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Starlink offering free internet access for 30 days for Hurricane Helene victims

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Re: Starlink offering free internet access for 30 days for Hurricane Helene victims

#191

Post by svnt »

zdragnar wrote: post #152
svnt wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure how disaster recovery will be over in a month, or how monopolies will become major Starlink users undetected.

The monopolies are Comcast, charter, quest etc who usually have exclusionary rights to serve high speed Internet over cable/fiber. Free starlink is meant to be a temporary patch to aid evacuation and lifesaving efforts until the communities can be reconnected physically. If anything, the monopolists should be paying for their customers to get free starlink until their own networks are back up.

They do not have exclusionary rights, that was the whole point of all of the telco and cable anti-trust work.

I don’t particularly like Comcast but the internet has been successfully preserved as a commodity, and communities worth serving are very well-served. I can choose from at least four competitive ISPs that I know of, and I am not in a particularly strong market area.

Re: Starlink offering free internet access for 30 days for Hurricane Helene victims

#192

Post by svnt »

ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #129
svnt wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My comment has little to do with zero sum, but I’ll assume you’re trying to imply that people in rural NC are going to re-subscribe to their local ISP and keep the promotional ISP, you know, once everything is repaired. But let’s change the story a little: Local ISP has all their infrastructure destroyed, but Comcast’s network is still online. Comcast offers a one-month-free promotion but you have to purchase several…

Starlink is bearing a real cost to service these new users. Yes they could donate more, but that is literally true for every single person providing relief right now.

Yes, offering the service probably has some marginal cost, but I am positive it is well within their projected (and profitable) CAC.

People who are donating have zero chance of a positive financial outcome. That is why it is called a donation.

Re: Starlink offering free internet access for 30 days for Hurricane Helene victims

#193

Post by ClownsAbound »

qsdf38100 wrote: post #189
h0l0cube wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think intention matters here. It’s great for those people who are helped by Mr. Beast, but it’s coming from a place of ego and profit, not charity. Happy for those helped, but it’s still a little unseemly. However, I do think Musk genuinely likes to help people^ (e.g. Puerto Rico and Ukraine), but also I feel his response to the (valid) rejection of his help by the divers in Thailand was ungracious and maybe a litt…

[flagged]

Or put another way Musk is anti censorship, anti war in Ukraine, anti complying with the Harris/Biden agenda to deplatform political rivals such as they did 4 days after Biden took office, forcing Pre Musk Twitter/X and Facebook to do their bidding - or else. Turns out the ones squawking loudest about the other being a threat to democracy are in fact the ones actively working against our Constitutional Rights. And I’m a lifelong Democrat who changed to Indy and won’t support these clowns going forward. Wake up before the US is just like the UK and the police are at your door because of a post they disagree with - fuck the first amendment, right? Just like Harris and Walz just said, the first amendment doesn’t protect misinformation or hate speech… actually; it 100% does but the boomer news is gonna try to make us all believe more of their lies.

Re: Starlink offering free internet access for 30 days for Hurricane Helene victims

#195

Post by jaredhallen »

ta1243 wrote: post #187
s1artibartfast wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's crazy. There are huge differences is costs and use cases.A generator is $500, and mine can run for 24hrs on 5 gallons of gas. A 5kw solar system is about $25k to 35k in my area before batteries.

Solar is far cheaper than that in my location - especially if you put the panels up yourself, and storing 100 gallons of gas (400 litres) to run for 3 weeks is far more expensive.

I realize this isn't the case for everyone, but I already have a large propane tank that supplies the house. My generator is tied in to that. So I'm not storing fuel specifically for the generator, but if it came down to it I could probably power the house for a couple months at least. And our geography and flora are pretty unfavorable for solar. So as with most things, it just depends.

Re: Starlink offering free internet access for 30 days for Hurricane Helene victims

#196

Post by bena »

WalterBright wrote: post #121
bena wrote: post #81

This might be good for responders, but not so much the victims. But then responders will have their own networks so won't need this. When you've been hit like this, you aren't going to use your power for this. You have bigger issues. You have to dry out your house, demolition, etc. And that's when you get power. You might not get it for weeks. And honestly, once power reaches residences, power to other services has u…

> you aren't going to use your power for this Sure you are. If you're, say, running off a gasoline generator, unplug A from it, plug Starlink in, make phone call, unplug Starlink, plug A back in. BTW, nearly everyone in my neighborhood has a generator because the power company fails whenever there's a storm.

In the 30 days after the storm, the last thing we m thinking about is internet.

It’s about cleaning up and assessing damage.

These people will need communication, but this is like too little. They will be dealing with this for years.

Re: Starlink offering free internet access for 30 days for Hurricane Helene victims

#198

Post by jmgao »

threeseed wrote: post #130
kortilla wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 700Gbps max per cell > having extremely low customer density I think you need to define “extremely low” because 700gbps is plenty for several thousand people. And the question was specifically about everyone in rural areas switching. If you go by rural being That sounds fine considering standard consumer usage patterns mean you’ll get 10x that as an individual even in peak times. That’s also assuming maximum densit…

> that lands at 7.2 mbps per person Which is ridiculously poor. This would simply create a digital divide further increasing inequality in rural areas.

I'm currently paying for 2Gbps symmetric fiber via 10Gbps XGS-PON that's multiplexed to 32 users, which is a mere 39 Mbps per user. In practice, this is absolutely fine and I have never run into any bandwidth limitations, because utilization rates for regular consumers rounds to basically nothing.

Re: Starlink offering free internet access for 30 days for Hurricane Helene victims

#199

Post by svnt »

astroid wrote: post #134
svnt wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My comment has little to do with zero sum, but I’ll assume you’re trying to imply that people in rural NC are going to re-subscribe to their local ISP and keep the promotional ISP, you know, once everything is repaired. But let’s change the story a little: Local ISP has all their infrastructure destroyed, but Comcast’s network is still online. Comcast offers a one-month-free promotion but you have to purchase several…

Wouldn't it be better if more local people were subscribed to StarLink to begin with? People like you literally cannot be happy about anything. Good grief. I mean, Comcast and Xfinity will probably not go down the next time this happens, right? At worse this is nice gesture that will result in a slight market correction and better outcomes for all next time.

It is marketing on the back of a natural disaster. Again, a nice gesture is actual charity, not a “the first month is free” promotional cliche.

Re: Starlink offering free internet access for 30 days for Hurricane Helene victims

#200

Post by dotnet00 »

elintknower wrote: post #174

Actually insane that the FCC opted to cancel the rural broadband contract with SpaceX for Starlink, to placate ancient telecoms who wanted to spend 4x more doing it with fiber... Not an elon fan, but the current admin / gov in charge is run by halfwits.

The interesting thing is that an FCC commissioner has also been constantly commenting on how nonsensical that decision was. I don't really know enough about the decision to decide either way, but it does seem dumb to me that the other providers don't seem to be getting threatened with removal if it is true that no one has received improved connectivity due to those subsidies (even if we accept that the money has only been allocated and not spent yet, it'd be a failure to have spent all this time just working on allocating money).
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