1 hourWe’ve noticed that our service no longer works properly, so we’re going to charge you more for it.
- flop_leash_973@lemmy.worldEnglish2 hours
“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.”
- 12 minutes
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.
- Crozekiel@lemmy.zipEnglish4 hours
“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”.
- JcbAzPx@lemmy.worldEnglish3 hours
To be fair, if you’ve ever had to use HughesNet, a leopard eating your face is a welcome change of pace.
The country that invented the internet… has the worst internet infrastructure in the developed world. Worse than some developing countries too. Astonishing.
- green_link@lemmy.worldEnglish51 minutes
the US didn’t invent the internet. yes the US made ARPNET, which is the underlying functions that the internet was built upon. but the internet that we know today wasn’t created in the US, the WORLD wide web was created in Switzerland in 1989 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research). the world wide web, or the internet, uses a lot of the same protocols that ARPNET created. but ARPNET is not and was not world wide until Sir Tim used the same protocols to allow regular people to traverse ARPNET from around the world. the US built the underlying tech, but Sir Tim Berners-Lee and CERN built the internet on top.
- phutatorius@lemmy.zipEnglish27 minutes
The web is a layer on top of the internet. They’re not the same thing.
No, we in Germany are almost as bad for almost those prices.
That’s more astonishing to me.- curbstickle_lw@lemmy.worldEnglish1 hour
Is it really??
I used to be jealous of some friends with their 10mbit symmetric lines while I was getting a whopping 4mbps (down only) on cable. (Obviously… not recent).
While most around us (Switzerland, Austria, Netherlands for example) have either 10gbit fiber amd or cheap internet, Germany meanwhile has much DSl or coax commections. Fiber is getting popular and is subsidized heavily (you basically receive it for free to the house when signing a contract for some years) a good chunk of seniority are refusing it with “Well, DSL was already enough for me. I don’t need this new fangled stuff. And it costs 75-100% thab my current contract for more unneeded bandwidth. Nah, I’ll pass on the offer”.
Meanwhile the grandson in 30 years will be very “thankful” for a house in a good condition and having to order a telecom contractor to connect the house to fibre network for 10k €. Just because granny was (not unjustified) a bit cheap.
And this analogy can be expanded to the highest of governments in Germany.
Old rich people, disconnected from reality, ruling over the commoners and deciding their fates.
Just recently our local newspaper showed an example of it.
A divorced/widowed father with a grods income of 5000€ would receive more state child support than an equal family with an income of 3500€.Just why…
Quote from the paper (feel free to use a translator of choice)
Das Finanzministerium nannte Beispiele. Demnach soll beispielsweise ein Paar aus Pflegekraft und Busfahrer mit je 2.800 Euro brutto und zwei Kindern 2028 eine Entlastung von rund 632 Euro im Jahr bekommen. Ein Paar aus Erzieher und Elektrikerin mit je 3.200 Euro brutto und zwei Kindern bekommt rund 642 Euro mehr.
Ein Paar aus Lehrerin und Ingenieur mit je 5.000 Euro brutto und zwei Kindern kann mit rund 678 Euro mehr rechnen. Eine alleinerziehende Pflegekraft mit 2.800 Euro brutto und zwei Kindern soll mit rund 468 Euro entlastet werden, eine alleinerziehende Erzieherin mit 3.200 Euro brutto und zwei Kinder mit rund 471 Euro und ein alleinerziehender Lehrer mit 5.000 Euro brutto und zwei Kindern mit rund 496 Euro.(I really hope I understood the article correctly and not making a fool out of myself. But the idiocracy should be enough to see where it’s generally going here in Germany)
- Jankatarch@lemmy.worldEnglish9 hours
How could someone who knows all about computers and networking not predict the logistics problems for such projects? /s
- bitjunkie@lemmy.worldEnglish5 hours
The world’s first trillionaire doesn’t get to call anyone else greedy.
- prole@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish8 hours
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???
- ddplf@szmer.infoEnglish9 hours
I just can’t imagine having such excessive wealth and not saying “eh, whatever” when someone tells me I’m losing money on some internet fees.
You fucker, you could make the world at least a tiny bit better for billions of people at virtually no expense to you, but you just keep playing your stupid fucking rich manchildren games with your billionaire parasite buddies.
Keep grinding bro, maybe this way you’ll get used to the feeling of having your bones crushed in the grinder.
- SalamiDommie@lemmus.orgEnglish44 minutes
It isn’t just the company leader. It is the brigade of product managers, pricing accountants and more that are involved in these types of corporate consensus decisions.
There is a fleet of people who see their bonuses, commissions, and rev share increasing.
Greed is contagious.
How else you get to inflate the stock price?
You got to get the returns on it.- bitjunkie@lemmy.worldEnglish5 hours
You don’t get that wealthy in the first place by not gobbling up every fucking penny you have a chance to. You think he’s just going to take the dub and stop?
It makes more sense when you realize his wealth is all smoke and mirrors based on a shared lie.
- Hozerkiller@lemmy.caEnglish9 hours
It’s not evem really losing money it’s inventing in the infrastructure youre using to make money.
- ddplf@szmer.infoEnglish5 hours
I know, he’s better than me by a factor of his net worth divided by my net worth. So around, what, 100 millions times?
- ILikeBoobies@lemmy.caEnglish3 hours
Not better, just a hoarder.
It’s why there are no good rich people.
- MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish17 hours
I have a neighbor who has access to 1gb cable and 1gb fiber from two ISP’s. Both have high data caps. Instead he is rocking the starlink and I can’t for the life of me figure out how he thinks that shit is somehow better than a hard link.
- 17 hours
I don’t run starlink, but I run Starry (fixed point wireless) when AT&T and Spectrum are available because:
- I do networking for a living, including wireless (or technically my coworkers do). I know how this thing works and what it’s limitations are
- I live in an area where it almost never rains, so little to no attenuation
- AT&T is on my banlist after shutting down my account for migrating to a 5G phone not on their approved list. Customer service didn’t even let me transfer the sim back to the old 4G phone. The account termination was immediate. I ended up convincing customer service that I needed my phone number for emergency contact, and immediately transferred the number elsewhere upon it being restored.
- Spectrum routing is shit
- Wireless can be as good (or even better) than wired in ideal conditions (see 1), my current 1Gbps plan also only costs $20/month.
- MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish2 hours
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.
- 2 hours
-
I agree LEO Sat is different from 60GHz. But the detrimental effects of wireless is completely overblown. People running into issues should just run a signal test first to make sure it’s not their setup that’s the problem.
-
There is no such thing as weather in SoCal (other than that one week of continuous rain each year).
-
If you are just looking at 4 9s or 3 9s latency while the link is not saturated, it’s fine for general use (assuming my first bullet point holds). It’s not like I’m running aws off of my home network.
-
Even in the rain, the latency is mostly fine. It’s usually just the minute it starts raining that the latency goes through the roof. My assumption is that it’s sampling and adjusting the modulation/coding scheme.
- MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish1 hour
Let me tell you a little story about a 2008 Chevy truck. Around 2018 we had daily interference with our satellite receivers. It was a ongoing problem and we couldn’t find anything wrong. We changed out LNB’s and even the receivers. Ran temporary cable replacements on the ground. Finally someone noticed out outdoor wifi was going down at the same time as our other problems. We fired of a spectrum analyzer hooked to a tuned 5ghz dipole and nothing out of the ordinary. The next morning our CEO was calling cause fox news went out in the middle of his daily indoctrination and he was getting calls from his assholes buddies he golfed with were not getting their fix of manufactured outrage. We go to the headend and sure enough its out and the spectrum analyzer was showing a massive signal wider than the analyzer could display at once.
We of course were dealing with the problem and didn’t notice the twenty year old in one of our old trucks loading up what he needed to bury some drops that day. We also didn’t notice as soon as he drove off that everything started working again. After a few minutes of getting our ass chewed when the CEO called and wanted to know what we did and we had done nothing, our operations guy called the kid in the chevy back for something unrelated. As soon as he drove up everything went tits up again and it dawned on us all it was that truck. We switched him to a different vehicle and parked that one. After replacing a number of parts the problem went away on the truck.
It doesn’t matter if its the weather or if it exists in you corner of the world. It can be anything cratering your signal. I’ve seen old lighting ballast interfere and all manner of electrical appliances. I know you can’t be convinced because it hasn’t happened to you yet but wireless is a poor poor substitute for a hard link.
-
- kuiskaaja@lemmy.mlEnglish3 hours
telecom operators in america can terminate your service if you use the wrong phone? wtf?
- 2 hours
They were checking against a whitelist of IMEIs to force people to migrate to 5G phones. While my new phone was 5G, it was acquired internationally and thus not on the whitelist. So as soon as it got on the network, the line got terminated.
- grandma@sh.itjust.worksEnglish20 hours
America will do anything except lay some fucking cable to provide internet to the ruroids.
- JcbAzPx@lemmy.worldEnglish3 hours
Including paying companies specifically to lay that cable then never forcing them to actually do it.
- Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish17 hours
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.
- poopkins@lemmy.worldEnglish5 hours
Same reason rural places in the US also haven’t discovered electricity yet. Oh, wait…
- chiliedogg@lemmy.worldEnglish6 hours
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.
- 10 hours
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?
- Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish6 hours
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.
- prole@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish8 hours
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
- 20 hours
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.
- Joelk111@lemmy.worldEnglish19 hours
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.
- HugeNerd@lemmy.caEnglish19 hours
We have terrestrial radio and cables. What is the point of this complex space-based trash?
- 15 hours
The US taxpayers literally paid TWICE to privatized telecom companies (telco) to run fiber optic to the home, once in the 90s and again that last early “surge” of FTtH(fiber to the home aka “last mile”) when google started competing direct against telcos that would not get the lead out so they all buried a fuckton of (dark)fiber that they then kept artificially turned off and sat on their excess bandwidth instead of releasing that excess supply to the market to do bare standard minimum of using their good taxpayer funded fortune AND their privatized, ridiculously gained profits from the calculable increase of use in the information age YOY to offer it for reasonable prices. We could all be on $25 a month or less no cap 1GBps fiber in many places but again, the market forces at work at this point seem more actively just hostile to the rest of us on ground level here now. It’s a fascinating and also infuriating subject as an ex-IT person that helped build out this infrastructure that only could watch as it all remained dark. I was stuck in rural nowhere where we still had a small local telephone cop-op. They took that money, laid fiber and sat on their asses with it while they charged exorbitant rates for 56k dial up service while Netzero and the such took dome of that broadband at a time when independent local ISPs were cropping up, teaming modems and some fiber to offer a service with a saner price structure and this was all before data caps and bandwidth throttling was evenr a thing because all you needed was single rack in strateic locations , set the equipment up and basically forget it with the only fixed costs was your mainline fiber, equipment, colocation etc and such yet they STILL offered 100% FREE dial-up internet, co caps off those systems(of course subsidized by ad networks).
htps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fibre
- phutatorius@lemmy.zipEnglish23 seconds
“Market forces” in this case being oilgoplistic rent-seeking. Which, I suppose, is the result of market forces if you refuse to regulate that market to force competition.
- Einskjaldi@lemmy.worldEnglish17 hours
It’s the only high speed solution if you’re more than 30 miles away from the nearest town and you live completely surrounded by trees or hills. 4g internet is pretty good for home use and that covers most rural areas but that’s not large amounts of data usually. It’s good for a lot of edge cases like open ocean or really remote areas. And crucially it can do that with very low lag unlike any other traditional geosat space internet.
- Auli@lemmy.caEnglish9 hours
Yes but people in cities getting it makes no sense. Unless your a neither town.
- Einskjaldi@lemmy.worldEnglish5 hours
It’s more useful as a backup in case your internet goes down, for things that need 1 or 2 backups for high connectivity uptime
- 18 hours
Go to hyperspace, bro. That’s where Jesus and Joseph Smith transcended to. Enlightenment is a process of becoming an independent phenomenon. God is an independent phenomenon; it created itself. The Alpha is the Omega; the restuarant at the end of the universe is the transcendental particle that can be in multiple…stepmoms? Tf you saying God? Yea, I got a big stepmommy fetish, tf is your point of bringing it up now? No I don’t toe? Tf is toe for? I’ll put my big toe in your pussy and be happy to call you about it in the morning so you come to church with me. This is why God made me a Mormon Occultist, because ain’t nothing on this world for me but sin, and I did but didn’t to learn defilement as the Buddhists call the möbiation of entanglement, as I call the phenomena. But space bro? Space doesn’t exist bro. Get over yourself or Jesus’s dad is gunna fuck your ass up.
- 17 hours
I am valid, that is for sure. At least my parking is. I am quite invalid in certain respects. Retarded, too, and that’s my peoples’ word and I will say it in praise of our lord. You ever smoke a ham sandwich? I don’t recommend it.
- 3 hours
I told my ROTC cadre that my nonexistent sister got me pregnant because I judged my father’s wrath more of a threat than the US military, and then kept up faking schizophrenia for years cuz I thought I was under investigation. I was not, as I gave the money back.
I am retarded. This is how I identify as someone that developed schizoaffective disorder because I was constantly paranoid and this reconditioned my brain. You don’t get to tell me how I identify, you prejudiced person. And if you do think get to dictate what words I can use, I’ll start telling you you can’t say the word love cuz you clearly can’t do that to anyone but yourself, you virtue-signaling narcissistic twad.
- HugeNerd@lemmy.caEnglish9 hours
Nothing to do with religion, a severe mental illness afflicting many, is funny.
- Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish1 day
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.
- captainlezbian@lemmy.worldEnglish1 day
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.
- ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.netEnglish6 hours
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.
- Auli@lemmy.caEnglish9 hours
Oh shut up with the colonizer bs. So its OK for the indigenous to use a Nazis system because burns hits them.
- absentbird@lemmy.worldEnglish23 hours
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.
- 5 hours
We had point to point internet for years. Then they went belly up. Which is why we have starlink today.
- Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish18 hours
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?
- Einskjaldi@lemmy.worldEnglish17 hours
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.
- Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish3 hours
How many people is that? Maybe a million in the entire world? Less? I dont think internet is on their mind that much tbh
- Auli@lemmy.caEnglish9 hours
Could do point to point wireless. And only have towers every so often. The land is cwey flat.
- 10 hours
Hundreds of miles of expensive cable because terrain make expensive to serve dozens of hundreds.
- Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish6 hours
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.
- captainlezbian@lemmy.worldEnglish4 hours
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
- ThirdConsul@lemmy.zipEnglish5 hours
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.
- Phoenixz@lemmy.caEnglish1 day
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
- partial_accumen@lemmy.worldEnglish1 day
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.
- 24 hours
Yeah, my family was forced to get starlink because ATT and other wireless internet sucks in where we live
- Phoenixz@lemmy.caEnglish1 day
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!
- Einskjaldi@lemmy.worldEnglish17 hours
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.
I’d say LEO is where we want these, no? My understand is that if SpaceX went defunct tomorrow, the satellites would (eventually) burn up on reentry, so there’s no risk of them managing to fragment and become more permanent bullets wizzing around in our orbit. Or is that incorrect?
- absentbird@lemmy.worldEnglish23 hours
That’s sort of like saying you’d want the milk to spill in the kitchen because it’s easier to clean up. But the thing people are upset about is that the spilling of milk in the first place is not necessary.
Satellite internet is extremely important for certain regions of the world. Good luck running anything to remote areas like Alaska, or areas of northern Canada.
It’s an extremely important piece of infrastructure, even if you have zero use for it.
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.
- AlteredEgo@lemmy.mlEnglish1 day
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.
- Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish18 hours
Vacuum of space? Dude there’s an entire atmosphere with clouds and shit in it.
- Railing5132@lemmy.worldEnglish22 hours
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.
- 1 day
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.
- 23 hours
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.
- 23 hours
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.
- 23 hours
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.
- SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.caEnglish1 day
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.
- 1 day
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.
