4 ms·

>A few more words: they’re struggling to find a niche where their ungodly expensive product makes more sense than the readily available alternatives pretty obv

>A few more words: they’re struggling to find a niche where their ungodly expensive product makes more sense than the readily available alternatives pretty obvious you never worked for an ISP and forgot about all the `middle of nowhere` customers who have no high speed internet. even for me, in houston texas, we cant get fiber to the home and were stuck with AT&T DSL which was like $60 per month and ungodly slow. Also my GF and I both work from home and she does massive file uploads. had xfinity not been available starlink would be an easy choice. ive tried 5g hotspots and they are not super reliable.

overfeed 7mo ago
In all fairness, it was a qualified statement: "readily available alternatives". That immediately disqualifies customers stuck in the boonies, or a few hundred feet away from service coverage.
- mattmaroon 7mo ago
  He has readily available alternatives, but they suck. There are other, far worse forms of satellite Internet, so everybody has a readily available alternative. That makes it not a qualifying statement at all.
- Wyverald 7mo ago
  Just noting that the phrasing "readily available alternatives" by itself is slightly ambiguous: it could be read as subsetting ("the alternatives that are readily available") or just attributive ("the alternatives, which are readily available").
kdkdkrjrj 7mo ago
To be fair: this is an america regulatory capture problem.
- nradov 7mo ago
  Regulatory capture is only a secondary reason why many parts of the USA still lack cheap, reliable broadband Internet access. It turns out that running fiber everywhere is expensive, and in some areas the potential customer base doesn't justify the cost.
  - rconti 7mo ago
    It doesn't justify the cost when they can just rip you off, charging the same amount for a fraction of the bandwidth.. unless and until there's competition. Funny how quickly my internet options went from expensive cable internet, to 1 gig symmetric fiber for $90, to 10 gig symmetric fiber for $50. And now, magically, Xfinity has 1Gbps+ service for $50 as well.
    - ghaff 7mo ago
      I most certainly don’t have 1 Gps+ service for $50 though in practice my circa 50-100 Mps service for about twice that works fine does for me from Xfinity. I care a lot more about reliability.
    - parineum 7mo ago
      > It doesn't justify the cost when they can just rip you off, charging the same amount for a fraction of the bandwidth... You can start a company right now and lay fiber in these places and start your own telecom. You probably don't have the money for that but, if you put together a solid business plan, a bank would give you a loan. You may not have the experience or expertise to do that, but there are plenty of people who do. Why hasn't that happened yet? It turns out that laying down miles of fiber for a handful of customers isn't profitable. Google dod it in a few places that were low hanging fruit. Places that had telephone poles where they could get relatively easy access to them. There are certainly places where access to those poles is more difficult than it should be but most places are hampered by either being too remote to justify the cost of burying lines to a few customers (rural areas) or the digging is too expensive to many customers (suburban areas) because they'd be digging up streets.
      - 7mo ago
nativeit 7mo ago
I apologize for the initial ambiguous snippy comment. I'm an I.T. consultant in N. Carolina, and I've worked in very rural areas setting up connectivity for farms. Indeed, I have recommended StarLink on at least two occasions, albeit in concert with 4G/5G cellular (bad weather remains a problem). StarLink sounds great for airlines, RV's, boats, base camps, disaster relief--but those are almost all examples where affordability aren't usually high priorities, and I'm not sure if it's significantly better than upgrading geostationary satellite tech. I do firmly believe that StarLink is, at best, a flawed solution to the largely solvable problem in the context of rural broadband access. We very recently had federal programs and funding to advance cable/fiber rural broadband services, but it was so weighed down with bureaucratic cruft that basically nothing got done. I dunno if that specific provision of Biden's infrastructure bill remains law, but I'm pretty sure it ceased being a priority after the last election (not for nothing, StarLink had plenty to gain by those federal programs dying, although I have no direct knowledge that Musk, DOGE, et al made any direct moves to stop it--I think it was mainly the shite implementation/execution by the Biden administration). So "readily available" in the sense of "we could do it at any time, and it would be a helluva lot cheaper and more durable than continuously launching hundreds of satellites into LEO". Poor choice of words on my part, and even still I'm sure there's still plenty to disagree with there.
tayo42 7mo ago
You couldn't get cable internet in Houston?

overfeed 7mo ago

In all fairness, it was a qualified statement: "readily available alternatives". That immediately disqualifies customers stuck in the boonies, or a few hundred feet away from service coverage.

mattmaroon 7mo ago
He has readily available alternatives, but they suck. There are other, far worse forms of satellite Internet, so everybody has a readily available alternative. That makes it not a qualifying statement at all.
Wyverald 7mo ago
Just noting that the phrasing "readily available alternatives" by itself is slightly ambiguous: it could be read as subsetting ("the alternatives that are readily available") or just attributive ("the alternatives, which are readily available").

kdkdkrjrj 7mo ago

To be fair: this is an america regulatory capture problem.

nradov 7mo ago
Regulatory capture is only a secondary reason why many parts of the USA still lack cheap, reliable broadband Internet access. It turns out that running fiber everywhere is expensive, and in some areas the potential customer base doesn't justify the cost.
- rconti 7mo ago
  It doesn't justify the cost when they can just rip you off, charging the same amount for a fraction of the bandwidth.. unless and until there's competition. Funny how quickly my internet options went from expensive cable internet, to 1 gig symmetric fiber for $90, to 10 gig symmetric fiber for $50. And now, magically, Xfinity has 1Gbps+ service for $50 as well.
  - ghaff 7mo ago
    I most certainly don’t have 1 Gps+ service for $50 though in practice my circa 50-100 Mps service for about twice that works fine does for me from Xfinity. I care a lot more about reliability.
  - parineum 7mo ago
    > It doesn't justify the cost when they can just rip you off, charging the same amount for a fraction of the bandwidth... You can start a company right now and lay fiber in these places and start your own telecom. You probably don't have the money for that but, if you put together a solid business plan, a bank would give you a loan. You may not have the experience or expertise to do that, but there are plenty of people who do. Why hasn't that happened yet? It turns out that laying down miles of fiber for a handful of customers isn't profitable. Google dod it in a few places that were low hanging fruit. Places that had telephone poles where they could get relatively easy access to them. There are certainly places where access to those poles is more difficult than it should be but most places are hampered by either being too remote to justify the cost of burying lines to a few customers (rural areas) or the digging is too expensive to many customers (suburban areas) because they'd be digging up streets.
    - 7mo ago

nativeit 7mo ago

I apologize for the initial ambiguous snippy comment. I'm an I.T. consultant in N. Carolina, and I've worked in very rural areas setting up connectivity for farms. Indeed, I have recommended StarLink on at least two occasions, albeit in concert with 4G/5G cellular (bad weather remains a problem). StarLink sounds great for airlines, RV's, boats, base camps, disaster relief--but those are almost all examples where affordability aren't usually high priorities, and I'm not sure if it's significantly better than upgrading geostationary satellite tech. I do firmly believe that StarLink is, at best, a flawed solution to the largely solvable problem in the context of rural broadband access. We very recently had federal programs and funding to advance cable/fiber rural broadband services, but it was so weighed down with bureaucratic cruft that basically nothing got done. I dunno if that specific provision of Biden's infrastructure bill remains law, but I'm pretty sure it ceased being a priority after the last election (not for nothing, StarLink had plenty to gain by those federal programs dying, although I have no direct knowledge that Musk, DOGE, et al made any direct moves to stop it--I think it was mainly the shite implementation/execution by the Biden administration). So "readily available" in the sense of "we could do it at any time, and it would be a helluva lot cheaper and more durable than continuously launching hundreds of satellites into LEO". Poor choice of words on my part, and even still I'm sure there's still plenty to disagree with there.

tayo42 7mo ago

You couldn't get cable internet in Houston?