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.
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.
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!
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
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?
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 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.
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.
LOL…from the beginning of this grift, experts said Starlink was not scalable.
From what I see, 99% of the business community thinks all graphs linearly extrapolate.
Spoiler alert: AI learning is not scaling either.
Theyre still improving bandwidth with each launch as the newer hardware goes up, they haven’t approached the flat line of 1 dish comes down for 1 dish going up which would be at the 5 year mark of no improved hardware or launch capabilities.
Once starship is operational, its 20x the bandwidth per launch, and cadence will increase so there’s still tons of room to scale, and its not like those dishes wont improve either.
And that was supposed to be the backbone of the space based data center
Pipe dream was supposed to be the backbone of another pipe dream. The Elon way of doing business.
How could someone who knows all about computers and networking not predict the logistics problems for such projects? /s
That tweet is almost impressively stupid.
What the fuck does the download size of Wikipedia have to do with anything?
I can also fit some of the largest LLMs on my phone. Where is all that AI investment going to???
The world’s first trillionaire doesn’t get to call anyone else greedy.
“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.”
Yes, that is what everyone has been warning about for years and why we want the communication monopolies torn down… Fucking leopards running loose out here eating faces and they still just kinda shrug and go “wish there was an alternative to letting all the leopards run free eating our faces”.
To be fair, if you’ve ever had to use HughesNet, a leopard eating your face is a welcome change of pace.
Brother… You speak the truth…
I saw my first billboard advertising Starlink in Billings, MT today. They have avoided advertising in the past.
Generally they haven’t needed to. For most of the situations where Starlink really shines like rural connections, the alternatives are objectively a lot worse. And the other common situation is to avoid a regional monopoly which is still like 90% of the US.
Starlink basically sells itself, even with Elon at the helm.
Starlink will enshittify like all other non-PUD ISPs. This article shows that, and it’s already begun to struggle with throughput and scaling it is becoming more and more of a challenge.
There is one alternative that has been shown to be better than anything else: PUD projects which treat internet access as a utility and not something to make more and more money off of. The FCC has rural grants for ISPs that serve rural areas, but instead of exclusively funding PUD projects, they keep giving money to big for-profit ISPs (like Starlink).
Starlink should be considered a band-aid and only something that you’d need when you were in a super rural area without other utilities. The solution is giving everyone with grid connections public fiber via PUDs.
I know we don’t live in a utopia where that will happen overnight, and we don’t have an FCC that gives a shit. But the FCC should not be giving a trillionaire taxpayer dollars for a half-baked, polluting, wasteful service that will ultimately do the same rugpull that other private ISPs have done.
What’s pud?
Public utility district (although sometimes “people’s utility district”). Used for utilities like water lines, sewer lines, and fiber. Typically the cost is paid by a group of neighbors, an entire neighborhood, or it can be county wide as well. Usually also subsidized by the county, state, or federal government to help reduce cost.
At my previous employer, we just used Starlink as a third backup circuit. There they’d be better suited for that and travel vs whole home internet.
Fortunately rural fiber rollouts are happening very frequently now. The big ISPs don’t want to miss out on the starlink money.
sounds like MUSK is desperate.
“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!
The whole concept is rotten right from the start.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk maintains an extremely close relationship with Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr.
Under Carr’s leadership, Musk’s rocket company has effectively been given carte blanche in its efforts to roll out its orbital Starlink broadband service to more Americans, a glaring conflict of interest that could have profound implications for society.
That’s despite concerns over thousands or even millions of satellites cluttering our planet’s already extremely busy orbit and the environmentally damaging rocket launches that send them up.
And the space-based network is already starting to experience some major strains — as some experts have long predicted.
“How can Europe compete with that?” I ask myself more and more often (also AI bubble/data centers). Hopefully in the long term.
Brendan Carr deserves a fate worse than Mr Hands.
“How can Europe compete with that?” I ask myself more and more often (also AI bubble/data centers). Hopefully in the long term.
The competition with Starlink is the Eutelsat Group with it’s Oneweb satellite internet product. This is a French company. The founder was championing LEO satellite internet before SpaceX was in the game. Oneweb actually has the more preferred orbital slots and frequencies that SpaceX wanted. However SpaceX far outpaced Oneweb in technological growth as well as orbital constellation deployment.
From a consumer point of view Oneweb is massively more expensive to subscribe to than Starlink. 100GB of Starlink data will cost you $55/month while the hardware will cost $300. 100GB of Oneweb will cost you $325/month with the cheapest hardware costing $3800.
The article states that pushing consumer satellite internet instead of cables/mobile is basically BS, in my words.
The question wasn’t so literal. Much broader.
Aren’t they building an LEO constellation backed by the EU and ESA?
The primary Oneweb constellation exists right now in orbit. You can buy hardware and service today if you wanted to. Also yes, they continue to expand the constellation.
Since the article doesnt make it clear
This is for new or re-activating customers in a congested area.
This isnt a random usage fee, this is for areas they claim are too busy, so you gotta pay if you want to gain access.
Its like when you call a contractor and they quote you a stupid high number. Its often because they’re too busy, but if you’ll pay the stupid high number theyll do it.
There was no world where SpaceX could support unlimited customers in a cell region.
This isnt a random usage fee, this is for areas they claim are too busy, so you gotta pay if you want to gain access.
Congestion pricing is the PC way to describe it.
Price gouging is the more honest term.
There was no world where SpaceX could support unlimited customers in a cell region.
You can charge a fixed rate and ration bandwidth during peak use.
Or you can charge a variable rate in order to maximize revenue during peak demand.
One maximizes utility while the other maximizes profit.
Neither of those options would support everyone living in a high density urban area, bandwidth would drop to nothing and no one would want to buy it, and people generally hate inconsistent bandwidth, or random peak hour usage charges on their bill.
Edit: Their overall bandwidth per cell is just too low to be able to support everyone in high density areas like that.
That’s why dense urban communities prefer using ground fiber and big routing stations to cellar satellite, sure.
But now we’re talking about the real bandwidth capacities, not the pricing for connectivity.
I mean don’t get me wrong, it’s 100% pure capitalism to do something like, we can confidently service 1000 people per cell region and maintain our advertised service, but once we reach 950, we’re going to charge super high fees to connect. They don’t have to be doing what they’re doing, but they saw a way to make money.
Edit: And this is all assuming the congestion is even real.
I don’t doubt the congestion is real, as consumption - especially data consumption - rapidly expands to fill its container.
I might suggest that some of the early adopters and insiders are receiving subsidy rates in order to goose Elon’s investor briefs on adoption. And the folks on the back end who are eating the exploding prices exist to pad Musk’s proposed future revenue estimates.
“We added 10,000 people a day for the last 30 days, even as we raised rates from $10/day to $100/day!” tells a very attractive story to investors without tipping your hand and revealing what the next 30 days will look like. But it also becomes a kind-of self-fulfilling prophecy, when it results in banks giving you another hundred billion dollars in low-interest credit to expand your network.
They did exactly that with the new standby mode.
You used to be able to pause your service for free. Then they changed it to $5/m but you got unlimited 256kb/s bandwidth and the dish would always be up to date. Just before the IPO they doubled that to $10/m and removed the ability to use it while in motion.
I’d love to see how many people dropped the service after that 2nd price jump which wouldn’t have been apparent until after the IPO. Both changes happened within a year.
That’s why they used to restrict signups in certain geographical areas. But then people complained that they couldn’t sign up. So here we are.
Oh did they stop that entirely? I remember areas being unavailable in the past.
