Clinton era Telecommunications Act of 1996 was where it all started.

Thanks to corporations for pocketing the money, and the Republicans for blocking Democrats from providing consequences.

Fiber should be deployed to rural addresses like yours (and should've been a long time ago). Instead, that money was funneled to the likes of Time Warner and Comcast who never even followed through on their part of the deal. Now, SpaceX is getting funneled the cash.

I'm super thankful that WA State supports and gives assistance to counties building out public LUDs for fiber access, many paying attention to rural communities first. I escaped Comcast two years ago because of it.

Gee, I wonder why they would do that.

Just for reference, I get about 45-50 ping playing Marvel Rivals on Starlink.

ha yeah... not having to make a 340 mile round trip instead of the hundreds of feet to the nearest router will do that

You know I'm starting to suspect that maybe corporations don't have our best interests in mind....

The tech behind starlink is good. LEO satellites play a purpose. Upsides are they have less latency than GEO satellites. Speeds are the same though.

Downside is you have to deploy them evenly as a constellation or else you get service inturruption. Which means if you look at any population map 90% of your constellation is going to be underutilized, and the other 10% is going to be full.

The real target audience should be mobile broadband. Airplanes, ships, RVs, cars, phones, etc.

But what do you do in the meantime? Fill in the unutilized constillation with rural residential. You can't compete with fiber tech, so you sue the govt for free money.

Don’t forget Nazi

A bunch starlink modems in an area can overload or whatever the nearby satellite. This is not feasible in its current form.

Yeah, I can’t imagine a medium sized town all using Starlink at once without issues.

Weird, that sounds anti-competitive.

So if my ping is currently 90ms on fiber, it’ll become 900ms - 4.5s on starlink?

That’s basically perfect, with regards to online gaming.

A subscription that somehow still manages to use surge pricing? I’m assuming that’s the next logical step.

Companies like Viasat with GEO sattelites have the advantage of one mololithic sattelite with massive coverage. They have a ton of little antennas on each sattelite that they can adjust as demand changes. Need more coverage in an area due to demand? They can task an antenna not doing anything over there.

Latency is a B though. Minimum 500ms each way. Which is minimum 1sec round trip just physics not actual. What's interesting is the layperson (non online gamer) doesn't notice much. It's not abnormal for a rando website to take a few seconds to load on my wifi. Or for a netflix stream to take a few seconds before it starts buffering. The biggest problem a company like viasat has is old tech in the sky. They can't handle the load of everyone watching netflix. So, they have to data cap everyone. It'll be interesting to see if their new sattelites later this year fix that or if they keep the caps on.

Probably no. Your ping is abnormally high for fiber, I’d expect a sub 10ms ping for you.

Not only do you have to deploy them in a constellation, you have to deploy them in a descending constellation. They are constantly burning up all the time and you have to keep launching new ones forever just to maintain current capacity. It’s the perfect business plan to make SpaceX look better on paper.

Here's a better idea: nationalize SpaceX and tell Musk to go fuck himself first. Not going to happen? Then no grant money.

That makes a lot of assumptions about what I am pinging, and the networking context.

In my case I was quoting my average ping in VRChat.

How can you quote 10-50 times higher and then tell me no when I calculate what that means for me?

Is it because latency does not scale in that way?

I got better ping playing Quake multiplayer in 1996