US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

Post by fastball » Thu, Dec 14, 2023, 1:53 AM UTC

causal wrote: post #196

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

This document doesn't really support the censorship claim, perhaps you meant to link the other FCC commissioner's document: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-23-105A2.pdf I don't know much about commissioner Carr other than that he was appointed by Trump, so perhaps it is unsurprising he would disagree. I don't know enough about the facts underlying the competing narratives to say confidently whether or not…

Post by andrei_says_ » Thu, Dec 14, 2023, 2:02 AM UTC

mdasen wrote: post #38

I_Am_Nous wrote: post #15

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;…

Post by ajsnigrutin » Thu, Dec 14, 2023, 2:09 AM UTC

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #41

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…

> It costs essentially nothing to lay fiber in the ground in most places I'm sorry what? This part of your comment is so absurd that it calls into question anything else you might be saying here. I lived through a fiber roll out only a short year or so ago, it was an entire summer of trucks, mostly contractors by the look of them, with trailers, with boring machines, stacks of boxes, and of course, spools upon spools…

Post by iAMkenough » Thu, Dec 14, 2023, 2:13 AM UTC

iav wrote: post #24

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…

Hmm, I would like to see a citation on that second comment. You can look at Frontier's last earnings release, they spent $168M of build Capex to pass 332k homes, or $506/home passed in the last quarter. Note that "passing" a home is not the same as connecting a home, there is additional cost involved there. And Frontier has tremendous cost benefit from the fact that they already own the telephone poles that they can…

Post by mannykannot » Thu, Dec 14, 2023, 2:25 AM UTC

acdha wrote: post #463

mannykannot wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not obvious that even level 5 FSD will require either self-awareness or a theory of mind: adequate modeling of the possible behaviors of nearby actors in the immediate future may be "all" it takes, and current systems are struggling with that. Of course, if one were to define FSD in terms of being so capable that it could also likely pass the Turing test (or whatever better replacement we come up with as a meas…

I said “substantial subset” precisely to avoid this kind of tangent. My point was simply that there are a lot of edge cases we have no clear path to solving which are masked at the current level by punting the problem to the human driver. We are a very long time from being able to build cars without manual controls even if we might hit the point where a majority of driving miles are automated long before then.