Technology

all you can eat latency and an oversaturated network on devices with a limited lifespan.. what else could you ask for!

I’m a starlink customer and think it’s one of the best advancements in the past decade as it provides real access to rural addresses. The side effects of this is nearly immeasurable.

Spacex needs to STFU about this though. Fiber should continue to be deployed where possible.

Hmmm ditch lightning fast and stable fiber for the mediocre speed and unstable micro satellite internet connection controlled by a petty asshole...

What to do, what to do?

"Give me all your money" says world's richest person, in a fit of originality.

Fibre is an investment that can be used and upgraded for decades. Starlink is a subscription service forever to a private company.

Except StarLink cannot possibly provide the same bandwidth, latency, and throughput a fiber connection can. Because of physics.

I can either share my 10G symmetrical connection with nobody, or with 200 others.

And, Fiber costs me $70 a month. Starlink, with worse performance, costs 4x more.

Going from the most secure, hard wired formats to a con man's satellites would be a fatal error. Any sort of military conflict and the network is all down, atleast broadband keeps secure networks intact.

Publicly funded fibre can be provider agnostic. Starlink can't. Unless Musk is arguing for the nationalization of Starlink, which frankly I could get behind.

Fiber fucking rules

A society grows great when old men plant fiber whose speed they know they shall never download from.

I say this as someone who actively pays for starlink out of necessity.

Fuck you, no. Fiber is much better for everyone. Eat shit muskrat.

American taxpayers paid for both Starlink and Space X. Overpaid, actually, that's why he's the richest man in the world. None of his businesses are profitable, he just skims hundreds of billions off the enormous government grants he gets.

Since we overpaid for that tech, we should just confiscate it from him. He can be thankful that he doesn't go to prison for misappropriating government funds.

He can keep Tesla. It'll be bankrupt in 2 years anyway.

Company says that everyone should give them money and stop using competing products.

Obvious thing to say in the land of self-interest.

This country is so cooked

I got a better idea: a civil war against oligarchs

"Oligarch mouthpiece demands diverting of major public funds to oligarchs instead"

Story of America, really.

Honestly, I think starlink is a fantastic idea in general, but this is clearly bullshit. Starlink works well in tandem with fiber, not as a replacement.

It's just never going to be as cost effective as installed fiber. Fiber is obviously the right technology to use in heavily populated areas i.e. for the vast majority of Internet users. And where the population is sparse and laying fiber for individual customers is cost prohibitive, that is where satellite connectivity shines. If SpaceX or anyone else is pretending otherwise, they're being blatantly deceitful and malicious. That's not in Internet users' best interest.

Yeah! I want my internet connection run by a man baby who turns off your access if he doesn't like you!

Fiber all the way, especially if it is owned by the community. That would simply ensure that Musk nor TelCos can't fuck around with people. Fast speed, no data caps, low prices, and not being at the mercy of some wealthy jackhole would be wins across the board.

Also, if America has a 2nd Civil War, fiber will be much more safe than relying on sats - those can be shot down, or worse, Musk can cut off the good guys from having internet. It is simply harder to sabotage if the wires are underground and cannot be readily seen by hostile actors. As seen in Ukraine, the fucker has absolutely no compunctions against disabling the internet at key moments.

Nah we don't support nazis

No fucking thanks. Gigabit+ fiber > Nazi-ass satellite internet that doesn’t have even remotely near the needed bandwidth for actual dense population centers.

Remember when our government spent billions of our taxes on getting high speed internet out to as many Americans as possible? Remember how literally nothing happened and they just shrugged when we asked where the money went?

This was during the Obama years too if memory serves correctly.

It doesn't matter what they decide to do. The money will magically vanish and we will all get left holding the bag once more.

Alternative Headline: Billionaire Signals States Should Speed Fiber Rollout

SpaceX should dump all their space plans and give back their grant money.

Wireless data transmission should only ever be used for nomadic, temporary, and/or sacrificial links.

They’re useful for quick deployment, but are intrinsically brittle and terrible for resiliency and efficiency.

The longer the dependence on them for a given use case, the less defensible arguments in support of them become.

I’m all for the use of satellite delivery of internet services, but only when it’s used in conjunction with a broader roll out of hardwired infrastructure, at which point it can reasonably be relegated to serving as a secondary, backup diverse path.

Fuck off and give me the fiber that was promised and paid for decades ago.

It shouldn’t be all or nothing. It should be diversified.

Yeah, there are rural locations where Starlink makes sense but also there are a lot of urban places that it would never work in.

How about no

How about we take down every starlink satellite so NASA can operate unabated, and our telescopes aren't interfered with.

The tech behind starlink is good. LEO satellites play a purpose. Upsides are they have less latency than GEO satellites. Speeds are the same though.

Downside is you have to deploy them evenly as a constellation or else you get service inturruption. Which means if you look at any population map 90% of your constellation is going to be underutilized, and the other 10% is going to be full.

The real target audience should be mobile broadband. Airplanes, ships, RVs, cars, phones, etc.

But what do you do in the meantime? Fill in the unutilized constillation with rural residential. You can't compete with fiber tech, so you sue the govt for free money.

I've been WFH for at least 10 years and live in rural area. Starlink was like 150-200$ a month for an unpredictable 5-150mbps and did meh. When I finally got fiber it was sub 100$ a month for 2gbps stable. Not a hard decision :)

On one hand, Musk.

On the other hand... Telecos.

You can either give billions more to the world's richest asshole, or you can give billions to companies that already received that money last time and did absolutely fuckall with it.

Lose-lose

Remember how Elon Musk conned Vegas out of millions with the hyperloop.

Satellite internet is not the future; it's cell internet.

To quote Dan Harmon out of context: "If you ask a toaster, "What's the most important thing in the world?" it's going to tell you, "Bread." And if you ask a toaster its opinion of bread, it's going to tell you, "It's not toasted enough."

Business owned by greedy manbaby says to give money to business also owned by greedy manbaby. Hmmm....