Comment by PaulRobinson
4 days ago
Laying fiber is expensive and time consuming.
Satellite is - once you've got the infra up in the air - very straightforward, with the downside that your satellite ISP is likely owned/operated by an unregulated billionaire nutcase that will turn off your access if he doesn't like you any more (c.f. Ukraine front line). It's hard to do that with regulated fiber backhaul, but not impossible.
I've seen a few wireless ISPs mentioned here before, which can be a nice hub/spoke model - run fast fiber to a community, but distribute via wireless (note, not WiFi) to homes and businesses within range.
I'd definitely love to see more community-run ISPs in the World, it's how the Internet should work, really.
And even if you aren't disconnected, there are valid concerns about privacy and censorship.
> owned/operated by an unregulated billionaire nutcase that will turn off your access if he doesn't like you any more (c.f. Ukraine front line)
Is this actually true?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russian-Ukrain...
> In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a counterattack on a Crimean port, from which Russia had been launching attacks against Ukrainian civilians; doing so would have violated US sanctions on Russia. This event was widely reported in 2023, erroneously characterizing it as Musk "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.
Sad to see your comment downvoted for inconvenient facts correcting a very prevalent urban legend.
This is the level of political bias that exists where facts have to be suppressed to fuel the narrative and the agenda.
Original (non-primary) source cited at the end of that paragraph:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/07/elon-musk...
[EDIT: Deleted quoted text from above, because I missed (!!!) the retraction from the cited primary author ]
Not true. From the very second paragraph in bold on top from your own link:
> Update: on 9 September 2023, Walter Isaacson said his biography’s claim about Starlink and Crimea was based on “mistaken” information [see footnote]
The footnote:
> This article was amended on 14 September 2023 to add an update to the subheading. As the Guardian reported on 12 September 2023, following the publication of this article, Walter Isaacson retracted the claim in his biography of Elon Musk that the SpaceX CEO had secretly told engineers to switch off Starlink coverage of the Crimean coast.
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