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Comment by ahmeneeroe-v2 | Hacker News Reader

>are funded with tax-payer money

This has nothing to do with profitability. DoD/War Dept contracts are "tax payer money" and shareholders are happy to have those.

>it is actually cheaper to run 10 KILOMETERS / 6 Miles of Fiber cable through the jungle

Cheaper, sure. But try getting this approved in the US through a County Planning Commission. And you did get NEPA/CEQA done too right?

>No, not rural USA. Fiber will be cheaper.

My not-that-rural town has fiber only 80% of town. Houses with city sewer/water don't have fiber

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All of this is regulatory stuff. Your state has the option of making it expensive and a PITA or not.

In my ex home town in Germany we had the exact same thing as you are describing - Fiber available everywhere up to 20 meters away from our house, and no chance to get it connected. For purely regulatory reasons.

True. And starlink is a way to bypass all your/my local regulatory hurdles. They had to deal with several very large regulatory hurdles, and then they're golden. No dealing with every little town separately.

Not true really. You will hit regulatory hurdles if your rockets explode in other countries too often :)

And: RF spectrum is HIGHLY regulated.

Also, 4 weeks ago they spent 17 BILLION USD on buying ~30 MHz of spectrum in the 2 Ghz range. 30 MHz translated to a total bandwidth capacity of about 300 MBit/s.

Yes, you have read that correctly: 17 Billion for 300 MBit/s.

So you're telling people to live with bad/no Internet connection now (due to local regulations) because of hypothetical future problems with their viable alternative in the future?

Easy advice to give from the outside, especially (presumably) from a place with great fiber options.

> Also, 4 weeks ago they spent 17 BILLION USD on buying ~30 MHz of spectrum in the 2 Ghz range. 30 MHz translated to a total bandwidth capacity of about 300 MBit/s.

That's L-band spectrum for direct-to-device services, which comes at a heavy premium due to its advantageous physical properties and inherent scarcity (the entire L-band has fewer Hz of spectrum than what Starlink alone is already using in the Ka band). Ka-band spectrum is much, much cheaper. You're comparing the cost of real estate for factory/campus on a green field hours away from everyone with that of a high street storefront.

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