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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

There seems to be a lot of wishful thinking in this article? You don't get the Berlin airlift unless someone is willing to pay for it, and that only happened in an emergency.

Getting into communication satellites is smart and sounds like it will be big business, but it only goes so far in increasing demand. It should be great in remote and rural areas, but most cities already have Internet.

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Internet is becoming a staple commodity, vital to modern life. If it isn't available somewhere, people don't move there. Cities abound now in growing part because that's where high-speed low-latency reliable connectivity exists; if a location doesn't have it, people don't stay there long at all. Expanding "broadband" coverage is a serious factor in alleviating overcrowding, and opening paths toward first-world development.

It's currently a deciding factor in my location. I want to move, but can't go where I want because there isn't reliable >25Mbps there.

Couple with that the popular opinion of internet providers in general. People will stampede to a new platform.

This summer I toured the US midwest. So much wonderful open space, growth hindered mostly by "no wires and no bars". Make worldwide telecom cheap fast & reliable, and methinks numerous new centers of productivity will spring up almost overnight.

According to the ITC, only 11.9% of the world has "Fixed broadband" aka wired internet. 30.1% in developed nations. There's a big gap, especially when the world catches up in a few years.

Good to know, but it might not be the most relevant metric? In many places, wired phone service got bypassed by cell phone service. I'd guess a lot more people have cell phones and are usually in cell phone range, so what we really want to know is coverage, cost, and quality of the data services that people already use to access the Internet, and how big a role satellite service would play in improving that.

I've seen estimates that the satellite business will generate more profit for SpaceX than NASA's budget. Since Musk controls over half of the stock, he can do whatever he wants with that.

And yet we waste a trillion dollars a year on the military...

Without the military there would be no space program, and no internet for you to moan on.

Yes that is the only reason those things exist. In fact everything has been developed by the military! The military built all the telecommunications infrastructure, laid all the intercontinental data lines, and developed optical switches.

Oh you mean they developed a pretty basic protocol? Let's give them all the credit.

You can thank the GERMAN military for the space program.

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