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Comment by LMYahooTFY | Hacker News Reader

>Ignoring all the other social/anticompetitive issues there is with Facebook proposing this, it stinks like a scam to get a tax writeoff or jump onto the same sort of FCC rural internet grant money Starlink is bilking taxpayers out of. You can't scale a midband macro like this even using a dumb amount of spectrum. Oh totally forgot, there's an 'educational' use case for use of BRS (2500mhz) spectrum that I'll bet Facebook will also try to get their hands on.

Is it very clear that this pessimism/cynicism is warranted?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzXZdipxCuw

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>Is it very clear that this pessimism/cynicism is warranted?

Yes, read some of my earlier comments regarding Starlink, DISH, and general telecom schemes. I'm not coming out of nowhere with this criticism.

With that being said I fully understand where their system is better than current MEO/GEO systems for low-latency rural deploys. I'm just not in the cult of Elon, physics/money/practicality have their limits.

I'd honestly be more excited with Starlink if they were primarily using it as a replacement for satellite backhaul on very remote cell sites. That way you don't need residential roof antennas and a ton of power to communicate with the network, just need your main power at the cell site. That's more practical for poor rural countries but isn't as big of a writeoff, doesn't look as sexy.

I could see Starlink-fed WISPs or cellular becoming something very real. Starlink CPE is very expensive and probably heavily subsidized. Plenty of villages where 0 can afford it, but collectively they could.

Starlink may as well take the money on the table if the constellation will fly overhead anyway.

This is the business model that Telesat trying to make work. While they are behind Starlink in terms of rollout, they are a credible manufacturer/provider for a service like this

https://www.canwisp.ca/resources/Conference%202020/Presentat...

I take all that to mean that Telesat hasn’t cracked the $$$ CPE nut like SpaceX has, or the SpaceX CPE subsidies are even bigger than I can imagine.

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