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.
Capitalism breeds innovation
Reminds me of the German Telekom and their unceasing effort to slow down state subsidised fibre deployment.
The subsidies are primarily for towns left behind with bad ADSL (it was below 30mbit average and is now afaik 100mbit), that want to build their own local fibre nets cause nobody else does.
They seem to watch for construction permits and then swoop in and build a few fibre adsl distribution boxes or elevate a street or two with fibre to raise the average speed in town just above threshold. The local net can still be built, but only commercial customers are still allowed to be connected…
Federal. Money should go to the poor. Elon musk can fuck off.
“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.
i hope elon dies and starlink goes bankrupt
I’d rather Starlink just be independent from Musk. There are people who just can not get a good Internet connection and rely on it, and other Satellite Internet companies are awful.
I hate Musk as much as the next person, but Starlink is brilliant and works well.
Id rather all this space trash burn up and we just spend the money on providing internet via land.
It’s still a good thing for cell coverage in remote areas for hiking emergencies though. The few satellites that currently do that are stupidly annoying and expensive to use. You have to carry specialized equipment, and if you use Garmin, you pay a yearly fee for the privilege of signing up for the low tier plan, then a monthly fee for the service, and then pay by the text message after the first few. Starlink just added T-Mobile so if you have a newer phone and use T-Mobile you can skip all of that and message out in emergencies without all that nonsense. Hopefully more brands will be added soon, but I don’t know.
but not in this order, the reverse would be so much more satisfying
Starlink is literally his plan to rule the world. If you singularly control access to the internet for everyone, you’ve won the information war… against everyone. The good news is his Nazi addict ass will likely die young from a chest-cavity attack.
Good luck having that shitty tech win over Europe, where fiber is proliferating particularly quickly. We all know sattelite internet cannot come close to the speed and reliability of fiber.
Plus we hate Musk.
It’s good for remote areas and at sea, it’s shit everywhere else
I thought he would just abandon his torso mech and a tiny body would come out.
L. Bob Rife in the making, lol
This is absolute insanity. To think that fiber and satellites are even on the same playing field is absolute brain damage.
We just got fiber 3 weeks ago. I pay for 600Mb/s and it is honestly the best internet I’ve had. I was afraid that we wouldn’t get it, but I was astonished when a salesman stopped by. I signed up that day. Lol
The problem I see is that we’ve already paid for fiber
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.
the way things are going, food won’t be that easy to come by
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
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?
and each time they’ve pocketed the cash and done nothing.
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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.
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