3 ms·

What a joke, Starlink is the best remote service for broadband, and there are no others. Please don't say "HughesNet" or some geosync service with a straight fa

What a joke, Starlink is the best remote service for broadband, and there are no others. Please don't say "HughesNet" or some geosync service with a straight face. Of course the FCC and its zombie representatives from legacy telco will be assholes to Starlink, but nothing else will actually get you service from a warzone, fire zone, a distant mountain range, central Africa, etc. If legacy telco was in charge of starlink, the FCC would make the standards whatever they wanted. The other telcos take years and years of rural broadband funding from Congress and just BRAZENLY pocket it and tell the American people: "Fuck you, see how much we own the government? THIS MUCH". Starlink provides a paradigm-changing useful service and you get crap headlines straight from the lobbyist/astroturfer's mouth. Why can't we have nice things? This. Starlink could double or triple their price and they would probably have all their subscribers filled. Think about what Starlink means to Africa, central asia, interior australia, remote south africa. The economic/information access to those areas without tens of thousands of 5G towers and laying thousands of miles of fiber. The amount of humans this brings silicon valley's big companies into contact with probably increased a by a billion or more. They should be sending billions of dollars to SpaceX to get the flotilla deployed ASAP.

ncmncm 4y ago
Most of Africa and central Asia cannot afford a terminal. Australian outback is too sparsely populated to matter, economically. You seem to imagine Starlink will be motivated to behave better than other telecomm companies. I have no clue why you imagine this. I expect the more power they amass, the more they will use. On their own behalf, not yours.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  > Most of Africa and central Asia cannot afford a terminal. Those places are pretty big and even 5% is a huge amount. And terminal cost go down over time, and people can share 1 terminal. 1 Terminal is preferably fine for a multi-family home or potentially even a whole remote village.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    You think subscriber agreements will permit using it as the uplink for a local ISP? Do they now? Seems like that would cost rather more. You could imagine customer ... sparse ... areas might get a discount, but you could also imagine not. Anyway they will need to maximize revenue to pay for lofting new satellites, what, 4000/y? 6000/y? as those age out.
    - wmf 4y ago
      People in the developing world don't care about those agreements. Ultimately there's probably a way to make the numbers work, like charging 5x the price for 20 customers sharing one dish.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        Getting cut off for abusing your uplink would be pretty troublesome.
    - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
      1) hell yes starlinks will be shared by entire remote villages, it happened in the volcano eruption in Tonga. 2) starlink would love the positive press of third world connectivity enablement 3) remember, starlink is a low-flying satellite flotilla. So the satellites over remote expansive areas aren't being used as much, and so revenue from central africa can be priced differently to get whatever you can out of the geographic areas the satellites fly over. Revenue is revenue, even if it's only 10% of your US revenue. As you say, the goal will be to get revenue for the time the satellite is aloft. If you get a million/day while it passes over the US, then 100,000/day as it passes over South America, well, that's still money. Africa is 1.2 billion people, South America is 422 million, the satellites fly over regardless. 1.6 billion people is a lot of potential revenue, even if third world.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        Starlink is limited in how much attention they can devote to such customization, and even by how complicated their billing and payment systems would get. So picking up those subscribers, even where substantial money is in principle on the table, will necessarily lag far behind.
haswell 4y ago
Nowhere does the article claim that the Starlink service is poor, or that other services come close. The RDOF auction had specific criteria, and as noted in the article, participants could bid at four tiers: 25/3, 50/5, 100/20 and 1000/500 Mbps. Simply put, Starlink bid at 100/20, and they have an obligation to meet that in order to qualify for the fund. There's plenty of evidence that they can do just that, albeit with some open questions about how things will go as they continue to roll out the network and take on more subscribers. I don't understand the anger throughout the rest of this comment. Geos that qualify for RDOF funding are just a subset of Starlink's market, and arguably any Internet provider bidding for those funds should be held to the standard set when bidding for those funds. It's fine (and justified, IMO) to be angry about how crappy telcos have been for years, and their misuse of funding is certainly upsetting, but are you suggesting that Starlink should somehow be absolved of their responsibilities because of past transgressions by legacy telcos? > Why can't we have nice things? This. What is the nice thing here that we cannot have? Why? > Think about what Starlink means to Africa, central asia, interior australia, remote south africa. I think the value of Starlink is tremendous hard to estimate, especially in these traditionally underserved regions. But how does the RDOF funding conversation have anything to do with that?

ncmncm 4y ago

Most of Africa and central Asia cannot afford a terminal. Australian outback is too sparsely populated to matter, economically. You seem to imagine Starlink will be motivated to behave better than other telecomm companies. I have no clue why you imagine this. I expect the more power they amass, the more they will use. On their own behalf, not yours.

panick21_ 4y ago
> Most of Africa and central Asia cannot afford a terminal. Those places are pretty big and even 5% is a huge amount. And terminal cost go down over time, and people can share 1 terminal. 1 Terminal is preferably fine for a multi-family home or potentially even a whole remote village.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  You think subscriber agreements will permit using it as the uplink for a local ISP? Do they now? Seems like that would cost rather more. You could imagine customer ... sparse ... areas might get a discount, but you could also imagine not. Anyway they will need to maximize revenue to pay for lofting new satellites, what, 4000/y? 6000/y? as those age out.
  - wmf 4y ago
    People in the developing world don't care about those agreements. Ultimately there's probably a way to make the numbers work, like charging 5x the price for 20 customers sharing one dish.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Getting cut off for abusing your uplink would be pretty troublesome.
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    1) hell yes starlinks will be shared by entire remote villages, it happened in the volcano eruption in Tonga. 2) starlink would love the positive press of third world connectivity enablement 3) remember, starlink is a low-flying satellite flotilla. So the satellites over remote expansive areas aren't being used as much, and so revenue from central africa can be priced differently to get whatever you can out of the geographic areas the satellites fly over. Revenue is revenue, even if it's only 10% of your US revenue. As you say, the goal will be to get revenue for the time the satellite is aloft. If you get a million/day while it passes over the US, then 100,000/day as it passes over South America, well, that's still money. Africa is 1.2 billion people, South America is 422 million, the satellites fly over regardless. 1.6 billion people is a lot of potential revenue, even if third world.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Starlink is limited in how much attention they can devote to such customization, and even by how complicated their billing and payment systems would get. So picking up those subscribers, even where substantial money is in principle on the table, will necessarily lag far behind.

haswell 4y ago

Nowhere does the article claim that the Starlink service is poor, or that other services come close. The RDOF auction had specific criteria, and as noted in the article, participants could bid at four tiers: 25/3, 50/5, 100/20 and 1000/500 Mbps. Simply put, Starlink bid at 100/20, and they have an obligation to meet that in order to qualify for the fund. There's plenty of evidence that they can do just that, albeit with some open questions about how things will go as they continue to roll out the network and take on more subscribers. I don't understand the anger throughout the rest of this comment. Geos that qualify for RDOF funding are just a subset of Starlink's market, and arguably any Internet provider bidding for those funds should be held to the standard set when bidding for those funds. It's fine (and justified, IMO) to be angry about how crappy telcos have been for years, and their misuse of funding is certainly upsetting, but are you suggesting that Starlink should somehow be absolved of their responsibilities because of past transgressions by legacy telcos? > Why can't we have nice things? This. What is the nice thing here that we cannot have? Why? > Think about what Starlink means to Africa, central asia, interior australia, remote south africa. I think the value of Starlink is tremendous hard to estimate, especially in these traditionally underserved regions. But how does the RDOF funding conversation have anything to do with that?