To be fair, the network being crushed by high demand is extremely unsurprising. Cellular networks have always had this problem in dense areas, where it’s no way you’re reaching the advertised speed. This is mainly due to the available channels being shared by everyone in a relatively large area, connected to the same cell. Which is mitigated somewhat by setting up more cells with shorter range for a higher cell density in cities.
How could a satellite based network ever scale? Where you have what, a handful available cells to cover an entire state?
Guy is being a little too trigger happy with this bait and switch but it should still surprise absolutely no one. Starlink with it‘s thousands of satellites, requiring hundreds of rocket launches is ridiculously expensive to operate and can‘t hope to compete with fiber price wise.
I remember when starlink first became available here and had better speed than you could get with terrestrial services. 5 minutes research showed network bandwidth would be a problem once they had significant adoption. Lo and behold…
I’m sure it will get better. Just give him a few more goverment subsidies, grants, and 0 interest federal loans to be forgiven later, have the entirely military fleet of humvees replaced with CyberTrucks that he’ll never produce, give him carte blanche to fill more layers of the sky with his private satellites without any oversight, regulation, forethought, or concern for the actual good or needs of humanity, and suddenly your current 3 Megs download may hit 5, even 6 megs in off peak hours! Only an extra $150/month for their premium subscription plan!
So basically:
His companies are hilariously insolvent, so he rolls them all together and does the biggest IPO of all time to raise money.
But he still needs more money.
So then he tries to do a corporate bond issuance… doesn’t go super duper well.
So he still needs more money.
Welp, ok then, jack up fees, whatever, not very original, but does at least kind of work.
Any takers as to whether or not he’ll still need more money?
If you guess correctly, you get a free Neuralink installed in your head that you can send OTA bluetooth firmware overrides to nearby devices with your brain!
Or well, maybe it works… maybes its the opposite of that. Whatever.
… But you can recharge them with your solar roof tiles! And then get in your Tesla Roadster! And then take a Starship ICBM flight to Hong Kong or Moscow or Buenos Aires or Rome! And then take the hyperloop to Antarctica!
And that was supposed to be the backbone of the space based data center
Pipe dream was supposed to be the backbone of another pipe dream. The Elon way of doing business.
Over promise and under deliver, the musk way. Fucking clown ass Nazi piece of shit. I know there’s not a lot of viable alternatives, but if you’re using a Nazi service, I lack sympathy when the Nazi raises your prices.
Meanwhile the airlines rolling out “free Starlink WiFi” without so much as an asterix about who provides and controls the bits you’re sending through it.
Imagine how much data musk will be able to glean getting free access to travelers internet habits and probably a lot more.
If they’re offering “free Starlink WiFi” they are telling you who is offering it. If they are offering “free inflight WiFi” they are hiding it
I was just on a flight with that, and it was ass. I got a few text messages in and out, but that was about it.
Billionaires will kill us all, while millionaires scream and yell. Thousandaires defend them both, while we all suffer in hell.
This is like those people who bought Meta glasses and then acted surprised when they got screwed. Did you really not expect something like this from Musk?
And I read somewhere that he may be trying to buy t mobile to be able to meet that demand.
That doesn’t make much sense, how is a completely different infrastructure going to help their capacity issues? Unless the plan is to pivot from satellite to 5G or something
Fuck, I hope not. My only other fiber option is ATT
Then he will buy that too. America loves monopolies!
I saw my first billboard advertising Starlink in Billings, MT today. They have avoided advertising in the past.
Generally they haven’t needed to. For most of the situations where Starlink really shines like rural connections, the alternatives are objectively a lot worse. And the other common situation is to avoid a regional monopoly which is still like 90% of the US.
Starlink basically sells itself, even with Elon at the helm.
Starlink will enshittify like all other non-PUD ISPs. This article shows that, and it’s already begun to struggle with throughput and scaling it is becoming more and more of a challenge.
There is one alternative that has been shown to be better than anything else: PUD projects which treat internet access as a utility and not something to make more and more money off of. The FCC has rural grants for ISPs that serve rural areas, but instead of exclusively funding PUD projects, they keep giving money to big for-profit ISPs (like Starlink).
Starlink should be considered a band-aid and only something that you’d need when you were in a super rural area without other utilities. The solution is giving everyone with grid connections public fiber via PUDs.
I know we don’t live in a utopia where that will happen overnight, and we don’t have an FCC that gives a shit. But the FCC should not be giving a trillionaire taxpayer dollars for a half-baked, polluting, wasteful service that will ultimately do the same rugpull that other private ISPs have done.
What’s pud?
Public utility district (although sometimes “people’s utility district”). Used for utilities like water lines, sewer lines, and fiber. Typically the cost is paid by a group of neighbors, an entire neighborhood, or it can be county wide as well. Usually also subsidized by the county, state, or federal government to help reduce cost.
At my previous employer, we just used Starlink as a third backup circuit. There they’d be better suited for that and travel vs whole home internet.
Fortunately rural fiber rollouts are happening very frequently now. The big ISPs don’t want to miss out on the starlink money.
