Americans deploy fiber optic with :brrrrrrrrrrrr: challenge impossible
It's the only internet I can get where I live. A week after we opened the box, we got an email saying "actually we are going to charge you $25 more a month, dawg"
Our power company is working on fiber in our area and I can't wait to get off Starlink.
Hey, I personally designed 175,000 feet of fiber optic network in Louisiana last week so don't blame me
Now they just need to build it, but they're always cheap as fuck. Literally only using the sale equipment from China that they have to wait 3 months to get shipped.
They also get more government money than the cost of design and constructio, so they literally walk away with a profit before their utility rent comes in.
:fidel-salute-big: :kim-salute: :chavez-salute: :deng-salute: :maduro-salute: :sankara-salute:
Our little team of 8 people designed a total of 151 miles. North Carolina, Louisiana, Missouri, Texas, and Chicago.
Starlink has always been a con to drive sales for Space X rockets.
and to provide network connectivity for american military ventures so they can do that whole battlefield awareness bullshit
Anyone been stargazing recently? There are wayyyyy too many satellites now. I am personally cancelling starlink.
:rat-salute: to comrade :melon-musk: for cluttering low orbit. Soon, the chain-reaction of colliding debris will render the planet inescapable, forcing us to abandon naive dreams of inter-planetary colonization.
I'm pretty surprised China hasn't put their foot down on shit like that yet. I'll bet it becomes a conflict sooner rather than later.
That's why they designed a satellite for scrapping garbage satellites in orbit and western media was pushing articles describing them as attack satellites designed to destroy other satellites in a nefarious manner
I remember that now that you mention it. Past few years are truly a blur.
It's not even a unique capability, it's the Chinese space program developing their own version of the X-37b that the Space Force has.
how about we stop letting this bastard shit shiny move-y things into the night sky?
fukin blasphemy against the celestial realm, all misfortune is punishment for our hubris
If their 4,400 satellites can only service 400k consumers (and not very large ones at that), only stationary, given their 5 year lifespan at a cost of 400,000 per satellite (optimistic, doesn't include launch price), assuming all the rest of the infra is free, no opex, that's going to be about 1000$/year/customer in costs only in capex....
Yikes!
Meanwhile there are satellite internet companies with 3 sats and consistant, speedy performance.
The only issue with a lot of satellite internet is that they're higher up so the ping is super long and you cant be a :freeze-gamer:
those have insane latencies though (>400ms) but yea way more sustainable than Starlink
Mmmm but nothing beyond online games and webapps make use of that right?
everything will load slower and latency sensitive apps like video/audio conferencing may not work right.
edit: also satellite internet has very small data caps
Meanwhile, a fiber optic install that services 20,000 people only costs about $300/customer to install and maybe $5-10/month per customer to maintain in the worst case (like aerial installs in tornado alley).
But right now a huge amount of new build is being done with horizontal directional drilling which has a higher upfront cost, but lower long term maintenance cost.
You can also run OLT/AON networks on fiber infrastructure and have multiple ISPs using the same backbones so it could be a good setup for breaking some of the monopoly that Comcast, Charter, and AT&T hold right now.
The thing that's really helping get fiber built out everywhere right now is the insanely cheap hardware cost. China is rocketing ahead on fiber build out and as a side effect, their factories are capable of supplying the global market with cabling and terminals at like 10x lower cost than even a few years ago.
Couple that with the infrastructure bill giving something like $60B to any ISP that builds out new fiber and you have a recipe for tons of new build where the monopolies don't even have to eat that $300/customer cost and actually walk away with a profit for just paying a subcontractor to build out a network.
Given neoliberal capitalism's track record with private bailouts though, a huge amount of this new proposed build will be shoddy or just never actually finished as the big guys pay out massive dividends to shareholders and do stock buyback while they find ways to cash in on the stimulus without actually doing any capital expenditure.
The good news is that we're in a huge rush to build out new backbones (I'm working on one that goes up the Mississippi river from Louisiana to Missouri and will service something like 1million homes directly with fiber). And that's just one of the several projects we're working on. We're also a small ass team of 8, who knows how much build out the bigger firms are doing.
Some people have said Starlink is like the one Elon Musk thing that isn't total bullshit, but it absolutely is too. The network can't handle a very high load at all unless they basically make so many satellites it triggers a Kessler ablation cascade which will destroy any satellite placed into low earth orbit, as well as pose a significant risk for anything passing through that zone, for hundreds of years.
Well, the good news about Starlink is that they're low enough that even if they all spontaneously exploded low orbit would only be unusable for at most six months before all the debris fell back and burned up.
Best part is the fcc didn't just give them $900,000,000. rare good decision.
https://www.engadget.com/fcc-rejects-spacex-starlink-rural-broad-band-funds-194352343.html
