“I can complain about Starlink raising their prices, but it’s the only genuine option we have,” former Nebraska state senator and Republican Julie Slama told the Washington Post last month. “Once they have rural customers on their service with no meaningful alternatives, they’re free to raise prices at will.”
Should we pull up the record and see who voted to allow that to happen in Nebraska while on the subject?
“We only have the option to use this hyper expensive private satellite service… because we spent all of the wired rollout grants/funding on bullshit.”
because we spent all of the wired rollout grants/funding on bullshit.
Oh, it’s worse than that. The grant money was the wrong party color, so it had to be disposed of rather than lead to a positive outcome.
But you see, if they took the grant money and used it for something that people liked, they’d have to admit that the party they don’t like did something useful! Can’t have that!
We’ve noticed that our service no longer works properly, so we’re going to charge you more for it.
You should only be a Starlink customer if you have no other feasible choice.
Sending money to a clown and NOT expecting a fucking circus, are we?
“High demand” meaning underprovisioning.
This is sooo on cue, right as my AI loving IT colleagues are talking about getting starlink, only to have a backup internet connection in case of an outage.
Ah great. My Starlink hardware just arrived.
I wasn’t charged any high-demand surcharge though. I probably wouldn’t have ordered it if I had to pay one of those.
I don’t think my area will have high demand for Starlink anyway. Even their fastest options are slow. There are options for like 5-10x the speed around the same price in my area. The only downside: There’s like a 50% chance of lightning frying my modem each year, and it takes like a week to get a tech on site.
Starlink is a great backup connection. It’s cheap to just keep in standby mode (~$15/month, IIRC). An unexpected, heavy surcharge might be a deal breaker though
Billionaires will kill us all, while millionaires scream and yell. Thousandaires defend them both, while we all suffer in hell.
That’s great, gonna have to print it out on stickers and place them around town.
dramatic much?
Over promise and under deliver, the musk way. Fucking clown ass Nazi piece of shit. I know there’s not a lot of viable alternatives, but if you’re using a Nazi service, I lack sympathy when the Nazi raises your prices.
Meanwhile the airlines rolling out “free Starlink WiFi” without so much as an asterix about who provides and controls the bits you’re sending through it.
Imagine how much data musk will be able to glean getting free access to travelers internet habits and probably a lot more.
If they’re offering “free Starlink WiFi” they are telling you who is offering it. If they are offering “free inflight WiFi” they are hiding it
They must always know where we are, but we must never know where they are. Funny how that happened while lawmakers stood idly by.
stood idly by
funny way of saying ‘actively participated’
I was just on a flight with that, and it was ass. I got a few text messages in and out, but that was about it.
I think most of the data going to and from your phone is gonna be https, I doubt it would provide much value tbh
Unfortunately there’s still plenty of unencrypted traffic from normal usage (e.g. DoH is still fairly rare).
I mean, I guess you can get a list of domain names accessed, but accessible data is still quite limited imo.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather avoid it entirely or use a VPN if I’m on such a network if I must.
Some places have to use starlink sadly, like the ones in remote zones and islands in the middle of the ocean
Geo makes more sense for theses use cases. Yes you’ll have more ping. But for data dumps it matters not.
What makes sense is the quality of service offered at the price point. There’s a reason why Starlink outcompeted Hughes so badly.
Yeah, but as this article points out, the price point is a lie.
The price point has been very much true, it is just early on the enshittification curve.
With these price hikes, we’ll see.
My point was that Hughes was really bad.
So basically:
His companies are hilariously insolvent, so he rolls them all together and does the biggest IPO of all time to raise money.
But he still needs more money.
So then he tries to do a corporate bond issuance… doesn’t go super duper well.
So he still needs more money.
Welp, ok then, jack up fees, whatever, not very original, but does at least kind of work.
Any takers as to whether or not he’ll still need more money?
If you guess correctly, you get a free Neuralink installed in your head that you can send OTA bluetooth firmware overrides to nearby devices with your brain!
Or well, maybe it works… maybes its the opposite of that. Whatever.
… But you can recharge them with your solar roof tiles! And then get in your Tesla Roadster! And then take a Starship ICBM flight to Hong Kong or Moscow or Buenos Aires or Rome! And then take the hyperloop to Antarctica!
Yeah, none of that is a sign of a thriving business empire if you ask me.
Not sure I want those to actually thrive though.
Investors should have learned by now that Musks endeavors are 100% ADHD cycle projects; hyper focus, obsess, launch, start to lose interest, hop on the the next, abandoning previous project, instead of building on the success.
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I remember when starlink first became available here and had better speed than you could get with terrestrial services. 5 minutes research showed network bandwidth would be a problem once they had significant adoption. Lo and behold…
I’m sure it will get better. Just give him a few more goverment subsidies, grants, and 0 interest federal loans to be forgiven later, have the entirely military fleet of humvees replaced with CyberTrucks that he’ll never produce, give him carte blanche to fill more layers of the sky with his private satellites without any oversight, regulation, forethought, or concern for the actual good or needs of humanity, and suddenly your current 3 Megs download may hit 5, even 6 megs in off peak hours! Only an extra $150/month for their premium subscription plan!
Who are you who are so wise in the ways of science?
I mean, tbf, all the big telecoms have received billions over the last 20+ years to “connect rural America”. A lot of us still don’t have access to alternatives.
Oh I’m aware. The amount of screwing over rural residents the telecoms have done and continue to do is massive. Satellite internet helps bridge that gap. But there are better and cheaper ways to do that just by running some more wire. If county governments did their damn jobs for their residents, there wouldnt be as much of a need for satellite internet to supplement the land-based ISPs.
Upvoted for proper spelling of “Lo and behold”.
All the Elon books and profiles love to fluff Elon about how he always holds things to the raw physics and makes sure the math works.
Either that was BS or he needs to find a different cereal from Special K.
To be fair, the network being crushed by high demand is extremely unsurprising. Cellular networks have always had this problem in dense areas, where it’s no way you’re reaching the advertised speed. This is mainly due to the available channels being shared by everyone in a relatively large area, connected to the same cell. Which is mitigated somewhat by setting up more cells with shorter range for a higher cell density in cities.
How could a satellite based network ever scale? Where you have what, a handful available cells to cover an entire state?
I thought the whole point of this service was to provide internet to places that traditional services couldn’t reach. Meaning they wouldn’t be over populated because those people already have good internet.
Now that I think it through, there’s no way that demographic is generating enough money to make this work.
Whoops?
Starlink has always been a shitty cell service at best. Only now the towers have to be entirely replaced every three or so years if memory serves.
Coulda just run fiberoptic but that would be the boring solution with a lower return.
It does make sense for very rural customers. For my parents to get fiber like you suggest, someone would have to string up about 10 miles of fiber to gain like 50 customers, maybe. With another 90 miles of fiber they can get all the way to 1000 people served; idk how many households that is but the unit economics don’t make sense.
I mean if we’re looking at pure economics, it’s probably not even worth running power lines to your parents. Matter of fact, they probably wouldn’t even have electricity if the government didn’t force electrical companies to build power lines to everyone, with the electrification act of 1968.
It isnt worth it, but at least in Canada and USA we’ve given the ISPs billions of dollars to service them, and they keep adding a token amount of people and saying shucks all the money is gone we couldn’t do what we said, and then we give them more. Rinse and repeat.
It’s not. But fiber isn’t a regulated utility like power is, so the argument is moot until that changes.
Yes, and that’s the problem. Fibre should be treated the same way as electric and, formerly, landline phones. For the last 20-30+ years, the government has handed billions out to connect everyone. With very little movement in a LOT of places.
Give it 50 years of replacing satellites and I am willing to bet a one time install of fiber would have been cheaper.
Fiber wouldn’t be a one-time charge though. There’s regular ongoing maintenance needed for a fiber network.
There’s an old joke in the telecom world:
Q: If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and you could only take one thing with you, what would you take?
A: I would take a small bundle of fiber optic cable. As soon as I was on the island, I’d make a small hole in the sand and bury it. As soon as I turn my back there would be someone with a backhoe there to dig it up.
The cost of sending crew out to fix a 10 mile fiber run servicing a single household would wipe out any possible profit from that subscriber for more than 100 years. Now multiple that by how many 10 mile+ fiber runs we’d need to service all those widespread low-density rural customers.
Those satellites are all earning profit everywhere else around the world they can service. That line to a 100 person community taking decades to be profitable is money the ISPs dont want to spend because it’ll take decades.
Rural, cellular dead zones (eg desert, mountain passes), air, ocean/seas/large lakes.
To cover rural reliably though you end up having to be over dense areas as well, but they cant really compete in the dense areas as they’ll be cheaper options, but you can make some money there since you already cover it. The area they could best compete there would be critical backup service.
I’d like to see someone setup cell towers across the pacific ocean. I even started dreaming up what it would take/cost - but I soon realized it would never be worth it so I’m not asking for investors. (though probably I should have… Anyone know a VC with money to burn?)
Wait so you’re saying the ships, just the ships moving across the pacific are enough reason to have low earth orbit satellites in such quantity they impede things as simple as looking at the stars? The ships can get internet from higher earth orbit satellites that don’t have to be constantly replaced. We haven’t been choosing between internet and no internet with starlink, there has been satallite internet way before starlink and there will be way after. All it takes is a less cooperative FAA not allowing so many rocket launches for the AI nazi company and slowly holes form in the coverage as the satellites burn up.
that don’t have to be constantly replaced.
Its by delibarate choice
Increase the orbit by a bit and it quickly goes from about 5 years to decades and decades for reentry
The entire point is that they will be replaceing them that often anyways, may as well get some other benefits
No, I’m saying that the ships would like it. Also having used geosynchronous satellite internet I have first hand experience that the lag sucks. Better than nothing, but Starlink has less lag. Probably faster but I don’t know what the latest speeds are. Still geosynchronous covers a lot of area which means you are sharing with a lot of people.
Cruise ships pay a lot for internet because their customers want it. Crew on all ships want it for their breaks.
Starlink isn’t worth it for just the above, but add in rural people on land and it makes sense. Though I understand the astronomers hate it.
I’ll be short with you.: I don’t care how much nicer starlink is, putting that many satellites into low earth orbit all the time is not good for the climate. The few thousand people on ships at any given time can wait to stream high def porn or download it while at port. All the needed uses of the internet can be met via slow higher orbiting satellites.
Lots of things are not necessary and are bad for the climate. You likely enjoy many of them. You start by reducing your own consumption.
I’d like to see someone setup cell towers across the pacific ocean.
Fiber cables cross-cross the oceans many times.
Fiber without cell towers are pointless. Ships and boats commonly have starlink internet now, because it is so much better than any alternative. Cell towers are needed for fiber to compete.
The pacific has some deep trenches, I don’t think fiber runs across them.
map of fiber cables:
That would be a reasonable expectation, but I want to remember this being talked about as a revolution for internet in the US; how much better it would be compared to shitty cable providers and how you would get Gigabit speeds without having to run fibre.
Sure, it looked impressive early on, but a wireless system like this will always degrade the more customers they get.
I also remember it was cautioned early on that they had limited bandwidth and so focused on rural areas and a backup for cell phones. For rural areas this is better than having to run fiber (rural areas typically didn’t have cable, though they were running fiber close enough to get DSL - better than nothing but very slow)
The whole point is war not helping consumers. Wire and cell towers are already not only cheaper but straight up better in every measure: latency, bandwidth, cost, maintenance, deployment, maturity.
You could literally cover entire land mass of earth for space x valuation with fiber and cell towers and still have left over money to do the ocean too.
The sats pass by every location, because of physics they circle the globe constantly rapidly. They can’t only operate in rural areas. So you will have some people in cities use it just not very much.
America will do anything except lay some fucking cable to provide internet to the ruroids.
It’s crazy how behind US is on that. Americans say “yeah but US is bjg and mostly empty space” so is Asia and the rest of the world yet they are not defeated by a cable. It’s just cable laying - come on, we solved cable laying 50 years ago.
How many big empty rural areas in Asia have fiber optics internet relative to big empty rural areas in the US? I thought starlink was heavily used by a lot of counties where people didnt have great access to internet?
How many big empty rural areas in Asia have fiber optics internet relative to big empty rural areas in the US?
I think China has done it for all of their rural villages (or maybe 98% it seems)
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201908/02/WS5d43f3c6a310cf3e355639b3.html
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1043951X22001110
Basic all rural areas have fiber/cell towers in Asia. Depends how you measure it but like 90% of populated Asia is connected and most of these stats are only being held back by Russia too.
The US has a weird mix of big emplty spaces, really fucking expensive existing underground utilities and roadways, and private property (easements ain’t free) that makes new underground utilities stupidly expensive to run.
You have to buy big easements, negotiate utility contracts with local and state governments (to use the public right-of-way), dodge existing infrastructure while repairing what you break, and lay a fuckton of cable.
I work on the municipal side, and despite Google Fiber having a utility agreement with us for years they still have yet to lay a single foot of underground fiber because we won’t allow them to cut across roads that we just replaced in the last year, require their microtrenches to follow engineering standards, and they need to show existing underground water, gas, wastewater, and electrical services on their plans because they’re famous for just running a trench and making it the water district’s problem when they cut 7 public lines in an hour.
Same reason rural places in the US also haven’t discovered electricity yet. Oh, wait…
It does seem like that at times. But at least in Minnesota, the ruroids often seem to have better availability of fiber than the suburbanites and exurbanites. Possibly due to state broadband grants.
This is how it was where I grew up in Washington State. We were not rural enough for our neighborhoods to qualify for grants, but not densely populated enough for it to be financially worth it to lay cable. I moved out in 2018, where the best options were still dial up or conventional sattelite.
I did discover that by voiding Cricket Wireless’ TOS you could use your BYOD as a hotspot with unlimited data and you’d just have to change sims/numbers every few months when they caught on. Of course now Starlink and T-Mobile home internet exist instead and hey, maybe they laid cable in the past 8 years, it’s possible.
Including paying companies specifically to lay that cable then never forcing them to actually do it.
This is why satelite internet is a dead end. The latency and bandwidth are fundamental limitations of physics which are incredibly expensive to scale up compare to cable and cell towers.
Even if we have a complete satellite roll out we’d still have to go back to cell towers for better latency. So why even entertain this detour if not for war machines - one niche where satellites are actually better.
Satellite is better for remote people. I know a woman whose Alaskan village (indigenous, not colonizer) got significantly better internet once starlink was rolled out.
Now you could say that nations with meaningful duties to remote peoples should band together and essentially jointly operate (maybe having the UN administer it) such a service for them and use it as the last resort akin to sat phones. And I’d be cool with that. But I so think such people should have internet, and this is probably cheaper than running and maintaining cables all across Alaska and northern Canada.
That’s true, but it’s largely due to a market that doesn’t prioritize remote clients and a regulatory system which has roped off huge parts of the radio spectrum.
Instead of a starlink receiver talking to low orbit, you could have a dish that uses fixed wireless access or point to point connections to access a terrestrial tower. In exceptional situations geostationary satellites make sense, but these low earth constellations are getting out of control.
We had point to point internet for years. Then they went belly up. Which is why we have starlink today.
Give them internet via a geo stationary satellite.
You only need a few in a space where there is a lot of room, and it won’t bug anyone, contrary to the shit show we have with the countless starlink satellites visibly zipping over while working hard to make the Kessler Syndrome a thing.
I’m not even talking about the pollution caused by those rocket launches
Give them internet via a geo stationary satellite.
We have that already. Its comparatively very expensive, and also very very high latency simply because for the speed-of-light. The satellite at GEO sits at 20k kilometers. That by itself introduces 250ms of latency each way. So a 500ms latency is not uncommon for GEO satellite internet. Also, GEO satellites are very expensive because of how much energy (deltaV) it takes to get the satellite out that far and for how long they have to operate to make that money back.
Yeah, my family was forced to get starlink because ATT and other wireless internet sucks in where we live
But it’s not better. It’s just rhe only option. They would very much prefer to be connected with a cable or a cell tower no? Why wouldnt they?
You have permafrost melting so northern tundra areas will be worse to build on going forward. But the context is tiny rural places that don’t have roads and you travel by plane or snowmobile, they’re not getting cable.
Could do point to point wireless. And only have towers every so often. The land is cwey flat.
they’re not getting cable.
why not?
Hundreds of miles of expensive cable because terrain make expensive to serve dozens of hundreds.
It’s significantly cheaper still. Cable is dirt cheap, technology of laying cable is mature and we already have roads developed to piggy back off infra off. Now think about satellites that only live a few years and are incredibly expensive and immature.
20,000-30,000 miles to cover 250,000-300,000 people (I looked for numbers based on places with at least 100 people) for a total cost of $2,000,000,000-$7,000,000,000.
Good luck with that.
Which part of permafrost do you not understand?
Beyond permafrost it’s also extremely remote and often separated from Anchorage (metro area has the majority of the population of Alaska, at a similar population to the city of Cleveland) by national parks, mountains, and rivers. It’s very expensive to run cable out to such small populations
Do they have electricity?
Cables dont freeze lol
Ah. I see. You’re thinking to let the fiberglass cables lose on top of permafrost like it’s a hose from a shed.
If you’re able, you can learn why that is a bad idea online. There is plethora of reasons why fiberglass cables usually go underground.
How many people is that? Maybe a million in the entire world? Less? I dont think internet is on their mind that much tbh
5G is the answer for most people. The few people living in extremely remote places are not worth rolling out special satellites for them. It will not be profitable. They can use existing satellite services for basic communication.
Oh shut up with the colonizer bs. So its OK for the indigenous to use a Nazis system because burns hits them.
And even then, why the everlasting fuck do you want low watch orbit satellites for this? Why do we need to pollute the shit out of our ecosystem, our LEO, and our night sky (fuck those moving blips) just to have latency low enough to play a game over na internet connection that shouldn’t be used for any of that…
Everything about starlink is maddeningly stupid and it is negatively impacting so many people that want nothing to do with it but hey, it’s Elmo Musk, so just let him do that shit anyway!
I’d say LEO is where we want these, no? My understand is that if SpaceX went defunct tomorrow, the satellites would (eventually) burn up on reentry, so there’s no risk of them managing to fragment and become more permanent bullets wizzing around in our orbit. Or is that incorrect?
That’s sort of like saying you’d want the milk to spill in the kitchen because it’s easier to clean up. But the thing people are upset about is that the spilling of milk in the first place is not necessary.
Satellite internet is extremely important for certain regions of the world. Good luck running anything to remote areas like Alaska, or areas of northern Canada.
It’s an extremely important piece of infrastructure, even if you have zero use for it.
Thousands of satellites are immune to anti satellite missile, with only a few dozen geosats one country could blow up those sats and cut a few ocean cables and cut off most of the International transocean internet access. That’s a good thing, because it makes it so that any nation preparing for war isn’t tempted to cut off internet because it wouldn’t work anyway.
This is why satelite internet is a dead end.
Idk if I’d call it a dead end so much as a service of last resort. There’s definitely utility in a global network of always-on wireless communication. But because it’s expensive to deploy and saturated quickly, you can’t operate at the volume of a wired network or local wireless system.
So why even entertain this detour if not for war machines - one niche where satellites are actually better.
I think you’ve answered your own question. The incremental value of satellites as part of a weapons system far outstrips normal business applications (nevermind consumer markets).
But you still run into the same constraints at a certain scale. Even if your transmission system is unassailable, it cannot support the volume of traffic of wired connections. So you’re still going to see drone pilots with enormous spools of fiberoptic wire moving along the battlefront.
The latency and bandwidth are fundamental limitations of physics which are incredibly expensive to scale up compare to cable and cell towers.
Latency is theoretically much better because the speed of light is much faster in the vacuum of space than fiber optics. So the ping from continent to continent is better using a satellite network that transmit data to each other using laser light.
I suspect we could be moving the orbit of the satellites higher so we can reduce the insane number of them, while still have better ping. I don’t see a technical reason why bandwidth would be more limited in space than on the ground. It’s fundamentally easier to scale since you can just launch more satellites along certain orbits to add bandwidth.
The fundamental problem is of course privatization and the inevitable monopoly. It will never really be cheaper than land based internet, and so both will continue to coexist, so it just adds additional resource waste for no real benefit except to make some guy rich.
I can’t remember where I read it, but there was an article in high finance tech, where they were dealing with billions of transactions per second and relied on sub-millisecond timing. They still used terrestrial long-haul (cross-continent) microwave tower networks for this because even the time it took to transceive between optics and electrons in each switching segment meant fiber was slower. The latency tolerance for those applications preclude the drive up and down to space.
Vacuum of space? Dude there’s an entire atmosphere with clouds and shit in it.
In low earth orbit?
yes, where else it would be?
So what are you trying to say? You signal goes up a few kilometers, then you’re in near vacuum in space where signal travels with proper light speed and results in faster transcontinental ping.
There are no clouds and atmosphere in space. That is what makes it space.
EDIT: Actually radio signals already travel near speed of light in the atmosphere. Only light in fiber optics is about 66% of speed of light.
EDIT2: Oh wow, a Chinese research initiative just achieved a breakthrough with hollow core fiber optics which does transmit close to the speed of light. This could render that advantage of sattelite internet moot! Upgrading cables is going to be a massive infrastructure project though.
and what’s in those few kilometers? not atmosphere? Sure the signal travels a bit faster between satellites themselves but this is not relevant in modern networking. Almost everything is cached on edge in your regional server these days so only “the last mile” is what matters for latency. Even if you ignore all this the math would still favor cable every time - 66% reliable speed of light will always beat “potential 100% speed of light sometimes for some part of the distance”
Ping
