Longer comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827615If you divide up by altitude: it requires significant negotiation to place a vehicle (an arbitrary spacecraft or satellite) in any location.
If you partition by location (e.g. project current airspace upwards): your vehicles can't abide by these rules. They must orbit the planet. They will eventually go over most countries.
If you partition by orbit: you have to contend with precession. Craft drift[0,1]. This is because Earth is an oblate spheroid and not a sphere. It is also caused by angular momentum itself, so your orbit rotates. You will start in one and over time move into another. There's not much you can do about this and it is quite costly to maneuver (constant orbital maneuvering means an exponential increase in weight, complexity, and cost). Remember, the Earth does not rotate around in its axis in a fixed period of time, nor does it around the sun.
So really the laws of physics have you in a bind. Things are constantly moving and changing. So even the best laid plans will eventually lead to violation (and thus conflict) even through no ill-intent.
This is actually why a lot of (especially "hard") Sci-Fi has treated space travel as a global unification period. Because it becomes necessary in order to avoid conflict. This was a bigger discussion in the 60's and 70's when the initial space ventures were occurring and in the public eye, but has naturally drifted out of conversation as the underlying motivation similarly did. Though it stayed in conversation for domain experts who frequently content with this still.
tldr: No. Physics is a bitch
Which brings everyone the same speeds instead of perpetuating a digital divide between cities and rural areas. Which may not be bad now but once we start moving to ten and hundred gigabit plans, solutions like Starlink are going to resemble dialup.
The cool thing is that since they often own the power right of way, they can run fiber on it without any change.
The way coops work is that we're the owners, we vote for initiatives, etc. The local power company is now our region's #1 internet provider, hands down.
You need to vote and encourage others to make fast internet an election issue.
And even if every house has fiber, there are still many cases for mobile and robust Internet that can't be covered by cellular networks.
The reality is that Starlink needs a competitor. And besides, satellite Internet from LEO satellites is a viable competitive option to fiber, based on infrastructure costs alone. It's all nice to convince slow moving bureaucracies to lay out fiber, but nobody wants to wait the five to ten years for that to happen, when you can subscribe today and get it within a week.
It cost me $15,000 to establish my co-op membership 1,000 ft it went to the next guy. Our bylaws require all members to pay 100% of the full unsubsidized cost of extension up front.
This is fairly common. Not a lot of co-ops are built where prior entrants foot the full cost of new entrants.
The real cost of extending fiber can be $10+ a foot overhead or $30+ underground, which is a hard sell to prior entrants as a freebie to toss out.
>they can run fiber on it without any change.
I thought it said without charge, my bad. High cost but no change I guess.
This doesn't work once you get really remote, nor does fiber.
In any case none of them beat the experience of pulling an antenna out of a box and it pretty much just working.
I'd take fiber -> Taara -> Tarana 3.65 CBRS any day of the week over any LEO. Way faster, way lower latency, and way lower total cost to deploy. Also scales massively better.
To what? Starlink is getting you to a major exchange in two direct shots. When I was testing it in North Dakota I was getting lower latency to Google and Cloudflare through Starlink than I was through local fiber providers (likely due to their long circuitous route to Minneapolis).
Same reason a lot of HFT uses microwave vs fiber paths - fiber paths are following the ROW, the microwave paths are the physically shorter paths.
LEO is a niche technology, but not and shouldn't be the default for tons of reasons.
b) In Australia they are trialing 100g over the existing fibre network.
c) Everyone was fine with dialup at one point as well.
You dont want to use us as an example of internet speeds or leading the world on anything in this space.
Our internet infrastructure/speed etc is considered sub optimal by many. It is (slowly) getting better - but it has been years of lost oppoutunity.
b) Our internet infrastructure was sub-optimal but is being upgraded to full fibre to the door across the country. 1g is available to consumers today, 10g to businesses, 100g in testing. And it’s future proof.
If an area could be wired with phones in the past, it can be wired for fiber now even cheaper and nearly all of rural areas were wired with electrical and phone lines before. Fiber is cheaper and lighter than copper lines, bucket trucks have never been more common, and there are very few existing utilities to contend with. This fiber is WAY cheaper than any satellite internet, works even when the weather is shitty, and doesn't require investments into proprietary gear.
I know who the CEO of the 100% owner of Starlink is, but not Starlink itself. Do they even have one?
IIRC most states when filing an LLC for private equity require a president but not a CEO.
Which is owned by SpaceX, but it appears to be a separate company.
The entity I found in an Oregon bid was registration #4503816 in Deleware.
“Starlink services” was probably legal prep in case they ever wanted to sell it off if it flopped.
The body of the evidence as far as I can tell suggests Starlink is a separate company even if employees that produce much of its products work for a different company.
[0] https://apiproxy.utc.wa.gov/cases/GetDocument?docID=10&year=...
What we really need is the European Union to fund a global competitor.
Given that, I'd argue that critical infrastructure like this is concerning in the hands of any individual entity.
It would be concerning even if exclusively controlled by Mr Rodgers[0]. There's an opportunity here to build a global coalition and mutual partnership like never before. All parties benefit by sharing. And all parties MUST settle for inferior infrastructure by not working together. There's no way around this... the laws of physics are just a constraint that can't be overcome...
My main comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827615
If you criticize Musk on X, the self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist”, will reduce distribution of your posts [1].
We don't want someone like that owning critical internet infrastructure.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/23/business/elon...