Technology

I got a better idea: a civil war against oligarchs

Wireless data transmission should only ever be used for nomadic, temporary, and/or sacrificial links.

They’re useful for quick deployment, but are intrinsically brittle and terrible for resiliency and efficiency.

The longer the dependence on them for a given use case, the less defensible arguments in support of them become.

I’m all for the use of satellite delivery of internet services, but only when it’s used in conjunction with a broader roll out of hardwired infrastructure, at which point it can reasonably be relegated to serving as a secondary, backup diverse path.

No fucking thanks. Gigabit+ fiber > Nazi-ass satellite internet that doesn’t have even remotely near the needed bandwidth for actual dense population centers.

I have a better idea: don’t do that.

You cannot actually serve hundreds of millions in the US even if you invested the 75B it would cost to give every household a satellite it just can't support the bandwidth.

Going from the most secure, hard wired formats to a con man's satellites would be a fatal error. Any sort of military conflict and the network is all down, atleast broadband keeps secure networks intact.

One day he's gonna get assassinated and it will be a global holiday

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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."

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

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.

Musk is still hitting the special K.

The term "tech neutral' brings back terrible memories of the conservative Liberal successful campaign in #auspol against the #NBN (national broadband network) 😞

https://paulbudde.com/blog/nbn-ftth-broadband/the-coalitions-nbn-failure-political-sabotage-and-the-threat-of-privatisation-continues/

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 :)

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

Nah we don't support nazis

They’re welcome to say that, as long as their ruler doesn’t enter the political or policy arena and have the moral depravity to act despite a conflict of interest. As long as corporations don’t have undue influence on politics from lobbying or donations.

We don’t have to listen.

Our representatives should be representing us. ….. alright alright you can stop laughing now

"Humans should give me chicken" says Cat.

Yes. Lets tie our expansion of desperately needed internet access in rural America to massively carbon emitting rocket launches. Thats definitely not gonna back fire on us.

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

I’m so glad other countries are coming up with their own satellites just for the expressed interest to boycott musk.

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.