this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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LEO satellite internet service is life changing for people who live in underserviced, rural, and remote areas - but it’s a tragedy that it’s controlled by billionaires and the USA. Growth at all costs mindset cannot accept that they should exist only as an ISP of last resort, so they’re servicing urban areas and planning data centres.
It would be better to support public fiber infrastructure (through PUDs) in almost every way. I know not all remote areas can be reached with fiber, but most rural areas can be. My county has done exactly that with the rural portions - they focused on rolling it out to underserved rural areas first (even though it was more expensive to do that up front). Now, those rural areas have gigabit fiber and they didn't have to pay tens of thousands to wire it up to their homes.
Try dragging fiber to a ship. Starlink is a game changer for the shipping industry and removing it now would be a mess.
Did you miss this part? You're arguing over something I didn't claim, and didn't say.
But since you brought it up, SpaceX received nearly $1 billion in subsidies from the FCC in 2020 to support rural customers. That money is what I'm talking about. It wasn't for ships. It was to connect rural customers because it would otherwise not be profitable for large ISPs to serve them. This billion should have gone to supporting county PUDs, not a rich nazi fuck's company. It should have stayed with the public.
Unless you're saying that the billion from taxpayers should have been given to him to support ships in international waters?
As a bonus, fiber doesn't lose capacity just because it gets cloudy. Try using Starlink when a cumulonimbus cloud is overhead.
I don't know what a fcc is but if it helps us having good internet I'm all for it. I work on ships and I've used starlink on ships in storms and all kinds of bad weather including finding the antenna covered in ice and snow. It's fantastic. Our old geostationary communication system fails as soon as a passing bird looks at it.
The FCC is the Federal Communication Commission for the US. They're a US federal agency meant to do domestic policy in anything telecom and radio.
The intent of the subsidies was not for ships or international communication. It was meant for rural US properties. That's why it should have been allocated to PUDs (public utility district). It would have been more useful for the people paying the taxes to give broadband subsidies.
Shipping companies can pay their own way - they're corporations and can afford it. The subsides should not have gone to SpaceX.
I don't think you've ever used Starlink if you think clouds make it fail.
...you do realize it started in Seattle, right?
Seattle typically doesn't get hail core cumulonimbus (supercells). Plus, I'm not saying that it completely fails with just cloudy weather alone. Note that I said capacity, which is absolutely affected by moderate to heavy cloud cover or not being able to see the sky. Diminished capacity doesn't mean it fails, it means that it's slower, higher latency, and less reliable. In extreme cases involving hail storms (like I mentioned), it can and does fail - you can see this in the storm chaser streaming circles. Their streams cut out completely at times, if the satellites are between the storm and their antenna.
I am simply bringing up an edge case since the person who originally replied brought up ships when I was talking about rural fiber.
My point is still that SpaceX shouldn't have gotten FCC subsidies when a more reliable, cheaper (especially in the long run since we're talking about LEO), higher bandwidth, lower latency option exists. PUDs should have gotten all of that cash, not a different, large ISP owned by a billionaire.
An added bonus to fiber: it doesn't ruin ground based astronomy.
Yeah, fair. Where fiber can be run fiber should be run.
Just scarred from all the times where we spend x billion to expand fiber, it doesn't happen, somehow nobody gets held accountable.
I mean damn, at least Starlink is providing a service
That's because historically, major ISPs have been given the grants (including Starlink) instead of PUDs. Public fiber is entirely different, it's managed and installed like a public utility, not a service to be capitalized on. This is why I've been so focused on saying that SpaceX should never have been given $1 billion dollars. It shouldn't have been given to any non public organization.
Geo could do the job at a fraction of the environmental cost.
Latency would be a bit higher but that doesn't matter for download.
it's such a game changer when you're actually using it. night and day, completely different experience.
also, GEO is in many regards more at risk for Kessler syndrome because stuff up there doesn't deorbit
You know capitalism has reached peak efficiency when instead of laying some cables or even build a few more cell towers we decide to litter the atmosphere with satellites instead
You realize to reach rural / ocean areas and have continuous service, they do typically at some point fly over urban areas.
There are lots of pockets of rural all over the place and if you want to get it all, you'll end up with a global service where you have bandwidth to serve urban areas.
Edit: they also serve air traffic where ground service isnt available.
The issue with serving urban is that they need more satellites with narrower beams to handle the higher density and resulting load. Yes, they fly over, but they don’t have the capacity.
I mean I don't specifically know how much over capacity they are adding specifically so they can serve urban areas, but I do know that they are trying to reach the specifications set out by the FCC so that they can be considered broadband for rural applications. To qualify for that you need 100/20 down/up with latency requirements.
What I do know though is that they even with their full network, they aren't reaching that in all rural areas yet, only some (I vaguely recall something like 40-60% have met it?), so it's not like the existing network is over capacity specifically for urban right now, they still have more work to do on rural.
Edit: I think my 40-60 number is also about a year old, so its probably a little higher now.