given the new shiny one (that hasn't launched) is topping out at 1Tb of downlink (with half of it going to backhaul) and the current units are 80 Gb/s
Starlink got my business after VZW forced their 5G boxes to use 5G and not allow forced LTE usage. 5G is unusable there with 60-100/0.03. I force my phone to use LTE and all is well but 5G just does not work.
I hate giving Elon money but it’s the only affordable month-to-month option now.
I am not seeing a plan on Starlink’s website that is lower than $120 a month for unlimited data.
I live in rural Ohio.
My lake home is in Central MN.
You're competing for the amount of bandwidth in your cell. If there's more people in your area wanting service, it makes sense it's more expensive. There's a fixed supply and highly variable demand per square mile.
… is it? Why wouldn't a corporation use any and all data available to them to price discriminate as hard and as much as they possibly can?
> my corner of Ohio either. We have 3 fiber providers in the area
I … am not sure I believe that. Everywhere I think I have ever lived, broadband is a local monopoly.
- Elon is still stoking the Epstein stuff on Twitter as we speak
It’s not good for Starlink for that reason. We are inside the belly of fascism, so your question reads like someone oblivious, with all due respect.
Brendan Carr's has critiqued federal broadband spending: too much spent on rebuilding existing networks to be faster, not enough going towards new build out. This is because upgrading wealthy customers' internet leads to increased profit, and there is less money in serving the underserved. Several states have tried fighting the telecom companies on what they've delivered and I think the worst case was a slap on the wrist.
Starlink and 5G are likely increasing broadband coverage far faster than fiber, which is a big goal of federal broadband spending.
And then it turned out that the muddy dog just bought me a new yacht.
Also, it’s important to remember that Chevron wasn’t “however they want” or to “reinterpret their own authorizations”. It was a doctrine that if the agency (staffed by domain experts responsible for resolving the ambiguity) had a reasonable interpretation of an ambiguity in the law, even if the court thought it had a better opinion, it had to defer to the agency that Congress created and left it up to congress to resolve that ambiguity if they felt the agency did so incorrectly.
This is not an accurate description of what agencies are meant to be experts in.
Their expertise is meant to be in how best to act within their bounds. Which is distinct from deciding what those bounds are.
Under Chevron courts were to defer to agency interpretations if the statute was ambiguous and the agency's interpretation was reasonable.
/doubt
The founding fathers did not protect the branches from each other nearly enough, and certainly did not give the people an end-run mechanism to bypass and fix it.
Article III is light in describing the courts [1]. Our judicial system is mostly a creature of Congress, not the Constitution.
I’m personally a fan of choosing by lot, from the appellate bench, a random slate of justices for each case. (That court of rotating judges would be the one in which “the judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested”.) You could do this entirely through legislation—nothing in the Constitution requires lifetime appointments to a permanent bench.
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-3/
President nominates judges; he doesn’t appoint without the Senate.
Moreover, “the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments,” a category that includes “Judges of the Supreme Court” [1]. The Congress may, by statute alone, remove the President’s power to appoint SCOTUS justices.
As has already been noted by law there can be no more than 3 commissioners from the same party.
Traditionally when a commissioner's term expired and they were from the party that did not control the Presidency the President would ask the other party's Senate leadership who to nominate and would nominate that person.
Also traditionally the Senators of the President's party would vote to approve that nominee.
Biden followed this tradition, as did the Senate Democrats.
Edit: why disagree?
640K was "perfectly fine" for most people, too.
100/20 is barely enough for a household of 3-5 "light" users. The US already has abysmal broadband speed/bandwidth/latency metrics compared to the rest of the developed world and settling for 2010's version of "fast" in 2025 is ... not how we're going to get better.
> I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas
Why spend money and time to expand copper into rural areas when fiber is the same cost. it's the people/permits/labor that are $$$$. It makes no meaningful difference weather your expensive hbm crew is pulling fiber or copper and we know that copper doesn't go as fast ...
Well they voted for it, so I'll stick to my fiber in my big city and they can fend for themselves and pay $90/month for 10 up 1 down or whatever while I pay $40 for 1 gig....
With the snide remarks aside, why expand copper or fiber into rural areas when we can just let SpaceX and others launch satellites and provide a potentially better service?
I'm sympathetic to a goal of "have really, really fast Internet service" but maybe there is a better regulatory framework for increasing competition both urban/suburban and rural areas.
Not all of us.
> why expand copper or fiber into rural areas when we can just let SpaceX and others launch satellites and provide a potentially better service?
Fiber is objectively the right choice for future proofing. Bouncing a radio wave off of cube 300 miles above will _always_ be sub-par compared to a direct fiber connection because the latency is higher. SL May have a slight edge going vast distances since the speed of light is faster in a vacuum compared to glass but for 99.999% of residential ISP needs, fiber-to-the-home is going to offer a more robust pipe that fits more and with less latency.
> but maybe there is a better regulatory framework for increasing competition both urban/suburban and rural areas.
Almost certainly. Regardless, any better solution necessarily exists only in a world where 100/20 isn't "cutting edge" 30 years after it became technically possible.
What the hell are you doing that 100/20 is "barely enough"?
Also its ridiculous to think that is excessive in any way. Imagine what we could have if we had 100 gigabit or 1 terabit. Instead of watching a flat 4k movie, render a full 4k scene in AR.
[]: destiny 1/2 consume a lot, but that would mean your older child is over 30 and living with you.
That's if you use any streaming service, if you're streaming legally ripped Blu-rays, then yea, 100/20 isn't enough, but those are usually within LAN. And if you're talking seeding/streaming to others, then any asymmetric connection speed will suck.
100/20 is fine for one person. But gigabit isn't very hard to achieve and is a far better goal speed for entire households. Gigabit is also a lot more convenient any time a big download is involved.
> The only thing really supporting the old goal of gigabit connections was fiber.
Coax can do it.
> I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas. Fiber plans tend to be expensive and mostly available in the areas that already have usable high speed options.
Shouldn't fiber be a bit easier to run than coax? If you're going to run one data wire to a new area, it should be fiber. And if you can run power you can run data too.
"we" = the corporations: "yes, quite right"
sigh
AT&T Fiber or Verizon Fios will tend to start at $60-90/month as an "introductory" price where your bill just keeps going up $10-20/months every yera unless you go through the dance of calling up and threatening to cancel every year. So you could be paying $140/month when a new customer is being charged half that.
Chattanooga, TN has long been known for its excellent and affordable fiber Internet [1].
We know what works: it's municipal broadband not national ISPs. We've known this for a long time but we somehow refuse to recognize it, in part because national ISPs have successfully bought and paid for legislators to create a moat through things like onerous regulation or outright banning of building muncipal broadband.
But why is this so? It's economics and incredibly simple. You see when a town or city or county owns the Internet infrastructure, you've removed the profit motive. Put another way, the workers own the means of production.
When you have a national ISP, some pension funds and shareholders own the means of production. And what do they demand? Ever-increasing profits. And how do profits increase? By raising prices and cutting costs.
There is absolutely no reason Internet access should cost $100/month.
And we see this same pattern play out in every market. It's the end state of capitalism.
Get outta here with that. Most of Trump's outrageous policies are incredibly unpopular, even among his base. He's just enacting the wildly unpopular Project 2025, which he denied ever hearing of while hiring 70% of its authors into his administration.
Also, I'm wondering why we suddenly now care about democracy; if we did in 2016, Trump wouldn't have had a first term. If we had after his conviction, the judge in NY state would have taken the jury's democratic decision seriously and handed him to the maximum sentence, presidential election be damned.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fov7Mq75gYE
You're absolutely right.
Anyone I've known worth their salt in networking cares about latency far more than speed. Historically upload speeds on asymmetrical plans were a problem too, but since people have started to work from home, most cable/fiber/wireless internet providers' lowest plans offer upload bandwidth at multiple tens of megabits per second, faster than the ingestion speed of most video hosts, and more than enough for a dozen simultaneous HD video conferences, and their dowstream speeds are enough for dozens simultaneous 4K video streams at the highest resolution streaming services provide.
Incumbent ISPs lying about the benefits of gigabit plans, and lobbying for their requirement, is the equivalent of Intel bragging about 5 GHz speeds in the Netburst vs Athlon days. It ran at a higher clock speed, and that sold processors, but they ran slow, because they responded horribly to branching, and were late to the market on 64-bit an monolithic multi-core architectures.
Outside of rare power users, or someone especially impatient for one-off downloads, Gigabit is ridiculous for a large family or small office, and especially overkill for a small family or individual.
I can't stand the government either, and they'll probably replace that rule with one that's even worse, but it was a bad rule to start with.
That difference in latency isn't even what matters; it's the latency from the various types of modems. With the direct connection of fiber providers, you can often get sub-millisecond latency from nearby collocations, and rarely do ISPs have more than a few milliseconds of latency.
With cable providers, DOCSIS adds ten to twenty milliseconds of latency. You'll get about double that latency With LTE providers and low-eath-orbit satellite providers that have nearby ground stations. With geosynchronous satellite providers, you'll get several hundred milliseconds of latencu.
A 50 Mbps fiber plan will get an order of magnitude lower latency than a gigabit plan from anyone else.
Everyone from your fiber provider is getting fiber-class latency, regardless of the plan's max speed. The fiber ISP in my area uses 10 gig ONTs for everyone, and limits each plan's speed with PPPoE. This is pretty common, and likely yours is doing the same.
On the other hand, everyone using the cable provider in my area, whether on their fastest or slowest plan, is getting the same tens of milliseconds of DOCSIS 3.1 latency, on a node that has tens to hundreds of gigabits of bandwidth but is using TDMA and FDMA to share it between a few hundred users.
My point is that the lowest-tier subscriber from your fiber ISP is getting magnitudes lower latency than the top-tier subscriber from my cable ISP. If either of the switch plans, but don't switch ISPs, they'll have the same latency.
Propagation delay usually dominates latency, so it's generally not the biggest factor, but on a simple local network with two PCs and a switch, you can expect about 1ms latency with 100BASE-T, and 0.12ms latency with 1000BASE-T.
| Component | 100 Mb/s | 1 Gb/s |
| ---------------------------------------------- | ------------------- | ----------------- |
| Propagation (30 m) | ≈ 0.15 µs | same |
| Two NIC serializations (TX + RX, 1 500 B each) | 2 × 120 µs = 240 µs | 2 × 12 µs = 24 µs |
| Two switch serializations (store‑and‑forward) | 2 × 120 µs = 240 µs | 24 µs |
| Processing in switch + NICs | \~10 µs | \~10 µs |
| **One‑way latency** | **≈ 490 µs** | **≈ 58 µs** |
| **Ping RTT** (×2) | **≈ 1 ms** | **≈ 0.12 ms** |
Regardless, the latency difference between 100BASE-TX and 1000BASE‑T pales in comparison to the difference in modem speeds between different providers' network types.
Fiber providers with an ONT get LAN-like speeds, while cable providers' DOCSIS modems add tens of milliseconds of latency, LTE modems are similar to double that of DOCSIS, and satellite providers range from similar to LTE all the way up to hundreds of milliseconds of latency, depending on the orbit and if there are ground stations nearby.
Again, within any provider, you get the same latency with any the plan, but changing providers can have order-of-magnitude differences.
There's no savings for the ISP to throttle your pipe.
> rare power users
I would expect a lot of overlap between these two groups! Extremely common things tech people do that benefit greatly from high-bandwidth connections:
- disk backup to the cloud
- use Docker
- have a household with multiple HD TVs (Netflix recommends 30Mbps per stream)
- software installs/updates as a brief interlude instead of an ordeal
Essentially, high-bandwidth connections let you use the Internet like it's functionally infinite instead of something rationed.
Even if you are doing that to initially back up your network or install Call of Duty, after the initial usage you're only making differential updates, unless something goes very wrong, which hopefully doesn't happen even once a month.
For some users, it may be worth an extra $1000/yr to get the gigabit plan instead of 100 megabit, so that a Call of Duty install could theoretically happen in tens minutes instead of an hour or two, but really it's going to take an hour for your computer to decompress and write the data. Everyone else paying that $1000/yr extra is just wasting their money.
Also, Netflix only uses 16 Mbps at most, for a 4K video which is only a small portion of their catalog and only available to their top-tier subscribers. The extra bandwidth is a recommendation to allow for other users to still use the network and also to account for a special case of high latency that used to occur when saturating the connection on the fastest plans some ISPs offered. Here's some good research into actual streaming usage: https://www.wsj.com/graphics/faster-internet-not-worth-it/ (It's WSJ, but there's no paywall)
On top of that, the cheapest plans offered by most telecoms in the US are over 100 megabit, so you still get a guaranteed three 4K streams Netflix without issue, but realistically could pull off double that.
Fast, low-latency, and cheap is a pretty great combo.
Which is to say, every major telco offers faster speeds than the majority of their subscribers will ever use, often even on their bottom-teir plans, but a significant portion of ISPs have enough lag to affect their users, even on their top-tier plans.
If you're trying to push telcos toward offering a more useful product, don't set a goal for them to offer higher speeds, which are already high enough for the vast majority of customers, but instead push for low latency, which most telcos cannot provide even between the customer's equipment and the telco's equipment.
Fiber providers have excellent latency, and of course that's what you should get if it's an option, but many subscribers are stuck with telcos that use DOCSIS over a cable network or LTE over a cellular network, and nothing can be done to reduce the latency for current generations of those protocols, but there's no technical reason the protocols couldn't have lower latency, so pushing telcos toward offering lower latency could make it happen, creating an actual useful improvement.
Edit: downvoters, please explain why I need 125MB/s (that's 3 full installations of Windows 95 every second) for normal browsing.
> Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband is being deployed "on a reasonable and timely basis" to all Americans.
Carr says that when looking into whether that is being satisfied the FCC should not consider affordability because section 706 does not contain the word "affordability".
But it also does not contain any words for any of the things he does want the FCC to consider. All it says is "reasonable and timely".
I bet if you polled consumers and asked what they would think it means if they were informed some commercial service or product was available to them on a reasonable basis an overwhelming majority would include in their answer that it means it is available to them at a price they find affordable.
vjvjvjvjghv•6h ago
- Reduce science
- Reduce collected data
- Reduce immigration
- Reduce infrastructure
- Reduce adoption of EVs
giantg2•5h ago
aaomidi•4h ago
giantg2•4h ago
What if we want to be a world leader in satellite internet coverage? Is that a goal you support? Because that's part of what these changes are about.
Bluestein•3h ago
testbjjl•2h ago
datahack•2h ago
Unimpressed.
aaomidi•1h ago
datahack•1h ago
You get the community we settle for.
mattgrice•1h ago
Socialism with chinese characteristics/ Xi Jinpeng thought is the most successful ideology currently. Free speech/free markets power has decayed since people found ways to exploit them and more powerful people found ways to aid the exploiters.
The US is apparently powerless to exploit our own rare earth resources and fund/subsidize them or lithium production or photovoltaic production, nuclear reactors, or even semiconductor production.
By any measure that is weak.
stingraycharles•4h ago
bigbuppo•45m ago
JumpCrisscross•3h ago
And China’s dominance in LFP is based on its acquisition of A123’s IP out of bankruptcy [1].
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130131031501/http://www.reuter...
wnevets•3h ago
smt88•2h ago
That might be the only difference, though.
Mistletoe•2h ago
reactordev•2h ago
mattgrice•1h ago
gigatexal•1h ago
This whole project 2025 garbage is a coup run by weird Christian nationalists.
Anything good about America and its government is over. Any goodwill we gained is gone.