. OM4 multimode won't push 10gb at 500meters no matter how good your hardware is.
Ignoring the context of the discussion is even more misleading. In the context of this conversation, ISPs providing consumer connections and obtaining grant money, my statement is 100% accurate.
You just said multimode can’t do significant speeds at distance, yet claim that buildings separated by distance would be connected with it? That logic doesn’t hold.
Intrabuilding or intrarack Yes, you’ll find multimode fiber occasionally. But even these rare cases are increasingly replaced by single-mode as costs drop and bandwidth needs rise.
Everything else (ISP deployments, backbones, FTTH) Single-mode fiber dominates. I haven’t seen a single ISP deploy multimode for consumer-facing services over a typical network radius (~hundreds of meters to kilometers). The only minor exception is MMF from the building network room to an apartment unit, which is irrelevant for this discussion and would be EXCEEDINGLY rare as most buildings would just copper line to the unit. But even in that case... the 20+km from the head end to the building counts for much more than the 20meters to the unit itself.
For all practical ISP purposes, single-mode fiber is what’s in the ground/on the pole, and upgrades are handled via transceivers, not ripping out the cable.
But just because you said it...
https://www.corning.com/catalog/coc/documents/application-engineering-notes/AEN075.pdf
https://www.fs.com/uk/blog/om4-multimode-fiber-faq-highspeed-connectivity-guide-9499.html
https://www.timbercon.com/resources/calculators/om1-om2-om3-and-om4-fiber/
You absolutely can run OM4 at 10gbps at or over 500m depending on your optics/laser.
But Multimode was never the point of discussion as the whole thread is based around broadband services (virtually none of it serviced by multimode, if any at all) and grant money for rural area coverage. Any fiber upgrade in this scenario will 100% be SMF with no qualifiers. In my past 30 years of IT career all buried and pole mounted fiber is SMF that I've ever seen for an ISP. I can tell you for certainty that ever fiber I've buried in the past 10 years for several companies has been SMF. I'm not even sure that I've touched MMF in the past 5 years even in intra-rack setups, I think I might have gotten some with a government auction win about 8 years ago I wanna say? With costs of SMF at near parity for the cable itself and getting closer every year in the modules... it's a dying form factor and was never really in use for ISP services to begin with.
My fiber ISP runs single mode to my home. And it means it's all single mode on the pole for the neighborhood.
Multimode just isn't used all that much anymore. We replaced all fiber links in our DCs with single mode recently. It's just cheaper, and as the other person said: Its far more future proof.
Technically that's true.
You just need to lay the 100Tb/s capable cable in the first place.
Except StarLink cannot possibly provide the same bandwidth, latency, and throughput a fiber connection can. Because of physics.
I can either share my 10G symmetrical connection with nobody, or with 200 others.
And, Fiber costs me $70 a month. Starlink, with worse performance, costs 4x more.
It's not secure either. The next world war will involve efforts to sabotage satellites.
That's the point. Musk wants control over the entire internet.
If all the other internet infrastructure was abandoned, he would be the most powerful person in history. Want to regulate him afterwards? He could just shut down the internet in your region until you accept his terms.
He has already meddled in the Ukraine war doing things like this, too. He turned off Starlink during an offensive Ukrainian mission. He claims he had to because civilian systems aren't allowed to be used for a foreign incursion into Russia and that he'd face consequences. Which is a complete lie.
This is the number one reason my friend and I refused to even consider StarLink. We don't live in the US and do not want all our traffic going through there.
Pfff, physics, pesky detail! Clearly you are not a true visionary like Musk! /s
Starlink has no answer to dark fiber.
In principle I agree with you, but as a network guy, somewhere, between you and the server you are connected to, the bandwidth is shared. The only question is just where and how much bandwidth (well network throughput) there is to share. I work for a large university and our main datacenter has 10GbE and 25/100GbE connections between all the local machines. But we only have about a 3-5gb connection out to the rest of the world.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’d 100% rather have a symmetrical fiber connection to the ISP than something shared like radio or DOCSIS. I used to live in a neighborhood where everyone had Spectrum and about 5-6 PM the speed would plummet because cable internet is essentially just fancy thinnet all over again. Yes I’m old since I used to set up thinnet :)
PS: I would kill for $70 fiber where I am now. Used to have it but we moved to the sticks and I miss it terribly.
But the difference here is that on a fibre connection the shared portion goes over higher speed trunks which gives you most of that 1Gbps bandwidth. A wireless connection has a limited number of slices in the same band that it can share.
It's the same issue with too many people on a single WiFi connection.
Yep very true.
To me the main benefit of the direct fiber connection is the symmetry. With cable here I’m “supposed” to get “up to” 1000mbs down but my upload speed is at best 40. Moving large files back and forth to work is very painful.
Man, you get 40 up? I'm stuck on 30 up. And the funny thing is that just on the other side of the creek on the other side of my street is where they stopped the fibre rollout.
Technically correct. The best kind of correct ;). He should have said not sharing that last mile connection, like one would share with a satellite downlink.
That's good for Starlink and all other ISPs, intuitively, the less internet people have, the more they will pay for more, simple supply and demand !
The best financial move for SpaceX and Starlink would be to have a few "unfortunate accidents" where tesla crash into telephone poles which happen to also hold critical fiber junctions.
Now that is profit driven innovation !
Starlink is 120/mo. Over the past 30 days my average DL is 144Mb, UL 18Mb, with a 27ms ping. It suuuuuuuuuuuuucks, but the only other option is a literal 4Mb DSL for 80$/mo
And, wait until Starlink hits saturation... Your speeds will be 1mb down, 300kb up, and latency hitting 100ms...
You're only benefiting from early adoption at this time. It can only get worse the more they onboard.
How much for install?
Dish, router, and long ass cable was on sale for 300. Another 70 for a roof bracket if memory serves.
TIL 120 is 4 x 70....
Edit to add everything below this line
Downvotes for facts. I pay 120/mo. It's either this, 3Mbps DSL, or T-Mobile home 5G that works when it feels like it.
lol. I thought those commas were decimals for a second. Wow.
I'd rather have fiber, too. But until it's available here, this is the next best thing.
You lack individual choice by design. You should choose whatever is best for you, obviously, but you can be pissed there’s no fiber running alongside your electricity service.
So, not 4x, but 2x.
BTW, did you know HughesNet is cheaper, and works just as well. Or, it will work just as well once Starlink reaches the saturation HughesNet faces.
Physics says otherwise.
Geostationary orbit, which is where hughesnet satellites are, is approximately 22 THOUSAND miles away.
That's a round trip of 44 thousand miles.
That's a ping time of 236ms just for the satellite connection, before any other connections are added in.
That's worse than my dialup latency was in the 90s
Meanwhile, my Starlink ping averages less than 40ms, because these satellites are MUCH MUCH closer.
Wonder how your starlink will work once it reaches it's peak market saturation?
It's cute that you're worried about me. But it's still better than whatever else is currently available at my house. And it will always be better than anything using geostationary orbit.
Going from the most secure, hard wired formats to a con man's satellites would be a fatal error. Any sort of military conflict and the network is all down, atleast broadband keeps secure networks intact.
Gotta gear up for America's century of humiliation.
Just have a look at what's going on in ukraine. Once they started using drones, the drone were attacked through their wireless connections. Now they trail fiber optic cables for control. What does that say about the relative reliability and security?
Fiber fucking rules
A society grows great when old men plant fiber whose speed they know they shall never download from.
One day he's gonna get assassinated and it will be a global holiday
You'd be instantly banned on reddit for this comment lol
Which is why I’m here and not there. It’s the internet: I hope nobody posts their hot takes! Reddit needs to lighten up. Or even better, fuck off.
i like the alternative saying
it's vague and passive enough that you have plausible deniability, but the meaning is clear. plus I like the poetry of it.
Some of us were already banned for such comments, but now we are here being bloodthirsty dickheads. I want to put Musks head in a vice and tighten it till the two plates are dry.
That’s just ridiculous. The suffering he has inflicted on the rest of the world will be felt for a very long time. Crushing his head would get him out of those consequences.
Why not something more drawn out?
I say we fit him with an explosive collar and any time his asset valuation exceeds, let’s say 350% of the federal poverty guideline, its starts screaming an alarm. He would then have 2 hours to reduce his asset valuation or it explodes.
I would say he should to live as a poor person in the US forever but honestly, the idea of him balancing a bank account like the rest of us is more entertaining.
I’m going to start the celebration from now
I should buy some fireworks
ding dong the witch is dead
That was fast.
We should always celebrate whenever male supremacists meet their demise. People who use the term “misandry” unironically, for example.
Bigot rhetoric
Lmao maybe from the point of view of a traitor who deserves prison time.
Sexist bigots don't have valid ideologies.
You're almost indistinguishable from a male incel.
Seek therapy.
Traitor: male supremacy is good
Decent: no it is not
Traitor: you’re a sexist bigot
Publicly funded fibre can be provider agnostic. Starlink can't. Unless Musk is arguing for the nationalization of Starlink, which frankly I could get behind.
We paid for it, it should be nationalized. But they only ever socialize their losses, the profits are private.
Technically, S0aceX should be nationalized by the US based on the volume of money they've received in contacts.
American taxpayers paid for both Starlink and Space X. Overpaid, actually, that's why he's the richest man in the world. None of his businesses are profitable, he just skims hundreds of billions off the enormous government grants he gets.
Since we overpaid for that tech, we should just confiscate it from him. He can be thankful that he doesn't go to prison for misappropriating government funds.
He can keep Tesla. It'll be bankrupt in 2 years anyway.
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.
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.
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.
Obvious thing to say in the land of self-interest.
This country is so cooked
I got a better idea: a civil war against oligarchs
"Oligarch mouthpiece demands diverting of major public funds to oligarchs instead"
Story of America, really.
Honestly, I think starlink is a fantastic idea in general, but this is clearly bullshit. Starlink works well in tandem with fiber, not as a replacement.
It's just never going to be as cost effective as installed fiber. Fiber is obviously the right technology to use in heavily populated areas i.e. for the vast majority of Internet users. And where the population is sparse and laying fiber for individual customers is cost prohibitive, that is where satellite connectivity shines. If SpaceX or anyone else is pretending otherwise, they're being blatantly deceitful and malicious. That's not in Internet users' best interest.
As fiber is rolled out more, i see less and less why it would be cost prohibitive?
All you need to do to connect a remote place is lay a cable. More expensive if you need dig a trench and put the cable in there. But if it can be done for electricity it can be done for fiber.
Well the companies that want to lay fiber aren't always the same ones who own the telephone poles. If they have to pay for that, that adds to costs.
Also, above ground cables are more exposed and need to be repaired more frequently. Falling trees can sever cables and simply swinging in the wind puts more wear on the cables over time. All together, it means that burying cables is more cost effective in the long term, but present higher upfront costs. Whereas above ground cables are cheaper upfront, but more expensive over time.
The high upfront costs are the bigger deal, but in general, they just don't want to lay a mile of cable for a couple of users, regardless of how they're doing it.
lets get down to the real reason he wants to do this. he would be able to turn off connection for millions if they piss him off, or hand over the data to said political actors like putin or trump, also to manipulate future elections like he did last time.
It doesn't even work well in tandem.
Starlink has a single benefit going for it right now: Lack of uptake.
They only have a swath of spectrum, and that has a physical upper limit to how much information it can carry, in total. So does fiber. But, Starlink gets to share that with all users (Much like how cable internet works, its shared bandwidth for everyone on the loop). Fiber, you get your dedicated pipe.
This isn't even getting to view obstruction (A plane will cause a drop out), latency, jitter, etc. These are all physics problem that just cannot be solved without violating the laws of physics. Latency, at a minimum, is 2.6 ms, and that's just for the first leg.
It's crazy to say it doesn't work well in tandem... I mean, it's demonstrable, If it didn't work, people wouldn't use it, but they do. And there is no other way to reach users in some places. Starlink can reach users that only a long range wireless solution can work for. There are some other long range wireless solutions, but this one does work.
Look, I don't like Elon, I don't like monopolies, I'm not a secret shill for SpaceX, but I can admit the truth right in front of me. You don't have to stretch the truth to say Starlink isn't a good system for the vast majority of people, so why do it? Why create a false narrative? Why get all defensive about a technology?
And finally, I do not see any reason to care about an extra 5 ms latency.
There is, if we decided to instead of giving Elon billions every few months, we used that money to expand the fiber networks.
There are myriad technology solutions that are both viable, and already being used. Capitalism means we don't deploy them. Oligarchy means we instead choose to do things that are more expensive, but happen to benefit a friendly oligarch.
Except, it isn't. Its just the one with the hype.
Some people live in places that aren't connected to large electrical grids, they have local generation and micro grids for a small community. Isolated mountains or small islands, or deserts are good examples of these situations. So if connecting to the electrical grid wasn't realistic I'm willing to bet that a fiber connection also isn't realistic.
It's hard to believe you think fiber can work for literally everything. I really don't know why you're bothering to dig in on this issue, it's so easy to prove otherwise. I hadn't even mentioned the use case of vehicles yet, boats, planes, trains, trucks, campers, obviously you can't run fiber to a vehicle. Or truly remote locations where people don't live, but researches work there, Antarctic bases, etc.
Also, I think you misunderstood my last line. I'm saying Starlink isn't right for most people. I'm just not making things up to say that.
If fiber isn't possible due to electrical grids being non-existent... A power hungry sat transceiver will likely be a non-starter, too.
I don't think it can. I also don't think Starlink can work for literally everything, either. There are better, and faster, and cheaper solutions like Microwave backhauls and cellular data service for the last mile.
Boats are the one outlier here, that cannot be reach via cell service, with a fraction of the cost of Starlink. And sure, boats can use it, and boats should pay the full cost of the package. No need for government money to fund them, they didn't need it before, and don't need it now. Boaters were quite satisfied paying their Iridium bills in the past.
In France they authorised air hanging fiber, so they just use electric poles and hang the fiber under the 220 volt lines, as a last resort.
Cheap as hell. Or, where there's a will there is a way.
We do this in some parts of America too. My grandmother’s local electric co-op provided fiber to her house this way in the middle of no where.
Starlink still requires ground stations, and those ground stations can and are a limiting factor. I was up at a cabin that had Starlink, and service is still in the "better than nothing" phase.
There is concern for fucking up things like radio telescopes. Also, creating a Kessler syndrome event. "But LEO wouldn't have an issue with that because it would burn up". Two things:
Plus, the EU and China are understandably worried about Musk being the only game up there and want to deploy their own equivalent systems. So now there's not just one system of satellites threatening Kessler syndrome, but possibly three.
Just roll out fiber everywhere like we have with electricity.
While it is possible for objects in orbit to be knocked into a higher orbit, it's certainly not common. It basically requires a collision with another object in a highly elliptical orbit, this is not a kind of orbit we use very often.
Also, these low orbit constellations are simply nowhere near the majority of satellites, up in geostationary orbit. It's not realistic to imagine any debris from LEO ever reaching GSO, the distance between is just too vast. In general, Kessler syndrome would only extend downward from higher orbit, extending up to a higher orbit would be extremely unlikely.
Also, while astronauts could die, we keep enough emergency escape vehicles docked for the entire iss crew. NASA is full of smart people and they're generally risk adverse these days, I don't think anyone would die, but it would certainly be a shame to evacuate the iss.
This is in fact a worrying situation. Not because I think Kesler syndrome is a realistic concern, but because there's only so much space in low earth orbit. I really don't like one company having a monopoly on low orbit communications, but having layers and layers of satellite constellations also seems like a dangerous situation.
I'm all for that in theory, but whenever we dedicate funds to that cause... telecoms just walk away with it. If the US isn't interested in holding them accountable, I don't really see any reason to throw more money their way. That said, Starlink is doing fine, I see no reason to throw money at them either.
Fiber all the way, especially if it is owned by the community. That would simply ensure that Musk nor TelCos can't fuck around with people. Fast speed, no data caps, low prices, and not being at the mercy of some wealthy jackhole would be wins across the board.
Also, if America has a 2nd Civil War, fiber will be much more safe than relying on sats - those can be shot down, or worse, Musk can cut off the good guys from having internet. It is simply harder to sabotage if the wires are underground and cannot be readily seen by hostile actors. As seen in Ukraine, the fucker has absolutely no compunctions against disabling the internet at key moments.
"fiber will be much more safe than relying on sats"
Spoken like someone who has never had some idiot in a backhoe chop a fiber bundle...multiple times in a week.
We have a saying in IT. Always carry a 1ft section of single-mode fiberoptic when hiking. If you ever get lost, just bury that sucker and some dipshit in a backhoe will be out there in a hour to cut it in half.
And, when it happens, it generally gets repaired in hours. You cannot launch a new constellation in hours.
True, but your're comparing a single fiber optic line to an entire network of satellites. Blow up one, and they simply route traffic around it. Blow up 10, and you might have a small moving deadzone that removes service for a few minutes.
If you want to compare accurately, look at the time it takes to replace the cable infrastructure for an entire nation vs the time it takes to relaunch all the star link satellites. We started using satellites in the first place because it was the fastest (and in many cases, cheapest) way to get TV coverage anywhere on the planet.
You understand EMPs wouldn't affect one sat, right? Or a capture net can hit an entire train?
That can, and has been done in a couple of weeks. It happens somewhat regularly.
https://www.leadventgrp.com/blog/submarine-cable-damage-and-repair-claims-and-remedial-measures
10-20 days to launch a repair crew, and another week to affect the repair. At a few hundred million in costs.
A single rocket launch it minimally a year of planning. And BILLIONS in costs.
Well, yes, because they are placed in a high orbit (Not LEO) generally, in order to cover massive patterns with ONE WAY signalling (Aside from the one uplink).
This is a host of difference between myriad 2-way ground stations.
https://www.leadventgrp.com/blog/submarine-cable-damage-and-repair-claims-and-remedial-measures
Whoops, there you go again comparing the impact and resolution of a single cable to an entire national network.
That's... um... how it works? It's generally one, maybe two, cables connecting continents: https://dabrownstein.com/2015/06/30/charting-interconnectedness-in-undersea-internet-cables/
I mean, some continents, like the US, have myriad cables connecting. And purposefully sabotaging these is almost as challenging as repairing them.
So, generally, "nations" are not connected via undersea cables, continents are.
So, yes, repairing one, maybe two, would be reconnecting an entire national network. Which is STILL cheaper than replacing a mass of Starlink sats... Which, btw, need replacing routinely anyways, because their orbits decay purposefully.
So, every 5 years, we need spend tens of billions to launch another set of trains, just to have them fall into the ocean after 5 years of service. Just to obtain a service that is cheaper, and doesn't require nearly as much regular investment if we just used fiber.
https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html
I get the feeling you don't understand the economics, physics, and infrastructure of various connectivity systems. And, you also don't understand that without connected ground stations, served by those "at risk fiber networks on the ground" (That you purport as very risky), Starlink doesn't work, either.
You are comparing a backbone to last mile? Starlink relies on that fiber backbone too. Cutting all the last mile fiber in America would be an insanely difficult attack. Satellites are comparatively vulnerable to a great many attacks. They literally fly over the enemy.
I think you didn't quite understand. I'm not talking about just undersea cables. An accurate comparison for the impact of blowing up the entire Starlink constellation would be to remove ALL the fiber optic cables in an entire nation, not just the undersea cables. That is a more accurate comparison.
I may not have an expert level of economic knowledge, but the fact that Starlink exists and it can provide better service than rural broadband programs or the extensive terrestrial mobile broadband networks (which still use satellites BTW) is a pretty good indicator that it is viable.
Frankly this entire statement is insulting, and you should retract it.
So, just to clarify, are you in favor of replacing all fiber with Starlink?
Nope. But I think it would faster and easier to replace all fiber with Starlink than it would to replace all fiber with fiber again.
Okay, so to clarify, are you in favor of ending all new fiber installation projects in favor of Starlink?
No. That's not what I said. Please stop trying to frame this like I am pro-starlink. I'm not.
I'm just trying to understand why this argument is even happening.
You seem to basically agree with them. What's even the point?
This statement is not correct. It is the topic being discussed. Fiber network are more vulnerable than satellite networks. It takes specialized weapons to take out a single satellite link. Any idiot with wire clippers can take out a fiber link, and it happens all the time. Fiber networks are more difficult to replace at scale than a satellite network, and individuals links are more important to fiber network than they are to satellite networks.
And blockchain DNS?
Nah we don't support nazis
glances at the state of the nation
What would things look like if we did?
Isn’t there an army walking the national capital, and masked goons grabbing people off the street into unmarked vans paid for with a budget /almost/ as big as Canada’s entire military?
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.
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.
You know I'm starting to suspect that maybe corporations don't have our best interests in mind....
While you’re correct and I agree, they REALLY shouldn’t do whatever Elon wants.
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.
No fucking thanks. Gigabit+ fiber > Nazi-ass satellite internet that doesn’t have even remotely near the needed bandwidth for actual dense population centers.
Alternative Headline: Billionaire Signals States Should Speed Fiber Rollout
Wireless data transmission should only ever be used for nomadic, temporary, and/or sacrificial links.
They’re useful for quick deployment, but are intrinsically brittle and terrible for resiliency and efficiency.
The longer the dependence on them for a given use case, the less defensible arguments in support of them become.
I’m all for the use of satellite delivery of internet services, but only when it’s used in conjunction with a broader roll out of hardwired infrastructure, at which point it can reasonably be relegated to serving as a secondary, backup diverse path.
Cory Doctorow described it as anti-futuristic tech. Where fiber networks get better, faster, and cheaper the denser they get, wireless satellite will get slower and less reliable the more people share that spectrum.
Fuck off and give me the fiber that was promised and paid for decades ago.
It shouldn’t be all or nothing. It should be diversified.
Yeah, there are rural locations where Starlink makes sense but also there are a lot of urban places that it would never work in.
Problem with Starlink is that the satellites need to be replaced every 5 years or so.
That, and if they could pull heavy copper wiring to the furthest rural reaches of the country in the 1930s, they can pull fiber along side it today. The poles and right of way is already there. Satellite is a fine stop-gap while it gets done, but there’s no excuse for it to be the permanent solution.
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.
Yeah, I can’t imagine a medium sized town all using Starlink at once without issues.
Read this quick before the people selling generators get it buried: https://www.wtsp.com/article/money/consumer/south-tampa-generators-fail-during-hurricanes-teco-peoples-gas/67-144d70da-bb27-496c-8928-ab7e61a53b00
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...
Keeping the electrical grid balanced with varying loads is so hard I’m amazed it works at all.
It's something that's only possible because of the scale a grid works on. It also helps to have generation like hydro, which can ramp up and down very fast.
I believe Florida's recent build-out of utility scale natural gas plants is driven, in part, by their ability to ramp up and down virtually instantly.
However, the linked story is about a residential neighborhood where lots of homeowners installed individual natural gas powered generators for their homes. Then, when the public grid failed in a hurricane, they all switched on their "whole home, natural gas powered" generators at once for the first time and the natural gas supply to the neighborhood was nowhere near up to the task of delivering all that fuel at that rate.
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 (non online gamer) 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.
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.
Heh yep, in fact they're not lasting as long as they were supposed to.
Starlink is definitely faster than all but the most expensive GEO services (and those require specialized hardware)
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.
How about no
How about we take down every starlink satellite so NASA can operate unabated, and our telescopes aren't interfered with.
I've been WFH for at least 10 years and live in rural area. Starlink was like 150-200$ a month for an unpredictable 5-150mbps and did meh. When I finally got fiber it was sub 100$ a month for 2gbps stable. Not a hard decision :)
Remember how Elon Musk conned Vegas out of millions with the hyperloop.
Satellite internet is not the future; it's cell internet.
Physical lines first.
We already have physical lines.
Businesses and governments aren't going to invest in digging and laying down more cables to give people in rural America access to fiber. They're already reluctant to do it for major cities.
They actually have invested multiple times. Problem is the companies they give the money to just pocket it and don't update their infrastructure. Give this money to the local community or coop owned fiber operators. Stop giving money to these huge corps that don't need it and fund the small coop and community run fiber operators.
Fibre deployment is getting cheaper and easier. Both in terms of cost of materials and in the equipment and labour skills.
It's also much more secure from interference and disruption.
For populated areas, there's zero justification to rollout wireless over fibre lines. And most major cities already have fibre in most, or many, areas. And the thing with fibre is that the physical lines can be used to deploy faster speeds with upgraded endpoints.
Tech bros would have you think physical connections aren't a good choice anymore, because laying down fibre isn't sexy enough for that VC money.
Ok.
What about everyone else?
It's still worthwhile.
Who's going to pay for it?
Where? In the US? It's already been paid for multiple times over, through government grants and subsidies.
Conned them and then Nashville, I think it is, is also paying him for it. True stupid, the US isn’t a country of learners, it seems.
To quote Dan Harmon out of context: "If you ask a toaster, "What's the most important thing in the world?" it's going to tell you, "Bread." And if you ask a toaster its opinion of bread, it's going to tell you, "It's not toasted enough."
On one hand, Musk.
On the other hand... Telecos.
You can either give billions more to the world's richest asshole, or you can give billions to companies that already received that money last time and did absolutely fuckall with it.
Lose-lose
I mean there is a third option: municipal fiber
But then the gub’ment is your ISP but at least it’s not making billionaires money.
I’d suggest the best case scenario to me would be a fourth option like a community run co-op of fiber to the premises and have it be grant funded. But who am I kidding, that’s almost to socialist for rural America like where I live.
Fourth option: Municipal fiber, but open access to those lines for private ISPs of all types.
Third option: municipal fibre
Thats illegal most placss.
So twice as cool as well as functionally superior.
I should really read before I post… :)
Not really. Most of the rural plans in the US are run by utilities companies that are local.
That will work out as well as the death tunnel (formerly hyperlink)
Business owned by greedy manbaby says to give money to business also owned by greedy manbaby. Hmmm....
Don’t forget Nazi
SpaceX can fuck right off with that plan.
Musk = POS Nazi.
I’m so glad other countries are coming up with their own satellites just for the expressed interest to boycott musk.
No, please no
We don't need thousands of satellites to provide internet, the entire idea and design of Starlink is utterly stupid.
I can look up at the sky not and see stars and... Those fucking star link satellites.
We're already close enough to a Kessler effect scenario without adding thousands of satellites, and with governments world wide now ready to just shoot satellites (seriously, can everyone please stop voting for dumb fucks while we're at it?) can we please PLEASE stop this?
Just use fiber internet or where not possible, use geostationary satellites. We don't need semi low latency everywhere
There are areas of the planet where there is no signal or fibre. Clearly as you and I are capable of posting on an online social; you and I are not in one of these dead spots but they do exist. And some of these areas have to exist in order to provide sustainable lifestyle for the other more built up areas (farmland gets left in the dark much of the time)
Just something to think about before you run around running your mouth talking down with privilege of where you’re speaking about it.
And before you even utter the phrase ‘they should…’ or ‘someone should’
No. Stop. You first. you’re someone. You up end your life and go live there and fix it ‘sustainably’ and bump into all the problems with your online solutions and work it out and fix it before you talk about what everyone else should be doing in areas and lifestyles you don’t care to exist in enough to empathize or understand yet still benefit from.
And why is it only a problem with OTHER COUNTRIES do it while you sit there mute as musk does it?? So it’s all ok that he does it under the name of capitalism but should any other country act in their own agency you suddenly get all crunchy about it?
No. Absolutely not buying this ‘ok for me but not ok for thee’ bull rap.
So, we should take the billions per train launch, and install microwave backhauls and cellular service to cover those dead zones.
If they have electricity, than fiber is practical. For the tiny few that don’t, fine. But even then, for the billions invested in launching these satellite clusters, it just might be cheaper to build a handful of crazy long terrestrial microwave links.
Telsat Lightspeed, from the Canadian company that invented commercial domestic satellite communications in 1971.
Kessler syndrome here we come!
Ok then Go yell at musk about it.
Why? That won't accomplish much.
I just want people to know we are Fucked. This stupid fucking satellite Internet race is going to destroy Earth's orbital infrastructure.
Oh hell no. Fuck off with this won’t stand up to the bully but will stand on everyone else you think you can bully bullshit.
You are being the exact reason we are fucked.
Coward.
We have to stand up together, there's literally nothing I can do by myself. That's why I need to let people know, so they stand with me.
I'm sorry if you feel like you're being bullied.
I would burn the money before giving it to the nazi
I say that Emma Stone should divorce her husband and marry me instead.
Low orbit satellites will never replace fiber because physics of latency, bandwidth and error correction.
As far as things go today well never need less fiber. Even if we cover the sky with satellites eventually we'd need to upgrade to fiber because its literally impossible to beat. Except for scifi tech like quantum entanglement networks which might not even be possible or practical and wouldn't need the satelites anyway.
As an infrastructure bet it makes absolutely zero sense except for covering rare niches like war zones or oceans.
Fiber is like rail transport for the internet: expensive, high throughput infrastructure along a defined path. But when it's already there, it's very hard to beat.
Oh right, Musk stopped the discussion of proposed rail expansion with his Boring tunnels and Hyperloop, now he is doing the same thing to the internet.
The trouble with starlink is that the actual amazingly practical use-cases for it are not a sufficiently profitable market for it given the insane investment. So they have to convince people it’s a better idea as a rural ISP than demanding fiber.
What's dumb about this statement is all Elon would have to do is market to all the places where broadband companies refuse to go and be affordable. tRump already killed the rural broadband initiatives. There's literally no competition and word-of-mouth could probably pull in more who are unhappy with their broadband provider.
However, capitalism and greed are cancers that know no limit...
Like cancer, greed doesn't know that it is killing its host.
I sure am sick of super fast, stable internet connections. Let’s all get something that fucks up when it’s cloudy.
That's a dumb ass idea, and I'm literally on Starlink right now
Here's a better idea: nationalize SpaceX and tell Musk to go fuck himself first. Not going to happen? Then no grant money.
We should also dump passenger trains for...electric car tunnels?
Goat says garden needs more carrots.
You cannot actually serve hundreds of millions in the US even if you invested the 75B it would cost to give every household a satellite it just can't support the bandwidth.
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.
Fuck. That.
SpaceX can suck my ass
katy says spacex should go fuck themselves and go bankrupt
Yes. Lets tie our expansion of desperately needed internet access in rural America to massively carbon emitting rocket launches. Thats definitely not gonna back fire on us.
Musk is still hitting the special K.
Gee, I wonder why they would do that.
Yeah, please..... give me shitty satellite internet instead of a fast fiber line...
No
Weird, that sounds anti-competitive.
Of course. In a month or two he can tell trump Dem statez are stupid and he should force them to do that.
While trump looks down and says "don't take it out of your mouth again"
"Humans should give me chicken" says Cat.
They’re welcome to say that, as long as their ruler doesn’t enter the political or policy arena and have the moral depravity to act despite a conflict of interest. As long as corporations don’t have undue influence on politics from lobbying or donations.
We don’t have to listen.
Our representatives should be representing us. ….. alright alright you can stop laughing now
A bunch starlink modems in an area can overload or whatever the nearby satellite. This is not feasible in its current form.
Hey uh Musk how's that there hyperloop comin'?
Well I say starlink and f'elon can suck my ass.
Lol, lmao even
do they know what competing is? fiber is much cheaper, stablier, offers less latency and more speed.
lol. Of course it does.
Did you post all three of these via Starlink?
Nah. My instance was having issues for some reason.
If Intel has to give the US government 5%, Starlink should have to give back 25%.
SpaceX can suck my cock including the biggest welfare queen Elon Musk.
The term "tech neutral' brings back terrible memories of the conservative Liberal successful campaign in #auspol against the #NBN (national broadband network) 😞
https://paulbudde.com/blog/nbn-ftth-broadband/the-coalitions-nbn-failure-political-sabotage-and-the-threat-of-privatisation-continues/
SpaceX should deliver the service and access at the cost given and complete before the fiber team put a shovel in that ground.
what do you mean fiber "plans"? do you guys not have fiber?
Nope... i don't have cable or even great cell service and I live 45 minutes from a major city. Current ETA on fiber is mid 26.
oh my god... I can't believe I'm still getting surprised by how terrible things are in the US. it is the richest, poorest country.
EDIT: holy shit i just saw a 2019 OECD report that says the us had less than 20% of its fixed internet users connected by fiber which is way below the average for the 37 countries studied in the report, which was 27%.
funny thing is i remember reading about this very report in a news article, which was about how my country was way below the average; noting countries like japan, south korea and a bunch of european countries had above 50%. but i think the number for my country was something like 22%. we're not even in the EU and we had higher coverage than the US? that's crazy.
America.... where speech is money and regulatory capture is the norm. Also, fuck Elon for having the ONLY viable alternative for someone who works from home. I can't wait for the day I can light that dish on fire.
HahahahahaHHAHAHAAHSHAHAHAHDHDGF Country wide fiber in the US?? Think of the local monopolies gouging hundreds of dollars out of you for what amounts to dial up compared to fibre! Do you expect them to upgrade their infrastructure when they can do nothing and continue to make money??
I live in a backwater northern U.K. town. We have fibre. I’d have thought somewhere like USA was rolling it out to most places.
That's insane.
Yeah, because all the gamers love to play online with a 3 second latency.
Those dial up days on avp2 were peak gaming though. I don't want them to return, but I remember those days very well.