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Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

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Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#171

Post by scottyah »

moduspol wrote: post #136
devin wrote: post #126

I've written it elsewhere, but: it is such a shame that the United States saw fit to run electricity _everywhere_, no matter how rural your location, but instead of do the same for rural internet we had to wait for... a private company to launch a global network of satellites. Yes, this post is about internet access while traveling 500mph, which is a different problem, but it is so messed up that people fall over the…

Eh, I think we'll look back on this in 10-20 years and conclude that wireless transmission was always going to make more sense than running millions of miles of wires. Especially so for rural access.

Wired will definitely be the rich, elite way to go.

Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#172

Post by strbean »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #162
strbean wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is very short-sighted, on the order of "Why should we subsidize package / letter delivery to people in the sticks?" The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself.

> "Why should we subsidize package / letter delivery to people in the sticks?" Good point, it doesn't make much sense to do that either. > The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself. Or , we could zone areas to encourage people to live in towns where it's feasible for both corporations and the governme…

> Or, we could zone areas to encourage people to live in towns where it's feasible for both corporations and the government to provide infrastructure and services at a reasonable cost.

This is assuming there isn't a good reason why we might want some percentage of the population to be rural. To have farms and ranches, for example.

Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#173

Post by sysguest »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #150
devin wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buddy, many of the people who are being served by Starlink are by no means "very" rural at all. If you get into "lives in a shack in the mountains", then sure I agree, but a HUGE number of people are barely outside of an immediate service area and have no access for one dumb reason or another. This is a demonstration of the failure of our country to do simple, pragmatic things that would benefit our citizens' lives.…

Generally speaking, private companies want to make money by getting customers. Obviously there can be edge cases, but if there's profit to be made by hooking people up, they'll want to do it, and if private companies don't want to get more customers, you have to ask yourself some hard questions about why. I think we both know what's usually happening: people in an area who, as a whole, are rural enough and poor enoug…

this

people here don't understand how large USA is -- connecting every corner with copper/fiber, with all the intermediary networking devices means tax money...

Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#174

Post by sysguest »

hdgvhicv wrote: post #167
iknowstuff wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in the United States can choose to live in very rural and sparsely populated areas, far more remote than most OECD countries. It’s not clear to me that we should necessarily massively subsidize their choice to live in the sticks these days. Starlink and 5G are great for this, as is solar energy and batteries. We already subsidize sprawl’s expensive-per-person infrastructure with tax revenue from dense cities.…

If you’re on the electric grid why can’t you be on a fibre grid.

well for electric grid, you only need "local" connections -- eg. just your town and the generator...

Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#175

Post by throw__away7391 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #162
strbean wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is very short-sighted, on the order of "Why should we subsidize package / letter delivery to people in the sticks?" The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself.

> "Why should we subsidize package / letter delivery to people in the sticks?" Good point, it doesn't make much sense to do that either. > The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself. Or , we could zone areas to encourage people to live in towns where it's feasible for both corporations and the governme…

The situation with the electric grid is pretty crazy. The cost to supply power to houses in sparsely populated communities is orders of magnitude higher than urban apartments. Not just the power infrastructure itself but all sorts of little ongoing things like maintenance visits, as well as losses from transmission and distribution. I worked on smart grid systems and getting apartment buildings online was a piece of cake, with one simple connection handling multiple buildings with hundreds of meters, meanwhile suburban homes required much more expensive equipment that was more difficult for technicians to install and serviced only a handful of homes. Everyone talks about this as if these were humble shacks out in the boonies but the bulk of these service points are suburban McMansions built on cheap land at the margins of the cities. Broadly speaking this results is poorer ratepayers significantly subsidizing services for wealthier ones.

Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#176

Post by nativeit »

htx80nerd wrote: post #56
nativeit wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few more words: they’re struggling to find a niche where their ungodly expensive product makes more sense than the readily available alternatives. In this case, fair play it’s objectively better.

>A few more words: they’re struggling to find a niche where their ungodly expensive product makes more sense than the readily available alternatives pretty obvious you never worked for an ISP and forgot about all the `middle of nowhere` customers who have no high speed internet. even for me, in houston texas, we cant get fiber to the home and were stuck with AT&T DSL which was like $60 per month and ungodly slow. Als…

I apologize for the initial ambiguous snippy comment.

I'm an I.T. consultant in N. Carolina, and I've worked in very rural areas setting up connectivity for farms. Indeed, I have recommended StarLink on at least two occasions, albeit in concert with 4G/5G cellular (bad weather remains a problem). StarLink sounds great for airlines, RV's, boats, base camps, disaster relief--but those are almost all examples where affordability aren't usually high priorities, and I'm not sure if it's significantly better than upgrading geostationary satellite tech.

I do firmly believe that StarLink is, at best, a flawed solution to the largely solvable problem in the context of rural broadband access. We very recently had federal programs and funding to advance cable/fiber rural broadband services, but it was so weighed down with bureaucratic cruft that basically nothing got done. I dunno if that specific provision of Biden's infrastructure bill remains law, but I'm pretty sure it ceased being a priority after the last election (not for nothing, StarLink had plenty to gain by those federal programs dying, although I have no direct knowledge that Musk, DOGE, et al made any direct moves to stop it--I think it was mainly the shite implementation/execution by the Biden administration).

So "readily available" in the sense of "we could do it at any time, and it would be a helluva lot cheaper and more durable than continuously launching hundreds of satellites into LEO". Poor choice of words on my part, and even still I'm sure there's still plenty to disagree with there.

Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#177

Post by nativeit »

nradov wrote: post #101
kdkdkrjrj wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair: this is an america regulatory capture problem.

Regulatory capture is only a secondary reason why many parts of the USA still lack cheap, reliable broadband Internet access. It turns out that running fiber everywhere is expensive, and in some areas the potential customer base doesn't justify the cost.

We do a lot of things that require subsidizing, very much including the things commonly found in/around a lot of the rural farms where these services would target. If broadband internet access is a fundamental need for contemporary communication--much like the postal service, telegraph, and telephones were--then historically we do what's necessary to provide them.

Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#178

Post by poulsbohemian »

iknowstuff wrote: post #127
devin wrote: post #126

I've written it elsewhere, but: it is such a shame that the United States saw fit to run electricity _everywhere_, no matter how rural your location, but instead of do the same for rural internet we had to wait for... a private company to launch a global network of satellites. Yes, this post is about internet access while traveling 500mph, which is a different problem, but it is so messed up that people fall over the…

People in the United States can choose to live in very rural and sparsely populated areas, far more remote than most OECD countries. It’s not clear to me that we should necessarily massively subsidize their choice to live in the sticks these days. Starlink and 5G are great for this, as is solar energy and batteries. We already subsidize sprawl’s expensive-per-person infrastructure with tax revenue from dense cities.…

>It’s not clear to me that we should necessarily massively subsidize their choice to live in the sticks these days.

Last year I had a chance to talk to Gregg Coburn, author of Homelessness is a Housing Problem. We agreed that remote work and improved public transportation were the real solutions to many of our housing problems, allowing greater distribution of population back into more rural areas. This is an area where rural broadband investment could make a difference. Likewise, when we talk about American competitiveness in manufacturing et al, that isn't going to happen in our cities, but rather in more rural areas.

Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#179

Post by jjmarr »

iknowstuff wrote: post #127
devin wrote: post #126

I've written it elsewhere, but: it is such a shame that the United States saw fit to run electricity _everywhere_, no matter how rural your location, but instead of do the same for rural internet we had to wait for... a private company to launch a global network of satellites. Yes, this post is about internet access while traveling 500mph, which is a different problem, but it is so messed up that people fall over the…

People in the United States can choose to live in very rural and sparsely populated areas, far more remote than most OECD countries. It’s not clear to me that we should necessarily massively subsidize their choice to live in the sticks these days. Starlink and 5G are great for this, as is solar energy and batteries. We already subsidize sprawl’s expensive-per-person infrastructure with tax revenue from dense cities.…

Countries subsidize rural living because it enforces their control over the frontier.

The United States is difficult to invade because of the oceans surrounding it and the many people with guns in the interior that'll take shots at armies.

If you put everyone in a few cities on the coast, the USA becomes easier to invade.

Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#180

Post by performative »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #178
iknowstuff wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in the United States can choose to live in very rural and sparsely populated areas, far more remote than most OECD countries. It’s not clear to me that we should necessarily massively subsidize their choice to live in the sticks these days. Starlink and 5G are great for this, as is solar energy and batteries. We already subsidize sprawl’s expensive-per-person infrastructure with tax revenue from dense cities.…

>It’s not clear to me that we should necessarily massively subsidize their choice to live in the sticks these days. Last year I had a chance to talk to Gregg Coburn, author of Homelessness is a Housing Problem. We agreed that remote work and improved public transportation were the real solutions to many of our housing problems, allowing greater distribution of population back into more rural areas. This is an area wh…

other than introducing public policy to encourage building more housing, i assume?
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