What leads you to believe Elon's internet will, in any way, be pro consumer? Tesla certainly isn't, and their customer service is not good.
Maybe Starlink won't be perfect, but the bar is lower than you can even imagine.
Telcos (usually) do an OK job when there's a competing cable company, and vice versa, but when it's just one offering, there's often low reliability, low speed or both. This is most often in rural areas, where Starlink should be viable.
Some urban areas do fall into the same single provider, low quality offering, and Starlink won't be viable there.
Frontier doesn’t offer slow DSL to rural areas because they’re rolling in cash from having no competitors. And when they lose customers to Starlink, it’s going to make their subscriber revenue to infrastructure expenditure ratio even worse.
Now if there's a viable competitor, it's a choice between spending the money to keep customers or not spending the money and losing the customers over time. Terrestrial networking can easily beat Starlink on bandwidth, availability, latency, jitter, etc, all the quality metrics (except portability), but only if the terrestrial network makes the effort.
Telcos have the ability to quickly roll out new networks when they're inspired. AT&T ran fiber to the home (GPON) in several markets within about 18 months when Google Fiber announced they were entering those markets (which they then decided not to). Telcos have an army of people (many consultants) who can run outdoor wiring and do home installation, they have easy access to poles, and (mostly) a decent database of addresses and line lengths to get multifiber lines factory manufactured to roll out with minimal field splicing.
And that's the hard way; things like better remote terminal equipment and/or backhaul don't require a lot of capital or labor individually (but may in aggregate), or just more adaptive DSL speed profiles just developer labor and configuration pushes. I could probably get 50% more downstream speed and 2-3x my upstream speed, but my ISP has inflexible speed profiles; that's probably not the issue for people on 1.5 M dsl, but it's got to be an issue for some.
Their bad service is not the result of a lack of competition, it's a lack of a profitable business model. It is simply more expensive to connect 1 customer with a mile of wire than it is to connect 100 or 1000 customers with a mile of wire. I don't think there's any way to solve this problem without subsidization of rural internet.
They actually do. The reason they’re going bankrupt is because competitors have started showing up due to the Connect America Fund causing them to lose customers in droves.
Simultaneously they took funds themselves and didn’t bother using them to upgrade infrastructure.
Source: previous frontier customer who couldn’t leave fast enough. Also convinced every single neighbor to do the same, even the ones who thought it was “fine” and wanted to be “loyal”.
The Connect America Fund is also known as the "universal service high-cost program"
My parents live an hour out of our city (2 with traffic) and their service is around 3Mbps and it has just slowly degraded over the time they've lived there and been left behind by ISPs. They do have a great view of the sky though for their connectivity issues. I love the night sky there and soon I hope to love it even more knowing that its no longer a frustrating trade off for them.
Rural broadband and satellite providers are the ones looking to be disrupted with their low speeds, low data caps and high costs.
How is Tesla not pro-consumer? Genuinely curious. My thoughts as a non-customer are that they have blazed the trail for normalizing EVs. Without Tesla, the Porsche Taycan likely wouldn't exist, Rivian wouldn't exist in the same way, and electric vehicles altogether would probably be in the same place they were 10 years ago.
Even if their product isn't the best, at least it's an option, which leads to more competition, which in my eyes seems to be pro-consumer.
I can’t believe it. I paid an equivalent of couple dollars per month for that 15 years ago in Eastern Europe.
Canada is an easier example because it’s essentially serviced by 3 companies who then lease out to the smaller “competitors”: for rural areas some people have the choice of either DSL over oxidized above-ground lines or tower-to-dish internet where the tower is daisy-chained from another tower or from it’s own oxidized lines. There is no cell coverage at all, and poor phone service. If someone in an area like that wants internet the company says that ~”the cost of the service must cover all the infrastructure and maintenance” and then they base that cost on only a few percent of people actually using it. In that way it’s hard to argue against “well, it costs us $1500/mo to provide service to 10 users, so we’re losing money when we charge a ‘reasonable’ $120”. But what’s really happening is that people in those areas are bandwidth starved, signing up for anyone who can provide decent service, and signing up in bulk while the company oversubscribes. It’s easy for them to still show losses publicly, but on the back end they are collecting government subsidies and using free capital to extend the network as far as they can.
In Russia such issues were just solved by adding some passive "splitter" device that supposedly filtered some of voice call from DSL data transfer. Every DSL ISP did it.
Just make sure you place the dish in a location with zero obstructions.
50-180mbps down and 24-40ms latency. ~25mbps up.
But it is good news that Pville is in a served area now. Where did you find a prairie in Pville?
If I had control over placement and such I think I could get a view without obstruction.
They still have calnet as a fallback network, but it's slow and has similar latency.
A $half billion seemed like a lot of money back then.
Only the reduced number of landlines in use makes it rise more slowly.
A hyperbole is an exaggerated statement or claim not meant to be taken literally.
I had this phone service for about 12 years. It was horrible. When the phone rang, the DSL would stop working. When I ended calls, the DSL would stop working. There was so much static on the line I could barely talk/hear others. But it grew worse and started impacting my ability to work from home after COVID.
Verizon said they could "roll a truck" to my house in about two months if I agreed to pay several hundred dollars upfront. I told them no. I had had enough. I ported my phone number to Consumer Cellular and use 4G for Internet access now. It's faster, $30 cheaper each month and much more reliable although I do limit my use as it has a 35 GB per month cap and "may" slow down if I go over that. I wonder, would it slow down more than Verizon's 1.5Mbit?
I'm still Waiting on Elon and Starlink to save us.