• AA5B@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    That’s a nice thought, but

    • Starlink has no old infrastructure
    • Rural and remote customers are difficult to wire up

    Even in the best case where US was close to 100% wired up like we paid for, Starlink would have a market in remote areas world wide, RVs, aircraft, ships

    • AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      The US government asked the big ISPs how much it would take to wire everyone up to high-speed Internet, then passed a bill to give them a ludicrous lump sum to do so (IIRC it was hundreds of billions). The money was split between dividends, buying up other companies, and suing the federal government for attempting to ask for the thing they’d paid for, and in the end, the government gave up. That left loads of people with no high-speed Internet, and the ISPs able to afford to buy out anyone who attempted to provide a better or cheaper service. Years down the line, once someone with silly amounts of money for a pet project and a fleet of rockets appeared, there was an opportunity for them to provide a product to underserved customers who could subsidise the genuinely impossible-to-run-a-cable-to customers.

      If the US had nearly-ubiquitous high-speed terrestrial Internet, there wouldn’t have been enough demand for high-speed satellite Internet to justify making Starlink. I think this is what the other commenter was alluding to.

    • bitchkat@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      We managed to wire up large swaths of rural area for electricity back in the 1930’s

    • LordKitsuna@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      This, I’m both very rural and in an RV at the same time. Starlink is literally my only means of playing games. The only other even remotely viable option is LTE internet from something like T-Mobile but out here the towers don’t really have much capacity so I might be able to play the game fine and I might just start disconnecting Midway through a match randomly as the internet struggles to even load a basic web page

        • drathvedro@lemm.ee
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          4 hours ago

          Welp, I guess we all have to suffer with no internet in rural areas because of some astronomy nerds. I’ll take global, high-speed, expensive, but still affordable internet over some shots of distant nebulas any day. Not a Musk fan, but this sounds like a desperate attempt to find something to dunk on him for. There’s tons of reasons already, but this ain’t one.

          • spidermanchild@sh.itjust.works
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            2 hours ago

            Scientists doing science > tech bro nomads cosplaying as explorers but actually just playing fortnite in a van. You’re also ignoring the other downsides besides spectral emissions. Read the article I linked.

          • Queue@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            2 hours ago

            You certainly act like a Musk fan.

            This thing helps my fun but hurts lot of other people’s fun, fuck em! Who cares about Kessler syndrome and pollution, I gotta game!!

            I also live in a rural RV. I’ve been stuck in one and using copper wiring since 2004. I don’t have the money for Starlink, never have, never will. The upfront cost is insane. I also game on copper wires. Solo and multiplayer games, with my friends over discord.

          • AEsheron@lemmy.world
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            3 hours ago

            The point of this thread is that Starlink only exists to solve this problem because the ISPs were paid to do it the old fashioned way and decided to fuck off with the cash instead. It wouldn’t have solved the RV issue, but if nost rural areas had the cable internet the government bought, then Starlink likely never gets off the ground, pun intended.

            • drathvedro@lemm.ee
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              46 minutes ago

              Starlink only exists to solve this problem because the ISPs were paid to do it the old fashioned way

              This only applies to the US. My point is that by it’s nature it is global, and it competes with all the shitty local monopolistic ISP’s around the world. Like, I intend to do a cross-country tour around mediterranean next year, and from experience, local cell providers there can be quite a lot of hit and miss. If starlink is activated there by the time I’m all set, I’m dropping the cash, no question about it. And yeah, like @spidermanchild said, I’m just a tech bro nomad cosplaying an explorer, but there are also people actually living in those regions that have to deal with this bullshit. I know it’s unpopular opinion but I’d say a push against those local ISP’s and getting those rural people a decent internet connection is ultimately doing more good than whatever inconvenience scientists have to deal with scrubbing trails off telescope imagery and filtering out the radio interferences.

        • LordKitsuna@lemmy.world
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          6 hours ago

          I’m just saying blindly calling for it to go away entirely (which i see a lot of on stuff like this) isn’t helpful. Clearly they need to tone down emissions but it’s a useful service.

          I work 10hr shifts at work and it’s 1hr 30 both to and from work, moving isn’t really an option for me atm. I don’t think it’s unreasonable I’d like to be able to stream my shows or play games with my friends to relax

        • dubious@lemmy.world
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          6 hours ago

          lordkitsuna is the answer, dude. more people getting away from the grind of the big machine to live remote lives far from society is the answer. i don’t like starlink either but these networks are crucial for the modern nomad to exist.

          • spidermanchild@sh.itjust.works
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            2 hours ago

            The answer to what? If everyone does this, there won’t be a single remote place on earth that isn’t crawling with sprinter vans. It can’t scale, and it doesn’t need to be specifically catered to. You want the wilderness, you get the wilderness. You want low latency Internet, then get to a fiber connection. We don’t need every first world amenity everywhere.

            • dubious@lemmy.world
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              2 hours ago

              nah. you can live in the city if that’s what you like. i’ll do what i like. do you really want to alienate non-urban liberals?

              depopulation is a possible alternative to preventing swarms of sprinter vans too. you really don’t want to put everyone in a city.

              • spidermanchild@sh.itjust.works
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                8 minutes ago

                I’m not trying to alienate anyone, I’m trying to understand why low latency gaming needs for digital nomads is worth the real downsides of providing such a service (scientific, GHG, atmospheric tinkering, etc). I also believe that we should leave a lot more of the earth alone and that nature matters. I’m not trying to put people anywhere, just recognizing there are pros and cons to different living schemes, humans are social creatures, and population of 2 areas don’t warrant large societal investments. I’m similarly against a hypothetical drone sushi delivery service for rural Canadadian boreal forests if that happens to have real downsides too.

          • Queue@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            2 hours ago

            Does the modern nomad need to exist in the first place? Taking your money into an RV so you can guzzle gas on it, and just stream videos while you pretend to enjoy nature?

            • dubious@lemmy.world
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              2 hours ago

              you can just exist in a remote place and not make videos too my friend. sorry that your understanding of what life outside a city looks like has been shaped by the internet instead of reality.