It’s pretty good, but the latency is inherently high since Viasat is in GEO.

~600ms ping times vs ~40ms on Starlink

More personal information than you provide them to purchase the ticket to use the free starlink?

Yeah, as an RVer, I can tell you that you would probably be surprised by how much of the country does not have readily available cell service. And even if it does, they might not have it on your network.

I was paying more to have SIM cards for all of the big three, and getting much less out of it

Residential prices:

100 Mbps down / 15-35 Mbps up, unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €29/month in Europe, $39/month in the US.

200 Mbps down / 15-35 Mbps up, unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €49/month in Europe, $69/month in the US.

400+ Mbps down / 20-40 Mbps up (QoS higher priority), unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €69/month in Europe, $109/month in the US.

A good high-speed fiber connection is obviously better quality and value; but if you don't have one, then Starlink is absolutely the most competitive option you're going to get.

In all fairness, it was a qualified statement: "readily available alternatives". That immediately disqualifies customers stuck in the boonies, or a few hundred feet away from service coverage.

To be fair: this is an america regulatory capture problem.

I apologize for the initial ambiguous snippy comment.

I'm an I.T. consultant in N. Carolina, and I've worked in very rural areas setting up connectivity for farms. Indeed, I have recommended StarLink on at least two occasions, albeit in concert with 4G/5G cellular (bad weather remains a problem). StarLink sounds great for airlines, RV's, boats, base camps, disaster relief--but those are almost all examples where affordability aren't usually high priorities, and I'm not sure if it's significantly better than upgrading geostationary satellite tech.

I do firmly believe that StarLink is, at best, a flawed solution to the largely solvable problem in the context of rural broadband access. We very recently had federal programs and funding to advance cable/fiber rural broadband services, but it was so weighed down with bureaucratic cruft that basically nothing got done. I dunno if that specific provision of Biden's infrastructure bill remains law, but I'm pretty sure it ceased being a priority after the last election (not for nothing, StarLink had plenty to gain by those federal programs dying, although I have no direct knowledge that Musk, DOGE, et al made any direct moves to stop it--I think it was mainly the shite implementation/execution by the Biden administration).

So "readily available" in the sense of "we could do it at any time, and it would be a helluva lot cheaper and more durable than continuously launching hundreds of satellites into LEO". Poor choice of words on my part, and even still I'm sure there's still plenty to disagree with there.

You couldn't get cable internet in Houston?

Their competitors isn’t other satellite in most cases. It’s fiber, 5G and so on.

Everyone wins when you can wololo with others on the internet at 30,000ft.

Nobody is holding you hostage. Sounds like you need the timeout more than anyone.

And the assumption that this view was drawn from nostalgia is completely invalid.

Yea .. so new that I have only worked in the industry for 5+ years now. Your link doesn't support anything you said.

What passage in that interview says anything about "In‑Q‑Tel invested in SpaceX" or "CIA funded SpaceX"?

That interview is a NASA oral history of Mike Griffin’s career. It mentions his time at In‑Q‑Tel and later NASA, but it never says In‑Q‑Tel or the CIA funded SpaceX. You’re conflating "this guy once ran a CIA‑linked VC" with "he personally funneled CIA money into SpaceX," which simply isn't true. SpaceX’s early funding is well‑documented as Musk’s own money plus later NASA contracts as a customer, not a CIA equity round.

SpaceX (and Kistler Aerospace, Orbital Sciences etc.) was awarded contracts for commercial transportation to the ISS [1]. NASA’s role was as an anchor customer and partner under a publicly described program to get cargo (and later crew) to ISS via commercial providers. NASA’s commercial cargo program and SpaceX’s contracts are not secret. They were openly competed and publicly announced. That's the opposite of clandestine CIA startup funding.

DoD launch money for SpaceX (EELV/NSSL contracts, etc.) came much later, after Falcon 9 was flying and competing with ULA, and those are again launch service contracts, not "investment".

> Trump admin took this link down off NASA's website but it's archived just before the transition

That interview wasn't mysteriously "scrubbed". The website got updated and you found an old link that wasn't working anymore [2][3]. Not a conspiracy, just garden variety link rot.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Orbital_Transportat...

[2] https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/griffinmd-1-...

[3] https://www.nasa.gov/history/history-publications-and-resour...

Even in "rural regions", there are typically some small towns where infrastructure could be provided to them decently efficiently. It's when every single house is a good distance away from their neighbors that things like running fiber cabling become grossly inefficient.

Generally speaking, private companies want to make money by getting customers. Obviously there can be edge cases, but if there's profit to be made by hooking people up, they'll want to do it, and if private companies don't want to get more customers, you have to ask yourself some hard questions about why.

I think we both know what's usually happening: people in an area who, as a whole, are rural enough and poor enough that the economics don't really pen out well. And I'm sure said corporations would be happy for the local government to pay the cost of running those lines out -- if that's not happening, ask yourself why those local governments don't want to pay for it either.

Now if you want to say, "well I don't care if it scales badly, the federal government should just subsidize it until it works", that's your prerogative. But another option would be to encourage zoning and similar rules that impact how people live to change towards better scaling of infrastructure and services, so that spending on these kinds of things is more sustainable and fair.

Generally agree. I live in a location that had (still has?) PSTN service, electricity, and natural gas services, but never got any kind of broadband besides the network I paid for and deployed myself, and subsequently of course StarLink. I think the issue isn't so much that people are demanding internet service in random places, more they're expecting internet service in the places you get all the other regular services.

My parents have Starlink. They live in an area surrounded by dairy farms. It's half a mile between mailboxes. The nearest town is 7 miles away (though only 3 as the crow flies - lots of hills between here and there).

None of the neighbors have cable TV. You've got to either go into town or t'wards the highway 7 miles the other direction).

Three years ago, the utility ran natural gas that far out. Prior to that, it was propane tanks (for the past 50 years) for heat in the winter.

The state capital is 30 miles away... so its not that far away from civilization (this isn't Montana or the north woods of the upper midwest).

When nano-cells came out for cellphones my father and I were the first in line at the store (that was 2010 if I recall correctly). It let the house be able to use a cell phone in the yard - before that it was the landline (and it was DSL for the nano-cell backhaul).

In 2020 when school was remote, their grandkids were there. Prior to Starlink my father got a Firewalla (for network load balancing) and got a second DSL link (it was barely qualifying as high speed internet) so that it could support two zoom calls simultaneously (don't stream music or watch YouTube while the kids are on Zoom School).

5G cell coverage sounds great... but those hills I mentioned earlier? You can get cell phone coverage at the house without the nano-cell... if you get a ladder out and climb up to the top of the roof.

So yes, to support the person I'm replying to - there are a lot of people who are 30 minutes outside of a city of appreciable size and are without wired high speed internet.

In https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/location-summary/fixed?version=... the area that they live in has 0% for 100 Mbps for the majority of the northwest part of the county.

Unironically: go move to Somalia if that's the government you want.

The rest of us understand that's utter stupidity, natural monopolies exist, and capitalism needs guard rails.

> Or, we could zone areas to encourage people to live in towns where it's feasible for both corporations and the government to provide infrastructure and services at a reasonable cost.

This is assuming there isn't a good reason why we might want some percentage of the population to be rural. To have farms and ranches, for example.

The situation with the electric grid is pretty crazy. The cost to supply power to houses in sparsely populated communities is orders of magnitude higher than urban apartments. Not just the power infrastructure itself but all sorts of little ongoing things like maintenance visits, as well as losses from transmission and distribution. I worked on smart grid systems and getting apartment buildings online was a piece of cake, with one simple connection handling multiple buildings with hundreds of meters, meanwhile suburban homes required much more expensive equipment that was more difficult for technicians to install and serviced only a handful of homes. Everyone talks about this as if these were humble shacks out in the boonies but the bulk of these service points are suburban McMansions built on cheap land at the margins of the cities. Broadly speaking this results is poorer ratepayers significantly subsidizing services for wealthier ones.

The problem is that in places like Seattle and the Bay Area, there are hard geographic limits to construction, even if you turn them into endless high-rises. Having watched the WA state legislature go through several years of attempts to fix housing by throwing random policy ideas into the void, I'm not convinced any of it matters nearly as much as a) more money in the state housing trust to help people with down payments and b) a robust economy so more people have more money that they can apply toward housing.

So, sure, yes, by all means do things like pass residential-in-repurposed commercial changes, ADUs, greater density in transit-oriented neighborhoods - do all the things. But, getting more people able to move to parts of the state (in my case, Yakima, the Tri-Cities, Spokane, etc) where there are houses just sitting around relative to King / Pierce / Snohomish... that's just as viable a solution and solves a whole bunch of other water / energy / land use / political / social type problems.