Comment by cronix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cronix | Hacker News Reader

After reading many comments, I wonder why more people aren't looking into Space X's Starlink. Broadband speeds, no wired infrastructure, portable, no caps and $100/mo. It seems to be about $30 more/mo than most here are paying, but their broadband is tied to a physical location and not easily movable. Soon it will be mobile, as in dish corrects itself in realtime while driving a motorhome [1], etc. You can take them out in the middle of nowhere, as long as you don't leave your region, like I did 2 weeks ago as a test in the Willamette National Forest in Oregon, 20 miles out on a logging road. Didn't even get 1 bar of cell service, but was watching movies on Netflix in 4k and even played a bit of COD. You can change your region with Starlink, but it takes a day or two as you have to call and tell them the "new address." It's all manual. They are working on a way to automate those requests via the web so they take minutes to change instead of hours or days, and when mobile comes out you probably won't need to do that either.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/04/dishy...

Laying fiber is expensive, and the more rural you go the more expensive it gets.

Part of the reason people are very excited by municipal broadband is the ownership part. No giant corporate entity standing between you and your internet connection.

The connection being mobile is nice but it's not something I require from my broadband connection, I already have a cellphone. And I live in an apartment building where installing a dish will be all but impossible.

Don't get me wrong, Starlink is amazing tech and in rural areas it'll be a huge deal. But in reasonably sized towns and cities a wired, locally owned internet connection is also huge.

You just have extremely slow ass local government/regulation to deal with instead...

Which is better than an actively malicious oligopoly.

Yes but at what cost? If you undercut any private business to the point where they all leave the area and there's no competition or alternatives I don't think that's going to be a good thing in the future.

I’d argue that’s one of the reasons municipal governments are the best place to do this. If you tried at the state or federal level it would be slow as molasses but cities can move quicker.

Of course it’s all relative. Verizon has supposed to have been rolling out FIOS to my neighborhood for a decade or more now.

I get it. I have municipal broadband and it's obviously the better choice in my area right now. In the future it may not be though and if you run all the competition out of town by undercutting it with subsidized tax payer dollars then you might not like what's left when it comes time to upgrade that network. More choices, alternatives are always going to be better.

Starlink is only an option for a very, very small portion of the population.

The Starlink constellation has less total bandwidth than a single strand of fiber. It simply does not scale.

Starlink only has permits for about a million terminals or so and they must be very careful in where and how many customers they sign up so as to not overwhelm the system.

Elon himself has said that Starlink is only an option when you have no other options.

It's fiber, so... lay a lot of it once and you're good for a decade. Probably more.

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