Technology

Publicly funded fibre can be provider agnostic. Starlink can't. Unless Musk is arguing for the nationalization of Starlink, which frankly I could get behind.

Except StarLink cannot possibly provide the same bandwidth, latency, and throughput a fiber connection can. Because of physics.

I can either share my 10G symmetrical connection with nobody, or with 200 others.

And, Fiber costs me $70 a month. Starlink, with worse performance, costs 4x more.

It shouldn’t be all or nothing. It should be diversified.

Yeah, there are rural locations where Starlink makes sense but also there are a lot of urban places that it would never work in.

"Give me all your money" says world's richest person, in a fit of originality.

I say that Emma Stone should divorce her husband and marry me instead.

I sure am sick of super fast, stable internet connections. Let’s all get something that fucks up when it’s cloudy.

To quote Dan Harmon out of context: "If you ask a toaster, "What's the most important thing in the world?" it's going to tell you, "Bread." And if you ask a toaster its opinion of bread, it's going to tell you, "It's not toasted enough."

Hmmm ditch lightning fast and stable fiber for the mediocre speed and unstable micro satellite internet connection controlled by a petty asshole...

What to do, what to do?

On one hand, Musk.

On the other hand... Telecos.

You can either give billions more to the world's richest asshole, or you can give billions to companies that already received that money last time and did absolutely fuckall with it.

Lose-lose

all you can eat latency and an oversaturated network on devices with a limited lifespan.. what else could you ask for!

Nah we don't support nazis

Low orbit satellites will never replace fiber because physics of latency, bandwidth and error correction.

As far as things go today well never need less fiber. Even if we cover the sky with satellites eventually we'd need to upgrade to fiber because its literally impossible to beat. Except for scifi tech like quantum entanglement networks which might not even be possible or practical and wouldn't need the satelites anyway.

As an infrastructure bet it makes absolutely zero sense except for covering rare niches like war zones or oceans.

I've been WFH for at least 10 years and live in rural area. Starlink was like 150-200$ a month for an unpredictable 5-150mbps and did meh. When I finally got fiber it was sub 100$ a month for 2gbps stable. Not a hard decision :)

SpaceX should dump all their space plans and give back their grant money.

Fiber all the way, especially if it is owned by the community. That would simply ensure that Musk nor TelCos can't fuck around with people. Fast speed, no data caps, low prices, and not being at the mercy of some wealthy jackhole would be wins across the board.

Also, if America has a 2nd Civil War, fiber will be much more safe than relying on sats - those can be shot down, or worse, Musk can cut off the good guys from having internet. It is simply harder to sabotage if the wires are underground and cannot be readily seen by hostile actors. As seen in Ukraine, the fucker has absolutely no compunctions against disabling the internet at key moments.

Yeah, please..... give me shitty satellite internet instead of a fast fiber line...

A society grows great when old men plant fiber whose speed they know they shall never download from.

I’m a starlink customer and think it’s one of the best advancements in the past decade as it provides real access to rural addresses. The side effects of this is nearly immeasurable.

Spacex needs to STFU about this though. Fiber should continue to be deployed where possible.