Starlink operator SpaceX is fighting Virginia’s plan to deploy fiber Internet service to residents, claiming that federal grant money should be given to Starlink instead. SpaceX is already in line to win over $3 million in grant money in the state but is seeking $60 million.
Starlink is poised to benefit from the Trump administration rewriting rules for the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant program. While the Biden administration decided that states should prioritize fiber in order to build more future-proof networks, the Trump administration ordered states to revise their plans with a “tech-neutral approach” and lower the average cost of serving each location.
This is absolute insanity. To think that fiber and satellites are even on the same playing field is absolute brain damage.
The problem I see is that we’ve already paid for fiber
Yep, $400bn wasted on fiber “deployments” that never went anywhere while telcos pocketed the cash, and that was as of like a decade ago.
I’m so fucking tired of living in this god damned dystopia.
Don’t worry, it ends eventually.
all bleeding stops 🙄
Do something about it then…
PS: maybe you are, if so, Kudos to you… but the majority seem to only rue it
Hey man I’m all ears. Give me something concrete to do.
i have some ideas of stuff to do with this
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Start talking to people. Tie them together in ways that dont include the state.
I will string together old coathangers and twisted, unheated solder before I use starlink.
If you figure out the right protocol you could probably catapult a series of twisted pears from house to house.
The way the internet is going, bashed and bruised fruit salad sounds preferable to the actual data anyway.
Hey, we just need someone to innovate the shielded twisted pears, that will give us a much better fruit salad than the unshielded twisted pears.
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The visuals are priceless. Screaming, agonized pears flying from building to building with California raisins singing in flight amongst them. I think i just found a reason to play with AI video generation!
Previously i’ve only accepted AI into my life as a thing to use when I get asked ‘stupid business jargon management /HR question’ at work.
but I’m tentatively prepeared to allow this, it might be raisin the bar.
Recently talked my MIL into switching to T-Mobile home Internet instead of StarLink. I even volunteered to mount an external cell antenna on her roof if the signal wasn’t good enough.
Elmo and his shitty satellite company can kiss my ass.
Doesn’t t-mobile use starlink now?
They do offer their T-Satellite service which uses Starlink. It only works with supported mobile devices (not home Internet) and is additional to your regular plan.
T-Mobile is honestly one of the easiest cell operators to deal with in my experience. I would take them over AT&T any day.
Gotcha, I appreciate the clarification.
Musk is a domestic terrorist.
they hate you. always remember. they hate your entire existence. they’d literally crush you in a hydraulic press if they could. giving you pain is the only way they feel a semblance of happiness.
I don’t think they hate us, it just that they love money more. They can, and do, inflict untold misery and suffering so long as there is money at the end of it.
no. there’s no end to the amount of disdain they have for you. they’d do it for free too; they just don’t have to.
People who disagree with you are people who never spent time with the ultra rich. I’ve had the pleasure to hang in those circles and it was absolutely eye opening the complete disdain that social class has toward the working class. It’s so fucking crazy that one has to see it for themselves to truly appreciate the hate they have for everyone not in their economic circles.
Preach on brother, but I also understand why the plebs don’t believe you
They are genuinely inhuman monsters.
Look, yes, will we and they and literally all life end they aren’t stopped?
Sure, yes, obviously.
Can they be negotiated with persuaded medicated or coerced into rational sane self interest? Nope. Not one of them.
But if youre not willing to end all life for theit bullshit, to kill yourself in such a slow and spectacylar manner that no life escapes, you’re advocaging violence, you vig murdering dummy.
you almost had me there
Isn’t it that they just don’t care?
Nope. It’s active and malevolent.
I don’t care about most everyone on the planet, even if I had their resources I couldn’t summon up the fucks needed to be actively malicious in the way that they are. Not caring is Howard Hughes buying a TV station so he could watch whatever he damned well wanted, not filing a lawsuit because a state is improving it’s utilities which only vaguely undercuts you if even that.
you kidding? they’re demons, making your life worse is what they jerk off to.
I’m pretty sure they mostly do it for the profit.
“Hey, can we provide Fibre broadband to our residents?”
“No, we got a lot of money from Sattelite providers, eat shit and die.”
Hey, this seems familiar.
“lobbying” 🙃
Gucci Gulch should be a mass grave
Capitalism breeds innovation
If they could put that brain power to innovate on their product instead of innovate on how to fuck people, that would be great!
the Trump administration ordered states to revise their plans with a “tech-neutral approach” and lower the average cost of serving each location
In other words don’t give the tax payer the best options you can, give them the cheapest options to implement you can.
Federal. Money should go to the poor. Elon musk can fuck off.
Capitalism is truly wonderful
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Capitalism, is in fact, Fascism, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, Government with Benefits.
Fascism is just capitalism on speed
Nope. It’s hate driven authoritarianism using Capitalism as a weapon.
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Fascism is capitalism natural end stage
Fascism is fake capitalism, because the market is not deciding anything, government bureaucrats are.
Capitalism is when the market decides who “wins” and “loses” in the race for more money.
But when you add in government overreach and regulatory capture, it loses all semblance of capitalism.
Fascism is when capitalists control the government.
And then they use that government to pick winners and losers rather than letting the market decide. And at that point, the economic system is no longer capitalism.
When government is capable of picking those winners and losers, government service becomes more attractive to capitalists than running an actual business.
Ever notice that, for all their bluster, it’s usually the big business types in government that push regulations in the name of protecting one thing or another? Kids, environment, jobs, etc…
Because it’s not really about helping those kids, or protecting the planet, or anything else. It’s about continuing the size and scope of government to make it harder for new competitors to enter the market and provide a service cheaper than the established players can.
Did you know that in many states in the US, if you have a kid, but don’t have a grid power connection to your local power provider, that you can be charged with child endangerment? Even if you have off-grid electrical power.
Your local power provider loves that. It’s basically illegal to not have their service, so they can charge you basically whatever they want. “What about the public service utility commissions?” What about them? They’re all corrupt AF, and worse, typically run by unelected bureaucrats.
Then, add in the localities where the the utility commissions are so corrupt that they allow those same power companies to charge you a fee if you do add your own power generation. Because remember, you still have to have their service. So if you add, say, solar panels, they levy additional fees on you to make up for lost revenue.
And we can’t even vote the fuckers out, because it’s mostly unelected bureaucrats, and even the few elected officials that exist are just completely bought and paid for by the very same utility company they’re supposed to regulate.
Does fiber go down when it rains?
Didn’t go down at my house the other day and my fiber line is still laying in the yard waiting to be buried.
Starlink goes down during heavy rain.
Cybertrucks can’t handle rain either. I wonder if there’s some connection between them and Starlink?
Engineering for water related stuff is stupid when you live on a planet made of earth, duh. You don’t drive or internet underwater!
That’s the magic hand of the market that all talk about…
Capitalist myth similar to how monarchs are chosen by gods. I swear, Americans are so propagandized to that they would chuck disabled people into volcanoes if the Koch brothers told them Jesus wanted them to.
This is libelous. We would chuck differently-abled people into volcanoes.
As much as I dislike the muskrat, is this fiber actually real?
ISPs in US have been given billions of dollars, multiple times to bring Fiber out and each time they’ve pocketed the cash and done nothing.
Starlink at the very least, exists.
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If this is going to counties and cities to build out municipal fiber, then screw StarLink.
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If this is going to AT&T, again, for the fourth time to build this fiber, then no, give it to StarLink since AT&T will never actually build out that service, fourth time is not the charm.
I take umbrage with StarLink’s notion that Fiber is slow to build out though - the single biggest expense and time consuming part of rolling out a GPON network is getting it from the street to inside a premesis.
Guess which part StarLink still has to do and it isn’t any cheaper…
I think you’re low key conflating 2 different issues here.
When it comes to technology of fiber vs low orbit satellites fiber will always win in every circumstance that isn’t a battle field or an ocean. It’s one of those technologies that we really nailed. Combined with cell towers we can tap ourselves on the back and say “yay we solved internet” very convincingly.
There’s literally nothing in current practical physics that can match this latency and bandwidth and cost ration. Just try to do napkin math of how many low orbit satellites we’d need to cover today’s bandwidth and latency requirements and we will literally never need less than what we need today unless the world ends.
Now whether corruption has a role here sure - but you sure your trusting SpaceX more when its literally on the news right now for bait and switching the pause feature. There’s no basis of thinking that Starlink would somehow be less corrupt. In fact, it seems like hiding corruption here would be much easier for starlink with feature changes and priority lanes than literal “cable is here or cable is not here”.
Isn’t fiber also winning on battlefields now because it’s resistant to jamming?
BEAD funds are more or less administered by the state, and nothing is fundementally stopping them from doing the right thing and preferring local bids.
It’s entirely possible too, look at North Dakota, it has near 100% fiber coverage for the entire state, because the same model that brought electrification to them brought them fiber. In Utah and surrounding states there are municipal networks building out to member cities.
The real threat is the states capitulating to the incumbent providers like Comcast – but at least it’s a State level issue instead of being totally a given at the federal level.
I got fiber last year. It halved my bill and quadrupled my throughput. It’s real, and since then another vendor arrived and is competing with the one i have. This is hiw it is supposed to work.
I’m not sure why people are commenting that I think fiber isn’t real?
Of course it’s real.
But maybe you’re young- Comcast, AT&T, etc, have been given multiple tranches of money since the early 1990s to deliver a nationwide fiber network in the US, they’ve never delivered more than 0.1% of it.
Giving them more money, won’t make it happen.
Giving municipalities (cities, counties) the funds to build out their own fiber networks is good.
Giving more money to Comcast and AT&T to do nothing, is not good, it’s corporate welfare.
Giving municipalities (cities, counties) the funds to build out their own fiber networks is good.
Assuming the big ISPs don’t sue or lobby to make it against the law for those cities or counties to then build it.
That’s common too.
As much as I dislike the muskrat, is this fiber actually real?
You literally questioned its existence, why are you confused?
Now, everything else you said I either knew, or agree with the assertion.
Btw, I’m definitely not young.
I have fiber internet. I don’t understand this question. Are you suggesting that nowhere in the US has this technology? Like. This situation (where a private company sues a state, county, municipality etc to stop the rollout of fiber internet (or even another private company) happens so frequently that it’s unreal.
There’s plenty of places that already have fiber. And those private companies for the most part want to continue growing that user base by rolling out fiber in new markets.
And if it’s the state actually controlling the rollout that’s better than them just paying a private company to do it? If this weren’t a threat to Musk and Starlink he wouldn’t be suing.
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Why do we need to have debate with lobbyists and groups of that nature.
They have more $ than you and i, can buy their ways. How that shits not illegal is fucked. Guess it goes with insider trading for Congress, make laws for/against companies you’re invested in. USA is beyond rotten and corrupt from the inside. Blatant bribery with Tim cook delivering gold bars to the white house himself.
But they pose no comparison to requirements of what the city or community’s needs. Satellite is slower and pales in comparison to fiber.
But money, you think they care? As long as there is money, your needs mean fuck all.
This company is acting like a spoiled brat of a child.
