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The world needs an alternative to Starlink yesterday. If you criticize Musk on X, the self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” will reduce distribution of your

The world needs an alternative to Starlink yesterday. If you criticize Musk on X, the self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” will reduce distribution of your posts [1]. We don't want someone like that owning critical internet infrastructure. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/23/business/elon-musk-x-suppression-laura-loomer.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/23/business/elon...

threeseed 1y ago
We have an alternative for 99% of the world and it’s fibre. Which brings everyone the same speeds instead of perpetuating a digital divide between cities and rural areas. Which may not be bad now but once we start moving to ten and hundred gigabit plans, solutions like Starlink are going to resemble dialup.
- robalpha 1y ago
  This makes zero sense. Fibre is not going to be economically viable in rural areas at all. If that's the only option, they won't have any internet at all. I also don't think we'll be moving to >10g plans anytime soon. Only a small portion of users have even close to 1g, and everyone else seems fine with it.
  - threeseed 1y ago
    a) Hospitals and roads are not economically viable either. We do it because it serves the national good and by making people more productive it improves the economy as a whole. b) In Australia they are trialing 100g over the existing fibre network. c) Everyone was fine with dialup at one point as well.
    - laurencei 1y ago
      I'm from Australia. You dont want to use us as an example of internet speeds or leading the world on anything in this space. Our internet infrastructure/speed etc is considered sub optimal by many. It is (slowly) getting better - but it has been years of lost oppoutunity.
      - threeseed 1y ago
        a) Australia is a very large, geographically diverse country that has committed to rolling out fibre in rural areas. It is an example that it can be done and you don’t need to rely on bandwidth limited satellites. b) Our internet infrastructure was sub-optimal but is being upgraded to full fibre to the door across the country. 1g is available to consumers today, 10g to businesses, 100g in testing. And it’s future proof.
    - tastyfreeze 1y ago
      The interstate wasn't built for public good or trade. It was built for military. Public use for commerce is a byproduct.
  - ty6853 1y ago
    A lot of rural areas have small-scale wireless ISPs at 10-100mbps. You just have to install a directional antenna on your roof. This doesn't work once you get really remote, nor does fiber. In any case none of them beat the experience of pulling an antenna out of a box and it pretty much just working.
    - thallium205 1y ago
      These services are generally terrible compared to Starlink.
      - ty6853 1y ago
        No doubt, but given the cost and challenge of launching a satellite, I think your best bet if your rural enclave despises Starlink for whatever reason, right now your best bet is to run fiber to a single house and make a mini wireless ISP.
      - esseph 1y ago
        Maybe 15 years ago, but not for at least 10 years, and definitely 5 in most markets. I'd take fiber -> Taara -> Tarana 3.65 CBRS any day of the week over any LEO. Way faster, way lower latency, and way lower total cost to deploy. Also scales massively better.
        kortilla 1y ago
        >Tarana 3.65 CBRS any day of the week over any LEO. Way faster, way lower latency To what? Starlink is getting you to a major exchange in two direct shots. When I was testing it in North Dakota I was getting lower latency to Google and Cloudflare through Starlink than I was through local fiber providers (likely due to their long circuitous route to Minneapolis).
        esseph 1y ago
        Satellite can't handle the density required for one, but yes, network path is huge. Same reason a lot of HFT uses microwave vs fiber paths - fiber paths are following the ROW, the microwave paths are the physically shorter paths. LEO is a niche technology, but not and shouldn't be the default for tons of reasons.
  - lowmagnet 1y ago
    Weird, I'm sitting here in a rural area and I have 1g fiber. You may have forgotten that cooperatives exist. It's a common error, since they mainly exist in exurb and rural areas. The cool thing is that since they often own the power right of way, they can run fiber on it without any change. The way coops work is that we're the owners, we vote for initiatives, etc. The local power company is now our region's #1 internet provider, hands down.
    - bdamm 1y ago
      Which is great for you, but the vast majority of the world doesn't have such strong local organization consisting of members who can afford to pay for big ditch infrastructure.
      - threeseed 1y ago
        Vast majority of the world is having fibre being laid by governments. You need to vote and encourage others to make fast internet an election issue.
        bdamm 1y ago
        I'm sorry, but in an environment where sovreignty is increasingly the dominant election issue, fiber doesn't rate. And even if every house has fiber, there are still many cases for mobile and robust Internet that can't be covered by cellular networks. The reality is that Starlink needs a competitor. And besides, satellite Internet from LEO satellites is a viable competitive option to fiber, based on infrastructure costs alone. It's all nice to convince slow moving bureaucracies to lay out fiber, but nobody wants to wait the five to ten years for that to happen, when you can subscribe today and get it within a week.
    - ty6853 1y ago
      If you get 'free' fiber you are just punting the cost to other members. It cost me $15,000 to establish my co-op membership 1,000 ft it went to the next guy. Our bylaws require all members to pay 100% of the full unsubsidized cost of extension up front. This is fairly common. Not a lot of co-ops are built where prior entrants foot the full cost of new entrants. The real cost of extending fiber can be $10+ a foot overhead or $30+ underground, which is a hard sell to prior entrants as a freebie to toss out.
  - AngryData 1y ago
    Meanwhile, me living in a rural area, didn't have internet besides 56k until 4g LTE existed, got co-op fiber direct to my home now for less than my wireless plan, and it is so successful they have expanded to everywhere around here and continuously growing. If an area could be wired with phones in the past, it can be wired for fiber now even cheaper and nearly all of rural areas were wired with electrical and phone lines before. Fiber is cheaper and lighter than copper lines, bucket trucks have never been more common, and there are very few existing utilities to contend with. This fiber is WAY cheaper than any satellite internet, works even when the weather is shitty, and doesn't require investments into proprietary gear.
  - vel0city 1y ago
    Somehow we managed to bring telephone and electricity to rural areas but golly a fiber line is just too hard.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
ty6853 1y ago
It's hilarious hearing family/friends who I have invited to remote areas shit-talk Starlink while using it, because we have no great other choice. Personally I will buy internet from Satan himself if it works and for the right price.
- pseudocomposer 1y ago
  Are you saying this includes the price of not being allowed to criticize the CEO?
  - ty6853 1y ago
    This got me wondering who the CEO of Starlink is. I could not find it anywhere. I know who the CEO of the 100% owner of Starlink is, but not Starlink itself. Do they even have one? IIRC most states when filing an LLC for private equity require a president but not a CEO.
    - kortilla 1y ago
      Starlink isn’t a company. It’s a product of SpaceX. You want to look up the CEO of SpaceX.
      - ty6853 1y ago
        Both Wikipedia and various telecom bids / contracts I found listed it as ' Starlink Services, LLC'. Which is owned by SpaceX, but it appears to be a separate company. The entity I found in an Oregon bid was registration #4503816 in Deleware.
        kortilla 1y ago
        It is not a separate company in any meaningful sense. The job listings for Starlink all clearly say you are working for spacex and you are granted RSUs in spacex. “Starlink services” was probably legal prep in case they ever wanted to sell it off if it flopped.
rozal 1y ago
Why is Bezos preferable to Elon?
- an0malous 1y ago
  It doesn’t have to be Bezos, but competition is preferable to monopolies
  - godelski 1y ago
    Unfortunately in this case I think we have a natural monopoly. In such cases, I do not think control should be in any individuals' hands. Longer comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827615
    - ty6853 1y ago
      Wouldn't it be possible to privatize space in some way like land, and then enforce any damages to neighbor's 'land'/orbit?. Might involve some easements for 'right of way' into higher / intersecting orbit.
      - godelski 1y ago
        I mean you could... but good luck getting global agreement on that and realistically no. It is a thing that sounds nice and could look nice on paper but real world complications will result in issues pretty fast. Sounds like a great way to start a war as treaty violations will be inevitable and unavoidable. If you divide up by altitude: it requires significant negotiation to place a vehicle (an arbitrary spacecraft or satellite) in any location. If you partition by location (e.g. project current airspace upwards): your vehicles can't abide by these rules. They must orbit the planet. They will eventually go over most countries. If you partition by orbit: you have to contend with precession. Craft drift[0,1]. This is because Earth is an oblate spheroid and not a sphere. It is also caused by angular momentum itself, so your orbit rotates. You will start in one and over time move into another. There's not much you can do about this and it is quite costly to maneuver (constant orbital maneuvering means an exponential increase in weight, complexity, and cost). Remember, the Earth does not rotate around in its axis in a fixed period of time, nor does it around the sun. So really the laws of physics have you in a bind. Things are constantly moving and changing. So even the best laid plans will eventually lead to violation (and thus conflict) even through no ill-intent. This is actually why a lot of (especially "hard") Sci-Fi has treated space travel as a global unification period. Because it becomes necessary in order to avoid conflict. This was a bigger discussion in the 60's and 70's when the initial space ventures were occurring and in the public eye, but has naturally drifted out of conversation as the underlying motivation similarly did. Though it stayed in conversation for domain experts who frequently content with this still. tldr: No. Physics is a bitch [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nodal_precession https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nodal_precession [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsidal_precession https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsidal_precession
aaron695 1y ago
[dead]
tw04 1y ago
The problem is there’s no indication Bezos will be any better. He was more than happy to bend the knee to Trump. What we really need is the European Union to fund a global competitor.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- bergie 1y ago
  Oneweb is already live. I have no idea of the performance, and pricing details are hazy. It is a shame they decided to go the legacy B2B route.
godelski 1y ago
While I agree, I also think we have to contend that this is a bigger issue than Musk and Bezos. Fundamentally, this is a global issue. There's only so much space and the laws of physics can be unkind. Given that, I'd argue that critical infrastructure like this is concerning in the hands of any individual entity. It would be concerning even if exclusively controlled by Mr Rodgers[0]. There's an opportunity here to build a global coalition and mutual partnership like never before. All parties benefit by sharing. And all parties MUST settle for inferior infrastructure by not working together. There's no way around this... the laws of physics are just a constraint that can't be overcome... My main comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827615 [0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/mister-rogers https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/mister-rogers
AStonesThrow 1y ago
[flagged]
- breadwinner 1y ago
  Fortunately FOX News is not the only news source. We don't want Starlink to be the only satellite internet serving rural areas. Is that hard to understand?
- Freedom2 1y ago
  No, but I'm fairly sure FOX News and the NY Yankees don't advocate themselves as free speech absolutionists. So I'm not sure what your comparison is trying to do here.
  - AStonesThrow 1y ago
    Sorry but I was distracted by a high-pitched whistling sound as the point went far above your head; however, I'd be entertained to know your definition of "absolutionists". I know what "absolution" is, but y'all seem to be inventing new words in this respect.

threeseed 1y ago

We have an alternative for 99% of the world and it’s fibre. Which brings everyone the same speeds instead of perpetuating a digital divide between cities and rural areas. Which may not be bad now but once we start moving to ten and hundred gigabit plans, solutions like Starlink are going to resemble dialup.

robalpha 1y ago
This makes zero sense. Fibre is not going to be economically viable in rural areas at all. If that's the only option, they won't have any internet at all. I also don't think we'll be moving to >10g plans anytime soon. Only a small portion of users have even close to 1g, and everyone else seems fine with it.
- threeseed 1y ago
  a) Hospitals and roads are not economically viable either. We do it because it serves the national good and by making people more productive it improves the economy as a whole. b) In Australia they are trialing 100g over the existing fibre network. c) Everyone was fine with dialup at one point as well.
  - laurencei 1y ago
    I'm from Australia. You dont want to use us as an example of internet speeds or leading the world on anything in this space. Our internet infrastructure/speed etc is considered sub optimal by many. It is (slowly) getting better - but it has been years of lost oppoutunity.
    - threeseed 1y ago
      a) Australia is a very large, geographically diverse country that has committed to rolling out fibre in rural areas. It is an example that it can be done and you don’t need to rely on bandwidth limited satellites. b) Our internet infrastructure was sub-optimal but is being upgraded to full fibre to the door across the country. 1g is available to consumers today, 10g to businesses, 100g in testing. And it’s future proof.
  - tastyfreeze 1y ago
    The interstate wasn't built for public good or trade. It was built for military. Public use for commerce is a byproduct.
- ty6853 1y ago
  A lot of rural areas have small-scale wireless ISPs at 10-100mbps. You just have to install a directional antenna on your roof. This doesn't work once you get really remote, nor does fiber. In any case none of them beat the experience of pulling an antenna out of a box and it pretty much just working.
  - thallium205 1y ago
    These services are generally terrible compared to Starlink.
    - ty6853 1y ago
      No doubt, but given the cost and challenge of launching a satellite, I think your best bet if your rural enclave despises Starlink for whatever reason, right now your best bet is to run fiber to a single house and make a mini wireless ISP.
    - esseph 1y ago
      Maybe 15 years ago, but not for at least 10 years, and definitely 5 in most markets. I'd take fiber -> Taara -> Tarana 3.65 CBRS any day of the week over any LEO. Way faster, way lower latency, and way lower total cost to deploy. Also scales massively better.
      - kortilla 1y ago
        >Tarana 3.65 CBRS any day of the week over any LEO. Way faster, way lower latency To what? Starlink is getting you to a major exchange in two direct shots. When I was testing it in North Dakota I was getting lower latency to Google and Cloudflare through Starlink than I was through local fiber providers (likely due to their long circuitous route to Minneapolis).
        esseph 1y ago
        Satellite can't handle the density required for one, but yes, network path is huge. Same reason a lot of HFT uses microwave vs fiber paths - fiber paths are following the ROW, the microwave paths are the physically shorter paths. LEO is a niche technology, but not and shouldn't be the default for tons of reasons.
- lowmagnet 1y ago
  Weird, I'm sitting here in a rural area and I have 1g fiber. You may have forgotten that cooperatives exist. It's a common error, since they mainly exist in exurb and rural areas. The cool thing is that since they often own the power right of way, they can run fiber on it without any change. The way coops work is that we're the owners, we vote for initiatives, etc. The local power company is now our region's #1 internet provider, hands down.
  - bdamm 1y ago
    Which is great for you, but the vast majority of the world doesn't have such strong local organization consisting of members who can afford to pay for big ditch infrastructure.
    - threeseed 1y ago
      Vast majority of the world is having fibre being laid by governments. You need to vote and encourage others to make fast internet an election issue.
      - bdamm 1y ago
        I'm sorry, but in an environment where sovreignty is increasingly the dominant election issue, fiber doesn't rate. And even if every house has fiber, there are still many cases for mobile and robust Internet that can't be covered by cellular networks. The reality is that Starlink needs a competitor. And besides, satellite Internet from LEO satellites is a viable competitive option to fiber, based on infrastructure costs alone. It's all nice to convince slow moving bureaucracies to lay out fiber, but nobody wants to wait the five to ten years for that to happen, when you can subscribe today and get it within a week.
  - ty6853 1y ago
    If you get 'free' fiber you are just punting the cost to other members. It cost me $15,000 to establish my co-op membership 1,000 ft it went to the next guy. Our bylaws require all members to pay 100% of the full unsubsidized cost of extension up front. This is fairly common. Not a lot of co-ops are built where prior entrants foot the full cost of new entrants. The real cost of extending fiber can be $10+ a foot overhead or $30+ underground, which is a hard sell to prior entrants as a freebie to toss out.
- AngryData 1y ago
  Meanwhile, me living in a rural area, didn't have internet besides 56k until 4g LTE existed, got co-op fiber direct to my home now for less than my wireless plan, and it is so successful they have expanded to everywhere around here and continuously growing. If an area could be wired with phones in the past, it can be wired for fiber now even cheaper and nearly all of rural areas were wired with electrical and phone lines before. Fiber is cheaper and lighter than copper lines, bucket trucks have never been more common, and there are very few existing utilities to contend with. This fiber is WAY cheaper than any satellite internet, works even when the weather is shitty, and doesn't require investments into proprietary gear.
- vel0city 1y ago
  Somehow we managed to bring telephone and electricity to rural areas but golly a fiber line is just too hard.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

ty6853 1y ago

It's hilarious hearing family/friends who I have invited to remote areas shit-talk Starlink while using it, because we have no great other choice. Personally I will buy internet from Satan himself if it works and for the right price.

pseudocomposer 1y ago
Are you saying this includes the price of not being allowed to criticize the CEO?
- ty6853 1y ago
  This got me wondering who the CEO of Starlink is. I could not find it anywhere. I know who the CEO of the 100% owner of Starlink is, but not Starlink itself. Do they even have one? IIRC most states when filing an LLC for private equity require a president but not a CEO.
  - kortilla 1y ago
    Starlink isn’t a company. It’s a product of SpaceX. You want to look up the CEO of SpaceX.
    - ty6853 1y ago
      Both Wikipedia and various telecom bids / contracts I found listed it as ' Starlink Services, LLC'. Which is owned by SpaceX, but it appears to be a separate company. The entity I found in an Oregon bid was registration #4503816 in Deleware.
      - kortilla 1y ago
        It is not a separate company in any meaningful sense. The job listings for Starlink all clearly say you are working for spacex and you are granted RSUs in spacex. “Starlink services” was probably legal prep in case they ever wanted to sell it off if it flopped.

rozal 1y ago

Why is Bezos preferable to Elon?

an0malous 1y ago
It doesn’t have to be Bezos, but competition is preferable to monopolies
- godelski 1y ago
  Unfortunately in this case I think we have a natural monopoly. In such cases, I do not think control should be in any individuals' hands. Longer comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827615
  - ty6853 1y ago
    Wouldn't it be possible to privatize space in some way like land, and then enforce any damages to neighbor's 'land'/orbit?. Might involve some easements for 'right of way' into higher / intersecting orbit.
    - godelski 1y ago
      I mean you could... but good luck getting global agreement on that and realistically no. It is a thing that sounds nice and could look nice on paper but real world complications will result in issues pretty fast. Sounds like a great way to start a war as treaty violations will be inevitable and unavoidable. If you divide up by altitude: it requires significant negotiation to place a vehicle (an arbitrary spacecraft or satellite) in any location. If you partition by location (e.g. project current airspace upwards): your vehicles can't abide by these rules. They must orbit the planet. They will eventually go over most countries. If you partition by orbit: you have to contend with precession. Craft drift[0,1]. This is because Earth is an oblate spheroid and not a sphere. It is also caused by angular momentum itself, so your orbit rotates. You will start in one and over time move into another. There's not much you can do about this and it is quite costly to maneuver (constant orbital maneuvering means an exponential increase in weight, complexity, and cost). Remember, the Earth does not rotate around in its axis in a fixed period of time, nor does it around the sun. So really the laws of physics have you in a bind. Things are constantly moving and changing. So even the best laid plans will eventually lead to violation (and thus conflict) even through no ill-intent. This is actually why a lot of (especially "hard") Sci-Fi has treated space travel as a global unification period. Because it becomes necessary in order to avoid conflict. This was a bigger discussion in the 60's and 70's when the initial space ventures were occurring and in the public eye, but has naturally drifted out of conversation as the underlying motivation similarly did. Though it stayed in conversation for domain experts who frequently content with this still. tldr: No. Physics is a bitch [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nodal_precession https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nodal_precession [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsidal_precession https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsidal_precession

aaron695 1y ago

[dead]

tw04 1y ago

The problem is there’s no indication Bezos will be any better. He was more than happy to bend the knee to Trump. What we really need is the European Union to fund a global competitor.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
bergie 1y ago
Oneweb is already live. I have no idea of the performance, and pricing details are hazy. It is a shame they decided to go the legacy B2B route.

godelski 1y ago

While I agree, I also think we have to contend that this is a bigger issue than Musk and Bezos. Fundamentally, this is a global issue. There's only so much space and the laws of physics can be unkind. Given that, I'd argue that critical infrastructure like this is concerning in the hands of any individual entity. It would be concerning even if exclusively controlled by Mr Rodgers[0]. There's an opportunity here to build a global coalition and mutual partnership like never before. All parties benefit by sharing. And all parties MUST settle for inferior infrastructure by not working together. There's no way around this... the laws of physics are just a constraint that can't be overcome... My main comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827615 [0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/mister-rogers https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/mister-rogers

AStonesThrow 1y ago

[flagged]

breadwinner 1y ago
Fortunately FOX News is not the only news source. We don't want Starlink to be the only satellite internet serving rural areas. Is that hard to understand?
Freedom2 1y ago
No, but I'm fairly sure FOX News and the NY Yankees don't advocate themselves as free speech absolutionists. So I'm not sure what your comparison is trying to do here.
- AStonesThrow 1y ago
  Sorry but I was distracted by a high-pitched whistling sound as the point went far above your head; however, I'd be entertained to know your definition of "absolutionists". I know what "absolution" is, but y'all seem to be inventing new words in this respect.