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.

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?

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…

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.

I can also fit some of the largest LLMs on my phone. Where is all that AI investment going to???

Clearly it does.

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

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.

They must always know where we are, but we must never know where they are. Funny how that happened while lawmakers stood idly by.

I think most of the data going to and from your phone is gonna be https, I doubt it would provide much value tbh

Geo makes more sense for theses use cases. Yes you'll have more ping. But for data dumps it matters not.

Goddamn HughesNet. I had vehicle dealerships on that fucking piece of shit for their parts system and payroll. What a horrible service, for thousands of dollars a month.

Brother... You speak the truth...

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.

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.

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?

Starlink and your short hall wireless solution are not really in the same ball park. I'm sorry for your problems with ATandFee. I use them for 1gb fiber. It hasn't dropped once in the nine months or so I've had it. I had cable internet for 14 years before that. For ten of those years I was the sysadmin for the company. It was a local Four city cable company that finally sold out to a larger operation. We maintained a really high availability with most outages being upstream of our connections. We helped maintain several wireless bridges for commercial companies who were outside our service area and in heavy rain or even fog the signal would drop on a ten mile shot. The 60ghz short hall links also would also suffer from interference from weather on occasion.. No wireless connection is as stable as a fiber link. None of them and they never can be.