Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 399 posts

Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#321

Post by wooger »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #138
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.…

Some people will be really mad about this comment, but it's absolutely correct. Broadly speaking, very rural living is generally a lifestyle choice. Yes, not everyone can afford to live in big cities, but there are typically small towns in the general vicinity of rural areas that are quite affordable. Of course, there are exceptions where you truly need the space, like if you're a farmer, but that's not most people i…

Being a farmer is also a lifestyle choice.

Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#322

Post by wooger »

strbean wrote: post #160
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.…

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.

Dubious when you consider how few people this is.

Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#323

Post by wooger »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #186
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I'm a social democrat, I'm fine with subsidies in general, I just want them to be applied intelligently. Spending a lot of money to subsidize someone's lifestyle that's intentionally inefficient isn't smart. I'm all for helping the poor, but we should do it in a way that gets us a lot of bang for the buck.

They're not 'the poor' though. If you own a $20 million of land why is everyone rich and poor in the city paying a dollar to fund your faster internet?

Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#324

Post by Nursie »

andrewharvey wrote: post #215
modeless wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have it exactly backwards. It is far less complex and expensive and resource intensive to build Starlink than to run a new copper or fiber line with associated telecom equipment on both sides to every rural residence in the US, let alone worldwide. Yes, despite the large cost of launching satellites. And it's especially good that we don't have to force everyone to subsidize inefficient monopoly utilities with our…

this. Except it's no longer only in rural areas, grid connected utilities are now costing more than being off grid in the cities too. Starlink residential 100 Mbps is cheaper ($69/mo AUD) (ignoring hardware and setup costs) than 50 Mbps fixed line internet ($80/mo AUD). Depending on location, home solar + batteries will usually work out cheaper than being on the grid within the battery warranty period too.

This is because Australia has high internet prices. Partly because it's huge, but partly because the NBN got stuffed-up by the Liberals because they didn't believe the country should be investing in what they called at the time "a glorified video delivery service", so put the tech back a decade, and the country ended up paying more for a worse rollout.

Your comparison point is also a bit weird to me. If I want a decent speed, my choices are fixed wireless NBN at ~250Mbit (400 in theory, 250 in practice), or Starlink at ~200Mbit, and they cost around the same.

If I were just a few km closer to the city I could get 500Mbit fibre for ~$90 a month.

So while it's definitely not out of the range of other plans, I wouldn't say it's definitively cheaper. And I wonder if the recent price drops are down to people not wanting to have much to do with Elon Musk any more. I know it's worth a few bucks a month to me not to be a customer of his.

Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#325

Post by gib444 »

vineyardmike wrote: post #315
scubbo wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People can't afford to live in cities? Well, they should simply choose to live elsewhere. People choose to live outside cities, but want access to basic utilities of modern life? Well, fuck 'em.

Many of the aspects of life "outside the city" are subsidized by the city. It's affordable because of this, and the cities are extra unaffordable as a result. There are many small towns who will never generate the tax revenue to cover their $50M highway off-ramp and associated infrastructure. The thread was about internet, which has also been subsidized. We subside oil so driving long distances is cheaper. We subsidi…

So if 10 million people from rural towns moved to their nearest cities, the cities would become cheaper?

What would drop in price exactly?

Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#326

Post by JonChesterfield »

rob74 wrote: post #311
andrewharvey wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this. Except it's no longer only in rural areas, grid connected utilities are now costing more than being off grid in the cities too. Starlink residential 100 Mbps is cheaper ($69/mo AUD) (ignoring hardware and setup costs) than 50 Mbps fixed line internet ($80/mo AUD). Depending on location, home solar + batteries will usually work out cheaper than being on the grid within the battery warranty period too.

The question that comes up then is: how much traffic can Starlink handle until it gets saturated? I'm not sure it can handle even a significant percentage of the users that currently use wired connectivity. And if they see that demand for their services starts overwhelming supply, they will definitely raise the prices...

_Lots_ of traffic. It's going to end up being the global Internet backbone.

Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#327

Post by fdghrtbrt »

bogdan wrote: post #314
fdghrtbrt wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need my approval. Someone was asking how I view these things, and I was explaining: reading a book is effort, scrolling facebook is effortless. Now, keeping in mind that you don't need my approval: do you have any questions?

Are you on the spectrum by any chance?

No, but I understand why you ask. I just refuse to engage with certain figures of speech because I don't want to contribute to normalizing them. Don't say "would you approve if" if that's not what you mean. Say "what is your opinion on" or "what's your view on" or "how do you think about" or "how does that compare to" because that's what you actually mean. I'm not on the spectrum, but I think that when it comes to many things, language included, simpler is better. As simple as possible, but not simpler.

Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#328

Post by anonu »

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…

Weird take. The vast majority of US electricity infrastructure is privately owned and financed.

Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#329

Post by philipallstar »

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…

It's not a shame. The US, like most countries who sort of want rural internet, just gives money to massive companies who do a tiny bit of rural internetting every 4 years. They don't want to solve the problem because then there's no more free money coming their way. Starlink gets paid to solve their customers' problems, not to perpetuate them.

Re: Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

#330

Post by sam1r »

UltraSane wrote: post #256
andrewharvey wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this. Except it's no longer only in rural areas, grid connected utilities are now costing more than being off grid in the cities too. Starlink residential 100 Mbps is cheaper ($69/mo AUD) (ignoring hardware and setup costs) than 50 Mbps fixed line internet ($80/mo AUD). Depending on location, home solar + batteries will usually work out cheaper than being on the grid within the battery warranty period too.

Man, I pay $50USD/month for 1Gbps up down in Wisconsin.

Wicked, I wonder what the most juiced option would cost amongst your upgrade options.

“When in Wisconsin.”

Post reply on HN