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Comment by trynumber9 | Hacker News Reader

Why give money to unproven technology when we know ground networks work and can be low latency?

Surely there is a market for Starlink even without government funding. Then after they prove it is reliably low latency they can apply again. This isn't DARPA it's the FCC.

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Because in the US broadband ISPs wont wire up rural areas. My local school district has 40% of homes that cable will not wire. 13% of them can not get cell service at home. They have taken so many millions of dollars in state and federal money to provide service, but utterly fail to do so. We had a real good opportunity to build a public ISP to service our school district. A local Indian reservation had built up the expertise as they had accomplished it on their lands and was offering it to us. We partnered with a quasi-public development authority to handle purchasing and installation of equipment. Site surveys. State/Federal licencing. Starting an ISP is hard. The week before we were to start installing equipment on end users homes the cable company, who previously said they no objection to this, dropped a lawsuit. This was after thousands of hours of work and many thousands of dollars spent. We knew we didn't have the money to fight it in courts so we folded. If they had said they would have objected from the start we would not have gone done the path we did.

This venture was to provide students internet access for a tiny rural school district. They have YET to increase their footprint in this rural area.

So I hope starlink takes every fucking customer they have.

Given the cost of a Starlink ground terminal, I suspect many won’t be able to afford the service.

That's the whole point of the subsidy program SpaceX is applying for.

> If SpaceX and similar companies are rejected from the low-latency category, they will be at a disadvantage in a reverse auction that will distribute $16 billion—$1.6 billion yearly, over ten years—from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF). The auction, scheduled to begin on October 29, will give ISPs funding to deploy broadband in census blocks where no provider offers home-Internet speeds of at least 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream.

We've looked at getting the cable provider to run cable to area of the district. I could be as high as 10k per house to get them to do the work. How much are downlinks. You may not understand what a school district will go to to make sure its students are served.

Ground networks work… where someone bothers to deploy one.

The problem in rural areas is that no one does.

And places with no competition. Some times there is a ground network, or at most two (in the US, this tends to be Comcast and AT&T).

And most of the undeveloped world.

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