81–90 of 96 posts
I'm no fan of AT&T. Their contract terms are garbage, and I feel lucky to love somewhere with options. But the article hasn't done a great job of explaining this headline. It makes it sound like these subsidies were designed to encourage AT&T to build out more fiber. But when I follow the links, they're about things like general tax cuts that were followed by layoffs or misrepresenting figures to benefit from a COVID…
So it's not unjust to call bullshit when it turns out they aren't doing that, but are still keeping the money.
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This seems like a terrible idea. Satellite internet doesn't just cost money; having all those satellites in orbit have real non-monetary costs. They have a huge impact on astronomy, and they increase the probability of accidents which cause space debris.
Except the satellites are already up and functioning, the service is available today. We will look crazy for burying thousands of miles of wires to residential in the future.
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Personally I think 5g is the way to go. Free more spectrum from the old TV channels (DVB-T is a lot more efficient in terms of spectrum use), this will cover rural use. 10 years ago I would never think I would say that, but I'm happy with LTE at 50MB down, 15up. The problem? No new lte equipment manufactured in western countries. You want cat 16+ modems? ZTE and Huawei are the only ones to sell you one. And their sof…
5G networks need wired infrastructure to send internet data to towers within a few miles of the customer; fiber is the best option for those wires. And for the last few miles, fiber still has throughput and latency advantages over 5G [1]. [1] https://www.eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-today-why-fiber-super...
Force ATT et al. to build out fiber trunks in rural areas, then allow competitive wireless offerings to connect last mile. (Excluding the trunk owner)
And if ATT doesn't want to do that, then local governments should be free to do so.
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Does Musk need more government charity? He's made a lot off begging, we can see whether he puts more restrictions on companies that are non-viable without government handouts but considering most of his haven't been, I can't imagine it.
He’s already come out saying he wants to remove EV subsidies after his company was able to get off the ground with them. Age old pull-the-ladder-up!
This thing where the government funds R&D for private corporations and then the corporations get to keep all the profits because tHey tAkE AlL tHe RiSk is pretty amazing. I'm a stockholder in several fortune 50 companies except my stock is non-voting, doesn't pay dividends, I don't get to pick which stock I buy and I don't ever get to sell it or borrow against it.
As I understand it the US government is why every American home- from the deserts in Nevada to the mountains in Virginia- has electricity. And that investment has paid for itself a million times over.
They ran fiber down the street connecting to the street my grandparents are on, but didn’t go down theirs. But of course they’ll gladly charge more for “up to” 50mbit when it’s only 25 on a good day. They’re all criminal.
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This seems like a terrible idea. Satellite internet doesn't just cost money; having all those satellites in orbit have real non-monetary costs. They have a huge impact on astronomy, and they increase the probability of accidents which cause space debris.
Fair point though I would make a counterargument that with or without those subsidies, those satellites are still going up to space so wouldn't it be better to offer the service to as many folks as possible so that the most people get the benefit of satellites and we while we wouldn't offset the costs of putting sats up in space, at least we can offset the per-capita cost.
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How would painting a satellite black 'seriously constrain' them? Why do we let corporations foist externalities on science and the general public? Either you can engineer a solution, or you can't, and if you can't, you don't belong in space.
Painting a satellite black wouldn't solve the problem that they would still block the stars behind them when passing overhead. Instead of light streaks, you now have dark streaks across a region of the sky.
The problem with painted satellites is instead that they're not black enough; they still produce light streaks since they're still somewhat reflective. I don't know if it's possible to make them non-reflective enough to make this a non-issue.
What this tells me is that industries with limited growth potential and who are focused on incremental rather than transformative technology do not respond to government carrots, and to the extent that they do anything, it is to arrange scenarios where they privatize the carrots and socialize the costs. There is no return on investment for investments in rural fiber. Infrastructure needs a high density of users to be…
Subsidize community broadband, and stop subsidizing it when the incumbents rush fiber there. The current subsidy scheme hasn't worked.
A telecom corporation doesn't have a way of profiting from such community benefits. It only benefits if it can somehow charge a transaction tax on those benefits in the form of Internet connection fees high enough to turn a profit.