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Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

Spaceships and radio waves are cool and provide a unique solution.

Let’s not pretend this was the one true way to get around Comcast et al’s stranglehold though. That problem could have been solved politically with regulation plus (in the countryside) ground based radio, or (in cities) with regulation of cable infrastructure such that it was separated from packet-routing and customer-service.

If satellite ISPs genuinely are the solution to entrenched telcos then every streak of light in the sky is a testament to the failure to find a solution. We will look back and wish we had been able to achieve a system of sensible business regulation delivered by those elected to do so.

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This should be the top comment. It’s an especially prevalent view in the USA that bad politics is a law of physics and the only solutions are madly technological. It’s not true as many other parts of the world prove. You can just have a not-insane ISP/telco regulatory system if you so choose. (see also healthcare, food/agricultural standards, water quality, online privacy... all choices).

> It’s an especially prevalent view in the USA that bad politics is a law of physics and the only solutions are madly technological. It’s not true as many other parts of the world prove. You can just have a not-insane ISP/telco regulatory system if you so choose. (see also healthcare, food/agricultural standards, water quality, online privacy... all choices).

I agree. However it's going to be a tough nut to crack because that belief is self-reinforcing. People who believe the government can't do anything right also seem to advocate policies that make the government more ineffective, which provides false confirmation of the initial belief.

It is also very hard to change regulations whenever the ISPs are deep in the pockets of the same people making those regulations.

Yes, you make a very strong point. It seems the highest bidders in the city were able to work with city planners to lay their cable lines... while in the rural areas (where I grew up) there were not enough customers to justify modernizing old telephone wire.

The response to COVID-19 has been an expectancy on equal access to Internet and either the telco gets to capitalize on their geographic monopoly or the rural folks get short changed with 1980s dial-up or GEO satellite link.

I don't think you really have any idea what it's like to live somewhere truly rural. Cable and DSL companies do not serve these places.

Ground-based radio requires line-of-sight to somewhere with both power and an uplink. Nevermind "third-world" countries - the vast majority of the United States, by square foot, does not have this. Rural wireless is incredibly dependent upon topography, many places will just never get it.

I live one hour from SF. I have rural wireless broadband (bounced off a solar relay I installed on a hill). It's terrible, but I'm still one of the lucky ones - most of the properties we looked at when shopping did not have this access, and the only internet option was Hughes.

I appreciate the counterpoint as part of this discussion, though I personally grew up on a rural fruit farm which is currently served by a wind turbine powered hilltop relay (~4Mbps long range WiFi) and copper cable DSL (~7Mbps.)

The valley is 400’ deep and has 50 copper pairs coming up the side, of which 20 come to the road the house is on, and 10 remain by the time you get to the family property. 3 more are taken by properties down the way, so 7 pairs (or ~50Mbps) lay unused. It would be interesting if the copper was changed to a 100% utilization rate.

The point though is there is power and copper telephone at the site. And a road! At some point, someone managed to invest in infrastructure for this house. In some sense it’s quite disheartening that the only modern equivalent to that kind of infrastructure investment is the spaceship endrun around the incumbents.

> That problem could have been solved politically with regulation plus (in the countryside) ground based radio, or (in cities) with regulation of cable infrastructure such that it was separated from packet-routing and customer-service.

My hope is that these constellations put pressure on the ground based incumbents to fix their shit. The result might be that we get cheap enough internet on the ground that the constellations become unprofitable and shut down. Might be a win-win without politics and regulation.

> That problem could have been solved politically...

No.

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