31–40 of 348 posts
To paraphrase Sam Kinison...'It occured to me there woudnt be a rural broadband shortage if people would MOVE TO WHERE THE BROADBAND IS!!!'
To paraphrase Sam Kinison...'It occured to me there woudnt be a rural broadband shortage if people would MOVE TO WHERE THE BROADBAND IS!!!'
[1] Not original to him, but he said it. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/08/29/too-crowded/>
I think it probably should be more expensive to live off the beaten path. The per-capita CO2 consumption of people who rely on cars for everything is far higher than for people who can walk places or take public transport, and those environmental costs aren't passed on effectively to consumers.
I guess you have never had the pleasure of paying $5 for a frozen cheeseburger that you had to heat up yourself in a microwave at a filling station in Max, North Dakota! Lots of benefits to rural life, but things being cheep is not usually one of them.
$65 billion going into rural broadband over the next 5 years. Not finalized, but my read is the feds want fiber. They are wrangling over maps right now. https://www.commerce.gov/news/fact-sheets/2021/11/fact-sheet...
I'll bet 70+% of the money that ends up allocated will find its way into established isp pockets with absolutely nothing to show for it in return.
And yet, when you try and talk to the ISP about problems with the 2.5-down-.4-up DSL line they provide their literal reply is "You're lucky you have a dialtone."
This is at a location 1.7 miles down the road from a school that has gigabit fiber.
The existing programs are a joke. Nothing short of competition is going to get the ISPs to fix their problems. Centurylink has lost about 7k/month on customers switching to StarLink just on this one road. Maybe someday they'll consider fiber, but until then Starlink is a godsend.
So Starlink has been so effective and so popular that — utterly unsurprisingly — it is becoming more congested and they're raising rates. This is good news and not bad. It's a strong sign that the model fundamentally works and they will be able to fund continuous improvements to meet strong demand.
I have Starlink in an Airbnb in Puerto Escondido, Mexico. It has been a blessing. It used to be that we had to deal with either cell carrier 4G wifi or wait until the phone company would finally extend service one block away from its current service area. Even if you had access to either, both solutions were pretty bad. They were so unreliable that some coworking spaces had *three* providers: "broadband", 4G, and old…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The sentiment has been (up until this point?) that Starlink needs to lower costs for the customers, not increase them, as otherwise the customer base will remain as tiny as it currently is. Last I remember, the cost was ~500 USD + the monthly fee, I wonder how many in a rural environment are ready to pony that up for a measly connection. Maybe not difficult for live-on-a-farm-software-developers, but what about the r…
If Starship works out (and that's admittedly a big if), the price of launching Starlink satellites will plummet and they'll be able to boost the number of satellites in orbit from ~4k to 30k, which will improve bandwidth and cut costs. https://spacenews.com/spacex-goes-all-in-on-starship-configu... Also, if you think a $500 one-time fee is bad, try asking Comcast how much they'll charge for pulling 20 miles of fiber…
When they subdivided my neighborhood it was supposed to have fiber. All my neighbors had it, but not me. There’s supposed to be a major connection every other house, and mine should have it, but it doesn’t.
The person at Century Link that came out to my place and found the problem pulled the original plans for the subdivision, figured out who screwed up, contacted that company, and got fiber to my place. They had to go 500 feet, under a street and two driveways. Now I have fiber.
Thanks dude at Century Link.
p.s. Comcast (Xfinity) came out and looked too. They noped the hell out right away.
Starlink was designed for, and has always been intended for remote people who literally have no other connection option. No cable, no 3G or 4G. If you can get those other options, Starlink is not a product designed for you. Go remote, and Starlink is an absolute game changer without even a remotely close equal.
no offence, but this perspective doesn't apply worldwide. if you live in a country like Australia a StarLink connection will give you 10x the speed of many NBN (National Broadband Network) wired connections. 3G/4G/5G are metered by MB and not a viable option for a daily WAN link due to that. Unless you were lucky enough to get fibre pulled into your house before the government at the time kneecapped the NBN you'd hav…
Starlink was designed for, and has always been intended for remote people who literally have no other connection option. No cable, no 3G or 4G. If you can get those other options, Starlink is not a product designed for you. Go remote, and Starlink is an absolute game changer without even a remotely close equal.
It's gonna be interesting to see how they solve the financials. Targeting a rural/spare population via expensive satellite connections, that market has to be relatively limited. And with a limited amount of customers, how does it make business sense?
Also the sats are some of the cheapest, most mass-produced ever, and SpaceX's launch costs are a tiny fraction of anything done previously.
Given what they've achieved so far, I kind of trust SpaceX to have run the numbers on this more than you or I.
So Starlink has been so effective and so popular that — utterly unsurprisingly — it is becoming more congested and they're raising rates. This is good news and not bad. It's a strong sign that the model fundamentally works and they will be able to fund continuous improvements to meet strong demand.
Just because highways keep getting bigger doesn't mean it's the best mode of transport.