The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday reaffirmed its 2022 decision to deny SpaceX satellite internet unit Starlink $885.5 million in rural broadband subsidies.

    • badaboomxx@lemmy.worldEnglish
      151·
      2 years ago

      I agree. Also the issue that I have with starlink is that an any given time, if musk throws a tantrum, you could get kicked out of the internet.

    • AlternateRoute@lemmy.caEnglish
      9·
      2 years ago

      Can’t really help the small islands and all the shipping traffic and aircraft that have started using it and can’t benefit from a high speed connection with buried lines.

        • AlternateRoute@lemmy.caEnglish
          5·
          2 years ago

          There are also a lot of rural communities in Alaska, Northern Canada etc where the whole communities only option is satellite internet.

          Sure we should get it out to those areas NEAR major cities but there are huge amounts of users where the cost for that would be impractical.

            • br3d@lemmy.worldEnglish
              5·
              2 years ago

              Those are much much higher up, which introduces a lot of signal latency. The Starlink types are low down, which makes the Comms faster (and also means they keep burning up in the atmosphere)

              • alsimoneau@lemmy.caEnglish
                4·
                2 years ago

                Yeah, but the cost of low latency is thousands of satellites that burn up in the atmosphere, need to be continuously launched, are a catastrophe for optical and radio astronomy and crowd LEO, reducing available space and increasing collision risk. All for a barely scalable system.

                It’s not worth it. If you want low latency get a cable run or talk to a ground based antenna.