Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk shook up the automotive and aerospace industries with electric cars and cheap rockets. Now, he is focused on satellites, looking at ways to make smaller, less-expensive models that can deliver Internet access across the globe, according to people familiar with the matter.
Elon is definitely a visionary and the man gets shit done.
All those people begging the government for help with Net Neutrality because otherwise “there’s no hope” can now eat crow. The free market is what should (and in this case, may well) solve problems. Big government usually messes things up anyway. But most people don’t believe in the free market. On your knees, then.
Latency.
So you won’t be able to play first person shooters, but streaming your videos and surfing the web should work fine. Either way, the point is having an alternative to a throttled internet. With the alternative, Comcast or whomever could soon realize that they can’t do that because people do indeed vote with their money.
Latency matters for everything, not just first person shooters. The ONLY thing you’re likely going to be able to do with satellite well is watch a stream, and you’ll need to pick which stream over conventional tech.
I’m not saying satellite won’t be useful, but it’s useful for connecting the other 4 billion not for getting Americans their Netflix fix without Netflix paying extortion.
If you think the current internet is a free market, you’re sadly mistaken. To get the internet to a free market, you would need to tear up thousands of municipal regulation, exclusivity agreements, right of way and other local giveaways. But it’s much easier to ignorantly parrot something you read on a blog than to see that the current situation is a rats nest of regulations that puts the thumb on the scale in favor of incumbent ISPs.
Yeah, right. You know Gates and McCaw tried this 20 years ago? It didn’t work out. It could happen this time, oh, except for the speed of light.
Hey, but when you have clueless dogma, who needs reality.
I think you need to put down your copy of Atlas_Shrugged. If you think this is an alternative to, or remedy for, broadband internet from the big Cable providers, and their abuses, I’d simply ask how much of an alternative is a Tesla to other cars, or even other electric cars? Considering this company doesn’t even EXIST yet (money quote: “and Mr. Musk’s participation isn’t certain.”), I think I’d rather see the government offer a less than perfect solution now than wait a decade or longer for the Tesla S of the internet to arrive.
Before you can talk about the latency of the service, you may want to consider the latency of the company! There isn’t a single concrete statement in that article, other than one of how difficult the project is.
Got it.
Our thoughts differ in that I just don’t like big government and I don’t like asking them for solutions. I would prefer to cut my internet access completely until an alternative comes along (and it would come faster if everyone did it this way, since the offenders would lose all their customers) rather than beg government for help. Again, I don’t think their solution will last, plus it adds that many more pages to the already too big list of things you can and cannot do in life or as a business. I don’t expect you to agree though, since not but a couple of years ago I would just have shrugged this type of idea off too.
“I would prefer to cut my internet access completely until an alternative comes along (and it would come faster if everyone did it this way, since the offenders would lose all their customers) rather than beg government for help.”
I believe they call that “cut[ting] off your nose to spite your face.”
Are you talking about that magical free market that gave us the forced scarcity of Verizon and Comcast?
Lol Moeskido, I was waiting for you to jump in. Nice to see you are still a pillar here, old friend.
It’s not the same thing. It’s a way of protesting without going on your knees begging ‘Obama’ to do something.
You’re saying you’d rather go without a service then “beg” a government agency to regulate the service in a way that isn’t totally deferential to the service provider?
Dude, that’s exactly the same thing.
If that’s what you want to do, fine. Personally, in the same way I’d press for the EPA stop and punish a corporate polluter, I’ll press for the FCC to apply sensible regulation, that while perhaps stymying some innovation more robustly protects consumers.
Don’t forget that evil “big government” that funded the development and in a hundred ways subsidized the proliferation of the internet.
Nice to see you’d still rather beg a cable company.
Nonsense. Everyone knows the Internet sprang fully-formed from Bill Gates’ forehead.
I don’t understand what you mean. I just want us entrepreneurs to solve a problem, not the government. What’s so wrong with that. Are you a socialist?
Entrepreneurs can’t solve problems in markets dominated by two giants.
After having seen the combination work, I prefer a healthy mix of regulated capitalism and socialist government programs to the feudal brutality we’re slipping back into.
Lies! Al Gore invented it.
The free market is usually clueless and mostly full of crap.
The guy that Musk hired to head up this project was hired away from Google (who had been working on it the past year). Google has now moved on to other concepts for providing coverage in low/no-coverage areas. I know that satellite project was extremely ambitious and there are a huge number of hurdles to overcome to put the kind of constellation up required to provide the coverage they need. I Hope Musk has deeper pockets than Google.
I’ll take a guess that he at least has more focus than Google does.