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Starlink loses out on $886 million in rural broadband subsidies
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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Because as we know, the only way for companies owned by the richest person on Earth to do business is if they get hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money first.
As if giving it all to Comcast and Spectrum for the 47th time will make things any better? Starlink is actually something accessible for a lot of these people, while legacy ISPs just pocket the money and claim its too hard to serve rural customers.
It's great that there is variety and all but let's not pretend the CEO isn't dangerous, see starling/Ukraine issue and that the company isn't filling the sky with consumer shite designed to be burned up.
Infrastructure should be publicly owned and strong competitive regulation.
I'll just add that "designed to be burned up" is the correct approach to these types of satellite constellations. SpaceX has that aspect correct, at least.
Agree with everything else. Musk is a batshit egomaniac, and letting him dictate use of large infrastructure is careless. Government subsidies should entail a certain public influence over the operation of the system.
I just don't think we need satellites clogging up the sky for something we can accomplish if we wanted to. Fiber is cheap.
Starlink could be deployed in emergencies just fine.
Clogging up...the sky...you do realize the size of space right? And the size of on of these SATs right?... it's like putting 800 washing machines in AZ and then telling people az is clogged with washing machines...do you randomly run into people's houses driving through your neighborhood?
https://www.nasa.gov/learning-resources/for-kids-and-students/what-is-orbital-debris-grades-5-8/
This is what people are referring to when they talk about junk in orbit.
Starlink doesn't produce any debris, only the satellites. Now they keep the tie rods attached so they don't float off. The reason the picture looks so bad is because each piece of debris in this picture is represented as miles and miles across.
Both of you are right. Space junk is an issue (Kessler syndrome), but that's for orbits which won't degrade by themselves, starlink satellites are supposed to be low enough that at time of crash they should mostly crash towards the earth and burn in the atmosphere.