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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

#591

Post by [deleted] »

2devnull wrote: post #174
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or Musk could cut off Ukraine's capacity, which the US military admits is consuming hundreds of millions in Starlink capacity that could be allocated to US consumers to speed up their internet Satellites in LEO over Ukraine can't provide service to the US. (and because of the way orbits work a LEO satellite that spends time over the US will also spend time over Ukraine)

Is there not internet bandwidth involved? Bandwidth for one person means less bandwidth for another, doesn’t it?

[deleted]

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

#592

Post by [deleted] »

czl wrote: post #543
JohnFen wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have real trouble with "the ends justify the means" arguments. > Is it scammy? Probably. It's the behavior of a con artist. > But he likely got more out of people by pushing this false narrative than would have been otherwise accomplished. Even if that's the case, he could have had the same, or better, effect without the lying. The lying is clearly aimed at gaining investment money and preorders, though, not at som…

> The lying is clearly aimed at gaining investment money and preorders, though, not at some bizarre attempt at motivating engineers. It would be dumb to be caught "lying" over and over and Musk is not know to be dumb. Consider the possibility Musk is using reflexivity to accelerate progress. When people become convinced something is possible and work towards that goal their strong belief changes reality because there…

[deleted]

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

#593

Post by jongjong »

It's so obvious that this is in retaliation for Elon's stance on free speech. The people behind this are frauds and weak.

When China takes over and sends all the current elite to the electric chair, the people ofnl the west will be chanting Xi Jinping's praises. That's what you get for weakness and moral deprivation.

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

#594

Post by bilbo0s »

jlmorton wrote: post #343
mdasen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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;…

Starlink also just launched in earnest a couple years ago, and is experiencing meteoric growth rates of ~100% a year. It doesn't take very many doublings for this comment to go down with "why would anyone want Dropbox."

At those growth rates, they shouldn't need the 900 Million. So this decision by the FCC shouldn't make a difference.

As a matter of full disclosure, being from Wisconsin, (home of the great FoxConn boondoggle), I now find myself firmly against corporate welfare. Giving a guy who's supposed to be the richest man in the world a billion dollars to provide me internet service? Nah, that doesn't smell right to me. Something's off about that.

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

#595

Post by schmichael »

mcguire wrote: post #376
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hell I work at a farm on the coast near Silicon Valley in San Gregorio (designing a farming robot) and Starlink is the only decent internet option we’ve ever had.

What speeds do you get? Edit: That's weird. San Gregorio is like 15-20 miles from Cupertino. Here in Jackson County, AL, Farmers Telecom Coop has gigabit or half-gigabit fiber to much of the county.

> Farmers Telecom Coop has gigabit or half-gigabit fiber to much of the county.

You are benefiting from the rural broadband subsidies being applied well. A coworker of mine has lived in various rural Oregon towns through his career and regularly gets faster, more reliable, and cheaper broadband than I do in Portland. Not only that, but it's run by municipalities or coops and so you can often get to know the operators personally!

I think something that's often overlooked is when the Starlinks or TMobiles of the world win these subsidies: rural communities lose the potential to provide decent local tech jobs and offer customer service those of us in cities can't dream of.

If we're going to subsidize things, let's subsidize publicly owned infrastructure!

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

#596

Post by jmspring »

tomcam wrote: post #447
mdasen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is likely serving more rural high speed internet customers with greater speeds I live exactly 13 miles away from T-Mobile HQ (one city over) and their service was unusable. I know, I know, anecdotal. But funny!

I activated a tmobile hotspot for when I spend time in the San Juan Islands, because on at least one island TMo is the only provider.

The service and hotspot were quite reliable.

While at home - a rural area of northern CA, my fiber provider (which is also the backhaul for Verizon - my primary cell provider) went down for a couple days. The TMo hotspot was reliable, performant and served up both the work I needed to do and streaming TV just fine.

$50/mo with no penalty to activate/deactivate made me a fan. Years ago, TMo sucked a lot in the Santa Cruz area.

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

#597

Post by nomel »

2devnull wrote: post #174
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or Musk could cut off Ukraine's capacity, which the US military admits is consuming hundreds of millions in Starlink capacity that could be allocated to US consumers to speed up their internet Satellites in LEO over Ukraine can't provide service to the US. (and because of the way orbits work a LEO satellite that spends time over the US will also spend time over Ukraine)

Is there not internet bandwidth involved? Bandwidth for one person means less bandwidth for another, doesn’t it?

How Starlink works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs2QcycggWU

Its nearest ground station bounced off nearest satellite, or some inter-satellite laser links to make some hops, then to the user. It's optimized to be shortest route, just like routers with the wired internet you're using now: if you stream a movie, that request goes to in a short path from the server to you. You streaming doesn't slow down someone in China, because the data never approaches any equipment in China. Same with Starlink. Their data never approaches any starlink satellites in the US. When they get the whole grid laser link working, then it might, but it will still approach being optimal, with ground stations used as needed.

Ground vs laser is a latency thing, more than a bandwidth thing. No need to stream Netflix with low latency.

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

#598

Post by esoterica »

voakbasda wrote: post #23
hedora wrote: post #16

I wish they’d bar companies that have failed to build out their rural service areas for more than a decade from accepting this money, and also that accepting the grant automatically granted you the appropriate right of way via imminent domain. It costs essentially nothing to lay fiber in the ground in most places (they have little portable boring machines, so you don’t even have to trench), and independent ISPs have…

So, my tiny rural co-op ISP should barred from getting one of these, because they cannot afford to lay dozens of miles of fiber in order to serve a hundred households? You want to keep us country folk in the dark ages? Because that’s what it sounds like. Laying fiber requires a small crew, and they don’t work for free. My driveway alone is over a 1/4 mile (400m), and it will take them a day to lay and terminate my br…

If you choose to live away from civilization then you’ve chosen to forgo the benefits of civilization. It’s ridiculous that we massively subsidize people who made the voluntary decision to live in a way that makes providing infrastructure for them cost prohibitive.

It’s a free country and you can live in a cave on top of a mountain if you want, but you shouldn’t get to demand that the government spend millions of dollars to run fiber up the mountain to your cave.

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

#599

Post by Dylan16807 »

DoesntMatter22 wrote: post #544
Fountain1320 wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quote came from a conference call. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5SfDmL0sv3w At ~6:20.

Thank you for posting this. More proof of what I said. He did not say that they would definitively do it, he said exactly at the timestamp that you gave: "Our goal is". So clearly didn't say that it would happen for certain

Announced goals still need to have a connection with reality or they're lies.

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

#600

Post by fastball »

Timon3 wrote: post #132
fastball wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was basically stated[1] by one of the (dissenting) FCC commissioners, so not exactly unfounded. [1] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-23-105A3.pdf

Could you quote the part you're referring to? I searched for "censor" in the document, and it doesn't come up. Then I read through the document, and I don't see anything trying to explain possible reasons. There seems to be no connection between "the feds punishing Musk for not participating in their well documented censorship operations" and this document.

Sorry, linked to the wrong one. This is the one[1] (and twitter thread[2]) that calls that out more specifically. And the one I linked first starts by saying it agrees completely with Carr's dissent.

[1] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-23-105A2.pdf

[2] https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/173469670679577812...

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