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I've written it elsewhere, but: it is such a shame that the United States saw fit to run electricity _everywhere_, no matter how rural your location, but instead of do the same for rural internet we had to wait for... a private company to launch a global network of satellites. Yes, this post is about internet access while traveling 500mph, which is a different problem, but it is so messed up that people fall over themselves about Starlink for rural connectivity when it is an incredibly complex and expensive technology with huge ongoing costs that could have been solved once and for all by simply running some wires.

You have it exactly backwards. It is far less complex and expensive and resource intensive to build Starlink than to run a new copper or fiber line with associated telecom equipment on both sides to every rural residence in the US, let alone worldwide. Yes, despite the large cost of launching satellites. And it's especially good that we don't have to force everyone to subsidize inefficient monopoly utilities with our tax dollars to get everyone connected. Plus the benefit of mobility is enormous and shouldn't be ignored.

As solar and batteries become cheaper, eventually we can transition to most rural residences being entirely off the grid and self sufficient. This will also be cheaper and less resource intensive than maintaining the electric grid in those rural areas, let alone building it in the first place, and we can all stop paying hidden subsidies for those users.

For just ONE Starlink v3 it weighs around 2000kg and right now falcon heavy has an estimated cost per kg of $1,500 dollars so $3,000,000 per unit to orbit and let's say around $1,000,000 for the v3 itself. According to SpaceX each satellite can support 60 Tbsp downlink (I highly doubt this just purely based on the compute required) but assuming that is true that's 60,000 Gbps or 60,000 customers at 1 Gbps. The biggest issue here is that each satellite only lasts for approx. 7 years in LEO before its deorbited vs a fiber link last basically forever

this.

Except it's no longer only in rural areas, grid connected utilities are now costing more than being off grid in the cities too. Starlink residential 100 Mbps is cheaper ($69/mo AUD) (ignoring hardware and setup costs) than 50 Mbps fixed line internet ($80/mo AUD). Depending on location, home solar + batteries will usually work out cheaper than being on the grid within the battery warranty period too.

The question that comes up then is: how much traffic can Starlink handle until it gets saturated? I'm not sure it can handle even a significant percentage of the users that currently use wired connectivity. And if they see that demand for their services starts overwhelming supply, they will definitely raise the prices...

Starlink has, essentially, fixed capacity per area. Thus, sparsely placed rural users are "cheap" to Starlink.

Densely placed city users would strain the system, but cities also favor wired connectivity.

That makes the two complimentary. Wired makes the most sense in urban formations, satcom makes the most sense in Bum Fuck Nowhere.

_Lots_ of traffic. It's going to end up being the global Internet backbone.

Internet traffic today is estimated to be a few tens of exabytes per day. Even if you assume 100000 Starlink satellites (we're far from that), each satellite would have to handle hundreds of terabytes per day. That's tens of gigabits per second per satellite, assuming traffic is split evenly among them (will never happen in real situations).

Starlink V3 can pump out some seriously impressive speeds and handle thousands of clients. Starlink is both a great leap forward in rocketry and radio technology. I do still think funny how we are going back to the pre war technology tree for a re-visit

That's not even sufficient to handle the needs of a single large city. The limitation is that even with the much larger constellation they hope to deploy there won't be enough satellites visible at once from any given large metro area.

Citation definitely needed.

Grid prices are going to start coming down in some of the most expensive parts of Australia due to SAPS, home generation and storage, and microgrids.

I wouldn’t rule out the grid just yet.

If you find Starlink cheap they just haven't gotten around to the bait and switch in your locality. It'll come.

Where are you? In the suburbs of Atlanta I paid $80 for AT&T Fiber 1Gbps u/d.

If they're paying Australian Dollars.. probably not Atlanta

Man, I pay $50USD/month for 1Gbps up down in Wisconsin.

Wicked, I wonder what the most juiced option would cost amongst your upgrade options.

“When in Wisconsin.”

This is because Australia has high internet prices. Partly because it's huge, but partly because the NBN got stuffed-up by the Liberals because they didn't believe the country should be investing in what they called at the time "a glorified video delivery service", so put the tech back a decade, and the country ended up paying more for a worse rollout.

Your comparison point is also a bit weird to me. If I want a decent speed, my choices are fixed wireless NBN at ~250Mbit (400 in theory, 250 in practice), or Starlink at ~200Mbit, and they cost around the same.

If I were just a few km closer to the city I could get 500Mbit fibre for ~$90 a month.

So while it's definitely not out of the range of other plans, I wouldn't say it's definitively cheaper. And I wonder if the recent price drops are down to people not wanting to have much to do with Elon Musk any more. I know it's worth a few bucks a month to me not to be a customer of his.

> And it's especially good that we don't have to force everyone to subsidize inefficient monopoly utilities with our tax dollars to get everyone connected.

Again*.

In some ways we did subsidize the initial public phone network that put ma bell in the position to take over as an Internet backbone as "the Internet" became a thing. In some ways we're subsidizing starlink like direct grants of taxpayer sourced funding for rural broadband expansion and contracts that subsidize the spacex launches.

I do wonder sometimes if it's actually cheaper to connect a rural farm to the Internet by blasting a satellite into space vs setting up some kind of terrestrial radio based network like lora or microwave. That's not my knowledge area so maybe there are real, unsolvable issues that prevent terrestrial radio as a solution, but I have to assume blasting rockets into orbit is expensive both short term and long term, especially considering space trash.

Isn't this even more of a monopoly utility?

In theory you could have multiple providers but it just doesn't happen much due to market dynamics and incentives.

In this case if I understood it well there's a limit to the amount of satellites we can send into space at those heights and that space is essentially privatized for free uncontested and ESA and China's CNSA already complained about near collision events.

So not only do you get the same market dynamics but practical limitations too and an externalization of costs.

ESA and CNSA were always going to complain, real problems or not.

Why would that be? Having to pull tricks to dodge satellites seems like a valid one.

As far as electric goes, that's a nice thought but the reality is prices will not go down in such a scenario. I'd rather my bill go to subsidizing rural areas than to pure profit. Nevermind there are benefits helpful to rural areas that grid service can provide versus solar+battery.

Maybe today, but internet over radio cannot defeat physics. There is only so much bandwidth, so much space in the RF spectrum for data. But landline internet is effectively limitless. You can always lay a second, or twentieth, fiber run. A 10cm bundle of fibers can carry more bandwidth than the entire starlink network many times over, with much lower running costs.

The most effective in rural areas is generally a combination. Fiber to a central location and wifi radio out to customers. I am monitoring a property on the west coast connected via such a setup. The last relay is actually solar powered atop an island.

You can beat the physics here though. There are several techniques in signal processing and beam forming that can be used to make insane high-speed transmissions, the days of geostationary broadcast for all radio traffic are over when it comes to advanced radio communication.

Radio technology is truly the closes thing to black magic. I wish there were more places to learn and read outside of an EE degree

Starlink recently hit 10k satellites. I'd hazard a guess that's not anywhere near enough getting everyone in the US, let alone worldwide, online.

While having more satellites sure does help serve more people, there’s a second issue which arises when trying to serve high density areas, where you run into bandwidth limitations. The solution there is not more satellites but either bigger satellites (which can make smaller beams) or more FCC allowance on the spectrum.

Not everyone. But it's enough for rural areas, which are the most expensive and least practical to serve with wires.

The HN groupthink is to hate on anything Elon adjacent, satellite internet included.

hopefully that include his business partners , airlines in this case.

And yet this discussion seems to be driven by a load of TSLA maximalists.

Elon is a busted flush. He promises the world, delivers somewhat less, somewhat late, if at all. And then layers it with deeply unpleasant politics.

Not groupthink, a sane reaction. Belated, but sane.

It's not groupthink to believe that the guy sucks and is a threat to humanity. He constantly fights against the type of programs that could have possibly given us satellite internet, the same way we all get to enjoy GPS.

> It's not groupthink to believe that the guy sucks and is a threat to humanity.

Wow, that’s a wild misstatement; that is exactly groupthink nonsense.

You (people) loved him before he went in for Trump.

> You (people) loved him before he went in for Trump.

The inflection point for the public was Musk calling the cave diver, who helped orchestrate the rescue of a dozen trapped kids, a "pedo guy" and then doubling down on it, again, twice in front of his audience of millions.

The inflection point for anyone in tech with two eyes and a brain was Musk insisting his companies produce products that do more than they are, still to this day, capable of.

First was around 2018, the latter was ~2016, although anyone who was familiar with machine learning knew models were not as capable as Musk was insisting they were, and that the hyperloop was a scam.

Before he went in for Trump he created an obviously fake, insanely expensive system that could never work in practice (Hyperloop) just to slow down California rail projects

California rail projects fail because it’s California

Before he went in for Trump he was running a factory with an alarmingly high injury rate, where employees were regularly called the N-word, and union busting. People who liked him then weren't paying attention at all.

For what it's worth, I hated him well before he had anything to do with Trump. Most concretely when he called the cave diver a pedo for not wanting to use his stupid submarine, but I remember thinking that the Hyperloop thing he was proposing was pretty stupid too.

Oh, and when he lied about taking Tesla private so he could quickly boost the price of the stock. That sucks too. He's always sucked.

I do wonder about what happens when Starlink grows its customer base a lot bigger like many of you are predicting here, since Elon Fucking Musk, the king of over-promising and under-delivering, is at the helm. We might end up yearning for the days of the (slightly more) regulated utilities instead.

Ideally the other couple low orbit satellite based ISPs will get to a decent place by the time of irrecoverable enshittification.

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People in the United States can choose to live in very rural and sparsely populated areas, far more remote than most OECD countries.

It’s not clear to me that we should necessarily massively subsidize their choice to live in the sticks these days. Starlink and 5G are great for this, as is solar energy and batteries.

We already subsidize sprawl’s expensive-per-person infrastructure with tax revenue from dense cities. As a country we need to make a decision about which choices we want to encourage and discourage.

Some people will be really mad about this comment, but it's absolutely correct.

Broadly speaking, very rural living is generally a lifestyle choice. Yes, not everyone can afford to live in big cities, but there are typically small towns in the general vicinity of rural areas that are quite affordable.

Of course, there are exceptions where you truly need the space, like if you're a farmer, but that's not most people in rural areas.

Edit: to be clear, I don't think it's fundamentally wrong or anything for people to choose the rural lifestyle, I just don't think we should be heavily subsidizing it.

Being a farmer is also a lifestyle choice.

So what, you want to give them everything for free? They make good money, they don’t need further subsidies beyond what they receive for farming

You need to examine economics of being a farmer these days…. They do not make good money

Buddy, many of the people who are being served by Starlink are by no means "very" rural at all. If you get into "lives in a shack in the mountains", then sure I agree, but a HUGE number of people are barely outside of an immediate service area and have no access for one dumb reason or another. This is a demonstration of the failure of our country to do simple, pragmatic things that would benefit our citizens' lives. The "fix" was for some private company to launch things into orbit. It's an expensive fix to a simple problem.

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.

Looks like they may be getting fiber from Bertram Communications soon:

https://maps.psc.wi.gov/portal/apps/experiencebuilder/experi...

That or Starlink may be getting a wad of cash just to keep serving them, courtesy of this administration's NTIA.

The area south of Highway 19 in Dane County to north of Highway 39 in Green county is still rather bare of awards.

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.

this

people here don't understand how large USA is -- connecting every corner with copper/fiber, with all the intermediary networking devices means tax money...

Yes, it does mean tax money. Stop corporate welfare and bump the corporate tax rate back to a reasonable value.

A better option would be to eliminate corporate income tax entirely, and raise taxes on the highest income employees and investors to make the change revenue neutral. Corporations waste a lot of resources on financial engineering to minimize tax liability, and that's a pure deadweight loss for the economy as a whole.

Savvy executives can also keep their income near 0 by borrowing against their stock holdings.

So what. They pay interest on that loan, and those interest payments eventually flow to the employees and investors of the lender. Who can be taxed.

We paid $900 million in taxes to subsidize rural access to Starlink in one year lol

We also paid $42 billion in taxes for ISPs to roll out broadband access in a 2021 bill, and it hasn't connected a single person to the internet

Before that, we paid $400 billion to ISPs to do the same thing with the same results

wtf was this a upfront lump-sum money?

well even if I was the ISP, I'd just take the money and make the job "take forever"

Yes, but we've already done it, twice, and the benefits were quite significant.

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.

I don’t think we should subsidize internet, but your framing here rubs me the wrong way. People in these rural areas usually live among family and have lived there for generations, reducing this to a choice feels very elitist. People aren’t “choosing” to not pack up their entire lives and move to a city or town.

We shouldn't subsidize internet, it should be provided. The internet is necessary to participate in modern society, and to only provide it to people who can afford it is what's actually elitist.

Last we checked we pay for water too. It’s abundant. It still makes sense to have a price on it because it’s a resource like anything else.

In the same way, we pay for the internet. Free wifi exists if you can’t afford service.

Rather than elitist, it’s just… not communist.

And your water is subsidized... Subsidies don't have to make something free.

I think this is very short-sighted, on the order of "Why should we subsidize package / letter delivery to people in the sticks?"

The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself.

> "Why should we subsidize package / letter delivery to people in the sticks?"

Good point, it doesn't make much sense to do that either.

> The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself.

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.

> 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.

Sure, if we restrict the subsidy to farmers and others where we need them to live in rural areas, that's fine.

But not the educators teaching the farmer's kids, or the doctors and nurses treating their wounds? What about the clerks at the grocery store serving those farmers? The liquor store?

Trying to create an elaborate regulatory regime to decide who is justified to live in a rural area is absurd and a waste of money. Especially considering that most people living in rural areas are either employed in a necessary industry that needs to be rural, or work in professional or service industries either directly supporting said rural industry (e.g. tractor repair) or indirectly supporting it's workforce.

Furthermore, the marginal cost of providing broadband to all those "slightly-less-necessarily-rural" people is minuscule. Skipping every other house doesn't save you much when the majority of the cost is building infra to get broadband to the town/road in the first place.

> But not the educators teaching the farmer's kids, or the doctors and nurses treating their wounds? What about the clerks at the grocery store serving those farmers? The liquor store?

They can be in a small town in the region, which is where the school and liquor store probably already are.

Farmers and ranches don’t need any more incentive to live there on top of the boatload of money they make selling their produce

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.

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.

I'm a social democrat, I'm fine with subsidies in general, I just want them to be applied intelligently. Spending a lot of money to subsidize someone's lifestyle that's intentionally inefficient isn't smart.

I'm all for helping the poor, but we should do it in a way that gets us a lot of bang for the buck.

Having grown up in rural Kansas and now being an urban tech worker, I think you have a derogatory and ignorant view on people who live rurally.

You're welcome to believe that, but if you provide only insults and no reasoning it's pretty hard to take you seriously.

Especially when you threw out some lame strawman about Somalia. Surely you can do better than that?

They're not 'the poor' though. If you own a $20 million of land why is everyone rich and poor in the city paying a dollar to fund your faster internet?

Yes all of the farmers should move to the cities.

No, but many rural people could live in small towns.

The 80 year old house on a woodlot that a teacher is living in should be closed so they can buy a more expensive one in town?

This isn't (all) new construction of people deciding to cast off the shackles of urban living and shoveling sidewalks and deciding to move out into the more rural parts of the state... but rather people living in houses that are 50 or more years old that their parents passed on to them.

These are houses that were built in the early to mid part of the previous century that had two wires running - one for power, one for phone.

The idea that because you are not-farmer you should live in a city seems quite prescriptive.

People are living in rural parts of the country not because of the convinces of urban living, but rather because that's where they can afford to buy an old house and even with the additional utility costs (buying propane, septic, well) it is still less expensive than trying to buy a new construction house in the suburbs.

So they live in small towns and commute to their farms?

They could live in villages though, where services can be centralized for a few hundred people.

Dubious when you consider how few people this is.

No, it is not at all certain that it pays for itself. What evidence do you have for that assertion?

>It’s not clear to me that we should necessarily massively subsidize their choice to live in the sticks these days.

Last year I had a chance to talk to Gregg Coburn, author of Homelessness is a Housing Problem. We agreed that remote work and improved public transportation were the real solutions to many of our housing problems, allowing greater distribution of population back into more rural areas. This is an area where rural broadband investment could make a difference. Likewise, when we talk about American competitiveness in manufacturing et al, that isn't going to happen in our cities, but rather in more rural areas.

Decentralizing population seems at odds with goals like better public transport and infrastructure.

You think cities exist for the sake of buses, and not the other way around?

Who said those two were the ultimate goals to work towards?

other than introducing public policy to encourage building more housing, i assume?

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.

>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

Over three quarters of all residential land in Seattle is zoned single family and the population density of the city is less than a third that of NYC. The geography is not the hard constraint in this city.

Subsidizing down payments doesn't do anything to improve housing availability or affordability in the long run. It just artificially inflates real estate values and acts as a wealth transfer from taxpayers to property owners.

You offer cities with aggressive anti-development regulations, like max height restrictions, and then suggest things would be the same if they instead had endless high-rises?

Sounds like you've found an infinite-value hack: let developers build infinite housing yet prices stay the same.

How many of those "random policy ideas into the void" were to lift regulations to allow people to build housing? Which sounds a hell of a lot simpler than figuring out how to make everyone wealthier without proportional increases in market prices.

People can't afford to live in cities? Well, they should simply choose to live elsewhere.

People choose to live outside cities, but want access to basic utilities of modern life? Well, fuck 'em.

Many of the aspects of life "outside the city" are subsidized by the city. It's affordable because of this, and the cities are extra unaffordable as a result.

There are many small towns who will never generate the tax revenue to cover their $50M highway off-ramp and associated infrastructure. The thread was about internet, which has also been subsidized. We subside oil so driving long distances is cheaper. We subsidize food production. Electricity and water distribution is subsidized by urban customers. Even health care is subsidized.

If rural people actually had to pay market-rate for these resources, it wouldn't be cheaper than the city.

> We subsidize food production. Electricity and water distribution is subsidized by urban customers.

These things usually happen far outside of the cities. Without infrastructure for the countryside these things would not happen.

So if 10 million people from rural towns moved to their nearest cities, the cities would become cheaper?

What would drop in price exactly?

Yes, if you compare the efficiency of China’s economy to America, you’ll find that their giant cities save them a ton of money on everything overall. As long as you’re willing to build a lot of dense housing very quickly.

Small towns exist, and ones far away from major metro areas are usually quite affordable.

Small towns are or can be made to be efficient in terms of basic infrastructure/services, whereas truly rural areas where everyone is very spread out, it's somewhere between difficult and impossible to do that.

Small town are usually quite affordable because they offer fewer high-paying jobs. Remote work is by far not yet common enough.

that’s a bit pendantic, there exists such a thing as suburbs. even some rural communities are perfectly reasonable in terms of municipal infrastructure. but we are specifically talking about houses that are miles and miles from the next house that is then miles and miles away etc

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.

Ah yes, one step outside of New York City, and I'm immediately in the boondocks.

Moving is incredibly expensive. First+Last month rent up-front, plus a deposit equal to one month rent up-front. That could total around $10,000 up-front costs if you are targeting a major city.

Conversely, having quality utilities in smaller communities could incentivize the building up of those areas and they would become less rural.

lol I paid 17K for NYC - two months rent, extra month for being foreign, 2K since they removed blinds since they showed me the apartment and everyone in NYC could see into my house.

If you’re on the electric grid why can’t you be on a fibre grid.

well for electric grid, you only need "local" connections -- eg. just your town and the generator...

Who needs all of the damn farmers anyway?

The corporations buying up all of the land formerly owned by these bankrupt farmers probably do.

Countries subsidize rural living because it enforces their control over the frontier.

The United States is difficult to invade because of the oceans surrounding it and the many people with guns in the interior that'll take shots at armies.

If you put everyone in a few cities on the coast, the USA becomes easier to invade.

Quite the contrary: an empty countryside would make invasions harder because there would be no infrastructure: no roads, no bridges, no tunnels, no electricity, no water supply, no opportunities for shelter. Everything would have to be shipped from outside or built by combat engineers, putting an immense strain on logistics and slowing operations to a crawl.

No country capable of landing a single troop on the lower 48 is scared of undisciplined men with AR-15s.

In fact I am not sure if any country can get a troop transport near the US coast without being nuked to the ground first.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Mexico wanted to invade Texas and reverse the Mexican American war.

I can't find any source suggesting this was actually a thing in the 30s and 40s. All I can find is the Zimmerman telegram from a hundred years ago which the Mexicans weren't exactly enthusiastic about.

In any case, I doubt there is any realistic threat of a Mexican invasion beyond fantasizing from political fringes.

I don't think the math works.

There are 23 million rural homes in the US and about 3 million miles of rural public roads. Let's say you wired just the public rural roads (ignore going from the road to the house).

It costs $30,000 per mile to put up aerial wiring. $60,000 per mile underground. So we're already at $90 billion for wired poles and $180 billion for underground. And that's just for the wires--we're not including any of the switches and routers for actual internet.

By comparison, the Starlink system cost about an order of magnitude less ($10 billion).

I appreciate you actually taking a moment to think through the cost, but I think we could start with some pragmatism and look to run wires to people who are within a reasonable range of existing systems, of which there are many.

Clearly not every public road needs wiring. Then, consider that you could run wired connections to wireless access points to increase high speed wireless coverage. 1 wire to light up dozens of homes in areas which currently have no service beyond DSL.

Doesn't Starlink have some annual upkeep costs? Maybe $1-2 billion per year to replace aging satellites?

You don't think aerial lines have upkeep costs? ice, tree branches, hurricanes, etc

Yes, but Starlink needs to exist for military, planes, boats and other essential very rural services as well. So the upkeep should pay for itself.

And of course Starlink has to be for the whole planet, so just comparing it to the US would be a false analysis.

Of course you also need to upkeep the physical infrastructure. Specially if you don't put all those lines underground.

But one would need to do some more real work to compare. I would also say that a real program for urban fiber makes a lot of sense in more places. But I would love to see somebody take a shot at this, what would be the best if you started from 0 today?

Would 5G towers be a better alternative?

>I've written it elsewhere, but: it is such a shame that the United States saw fit to run electricity _everywhere_, no matter how rural your location, but instead of do the same for rural internet we had to wait for... a private company to launch a global network of satellites.

Actually whats crazy is that you guys had private and public power run everywhere, and those companies had private and public fibre companies run fibre through those power lead ins almost everywhere that's practical. A feat thats honestly not been achieved anywhere else that I have seen. Lots of people in other countries stomp around wondering why private fibre doesnt just materialise in their house, when they have no access to national public utilities. The answer was local utilities. But there's not even an ounce of appreciation for it outside of the ISP space.

Internet still has a "moral vice" label associated with it that I don't think electricity ever had.

In the popular person's imagination, electricity is the revolutionary technology that enables cheap and safe lighting, as well as instant access to information (through radio). The telephone is the revolutionary technology that lets you call a doctor in an emergency or negotiate crop prices. The internet is the revolutionary technology that lets you go on dating sites and stare at pretty girls on HotOrNot, talk to fellow netizens on discussion forums, and waste hours playing Mmorpgs. It's "that weird technology that the young people use for God knows what." It's for entertainment, not serious business use, except if your business is in providing the entertainment.

Of course none of it is true, especially these days as so much non-tech-adjacent business is happening over the internet (and especially internet-enabled smartphones).

It used to be cheap and possible to build things. The USA no longer can.

It's not a shame. The US, like most countries who sort of want rural internet, just gives money to massive companies who do a tiny bit of rural internetting every 4 years. They don't want to solve the problem because then there's no more free money coming their way. Starlink gets paid to solve their customers' problems, not to perpetuate them.

Are there any countries that have actually done an exhaustive job of this? I'm from the UK, and I'd say they are pretty good, my parents live in a 300 person village, and they can get 50ish mbit internet through wires. But "rural" in the UK is very different from "rural" in some parts of the US. And this was done by a private company (although it was based on infrastructure built by the government).

its literally cheaper to create a low earth orbit satellite constellation than deal with bureaucracy

The only way rural America got landline service was by the government forcing it. The market had no solution.

Blame rural America who continuously votes for politicians who oppose it.

Let me guess, it would be a 512kbit/sec service.

Matter of fact the feds have been spending billions of dollars onbrural internet projects for decades.

Those have just resulted in ya know... almost nothing.

Weird take. The vast majority of US electricity infrastructure is privately owned and financed.

Eh, I think we'll look back on this in 10-20 years and conclude that wireless transmission was always going to make more sense than running millions of miles of wires. Especially so for rural access.

Wired will definitely be the rich, elite way to go.

Satellite internet can get several orders of magnitudes more capacity.

Municipal internet is something the ISPs lobby against like there is no tomorrow. It is a shame, but that's how the US government works.

Why is wire better than terrestrial wireless? Isn't terrestrial wireless how most of Africa caught up to more earlier-developed regions in telecom?

Your understanding of the history and economics of it all is very confused.

> simply running wires

Lol. Yes let's just ignore the most expensive and complicated part of the whole endeavor.

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Ben Thompson interviewed UA's CEO on Starlink a few months ago.

Scott said: "It took time to negotiate, because we wanted to own the consumer data, and at the beginning, Starlink did, so that was hard, and then, the other thing was I wanted to let my big competitors in the United States finish their deals with other providers and get locked in so that we would — eventually, everyone’s going to have Starlink."

Brilliant. Just brilliant. Ensured that UA would be first (of the 3 major US carriers) to Starlink and that everyone else had to wait until their existing agreements multi-year expired before switching. UA's best CEO in decades!

https://stratechery.com/2026/an-interview-with-united-ceo-sc...

I'm surprised he would admit that publicly on a podcast.

After deal is done it becomes rational to describe how good it is in comparison to completion to promote it.

It's also possible that it's a post-facto rationalization that only seems prescient in hindsight.

People like to brag

He's signal maxxing so he gets a bigger bonus.

One nice thing about Starlink is that they force the airlines to offer it for free. I’m not sure why SpaceX is doing this, but it was surprising enough to me that my international WiFi was not only fast, but completely free that I researched it.

I think this approach gets the whole industry to adopt it.

Consider the opposite approach. If they let airlines charge any amount for it, the airlines that installed it would make it expensive. No one would use it. Other airlines would feel no pressure to offer it.

By making it free, it gets used, and eventually depended upon. SpaceX are making free wifi the expectation from consumers on flights.

Correct, I’ve had Starlink in several long haul flights over the past 6 months and it’s already becoming an expectation, ie makes the flights without it noticeably worse. I’m not sure whether everyone gets it for free, though, it was my understanding that it’s complementary for business class but a paid add on for economy. But once you have it, it’s fast and stable.

> I’m not sure why SpaceX is doing this

One word: marketing.

A few more words: they’re struggling to find a niche where their ungodly expensive product makes more sense than the readily available alternatives. In this case, fair play it’s objectively better.

>A few more words: they’re struggling to find a niche where their ungodly expensive product makes more sense than the readily available alternatives

pretty obvious you never worked for an ISP and forgot about all the `middle of nowhere` customers who have no high speed internet.

even for me, in houston texas, we cant get fiber to the home and were stuck with AT&T DSL which was like $60 per month and ungodly slow. Also my GF and I both work from home and she does massive file uploads.

had xfinity not been available starlink would be an easy choice. ive tried 5g hotspots and they are not super reliable.

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.

He has readily available alternatives, but they suck.

There are other, far worse forms of satellite Internet, so everybody has a readily available alternative. That makes it not a qualifying statement at all.

Just noting that the phrasing "readily available alternatives" by itself is slightly ambiguous: it could be read as subsetting ("the alternatives that are readily available") or just attributive ("the alternatives, which are readily available").

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.

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

Regulatory capture is only a secondary reason why many parts of the USA still lack cheap, reliable broadband Internet access. It turns out that running fiber everywhere is expensive, and in some areas the potential customer base doesn't justify the cost.

It doesn't justify the cost when they can just rip you off, charging the same amount for a fraction of the bandwidth.. unless and until there's competition.

Funny how quickly my internet options went from expensive cable internet, to 1 gig symmetric fiber for $90, to 10 gig symmetric fiber for $50. And now, magically, Xfinity has 1Gbps+ service for $50 as well.

I most certainly don’t have 1 Gps+ service for $50 though in practice my circa 50-100 Mps service for about twice that works fine does for me from Xfinity. I care a lot more about reliability.

> It doesn't justify the cost when they can just rip you off, charging the same amount for a fraction of the bandwidth...

You can start a company right now and lay fiber in these places and start your own telecom.

You probably don't have the money for that but, if you put together a solid business plan, a bank would give you a loan.

You may not have the experience or expertise to do that, but there are plenty of people who do.

Why hasn't that happened yet? It turns out that laying down miles of fiber for a handful of customers isn't profitable.

Google dod it in a few places that were low hanging fruit. Places that had telephone poles where they could get relatively easy access to them.

There are certainly places where access to those poles is more difficult than it should be but most places are hampered by either being too remote to justify the cost of burying lines to a few customers (rural areas) or the digging is too expensive to many customers (suburban areas) because they'd be digging up streets.

Profitable vs unprofitable is not black and white. No doubt there are some places where it's simply not profitable to run the fiber today.

However, there are a TON of places where the business strategy you outline is a great idea, and would be profitable.

..... until the incumbents lower their outrageous prices in the face of the competition, and bam, now your business model is no longer profitable.

We do a lot of things that require subsidizing, very much including the things commonly found in/around a lot of the rural farms where these services would target. If broadband internet access is a fundamental need for contemporary communication--much like the postal service, telegraph, and telephones were--then historically we do what's necessary to provide them.

Sure, subsidies are potentially an option to increase broadband availability. But that's not really a regulatory capture issue.

Yeah, a primary reason would include "spineless legislators who allowed carriers to say "We'd need tens of billions of subsidies to even consider doing this", and then when given that money to do so, just... largely didn't. And kept cruising without consequence (and with the money).

You couldn't get cable internet in Houston?

It's not that expensive. The Starlink Mini is around $200, and service is $50/mo for 100gb.

I've been somewhat skeptical of the addressable market (doesn't fiber + cell tower network offer good enough coverage?) but I know so many people who have put it on their RV, their boat, or are using it rurally that I've started changing my mind. And the service really is better than cell phone networks, which are far too patchy to provide reliable service at decent speed.

And you can put it on standby mode for $5/mo, so you're not even really locked into $50/mo if you're occasionally doing travel where you want to stay connected.

And in places like Africa, they've had to tightly rate limit new customers because demand is so high.

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

Australia we just turned 3G off now there are large black spots everywhere for hours.

Some trades now use them in there cars, they can use it for mobile service/internet nearly anywhere

RV is a great use case but a tiny market. For fixed broadband the others are cheaper most everywhere in the U.S. that people actually live.

The markets are additive. The great thing about Starlink is that it is GLOBAL. Meaning if you want to offer it for ships and planes (where there are no alternatives) you might as well also offer it to RV. And to rural people. And to the military. And you can do so in every country on the whole planet at the same time.

Having a few 1000s of sats to cover the whole planet is crazy efficient.

If you look at just the satellites, the build + launch costs are about $2.5M ea, which is impressive to be sure. But they only last 5 years, so that's $500k per year replacement costs. Then if you look at their capacity, they still can't meet their FCC / RDOF broadband designation speeds, but let's be generous and say they can serve 1000 simultaneous users per satellite (their current ratio, let's say it's good enough, incl. oversubscription ratio). So that already means 50%-100% of the entire monthly Internet bill from a consumer is going to just be replacing satellites. Let alone everything else to be an ISP.

This is very basic math. They need to launch more satellites if they want to hit their RDOF throughput goals and serve customers in the remaining areas. The most valuable extra-rural areas were low hanging fruit and already drying up.. the future addressable market is more dense and competitive suburban areas, which further limits the number of users per satellite because everyone shares the same spot beam spectrum.

But as you know well--having your personal connections to SpaceX it seems as you always defend them on HN--Starlink is about Golden Dome not consumer internet, so the private markets will fund it.

I live in a city. Like a large number of Americans, I had one broadband provider available for 20 years. (Something like 75% of us have 1 or 2).

The price was high and the service was bad. I struggled to reliably achieve 20mbs at $80/mo.

Starlink is better than that, and it’s millions of people. 5g home internet is slow to spread here too.

Their market is large.

Yes and unless you're paying Starlink say $300/mo, they are taking a loss to serve you internet. Cities are especially difficult for them because more users are in the same spot beam so everyone shares the spectrum and they need even lower oversubscription ratios.

Yeah I don't know about the math. I've seen numbers that differ significantly from yours, but none which make it profitable at a reasonable price. I am sure he will continue to drop launch costs and I assume satellite improvements will make them able to serve more people, maybe orbit longer as they get smaller.

Or maybe it'll just implode. I hope not.

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.

I don't have a lot of data points, but in metropolitan France at least I think you would always be better off with either a fiber or a 5G subscription, because it will be cheaper for more throughput, and because fiber is very widespread.

In Germany I think you are still better off with a cable subscription which also seems to be widespread in my experience and is cheaper than Starlink even if it's not as good as French deals (I only take in account offers without a contract for fairness, but if you don't mind you may be able to get even cheaper offers).

In the (relatively) rural area that I live in, the only ISP options available were something like $75/mo for 10mbsp speeds. Starlink was an incredible blessing when it became available. Legitimately feels like magic in comparison to the existing options we had.

> their ungodly expensive product

Do you have any idea how much other satellite operators charge per megabyte or Mbit/s?

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

It's cheaper then fibre here in Australia. Especially rural.

Wow that sucks that Starlink is cheaper than Fiber at the same speed.

Starlink isn't expensive by those standards either.

Probably depends where. It is for sure more expensive than fiber with the same speed where I live.

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Starlink's main goal isn't consumer internet, it's being the backbone for Golden Dome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...

> Of course that's terrifying...

Why would you be "terrified" of space-based ballistic missile defense? Seems a lot better than ground-based interceptors that have a not-great rate of interception.

For trillions of dollars, Golden Dome is unlikely to be effective at interception, but it destabilizes MAD and can be used as a global prompt strike offense weapon.

So, worth it?

Man this dumb conspiracy again ...

This is widely reported and documented, including by Reuters,

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/musks-spa...

This article in now way what so ever proves your point.

They have several niches where the alternatives are more expensive and worse. Half the RVers in any park have it now. RVing teaches you how much of the country is not covered by cell signal. Boats.

Another one I know first hand: food trucks. I do several events a year where cell signals get overwhelmed and cease to function, but I still have to process my credit cards. I’d say a solid 25% of food trucks are running these now.

$39/month for 100Mbps in the middle of nowhere is spectacularly cheap.

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Starlink costs around the same as business mobile Internet.

Or see T-Mobile away

United gives you free access only if you are a mileageplus member I think?

Regardless, having free high speed internet on a flight will motivate me as a consumer every time.

Joining United MileagePlus is completely free, you just sign up.

About the same work as filling out a hotel wifi login.

Completely free as in you don't have to give them money.

But you need to give personal information which also has value.

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

Regardless one of the conditions surely is giving them permissions to sell this to starlink as and everyone else. So whether the information is the same is probably irrelevant, how they are using it is.

Probably, because you are now associating your internet browsing with your personal information. (I don't know if they have the sophistication to actually do this, but it is very possible.)

The people concerned with that hypothetical can use a VPN.

At most they could see domains, ip addresses, timestamps, and http-only sites (are there any left?)

But the person sitting next to you can see everything.

> But the person sitting next to you can see everything.

Privacy filters are a thing.

you're literally an inch away from someone.

they are essentially looking head on at it.

that may work for business class, but not economy.

privacy filters aren't magic.

You realize you have to give them the same informaron to even step foot on the plane?

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That's why I exclusively pay cash and don't show an ID when I fly /s

Free (for now). Introducing or raising costs for a previously free or cheap service is normal practice for start ups.

Delta has had free high speed satellite internet for years. I’m going to start flying Southwest more this year but they also advertise free internet. I don’t know how fast it is.

Nobody wants their brand associated with price gouging and half-broken in-flight credit card payment portals, and Starlink is better enough than any alternative that they can play hardball with airlines.

Delta is still stubbornly refusing to adopt Starlink.

I've got status with them and have started booking with other airlines b/c it doesn't matter how nice the seats are if you can't get any work done. Most airline revenue comes from business flights, I don't think they realize how important this is to their customer base.

Airplanes are one of the places I feel happily disconnected from being online. Never used in-flight WiFi even when my company would have paid for it.

It's probably what the UA CEO was talking about, trying to get competitors to sign contracts with other providers. Viasat was hot stuff for a long time, wouldn't be surprised if there's a noncompete preventing the change.

Delta has had high speed internet for years on their flights. I’m Platinum Medallion

Delta uses Viasat and has been rolling out free wi-fi on more and more of their planes. Is it not usable?

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

~600ms ping times vs ~40ms on Starlink

Starlink failed it's Delta Demo.

The article is online.

It could just be the ESPN/gym membership/AAA business model. $ from every single passenger is more revenue than $$ from just those who click buy.

> Nobody wants their brand associated with price gouging and half-broken in-flight credit card payment portals

The airlines have no problem with this. T-mobile has no problem with it either.

Nobody had a problem with flip phones that play snake or Blackberry physical keyboards until the iPhone was demonstrated, and then nobody could conceive of ever going back (except in niche cases, e.g. journalists loved those keyboards)

T-Mobile also offers free Wifi on airplanes.

Only if the airplane uses much slower ground based Gogo (?). I use it every now and then when taking the 45 minute flight from ATL to my parents home in South GA

Really ironic given that they pulled the rug on general aviation usage.

It’s too difficult to distinguish between a terminal in small GA aircraft and something with destructive payload. Commercial aircraft are few and controllable.

Most of the airlines I have been on charge per megabyte. Having internet for the whole trip is a huge value add for the airline.

And show ads for it on the inflight entertainment

The built in entertainment systems are so full of ads, that I much prefer the planes with no seat back screens. I've always already got my own devices which I use to entertain myself, whether the airline is providing advertainment or not.

And no one interrupts the movie I fell asleep watching on my iPad in order to push a credit card application at max PA volume.

> One nice thing about Starlink is that they force the airlines to offer it for free

There are many ways to circumvent that, even while claiming to offer it for free.

On the flip side, the "private" aviation customer is 100% forced into the pricey plans privately with (physical) speed enforcement on the terminals.

There's even two tiers of aviation speed limting: 300MPH ($250/mo) and 450MPH ($1000/mo). They know who they're targeting at both speed points (the guy flying for fun in a prop VS the guy in a Gulfstream that wants to Get There Now).

https://starlink.com/support/article/9839230e-dc08-21e6-a94d...

What sucks is that normal "for fun" prop pilots used to be able to use the basic $50 roaming plan, and then Starlink pulled the rug out from under them by taking it away, instead offering the new plan 5X the cost with 1/5 the bandwidth limit. Total scumbags. Even your hated local cable company doesn't have the balls to 5X your monthly bill suddenly out of the blue.

give the customers the complete experience and they will subscribe.

IF carriers were allowed to charge, they would piecemeal or handicap the service, and passengers would leave with a bad impression.

For God's sake you can take 2-4 hours of not working, right? Just sit and relax, or take an audiobook with you! Or watch a cringy show from 90s. You don't have obligations of sharing #airplane #boeing #starlink #momwithbaby[kl]ickingmyseat every 5 minutes or so

I've only had it once, but inflight Starlink is a game changer. I was able to play a ranked AoE2 game over the Pacific Ocean.

That sounds somewhat unpleasant even if the connection itself is fine. How much space did you have for a mouse?

He didn't say he won.

This

Did they even enjoy it though beyond the novelty!?

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

It depends on the airline, but sometimes I can put my laptop in weird positions that aren't half bad. The main technique is fully opening the screen, balancing the laptop on its lower edge, and using a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. Has the added benefit of putting the screen closer to eye level.

Hah, reminds me of learning to play Quake Live on my macbook trackpad. It was hard to go back to a mouse.

I guess not everyone flies economy (I do though, and not out of choice.)

I thought this was an AoE2 eco joke for a second

No internet on flights is one of my favourite features.

Right. I don't know what I find more disturbing: that people are this addicted, or that they don't care. Either way, I'm with you.

So let’s get rid of internet on the highway and in trains, too. Because it’s pretty much exactly the same thing. One just happens to be airborne.

> So let’s get rid of internet on the highway and in trains, too. Because it’s pretty much exactly the same thing. One just happens to be airborne.

Ok? You sound like you're trying to make a point. Make a point.

his point is that it's useful, and there's nothing special about planes that make it important for them not to have internet, compared to any other mode of transportation. If you want to get away from the internet, you could have a dedicated space for that.

Also, nobody forces you to use the internet on a plane...

Yes, but why is he responding to me? I didn't say there was something special about planes and I didn't say someone was forcing me to use internet.

> get rid of internet on the highway

Does not sound too bad once you have seen the number of drivers scrolling their phones while driving lately.

Its cellphone based and has the same issues you would have just using your cellphone.

… or maybe I have 6 hours to kill?

Would you look at someone reading a book and be like "it's so disturbing that people are this addicted"? Is something Internet connected really that different?

(That said these days I'm thrilled if there is power on a flight.)

It IS different. Because scrolling is effortless, reading a book takes effort.

Do you understand?

The above statements weren't conditioned on "scrolling".

… even then, I struggle to see what's so wrong with someone just trying to distract themselves from the hell that is flying.

When am I allowed to relax boss?

I suppose you'd approve if I read book on the internet? What if I'd be working?

You don't need my approval. Someone was asking how I view these things, and I was explaining: reading a book is effort, scrolling facebook is effortless.

Now, keeping in mind that you don't need my approval: do you have any questions?

Are you on the spectrum by any chance?

No, but I understand why you ask. I just refuse to engage with certain figures of speech because I don't want to contribute to normalizing them. Don't say "would you approve if" if that's not what you mean. Say "what is your opinion on" or "what's your view on" or "how do you think about" or "how does that compare to" because that's what you actually mean. I'm not on the spectrum, but I think that when it comes to many things, language included, simpler is better. As simple as possible, but not simpler.

Maybe you don't know this, but there is much more on the internet then social media ...

For normal people the presence of wifi on airplanes is not a problem; they can simply not use it. It's not a threat to them.

I use the internet more than I'd like, and I agree that the lack of wifi (on a long international flight) can be a really nice experience.

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I tried Starlink on a United flight the other day (short hop from Hilton Head to DC) and it was amazing.

Neat problem to work on. The tail number lookup is the hard part and it sounds like you solved it the right way, by finding the people who actually track this obsessively rather than trying to scrape it yourself.

Two questions: how stale does the tail assignment data get in practice, and do you have a way to detect when an enthusiast spreadsheet goes unmaintained? And what happens to your probability estimate when an airline swaps aircraft last minute, which seems to happen pretty often on regional routes?

Great questions!

> how stale does the tail assignment data get in practice, and do you have a way to detect when an enthusiast spreadsheet goes unmaintained?

These are updated almost every day so far, so they seem very up-to-date. Internally we track all changes/removals, so I'm not that worried about spreadsheets being abandoned yet. It's a good thought though.

> And what happens to your probability estimate when an airline swaps aircraft last minute, which seems to happen pretty often on regional routes?

Honestly our estimate right now is pretty crude. At the scale we're at right now it works, but I think you're right that we could make this more accurate by tracking equipment swaps & really drilling into the details of which aircraft get assigned to which routes.

I wish my bloody commuter train into London had Starlink. Even when the onboard wifi works you are limited to 100mb of traffic.

I get a better 5g signal on the Jubilee line than I do on an overground train.

Just swap mac address if you have to use such a wifi. Or set up Xray[0] with the captive portal as domain if you have a VPS and are so inclined. Can also use this on locked down airplane wifi.

0. https://github.com/XTLS/Xray-core

can always macgyver your own antenna like this guy in Brazil https://tecnoblog.net/noticias/passageiro-causa-polemica-ao-...

Just get a good 5G plan? On the ground in a busy metropolis like London, I can't imagine why or how you would need to consider using satellite communication for connectivity. Then again the last time I was in London the cellular service was by and large pretty bad.

yeah, 5g doesn't work on trains very well once just a little bit out of zone 2/3. Actually to be honest any connectivity at all is patchy.

As someone who's really not a fan of fElon (he made Twitter steal my OG username), it's nice to see people misuse the Starlink term, and I hope it would eventually be genericised [1]. ;)

The proper term should be Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites, and there are other providers like Amazon [2] and Panasonic Avionics [3] that I hope other airlines would do business with.

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

[2] https://leo.amazon.com/

[3] https://www.panasonic.aero/blog/blog-post/what-is-low-earth-...

But this isn't genericising it. It's specifically for Starlink.

Neither Panasonic nor Amazon Leo (yuck) are operational.

Eutelsat OneWeb is.

I've definitely thought about substituting a nonstop flight for a 1-stop flight on UA regional jets just to get Starlink on the entire route. The annoying this is I live by a UA hub and UA doesn't fly regional planes between UA hubs.

So the best I've been able to do is a regional flight to a UA hub near me, and then a non-regional flight back to my home airport. Which is honestly probably not worth it. And it's definitely not worth doing a two-stop trip so I'm really excited for them to roll it out on their mainline jets!

Interesting, because I’d choose not to fly with an entire carrier because they have chosen to implement Starlink and support a Nazi pedophile, but horses for courses.

> The annoying this is I live by a UA hub and UA doesn't fly regional planes between UA hubs.

Oh I actually didn't know this! Do you know why?

Regional planes are for direct routes to smaller airports, but hub-to-hub flights can be filled up and easily justify larger airplanes.

Well, hells bells, next week I'm actually going to be flying on an Alaska Airlines E175. That's quite rare for me, I can't remember the last time I've flown on one of their small planes. And it looks like all of their E175s have Starlink. Sweet! I may have to try it out, even if paying for WiFi on a short flight is generally a waste of money.

Edit: ooh, it's free! Because I have their credit card.

> And it looks like all of their E175s have Starlink

Not quite sorry, we only track the frames that do have Starlink. But if you check back a few days beforehand you can see if yours matches!

Took me a second to parse that. It says 28 of 28 E175s have Starlink, but what I am hearing you say is that Alaska has more than 28 E175s.

Indeed, wikipedia says their fleet includes 47 E175s. Consider my hopes dashed :(. Oh well, I don't usually bother with wifi on flights that are only a few hours anyway, but free Starlink speed wifi would be fun!

Feature request: Put a disclaimer on the fleet page that the tracking is limited. Or pull enough data to say "28 airframes of 47 are starlink capable" which is what I think most people will be looking to know in the fleet info.

> Feature request: Put a disclaimer on the fleet page that the tracking is limited. Or pull enough data to say "28 airframes of 47 are starlink capable" which is what I think most people will be looking to know in the fleet info.

Oh, this one is very doable and makes sense! We track this internally anyway so it's just a matter of surfacing it on the fleet information.

Interesting data problem. Mapping tail numbers to capabilities sounds similar to other asset-tracking systems.

How often do you update the dataset?

People are so rude with their phones that I fear that starlink becomes popular in all flights.

United recently started announcing at the beginning of flights that using your phone with sound on the speaker is prohibited, as a new official policy.

Talking on your phone has always been prohibited while in flight. Having high speed internet on a plane is not new.

I share your concern. Airlines seem to be anticipating this. There was a recent publicized incident of American Airlines removing a woman from a flight for playing audio over her phone speakers. United has similar policies. As I understand it, both are saying they will ban passengers over it.

Big fan. One feature idea/request - a map showing coverage with 0-100% by route (red/yellow/green lines). I’m just curious to see where I should think to look for / expect starlink options. Probing into a few upcoming trips showed basically no coverage.

Oh that's a cool idea! We wanted to do a variant of this, will add it to the list. The tricky part for us is getting a canonical list of all flights + body types on it.

I’d imagine you could seed it more easily by focusing on top 50 routes by passenger count in domestic USA. Then go from flight schedules for top airlines into tail numbers into body types etc.

Would not having starlink on the flight influence your decision to take the trip

The globe doesn't pan to some routes - perhaps ones that cross the international date line? - for example https://stardrift.ai/starlink/search?origin=AKL&dest=LAX&dep...

This is awesome! I just came back from Cancun with my family, and I was on a WestJet flight. I was taken aback by a) free Wifi and b) how fast it was to support everyone streaming YouTube even. Your tracker let me figure out that it was a WestJet flight; now I know that I have to seek out these flights from now on.

Starlink is good I’m sure. But it isn’t the be all end all of high speed internet on planes. Delta doesn’t use Starlink and most of its planes have fast satellite internet except the A900s used for short hops.

Why does it work on the plane? are the constant handoffs between satellites not enough to break connections or cause extremely high packet loss for it to suck?

is there a speed at which it would break?

speed of plane is about 3% speed of satellite so i wouldn't expect handoffs to be much more frequent than with stationary receivers?

I see, stationary receiver already has to deal with this and plane speed doesn’t add much to the equation cause satellites already go brr.

Honestly that wasn’t intuitive in my head but makes a lot of sense, thanks!

This is awesome! In the past I would use the promise of starlink or other LEO internet as a tiebreaker for booking flights and was disappointed a few times (as clearly not all of the airframes for an airline have the capability)

This matches what I've seen in the data. The correlation between niche specificity and close rate is much stronger than most people expect — generalists trying to compete on price lose even when they win.

I built something similar[0] a while back, Stardrift looks 100x better - nice work!

[0] unitedstarlinktracker.com

This is the 1st link posted in /r/unitedairlines anytime someone mentions "starlink". One use-case better covered by https://unitedstarlinktracker.com/ is the upfront log that shows a quick swath of airports that might receive and depart starlink equipped planes. I can CTRL-F -> "RDU" and know immediately my chance of checking this out (not much).

Would it be hard to produce a pie chart showing top 10 airports with most starlink planes arriving/departing?

hey! I saw this and liked it a lot! It’s impressive how you pull in all the routes per tail - we considered doing it but were worried it would be too expensive. Definitely opens up cool options though.

My trip from USA to Amsterdam doesn't have starlink, at all. Not a single plane. No matter the company.

So sad

United has this on some flights. It's no cost but they force you watch ads in the captive portal. I'd rather pay the $8 and be left in peace, every time.

Just an ad one time when you login? That seems fine.

I've never paid for hotel wifi and never will, but I don't mind an ad on the captive portal.

It would be great to make this data into a browser extension that overlays the info when using Google Flights

Why the .ai domain? Are you using AI in your data pipeline somehow?

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Looking forward to Starlink on UK trains. I frequently have to go basically without internet for a couple of hours.

I’ve been frustrated by this for years, you just know that if there was a mobile data deadzone on a motorway they’d fix it immediately.

Meanwhile on the train 30 miles from London, nothing.

Here’s a hack, get yourself a cheap eSIM data only plan from an alternative UK network (VOXI, Talkmobile etc) if you main network doesn’t have connectivity; they will!

There's even eSIMs specifically marketed as being a "backup" esim, with coverage on _all_ UK networks.

At least on my android, you could set the second esim as a "backup" that it would switch to for data if the main one lost connection (it took a few seconds, so it wasn't an "always connected" experience, probably because the phone wants to save power)

Lots of options if you search for "esim UK all networks".

I used to be a first responder with a Firstnet setup (not just the plan discount, but the actual black SIM card) that could roam AT&T to Verizon to TMO as needed, so was as close to universal connectivity as feasible. Though (probably relatedly) it was always 1-2 generations behind (many areas were still ATT LTE, maybe 5GE, when they were rolling out 5G).

And the clusterfuck when I tried to transition my account back to normal, where an $8 balance that wasn't reconciled triggered the suspension of my AT&T whole family account, but when I tried to pay, no-one in FirstNet support or AT&T could tell me how much to pay or where or my account number (and this is in the store), until a poor store and a poor phone CSR spent THREE HOURS getting it resolved. "I am literally trying to give you the money to take care of this." "We don't know where to have you pay that money to fix this."

I was an early adopter, but FML.

Or if your main sim is an eSIM, there seem to be 500GB/month business sims for effectively £2 a month online. You can't port your existing mobile phone number over, but it's fine for data.

I was introduced to it by another HN poster: https://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/three-500gb-preloaded-5g-da...

looking back at the history of starlink, when was it decided to pursue this project at SpaceX? Was it always the natural evolution, i.e. cheap launches = more communications sats? Or was there a specific communications engineer/person that brought it up to Elon or Gwynne?

SpaceX originally partnered with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Wyler and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutelsat_OneWeb in 2014, then they eventually went their separate ways.

https://x.com/greg_wyler/status/1116101020675977218

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrey_Satellite_Technology

You can clearly see the tech had an older history at SpaceX pre acquisition

2004

I believe they also signed up a teledesic exec Larry Williams around the same time

I'm not actually sure myself, but I was really surprised to learn how profitable it is. SpaceX made $15b of revenue last year and $8b of profit. Starlink was 60-80% of that!

It turns out the demand for really good internet everywhere is huge.

Absolutely false.

There were article claiming "$8b profit" but relabeling EBITDA as profit. EBITDA only tells you that Starlink makes money on a satellite once it is already in space and connected to a user. It deletes the cost of building the satellite, launching the satellite, the user equipment manufacturing, and just about all other substantial expenses. Not to mention payments servicing all their debt and Starship development.

The fact a Starlink satellite only has a < 5 year lifetime and ~2 starlink sats burn up in the atmosphere every single day is entirely left out as well.

They have never been profitable in any real sense. But that's okay, because their real goal is backed by Uncle Sam: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_syst...

Starlink is based on the strategic defense initiative (SDI). Both reusable rockets (DC-X) and large satellite constellations (Brilliant Pebbles) were SDI inventions.

SpaceX was in fact founded with the architect of SDI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin who went from the CIA to become head of NASA and funded the early SpaceX (10x from what Musk himself put in!)

Now in 2026, SpaceX is the frontrunner for the Golden Dome, which is an SDI reboot.

The company was always about Wars not Mars.

ah good to know....it seems this history is kinda scrubbed from at least a quick Google search of the company's history.

I do remember DC-X, mostly as when I was a kid, that program coincided with when the web became popular, and I remember (hopefully somewhat accurately) downloaded jpeg/gif files from NASA publicity releases of that rocket over my 2400 bps modem

Elon was downloading those same images with you ;)

> The company was always about Wars not Mars.

Such a cynical take! Starlink made Golden Dome possible. It is easy to make up conspiracies post-hoc while forgetting that they were ridiculed when they announced it and the "experts" opined that it is impossible to do.

> SpaceX was in fact founded with the architect of SDI

This is highly unfounded speculation. Griffin went to work for "In-Q-Tel" after SpaceX was already founded (as said in the link you cited). There is no evidence I could find that they ever invested in SpaceX.

The existence of cheap launch and cheap satellites allowed the (at the time new) Space Force to pivot from large, expensive monolithic satellites to a "proliferated architecture" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Development_Agency#Launc...) at a much lower cost.

It wasn't In-Q-Tel directly...

https://scheerpost.com/2025/02/11/the-pentagon-is-recruiting...

https://web.archive.org/web/20241213051851/https://historyco...

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...

You just created the straw man argument about the CIA directly funding SpaceX. Not that simple. Read the articles.

> SpaceX was in fact founded with the architect of SDI

> Griffin who went from the CIA to become head of NASA and funded the early SpaceX (10x from what Musk himself put in!)

Strawman eh? You pretty much claimed that Griffin funded SpaceX, and not just that, that he invested 10x as much as Musk.

Now you go around editing your comments. Lol.

It is not a strawman to say that what you said is non even nearly close to reality.

Everything I said is correct. Griffin previous led SDI, later controlling NASA, directing 10x funding to SpaceX (before they had ever had any launch success), Griffin having previously been President of In-Q-Tel the venture capital arm of the CIA, Griffin was also part of the original visit to Russia with Musk on 2001 to look at ICBMs.

This is all very well documented. NASA provided the funds, not the CIA directly, so I'm simply not sure why you feel the need to keep insisting on that particular strawman argument. I do hope these facts aren't too bothersome just because they don't quite fit the usual Mars narrative.

Because, wouldn't you know it, Mr. Griffin was also a leader over at the Mars Society! He gave the co-keynote speech for Elon's original Mars Oasis pitch right there at their gathering. You can still find it written down in the old meeting agendas, if you'd ever care to take a look for yourself.

I've been in the industry for 35 years. Don't take everything these magical leaders say at face value. The reality is more down to earth.

I would love to see this integrated into Flighty.

It would probably be locked behind a paid upgrade. Shame that so many features are locked behind a subscription model, and super annoying that they try to force the subscription every single time you open the app, sometimes more than once.

Damn that's so cool I just checked it and it works dayum how far we have come guys

This is incredibly interesting, will follow.

Thank you for your service. Hopefully something like this can put pressure on airlines to understand how hostile their internet services are and that it matters.

Last year I flew roundtrip to the Philippines on Philippines Airlines. Each way they claimed they had internet and each time, they sent an email reneging the day before the flight.

The same thing happened when my sister-in-law flew with them a couple months earlier.

These are long flights during which I expected to be able to work. Just so infuriating.

That's frustrating. It's possible their link was down for some reason - airline maintenance issues happen all the time. :(

Planes and underground trains are/were focus sanctuaries ...

I had access to it on a long-haul AirFrance flight. While I avoid doom-scrolling in my daily life because there's better stuff to do... on a long haul flight it's a surprisingly good way to pass time intermittently. I still just watched pre-downloaded dropout for 80% of the flight but when I was too tired to appreciate it I'd turn my brain off and watch a bit of that wonderful doom-scroll slop.

The fact that it's powered by starlink is disappointing due purely to Elon Musk's involvement - but this is one of the better use cases for satellite internet technology. I'm not going to go out of my way to book with airlines that use the service though.

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Lots of examples of anti-Elon pols giving nazi salutes and no one cares. People are done pretending that your concerns are genuine. Move on.

>> People are done pretending that your concerns are genuine

I am absolutely not, and I refuse to spend any money on anything even remotely connected to Elon thanks to his actions. His nazi salutes go far beyond anything even vaguely acceptable in a public figure like him, as someone who lost family in the holocaust I don't find this "funny" or "a mistake" as some people put it. The other day someone was trying to convince me that it was some kind of heartfelt "from the heart" gesture - I've never seen someone so delusional.

Feel free to stick fingers in your ears and cover your eyes and pretend that people don't care about this or that this wasn't a nazi salute - but Musk is exactly who he is, nothing more nothing less.

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Because your concern is not real. It wasn't a nazi salute period. You are seeing things. Get your eyes checked.

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The fact that you're getting downvoted is a great example of why America is in the state it's in. Personally this tool looks like a useful way of booking a flight without financially funding the rise of fascism.

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Who is Mamdani? You've got mayors somewhere doing nazi salutes? Where is that?

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> Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.

Does anyone else appreciate the final space where we can be disconnected. I do, for one

I love disconnecting while hiking in the forest/mountaineering or such. But being stuck in an economy seat for 8 hours as an 188cm guy while being in a low air pressure environment just isn't the place for me. I'll gladly take the distraction.

You can be disconnected wherever you want, with a bit of self control.

Always a catch.

This misses the point. What’s nice is not that it’s just me, but that it’s everyone.

Host a “phones off” party, go to a sauna, go for a hike with friends with self control etc., but please don’t hold me hostage (connectivity wise) in a cramped metal tube for your sense of nostalgia.

Planes are just about the least pleasant space to experience involuntary offline-ness. (That said, people scrolling reels with the speaker on (or the display at brightness levels making me consider sunscreen) should immediately go on the no-fly list.)

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.

> What’s nice is not that it’s just me, but that it’s everyone.

This made it sound like you enjoy me being offline, and that seems pretty selfish (as long as I don't annoy you somehow with my Internet connection, and on that, see my original comment).

I'm a big fan of offline gatherings (ideally in nature, which is pretty much the opposite of economy class on many dimensions), but I think this should be a choice.

I do enjoy you being offline. There’s nothing selfish about having different preferences to you. Selfish would be forcing those preferences on you. That you assumed one was the other is a good reason to reflect.

Consider paying a visit to one of these if you want to immerse yourself in the world of ideas and disengage from screens:

https://labri.org/

My ~4 weeks were some of the most memorable of my life

Not really, personally... time waits for no one.

And now you’ll have one less opportunity not to waste your finite time on the internet.

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Even when flying intercontinental for many hours, I usually just pull a Puddy on flights and do nothing. I have my laptop with me, of course, but I usually leave it just in the overhead compartment.

I don't even watch movies or read.