The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday reaffirmed its 2022 decision to deny SpaceX satellite internet unit Starlink $885.5 million in rural broadband subsidies.
I’m a little torn on this because every time I’ve seen this posted on Lemmy there’re people who praise it and point out how it’s often the only viable option if you’re rural.
However, as someone pointed out, the infrastructure is not really sustainable long term, and may not be very sustainable short term it sounds like either.
We need to bury our electrical anyway, I say start in these rural areas and bury internet right along with it.
Can’t really help the small islands and all the shipping traffic and aircraft that have started using it and can’t benefit from a high speed connection with buried lines.
Ships and planes aren’t rural
There are also a lot of rural communities in Alaska, Northern Canada etc where the whole communities only option is satellite internet.
Sure we should get it out to those areas NEAR major cities but there are huge amounts of users where the cost for that would be impractical.
Northern Canada wouldn’t benefit from a US rural internet subsidy.
I’m not familiar with the areas in Alaska you’re referring too but are they completely isolated outside of satellite internet? If they have electric from the grid or cellular telephone service then there are other options using existing infrastructure.
A study from 2019 found national estimates ranged from 180,000 households to 750,000 that are not connected to the electrical grid. That’s out of 131.2 million households in the US. That means adding internet to power line runs as the entire grid infrastructure is updated and buried, which it should be, would mean .006 % of households wouldn’t benefit.
I don’t know what the best solution is but I question the practicality of 100s of millions in subsidies to any private company, not just Starlink.
In my opinion it’s time for internet to become a utility and tie it into the existing infrastructure.
A geosynchronous satellite makes much more sense for those use cases.
Those are much much higher up, which introduces a lot of signal latency. The Starlink types are low down, which makes the Comms faster (and also means they keep burning up in the atmosphere)
Yeah, but the cost of low latency is thousands of satellites that burn up in the atmosphere, need to be continuously launched, are a catastrophe for optical and radio astronomy and crowd LEO, reducing available space and increasing collision risk. All for a barely scalable system.
It’s not worth it. If you want low latency get a cable run or talk to a ground based antenna.
Yeah sure, but ships and planes don’t matter for rural subsidies
I agree. Also the issue that I have with starlink is that an any given time, if musk throws a tantrum, you could get kicked out of the internet.
Incoming Starlink price increases…
“New and improved” Starlink, with lightning fast speeds upto 8mbps, now from only $1399 per month…
/s
Separating Starlink from musk as much as is possible, it’s been a great service for me.
My only other option where I live is 20/1 DSL from CenturyLink, a company which, for me, has been far worse to deal with than Xfinity. The 20/1 service wasn’t even that fast when tested. If one device in the house managed to get a decent download going, the uplink would saturate and prevent pretty much any other traffic.
Starlink meanwhile has been a huge improvement at 120/10 most of the time for me, and very reliable. I pay $120/month.
There’s zero chance any service provider is going to run better corrections out to my neighborhood, the line of sight service options are not in my line of sight, and cell service is a joke.
I have had a similar experience. Previously the only thing we had was a AT&T hot spot that got 10/2 in one specific window. Starlink has been a godsend allowing me to work from home. My job for the last two years has been remote tech support for manufacturing, where I have to regularly VPN into customers sites to help them get up and running again. With Starlink we get 140/15 average and only occasional drops during severe storms. But yes Musk is not a good person and we would switch to copper or fiber if it was available.
Wow 120 dollars a month is a pretty hefty price. Didn’t know that’s what the cost was
You’ll be even more to shocked that it’s often a multi-month wait and you need to pay $600 for the Satellite dish. Not including install, or mounting hardware.
That said - it’s the best option that a lot of people have ever had. They often can use no internet, old-school satellites which is basically 56kbps, and Starlink.
That’s literally the exact same amount I’m paying Comcast in suburbia. The speed it a little bit better most of the time but it’s not like I can make full use of it.
If you think that price is insane, go check out the price for legacy satellite internet and the speeds/data cap they provide for it.
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I absolutely think that price is insane, and I’m laughing at people who willingly pay for that!
And that’s why someone invented the phrase, “ignorance is bliss.”
It’s weird. Even in the least densely populated county (and one of the poorest), we were able to get fiber. 50/25 is pretty reasonably priced, and could go up to 250mbps if we wanted for still fairly reasonable.
If they could do it, don’t understand why most places -except maybe the most rural western US - can’t do the same.
It’s weird. Even in the least densely populated county (and one of the poorest county), we were able to get fiber.
Just want to say that capitalism is about doing what is most profit able. That does not always mean it has to be the best service or product. This is one such example.
As a counter anecdote. I am 15 miles from a town of 150k people and I don’t have fiber, I don’t even have cable, or copper phone.
Thankfully these days we have 4G and Starlink. Otherwise we would have nothing.
I dislike musk, but this is a stupid decision, given how many subsidies went to shitty providers that did nothing.
Plus the fact that Starlink is actually serving these people already.
So if starlink isn’t getting the subsidy, guess whose prices are going through the roof next year?
So get rid of those instead of giving Mr.Rightwinger more socialism that he hates so much.
Bell operating companies stretched cable out to the rural areas. That’s a lot more than nothing.
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