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.
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.
Musk is a toxic stink in this world.
I’m so fucking tired of living in this god damned dystopia.
Do something about it then…
PS: maybe you are, if so, Kudos to you… but the majority seem to only rue it
Don’t worry, it ends eventually.
This time, it won’t.
this reads like an aged alchemist who is convinced he’s on the cusp of finding the philosopher’s stone
Does fiber go down when it rains?
Owh hell no! Just rollout fiber ASAP.
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 looses the subsidies and usually stops construction or if already built only commercial customers are still allowed to be connected…
Reminds me of the German Telekom and their unceasing effort to slow down state subsidised fibre deploymen
Capitalism is a disease.
It would be a shame if some random accident were to befall those token distribution boxes…
I love it when they reopen construction sites where cables from other carriers were recently buried (after Telekom said no) because NOW they want to provide their shit there too.
DTAG should be a wholly state owned company again.
When we got cable TV and proper broadband internet with it, the previous company relying on the local monopoly got extremely pissed. Every of their services costed the multitude of what competitors, even on phone line, could offer. Most outrageous was ADSL. Competitor ADSL started at HUF5 000 for 384k download speed, topped at HUF15 000 for 2M, per month. The local provider? It started at HUF20 000, for a laughable 256k download speed. Explanation? The parent company thought it was a luxury, because you could just send a hand-written mail instead of the e-mail, get a dish TV with HBO and a tape recorder with a timer instead of torrenting movies, etc.
Keep in mind, the cost of businesses to control politics is woven directly into the prices of their products and services.
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!
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.
“lobbying” 🙃
Gucci Gulch should be a mass grave
i hope elon dies and starlink goes bankrupt
I hope some hero gives him the UnitedHealth CEO treatment.
Green hat good
Sig heil bad
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. If they got rid of Musk and stopped being dicks like they are with this, it’d be okay.
I don’t know how much Musk can be separated from Starlink. Not only because Starlink, as part of SpaceX, is privately held but also because the main reason they now have a superior service to offer is that they got fucktons of money from government customers, which is also tied to Musk’s action
A big part of Musk’s involvement with politics is because everything he does, from EVs to rockets to, now, big energy-guzzling datacenters for AI, needs a lot of government backing, if not in terms of direct contracts at least in terms of regulation and incentives.
Even his direct involvement with Trump wasn’t because he suddenly became a Nazi (he’s probably always been one, according to his own family) but in order to become even more entangled with government investments, even trying to control NASA directly.
And not only US governments. I remember Musk suddenly being everywhere in Europe pitching Starlink. Meloni’s government in Italy was grilled for allegedly agreeing on a big contract with Starlink.
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.
Life is not safe. Adventure even less so. The loss of the night sky and the risk of Kessler syndrome is not outweighed by a slight convenience allowing influencers to stream video and hit social media while pretending to get away from it all.
It’s not for streaming. As far as I know it’s just text messages. Absolutely agree we should not be using screen time when out and away. We just need that little bit of safety.
There are also hand held radios, strobelights, flares, and PLBs that do not require more satellite infrastructure.
People being lost in the wilderness is not a new problem. It often happens because people don’t bother to consider that they might get lost and plan appropriately.
Sorry, but not everyone gets to come home, especially if they don’t do a little planning.
People should learn to navigate if they’re going into the wilderness, and face the consequences if they don’t. People will call for additional safety until we all live in padded cells. Frankly, people could stand to face a lot more danger in this world. Maybe then idiots will stop trying to pet the bears at Yellowstone. There’s no need to litter the sky with satellites so that the incompetent can live a bit longer.
Or we could just make satellite phone service more accessible? Without the need for thousands of pieces of space trash put into LEO? Nobody needs tiktok when they are climbing a mountain in a remote area.
but not in this order, the reverse would be so much more satisfying
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
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 satellite 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 could not be more sincere when I say: help us Europe; you’re our only hope.
I thought he would just abandon his torso mech and a tiny body would come out.
L. Bob Rife in the making, lol
I’ve been saying this for a while
He’s trying to fkn create the Raft
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
Yep, $400bn wasted on fiber “deployments” that never went anywhere while telcos pocketed the cash, and that was as of like a decade ago.
And across the pond the french government spent 20bn to have the government build out fiber and now basically everyone in france has super cheap fiber internet.
Paying companies to do stuff that’s against their financial incentives doesn’t work.
I will string together old coathangers and twisted, unheated solder before I use starlink.
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.
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.
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!
the way things are going, food won’t be that easy to come by
