Trump plan to fund Musk’s Starlink over fiber called “betrayal” of rural US

I think the bigger headline should be the huge conflict of interest between Musk being a megadonor and "advisor" / leader of DOGE (depending on if you ask Trump or his minions) and being the CEO of Starlink owner SpaceX.

Add it to the list including lease of Starlink services and kits to the FAA.

In a just world they would be publicly executed for blatantly grifting 300million+ people.
It's called crony capitalism
- It's called Late Stage Capitalism, converting and eating itself into fascism.
Since citizens united, the notion of this type of conflict of interest is a theoretical talking point
Conflicts of interest are no longer a concept that matter. American voters don't care.
- Hooo it DOES matter yes, a lot, but only to employees.

As someone that lives in the rural US and has no option for internet besides Starlink, I'd much rather have fiber. Starlink isn't bad, but it's garbage compared to fiber.

Plus I don't want to give Elmo my money. I really wish I had other options.

You’re lucky you get any channels besides Fox News. Keep complaining and you’ll go back to dialup ;) ;) ;)
- You straight up don't even get dial-up in some of these parts
- Fun fact: dialup is much better than cable in many countries.
  Edit: oh no thats cat3 on DSL. Not dialup
Connect yourselves. Telecom Cooperatives have a long and successful history in developing rural telecommunications
- My grandmother’s rural electric coop laid down fiber to most homes they service to. She has faster Internet than me in town.
Fiber is amazing. I paid $90 for 400 down and 10 up on cable... Then moved to a place with fiber. My fiber is now $49 for 1,000 down and 1,000 up.
- in the west coast sonic can provide up to 10gbits. for 40$ starting price. catch is the COL is somewhat expensive. for the longest time xfinity was the only choice, and we have known thier constantly changing the tiers of the services to charge people more.

It sucks to even be in partial agreement with the broligarchs, but as a rural American, I have zero sympathy for this fuckhead or anyone else involved in the broadband fund.

The government has been pouring money into broadband expansion for decades, and for decades, internet providers have been sopping up that money while doing exactly nothing to actually earn it.

I mean, we could tell them to pay back the money, or force them to make upgrades. But, its easier to just award contracts to starlink.
- We certainly can't make them pay the money back. That could affect executive bonuses and stock plans as well corporate stock buybacks to drive up stock prices! Won't you think of the executives! ^/s
Fuck Elon, but also fuck Comcast.
- Woah now. AT&T deserves plenty of fucking also.
Yeah there aren't any good guys to root for here.
- There is absolutely a far lesser of two evils here, though.
  Comcast sucks, but they’re not actively dismantling our institutions.
It's not all a story of failure, because there are numerous rural areas that have fiber now that did not before those programs. Some states have added on programs that boost the fiber adoption, like letting local phone and power companies roll out fiber on utility poles along the power lines. For example, I'm in a rural area and have 2 good options for fiber for about $50/mo with higher tier plans available.
They've been doing the exact same thing in Canada.
Give us money to expand! Billions later, or we got 5 new houses connected and spent the rest upgrading other shit not for rural people.
- It's so disappointing when you live in a region that has had multiple providers with even some that are offering decent services and competition to the monopolies, only to be bought by the monopolies a few years later.
  For a while, I lived in a rural region in Quebec with a "big" town of 5000 people surrounded by small villages. Because the big telcos were considering the villages too small and were always late to offer any service in the region, multiple small providers (and even a cooperative) started offering phone (and later internet) service in their own village. So around 2010, when FTTH was not even offered in big cities, the small municipality of Béthanie, with 300 people and no village, had FTTH from its local cooperative.
  Unfortunately, from the 4 local ISPs I knew growing up there, they have all been bought by Bell, except the cooperative. And villages that had plans to get FTTH now get nothing because they're not important enough anymore.
  My parents still live on a rural road in that region and surprise, the monopolies are not offering broadband, but the local cooperative is offering them FTTH. It's always been a bit surreal that my parents living in the middle of nowhere have FTTH before me in Montreal. The power of cooperatives!
in rural areas they dont have much choices, but in the west we have non-atat,xfinity, TWC, and verizon at least.

There is absolutely no reason the US government shouldn't be launching their own public satellite internet.

Look at North Korea. People get killed for smuggling in flash drives with western media into the country. We could be streaming it from uninterruptible satellites. We could be fighting the global information war on a level most other countries could only dream of.

On the domestic end, if we get Internet access to every corner of the country, it opens up remote work to every American. That could bring an incredible economic boost to impoverished rural areas.

Trump shut down Radio Free Asia. And Radio Free Europe, and Voice of America. I don't think he cares about getting the message out there.
And as far as a public Internet? Have you met the US? We can't deliver electricity or water without someone making a profit on each unit of energy or water delivered. It's unamerican. Why would satellite Internet be any different?
Yeah amigo, I get that'd be amazing but you think the government would want highly educated populace here and everywhere? and with free access to all kinds of information?
Yeah right...
- Sadly, I think it's been established that access to the internet doesn't make people more educated.
I would much rather see Europe doing it.
We are losing the information war at home. Why would we wish our terrible misinformation on anyone else? They’d turn this into a news max global broadcast system.

Satellite internet is simply never going to best the throughput and stability of fiber. Just another corrupt action so this administration can line their pockets.

Starlink makes sense on the top of mountain. If you have electricity from the grid, you should get fiber.

Not everywhere that has power has fibre though.
- Everyone who has power by grid has all the hard infrastructure in-place for fiber to their home. The only thing blocking it is corporate-political corruption
- I think that's kind of the point they're making
  There's no good reason why they can't run fiber to your home if you already have power lines and such going to your house. The utility poles, roads, and all the other infrastructure is there already, they mostly just need to send some guys in cherry pickers out to actually go run the fiber and hook it up to your home, and odds are they even already have guys out in the area servicing the old phone and/or cable lines that are probably also running to your house. They just don't want to spend the money (that the government gave them years ago to do specifically that)
  The only good reason not to have at least the option of running fiber to your house is if you're otherwise off the grid.
- You seem to be missing the point
- They should

And it totally won't be monitored or censored ... promise! /s

ATTENTION ~~CITIZEN~~ ILLEGAL ALIEN:
Connection to [lemmy.dbzer0.com] has been [BLOCKED] due to [RADICAL ANARCHIST TERRORIST ACTIVITY]. US-SchutzStaffel Agents have been dispatched to your location.
RESISTANCE IS FUTILE. HAIL TESLA!
probably the point of putting it in the white house, so russia can monitor it.

Wow I’m shocked. This is my shocked face.

USA has always been corrupt. What's chocking is the brazenness of this administration. Former administrations at least had the decency to do it in the shadows.

Regardless of the obvious moneygrab corruption, It's not like the fiber program was ever going to work in the first place as long as private ISP's were involved.

Fiber backbone got installed along 25 miles of rural county highway out in the valley my parents live in. The company paid to do it marks the area as "service coming soon".
That was in 2018. The fiber is still dark with all the distribution boxes empty and not hooked up to anything, the only other options being $110/mo DSL in a very few select spots, a local mountaintop microwave wireless service that is basically turned off from November until April, or Starlink... and I'm guessing it'll forever remain that way until the coming collapse of the USA.

I never expected the US to go down this way...

Really?? They have been shouting it from the topnof their lungs since Reagan
There were signs
Yeah I thought it would be a lot more Robocop 2.

Wouldn't 4G make more sense for most rural locations, its not like its a single house with nothing for 1000 miles in all directions

To the users yes, or coax(DOCSIS), how they get to the Internet doesn't really matter, the challenge for rural communities is how they connect to the urban networks(backhaul).
A lot of rural towns are actually serviced by wireless point to point radios. They have some impressive throughput capabilities but nowhere near what fiber can provide. Also, they are affected by environmental factors like weather or wildlife (https://youtu.be/cZkAP-CQlhA)
ISPs don't really want to spend millions of dollars to run fiber through mountains to service a town of 4 or 5 thousand people, it would be a poor investment, this is where government programs like above can be useful in then allowing that town or region to have better Internet.
They can probably make the argument that starlink is cheaper but it's not a long term solution.
It's so rural in my area that you will not get cell signals out here. 4g isn't an option. The best we can get is either satellite or 1mb dsl.
I'm in a rural town (less than 2k population), and we still have fucking DSL offerings available. It's wild. 4G expanded out here right before covid, but it's still really spotty and there's too many users for the tower's broadband, so it's actually kinda slow.

Can starling even come close to the speed of fiber? I’m getting a gibabit a second for 50 bucks a month

Nowhere close. Wireless anything needs to share a band across multiple devices. With fiber, you can either have an exclusive run to the service provider or, at the very least, to a connection point shared with some neighbors.
It's not meant for that and won't really ever compete well against it if fiber can be run there cost effectively, although there are odd situations even in cities where it's useful.
Like maybe there's a warehouse in some part of a big city that somehow wasn't connected and the utilities wants 50k to connect it.
Realistically we can't run fiber everywhere, but there's many millions of more homes out there that could be but aren't, and the telcos keep taking money to do the upgrades and do jack all.
I've seen about 250mbps down on a friend's terminal. You can probably get faster.
the latency for satellite signal is very problematic, while fiber is near instanenous. also satellite signals can be intercepted by hostile parties.