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US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

reuters.com

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Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#291

Post by AlexandrB »

DoesntMatter22 wrote: post #261
throw0101c wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> […] (and Musk in general) have been over-promising and under-delivering for years now. Related, "Tesla FSD Timeline": > September 2014: They will be a factor of 10 safer than a person [at the wheel] in a six-year time frame * https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/ * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38625380 (earlier today)

To be fair FSD is the hardest software problem that man has ever attempted.

This is important to consider when judging Tesla's engineering capability, but not when judging Elon Musk's highly optimistic promises.

Either Elon is aware of the fact that FSD is really hard and he's lying repeatedly about being able to deliver it "later this year". Or he is not aware that FSD is as hard as you say and needs to "hit the books" and understand the problem better. I don't really see an "out" here after so many missed promises.

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#292

Post by justsomehnguy »

shmatt wrote: post #284
jandrese wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it impressive that the government is actually punishing a project for running late and underdelivering. They should expand this to all parts of the government. Can you imagine if the F-35 was cancelled the first time it fell behind schedule? The Space Launch System? The Littoral Combat System? The USS JFK? So many boondoggles could be killed off before they spend money. Maybe contractors would have to start pr…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Abandoned_military_pr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cancelled_military_pro... F35 Survived but there are like 50 other planes that didnt in that second list

Bradley IFV is not on this list.

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#293

Post by grecy »

TheAlchemist wrote: post #280
grecy wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starlink was never designed to be faster than fibre, and it was certainly never designed or intended for use by people that ave access to fibre (or cable, or LTE for that matter). SpaceX have re-iterated this on many, many occasions. Anyone who things otherwise simply doesn't understand the product. Starlink is designed for people who live in remote areas that have no access to any of that. Go out right now and see h…

It was. The V2 that they are deploying is supposedly communicating directly between satellites, making it faster than fiber over long distances. Elon advertised that in 2019 or something already. I don't deny it is life changing for those people ! All I'm saying is that it's not economically viable to provide that to those people. And the only way it is, it's because it's either a business bleeding money, or supporte…

> It was

No. It was never designed or advertised to offer "faster than fibre" connections to end users, and all along Musk and maintained it makes absolutely no sense for a person to use Starlink if they already have access to a ground-based option like fibre or cable or LTE.

> All I'm saying is that it's not economically viable to provide that to those people. And the only way it is, it's because it's either a business bleeding money, or supported by the government

Those are wild claims.

Please post citations about how it's bleeding money or is supported by the government.

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#294

Post by tick_tock_tick »

akamaka wrote: post #219
convery wrote: post #67

As commissioner Brendan Carr's dissent wasn't included in the article: https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/173469670679577812...

Reading that dissent felt as painful as reading a partisan reddit comment. In one paragraph he said Biden is targeting Musk politically, and in the very next he states, as proof of the quality of the internet service, that the Pentagon just signed a contract with Starlink for military applications.

He said it's good enough for the military but apparently not good enough for the FCC chair who Biden appointed. How is that hard to understand?

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#295

Post by philwelch »

dotnet00 wrote: post #216
philwelch wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve always found the outrage on HN over this somewhat inconsistent. Lots and lots of people here are critical of the arms industry and were largely supportive of Google employees pressuring the company into dropping US defense contracts, but when it’s Elon who doesn’t want his satellite internet service to be weaponized he’s suddenly the bad guy? Personally I think Elon (and the general HN consensus against the defe…

I'd agree, but on the other hand, it isn't entirely HN users' fault that scummy journalists intentionally misreport and/or don't circulate their corrections as loudly as their initial accusations. Plus, I doubt those critical of the arms industry would be complaining about Google offering to take on defense contracts specifically intended to help Ukraine. If anything, they'd be complaining about Google not just payin…

> Plus, I doubt those critical of the arms industry would be complaining about Google offering to take on defense contracts specifically intended to help Ukraine.

The letter from the Google employees about Project Maven began, “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war”. If that’s what they meant, if those are the principles they were operating from, that would obviously apply even to the war in Ukraine.

Obviously what’s happened is that the war in Ukraine has taken on a particular partisan coding in the broader culture war. I’m not surprised to see the inconsistency here but it is worth calling out.

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#296

Post by jandrese »

shmatt wrote: post #284
jandrese wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it impressive that the government is actually punishing a project for running late and underdelivering. They should expand this to all parts of the government. Can you imagine if the F-35 was cancelled the first time it fell behind schedule? The Space Launch System? The Littoral Combat System? The USS JFK? So many boondoggles could be killed off before they spend money. Maybe contractors would have to start pr…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Abandoned_military_pr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cancelled_military_pro... F35 Survived but there are like 50 other planes that didnt in that second list

Most of those weren't cancelled because they ran behind schedule, they were cancelled for political reasons or because the role they were designed for went away. Sometimes because some other project was overrunning their budget so badly that they had to be cancelled to free up the money for the boondoggle.

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#297

Post by tekno45 »

martindbp wrote: post #242
TheAlchemist wrote: post #237

It looks like it's becoming apparent that Elon's empire is based on a lot of impossible promises. Starlink is probably one of them. A perfect 'business' for Musk. You can show something great - high speed internet in remote areas - and then extrapolate that - just think about the whole world etc... Faster than fibre, with V2... Thing is, this business is probably not economically viable. It can work if not a lot of p…

[flagged]

Like an investigation maybe?

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#298

Post by inemesitaffia »

toss1 wrote: post #187
chrisco255 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> The Starlink service is popular, because it generally works, and it's better than what a lot of people even have available to them in many parts of the country or in specific situations (like fulltime RVers). Right. And the issue is the ratio of popularity to supply. A neighbor near a family cabin in rural Maine, where the service is only copper ~10mbps down/1 up and more expensive that FIOS at home just installed…

They can offer an RDOF specific plan. Think internet essentials from Comcast.

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#299

Post by georgeecollins »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #292
shmatt wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Abandoned_military_pr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cancelled_military_pro... F35 Survived but there are like 50 other planes that didnt in that second list

Bradley IFV is not on this list.

Say what you want about the Bradley, and criticism of the military is very healthy! I think the war in Ukraine shows that while the project may have been wasteful the end result is still useful.

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#300

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

chrisco255 wrote: post #80
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really see how it's embarrassing that the FCC set out a clear requirement for a low-latency, 100/20M rural service and Starlink (having failed to show a plan to achieve that) is not accepted into the program. Which part is embarrassing to the FCC, exactly?

No one else is even close to being able to offer 100/20M rural service.

There's some kind of disconnect here, because 85% of the service areas covered by the RDOF have winning bidders committed to providing at least 1000/500M service.
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