0: No shade thrown at the submitter, as this is the title used by the site.
In business, especially on the government side, incumbency plays a very big role. Just knowing whom to call in case of issues and how soon they respond may account for all the trust needed to renew. My 2c.
But this year is also the year all European companies and governments learned the hard way they need to ditch US providers, and actually started working on it.
Blackmail from your provider is not great for business relations. Let’s not pretend otherwise.
But this article has nothing to do with the above, or with views of Musk. As others said, this request was for centralized access and SpaceX responded with a B2C proposal. It would have been rejected just as quickly even if it came from another company unaffiliated with the US.
The obvious aspect is that Starlink is a US company owned by a US oligarch with deep ties to the ruling regime, which is repeatedly threatening Greenland with invasion and annexation.
Relying on that service provider for communication would be outright stupid.
Oracle could offer a company a better product/service, but would you really trust them?
For example particularly in the UK and I think in Australia, the expression "ditched at the altar" is not uncommon.
If Greenland was legitimately close to a finalising a deal with Starlink, my semantics brain cells will accept "ditched" here.
Also, what's cool about Starlink is that they have sort of vertical integration with SpaceX that allows them to constantly keep launching new satellites which allows them maintain lower orbit constellation that allows for cheaper end-user equipment and potentially better speeds. Also the constant recycling of satellites allow for ever going network improvement as the tech advances.
What's not cool about Starlink is that it is American and Elon Musk affiliated, which makes it national security risk for Europe and Greenland in particular. That is also part of the newsworthiness because if this becomes a trend Starlink may become unviable business for a market of just 300M people.
When shopping solar, installers would open with ‘we sell various brands, what are your views on Musk?’
The do 4gb too, but I can’t use that much, and rarely get over 1gb.
It's described as slightly worse than Starlink, which makes sense because the orbits are not that different to warrant 20 orders of magnitude performance difference.
Where do you get the 1s latency number?
“If it’s like old school satellite internet”
Coverage is smaller than Starlink, but I don't think Greenland plans to move anywhere any time soon.
Nobody is arguing that it isn't newsworthy.
"but losing to an established competitor isn't super newsworthy"
345M people. Of which, the real market is around 15M households. Everyone else already has wired broadband. I suppose some people will want an additional link for redundancy, but my understanding is that Starlink satellites would be oversubscribed if urban areas had significant adoption.
AFAIK, you, as end user, cannot. Last time i checked that Eutelsat offers the service only as wholesale, to ISPs and other large customers, not to regular end-users.
I reckon he has delivered on plenty.