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[–] 150 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Billionaires will kill us all, while millionaires scream and yell. Thousandaires defend them both, while we all suffer in hell.

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    [–] 108 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)

    Over promise and under deliver, the musk way. Fucking clown ass Nazi piece of shit. I know there’s not a lot of viable alternatives, but if you’re using a Nazi service, I lack sympathy when the Nazi raises your prices.

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  • [–] 34 points 3 weeks ago (7 children)

    Meanwhile the airlines rolling out "free Starlink WiFi" without so much as an asterix about who provides and controls the bits you're sending through it.

    Imagine how much data musk will be able to glean getting free access to travelers internet habits and probably a lot more.

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    [–] 81 points 3 weeks ago* (1 child)

    So basically:

    His companies are hilariously insolvent, so he rolls them all together and does the biggest IPO of all time to raise money.

    But he still needs more money.

    So then he tries to do a corporate bond issuance... doesn't go super duper well.

    So he still needs more money.

    Welp, ok then, jack up fees, whatever, not very original, but does at least kind of work.

    Any takers as to whether or not he'll still need more money?

    If you guess correctly, you get a free Neuralink installed in your head that you can send OTA bluetooth firmware overrides to nearby devices with your brain!

    Or well, maybe it works... maybes its the opposite of that. Whatever.

    ... But you can recharge them with your solar roof tiles! And then get in your Tesla Roadster! And then take a Starship ICBM flight to Hong Kong or Moscow or Buenos Aires or Rome! And then take the hyperloop to Antarctica!

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  • [–] 60 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    Investors should have learned by now that Musks endeavors are 100% ADHD cycle projects; hyper focus, obsess, launch, start to lose interest, hop on the the next, abandoning previous project, instead of building on the success.

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    [–] 48 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

    I remember when starlink first became available here and had better speed than you could get with terrestrial services. 5 minutes research showed network bandwidth would be a problem once they had significant adoption. Lo and behold...

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  • [–] 21 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

    I'm sure it will get better. Just give him a few more goverment subsidies, grants, and 0 interest federal loans to be forgiven later, have the entirely military fleet of humvees replaced with CyberTrucks that he'll never produce, give him carte blanche to fill more layers of the sky with his private satellites without any oversight, regulation, forethought, or concern for the actual good or needs of humanity, and suddenly your current 3 Megs download may hit 5, even 6 megs in off peak hours! Only an extra $150/month for their premium subscription plan!

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    [–] 41 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    To be fair, the network being crushed by high demand is extremely unsurprising. Cellular networks have always had this problem in dense areas, where it’s no way you're reaching the advertised speed. This is mainly due to the available channels being shared by everyone in a relatively large area, connected to the same cell. Which is mitigated somewhat by setting up more cells with shorter range for a higher cell density in cities.

    How could a satellite based network ever scale? Where you have what, a handful available cells to cover an entire state?

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  • [–] 39 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

    I thought the whole point of this service was to provide internet to places that traditional services couldn’t reach. Meaning they wouldn’t be over populated because those people already have good internet.

    Now that I think it through, there’s no way that demographic is generating enough money to make this work.

    Whoops?

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  • [–] 41 points 3 weeks ago* (19 children)

    This is why satelite internet is a dead end. The latency and bandwidth are fundamental limitations of physics which are incredibly expensive to scale up compare to cable and cell towers.

    Even if we have a complete satellite roll out we'd still have to go back to cell towers for better latency. So why even entertain this detour if not for war machines - one niche where satellites are actually better.

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  • [–] 19 points 3 weeks ago (27 children)

    Satellite is better for remote people. I know a woman whose Alaskan village (indigenous, not colonizer) got significantly better internet once starlink was rolled out.

    Now you could say that nations with meaningful duties to remote peoples should band together and essentially jointly operate (maybe having the UN administer it) such a service for them and use it as the last resort akin to sat phones. And I'd be cool with that. But I so think such people should have internet, and this is probably cheaper than running and maintaining cables all across Alaska and northern Canada.

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  • [–] 13 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    That's true, but it's largely due to a market that doesn't prioritize remote clients and a regulatory system which has roped off huge parts of the radio spectrum.

    Instead of a starlink receiver talking to low orbit, you could have a dish that uses fixed wireless access or point to point connections to access a terrestrial tower. In exceptional situations geostationary satellites make sense, but these low earth constellations are getting out of control.

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    [–] 41 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

    America will do anything except lay some fucking cable to provide internet to the ruroids.

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    [–] 34 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    LOL...from the beginning of this grift, experts said Starlink was not scalable.

    From what I see, 99% of the business community thinks all graphs linearly extrapolate.

    Spoiler alert: AI learning is not scaling either.

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    [–] 33 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    And that was supposed to be the backbone of the space based data center

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  • [–] 31 points 2 weeks ago* (3 children)

    How could someone who knows all about computers and networking not predict the logistics problems for such projects? /s

    Musk tweet from 3 years ago: "Have you ever wondered why the Wikimedia Foundation wants so much money?
It certainly isn't needed to operate Wikipedia. You can literally fit a copy of the entire text on your phone!
So, what's the money for? Inquiring minds want to know ..."

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    [–] 30 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

    "I can complain about Starlink raising their prices, but it's the only genuine option we have," former Nebraska state senator and Republican Julie Slama told the Washington Post last month. "Once they have rural customers on their service with no meaningful alternatives, they're free to raise prices at will."

    Yes, that is what everyone has been warning about for years and why we want the communication monopolies torn down... Fucking leopards running loose out here eating faces and they still just kinda shrug and go "wish there was an alternative to letting all the leopards run free eating our faces".

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    [–] 26 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    “I can complain about Starlink raising their prices, but it’s the only genuine option we have,” former Nebraska state senator and Republican Julie Slama told the Washington Post last month. “Once they have rural customers on their service with no meaningful alternatives, they’re free to raise prices at will.”

    Should we pull up the record and see who voted to allow that to happen in Nebraska while on the subject?

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  • [–] 25 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    I saw my first billboard advertising Starlink in Billings, MT today. They have avoided advertising in the past.

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  • [–] 24 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    Generally they haven't needed to. For most of the situations where Starlink really shines like rural connections, the alternatives are objectively a lot worse. And the other common situation is to avoid a regional monopoly which is still like 90% of the US.

    Starlink basically sells itself, even with Elon at the helm.

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  • [–] 21 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (3 children)

    Starlink will enshittify like all other non-PUD ISPs. This article shows that, and it's already begun to struggle with throughput and scaling it is becoming more and more of a challenge.

    There is one alternative that has been shown to be better than anything else: PUD projects which treat internet access as a utility and not something to make more and more money off of. The FCC has rural grants for ISPs that serve rural areas, but instead of exclusively funding PUD projects, they keep giving money to big for-profit ISPs (like Starlink).

    Starlink should be considered a band-aid and only something that you'd need when you were in a super rural area without other utilities. The solution is giving everyone with grid connections public fiber via PUDs.

    I know we don't live in a utopia where that will happen overnight, and we don't have an FCC that gives a shit. But the FCC should not be giving a trillionaire taxpayer dollars for a half-baked, polluting, wasteful service that will ultimately do the same rugpull that other private ISPs have done.

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    [–] 24 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

    The whole concept is rotten right from the start.

    SpaceX CEO Elon Musk maintains an extremely close relationship with Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr.

    Under Carr's leadership, Musk's rocket company has effectively been given carte blanche in its efforts to roll out its orbital Starlink broadband service to more Americans, a glaring conflict of interest that could have profound implications for society.

    That's despite concerns over thousands or even millions of satellites cluttering our planet's already extremely busy orbit and the environmentally damaging rocket launches that send them up.

    And the space-based network is already starting to experience some major strains — as some experts have long predicted.

    "How can Europe compete with that?" I ask myself more and more often (also AI bubble/data centers). Hopefully in the long term.

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    [–] 23 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    Guy is being a little too trigger happy with this bait and switch but it should still surprise absolutely no one. Starlink with it‘s thousands of satellites, requiring hundreds of rocket launches is ridiculously expensive to operate and can‘t hope to compete with fiber price wise.

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    [–] 22 points 3 weeks ago (14 children)

    I have a neighbor who has access to 1gb cable and 1gb fiber from two ISP's. Both have high data caps. Instead he is rocking the starlink and I can't for the life of me figure out how he thinks that shit is somehow better than a hard link.

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    [–] 20 points 3 weeks ago* (1 child)

    Since the article doesnt make it clear

    This is for new or re-activating customers in a congested area.

    This isnt a random usage fee, this is for areas they claim are too busy, so you gotta pay if you want to gain access.

    Its like when you call a contractor and they quote you a stupid high number. Its often because they're too busy, but if you'll pay the stupid high number theyll do it.

    There was no world where SpaceX could support unlimited customers in a cell region.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 weeks ago* (7 children)

    This isnt a random usage fee, this is for areas they claim are too busy, so you gotta pay if you want to gain access.

    Congestion pricing is the PC way to describe it.

    Price gouging is the more honest term.

    There was no world where SpaceX could support unlimited customers in a cell region.

    You can charge a fixed rate and ration bandwidth during peak use.

    Or you can charge a variable rate in order to maximize revenue during peak demand.

    One maximizes utility while the other maximizes profit.

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  • [–] 20 points 2 weeks ago (9 children)

    The country that invented the internet... has the worst internet infrastructure in the developed world. Worse than some developing countries too. Astonishing.

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    [–] 17 points 2 weeks ago* (9 children)

    I just can't imagine having such excessive wealth and not saying "eh, whatever" when someone tells me I'm losing money on some internet fees.

    You fucker, you could make the world at least a tiny bit better for billions of people at virtually no expense to you, but you just keep playing your stupid fucking rich manchildren games with your billionaire parasite buddies.

    Keep grinding bro, maybe this way you'll get used to the feeling of having your bones crushed in the grinder.

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    [–] 17 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    This is like those people who bought Meta glasses and then acted surprised when they got screwed. Did you really not expect something like this from Musk?

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    [–] 17 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

    If a V1 satellite only has 24 Gbit/s in total capacity on its links to the base station, and a V2 mini satellite only 96 Gbit/s, then it's no wonder really.

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    [–] 15 points 2 weeks ago

    We've noticed that our service no longer works properly, so we're going to charge you more for it.

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  • [–] 15 points 3 weeks ago

    I mean, high demand shouldn't justify surprise pricing

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  • [–] 14 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    Poor Elon, down to his last Trillion

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    [–] 13 points 3 weeks ago (14 children)

    We have terrestrial radio and cables. What is the point of this complex space-based trash?

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  • [–] 25 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

    The US taxpayers literally paid TWICE to privatized telecom companies (telco) to run fiber optic to the home, once in the 90s and again that last early "surge" of FTtH(fiber to the home aka "last mile") when google started competing direct against telcos that would not get the lead out so they all buried a fuckton of (dark)fiber that they then kept artificially turned off and sat on their excess bandwidth instead of releasing that excess supply to the market to do bare standard minimum of using their good taxpayer funded fortune AND their privatized, ridiculously gained profits from the calculable increase of use in the information age YOY to offer it for reasonable prices. We could all be on $25 a month or less no cap 1GBps fiber in many places but again, the market forces at work at this point seem more actively just hostile to the rest of us on ground level here now. It's a fascinating and also infuriating subject as an ex-IT person that helped build out this infrastructure that only could watch as it all remained dark. I was stuck in rural nowhere where we still had a small local telephone cop-op. They took that money, laid fiber and sat on their asses with it while they charged exorbitant rates for 56k dial up service while Netzero and the such took dome of that broadband at a time when independent local ISPs were cropping up, teaming modems and some fiber to offer a service with a saner price structure and this was all before data caps and bandwidth throttling was evenr a thing because all you needed was single rack in strateic locations , set the equipment up and basically forget it with the only fixed costs was your mainline fiber, equipment, colocation etc and such yet they STILL offered 100% FREE dial-up internet, co caps off those systems(of course subsidized by ad networks).

    htps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fibre

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Service_Fund

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    [–] 12 points 2 weeks ago

    You should only be a Starlink customer if you have no other feasible choice.

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