121–130 of 773 posts
I don't know if it is part of the official report or not, but I'd bet that Starlink cutting off service in Ukraine to prevent them from launching an attack on Russian vessels in Crimea definitely played a part in this decision.
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From what I understand, this is a political hatchet job. Space X still had 2 years to meet the the mark but capricious new standards are being applied specifically to them.
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Sure. Neither you nor I were in the room, and the evidence is that the committee that was in the room evaluated those plans and it seemed more unlikely to meet the goals. Given Musk's track record, it is very reasonable to treat any timeline with a shipload of salt. He literally took $thousands from thousands of customers for Full-Self-Driving upgrades that were to transform their Teslas into self-driving Uber/Lyft g…
Space X is launching Falcon 9 rockets multiple times per week with additional capacity for Starlink on the regular. Space X is not Elon Musk. It's a company with its own staff, with its own track record, so let's set aside any emotional arguments about FSD from Tesla, which is completely unrelated and which itself is an extremely difficult problem to solve. The "recall" from Tesla, again a completely unrelated issue…
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/27/1202075844/kia-hyundai-recall...
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No one else is even close to being able to offer 100/20M rural service.
In my parents county (very rural), the local electric coop is running fiber on all their poles. Its possible that my parents living 10 miles from the nearest town (2 4-way stops, a grocery store and a couple of gas stations) will get gigabit fiber before my friends that live in a well off suburb in a dense urban area will.
Where politics doesn't impede the growth of municipal and co-op internet solutions, it is absolutely possible for rural communities to end up with very capable internet access.
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If the service is so awesome, why does it need a billion dollar subsidy, i.e., free money paid for by taxpayers?
Some other company could take it happily and increase the competition. Maybe even provide better results, while it might take some time.
If the complaint is that Elon Musk has a history of not delivering on his promises, why the #%@# are telecom companies still getting money based on promises? They also have an awful track record on delivering on their promises. Nobody should get anything until after they've delivered. If they need money to do their deployments, they can take their FCC awards to the bank and get a factoring loan. And if their plan is…
If the goal is to get levels of performance that Starlink cannot provide, then this makes sense? Odd that they'd include comments about Starship in it, though. That doesn't seem like a requirement for continued development of Starlink and seems very speculative. There could be details on that aspect that I'm missing though.
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>If the goal is to get levels of performance that Starlink cannot provide, then this makes sense? no, because the only reason Starlink doesn't currently hit the metrics is due to them having so many users joining. They could hit the metrics by temporarily halting signups, cutting off users, or delaying the Pentagon's massive deployment project. Or Musk could cut off Ukraine's capacity, which the US military admits is…
> due to them having so many users joining I’m actually curious, what is their userbase and where can I find the info?
I wonder who was ultimately approved for RDOF at my house. How do I find that out?
When applying for RDOF you say what service tier you are targeting and instead of shooting for the minimum 25/3, Starlink applied for 100/20. When they didn't reach those speeds[1], they were ineligible but not just because they didn't hit the required speeds on their existing network. There are more details here[2] but the jist is that Starlink bid to supply 100/20 internet to over half a million subscribers and the…
Starlink (and Musk in general) have been over-promising and under-delivering for years now. Starlink claimed 150Mbps back in 2020 and that speeds would double to 300Mbps by the end of 2021.[1] Instead, speeds have halved.[2] At this point, T-Mobile is likely serving more rural high speed internet customers with greater speeds (T-Mobile has 4.2M home internet customers and Ookla's stats show 34% to be rural for 1.4M;…
T-Mobile has a three decade head start (maybe four if you count their Sprint Wireless acquisition's history), so hardly surprising if there is currently more T-Mobile home internet users than Starlink users. But I also doubt that their rural base is as large as Starlink's currently is. Mobile broadband speeds heavily depend on the strength of the signal available in area, and in many rural areas, the 5G coverage is extremely spotty, or non-existent.