TIL: The majority of Lemmys have never lived an hour from the nearest population center, down a dirt road, on a few hundred acres of wilderness. I fucking HATE musk and I still have an RV kit in my basement so when I’m traveling around hours from anywhere, Starlink works perfectly.
I live two hours from a city, waaaay up in the Alps and I have gigabit fibre for€40 a month lol
Your infrastructure sucks donkeyballs 😂
two hours is waaaay out there guys!
My sides are in orbit! Here is a side-by side of the Alps
next to a small section of the American Rockies,
which is still nothing compared to Canada (yes there are people in that big empty area).
No offense, but true European rural doesn’t exist.
Me -
Your infrastructure is shit
You -
Here, I will demonstrate how correct you are
😂
No offense, but true European rural doesn’t exist.
Bro, come to northern Sweden and say that again lol
Shit, that picture outside Edmonton is hardly even distant, there are a bunch of communities in northern Alberta and BC that don’t even have roads going to them because they’re too far away.
No where in Europe is “remote.”
Come to the South West US where you can drive 100 miles in any direction and barely see another human.
Or maybe don’t go there and then complain about the obvious shortfalls of the place. The rural exodus happened for a reason.
It’s a difference between definitions of “city” and “middle of nowhere” between the US and Europe. The US is a massive place. Part of the reason the US appears to have such a crappy infrastructure is that when, say, mobile carriers want to improve it to upgrade something to 5G, they have to do so for the entire country, with many US states having an area the size of whole European countries. Texas itself is the size of Germany. That is a much bigger undertaking than improving it for a single European country or even a block of countries like western or central Europe. Things are so spread out here that “remote” can mean REALLY remote in some areas. Distances between reasonably sized cities in the US can be much larger than in Europe, and the US has more people in those more rural areas than some think, especially in states in the middle of the country. Local ISPs for internet in those areas can be good depending on the area, but a lot of people in the really rural areas would still be better and more easily served by a service like Starlink.
https://www.wideopencountry.com/map-shows-countries-fit-inside-texas/
This is far more hilarious to see that a good number of European countries fit inside of Texas.
Brother, we have wildly different definitions of “nowhere” if you get 5G. When I lived in a rural shithole in the US, I had to drive 100 miles to start picking up 5G signals (though that was just before the pandemic, so maybe 5G coverage has improved greatly in the past 3 years).
Yeah, Musk has gone insane, anyone can see that.
But Musk aside, LEO satellites are still really the only viable and economical solution to the problem of broadband in rural areas, and Starlink seems to work great.
Also, the objection that resulted in pulling this funding looks pretty bullshit. Several other broadband providers are getting these same funding deals for doing basically nothing.
Musk has gone insane
No, he hasn’t. He’s just a bog-standard capitalist doing bog-standard capitalist things.
Today you learned that the majority of people don’t live in the middle of nowhere?
Of course they don’t, by definition, if a bunch of people lived there, it wouldn’t be the middle of nowhere.
My partner’s family lives on a dirt road between a corn field and cow pasture… a full 1.5 hour drive from the nearest mid-sized city… they have gigabit fiber…
Not saying that their situation is currently typical, but id argue it is indeed a sign that good internet is slowly but surely coming available to everyone.
It’s not a scam. Satellite internet was extremely expensive and slow last time I checked a few years before starlink. Yeah , musk is garbage but starlink is actually helping a lot of people worldwide.
ITAR…go look it up. And the UA still uses it for good and so does everyone there, they just cannot use it as a direct weapon. Get off the musk hate dick… it’s clouding you and apparently a bunch of people’s judgement.
The money would have come from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund program (RDOF), but the FCC writes that Starlink wasn’t able to “demonstrate that it could deliver the promised service” and that giving the subsidy to it wouldn’t be “the best use of limited Universal Service Fund dollars.”
The FCC decision sounds like a good thing in this case, also because Starlink isn’t being managed responsibly
The technology itself is cool, and I hope some other companies can build off that work to meet that need. There are a lot of existing companies that take advantage of those living in rural areas, many of which don’t have other options or much disposable income
It’s probably the most wasteful way of providing internet imaginable since they have to send satellites up by the dozen every year for them to burn in the atmosphere only several years lates. Yeah I don’t think it’s a good business model at all, especially considering they haven’t been able to turn a profit and rely on subsidies.
Yet many towns where I live saw broadband, yes, broadband, not fiber, for the first time in their life thanks to Starlink. It’s easy to talk when coming from a place of privilege.
it absolutely is a scam… you WANT it to not be a scam, but you are incorrect…
I think it’s the other way around…you WANT everything he touches to be a scam.
I don’t like the guy either, but Starlink is a real, actual product that tons of people are using just fine right now. Also, his rockets are allowing the US to continue to send personnel to the space station without relying on Russia. That is not a scam either.
Why would I want it to not be a scam ? I don’t even use it. Years ago, I heard about internet satellite and got curious, so I searched a bit about it and found out it was really expensive. I don’t remember exactly but it was more or less in the 100s of dollars monthly for an abysmal speed like " up to 8mb" or something.
If anyone used internet satellite a few years before starlink was launched please correct me if I am wrong.
Oh no! It’s expensive! Wait. Isn’t he the chairman of a vertically integrated space shuttle and satellite international conglomerate? Why are Americans footing the bill for any of this?
How about that CGI car in orbit in front of a swim screen? There are still a lot of people who haven’t figured that one out yet.
What it accomplished is manifold, but mainly to get investors to pony up, and creditors to extend credit, and the fan boys to fan the flames.
CC: @misk@sopuli.xyz
Its simple like many Musk projects he over promises and under delivers.
Starlink performance is slow and unreliable. Sometimes you get 100 Mbps and sometimes you get < 1 Mbps with the average being around 25. So it cant even really be considered broadband.
My parents had it. Average was about 40mbps over a 60gb download, minimums were in the low 20s, and it topped out at around 80-100mbps. A fuck of a lot better than 10mbps down 750kbps up, their only other option. I hate Elon as much as the next guy, but starlink is awesome.
Doesn’t match my experience. The worst thing about it is ping, but download is mostly always around 100-200.
Yeah, I’ve always seen at least 20 down, never as low as 1 Mbps the grandparent comment claimed. I usually see roughly 100 Mbps down, though.
That’s based on using it in a few different places in our RV over the summer, some with obstructions from trees in some spots. Regardless of the actual speed, my wife and I were both able to telework and hold conference calls simultaneously without an issue - and my wife would use video (I kept it off, but she used it).
Really? Shit. I was planning to move to starlink but let me do some research.
I had Starlink too and it was definitely unreliable. It’s also absolutely atrocious in any kind of weather like heavy rain or snow.
It’s better than nothing for sure, but definitely look into it more, especially if you’ll be relying on it for work.
Quite excited to see what some competition will do in this space (no pun intended) with Amazon’s upcoming deployment.
That’s significantly less of a concern than assisting in elevating a few billion people out of poverty
This will not do that. That’s the entire reason they are NOT getting the money. Start thinking with your brain and stop listening to hype.
I imagine Amazon will be the one taking your tax dollars to do business. They famously have no money and need American tax dollars generated by working class labor in order to survive.
trying to get another one of his boondoggles financed by Congress i see… nothing but charlatan under those robes…
