Not the onion?

if it's an article about the government doing something shitty for the non-billionaire consumer with a completely ridiculous bullshit justification, then it's probably true

elon musk probably started whining that widespread 1GB fiber infrastructure would hurt his starlink money

head desk

"it is impossible to predict long-term technological developments and the evolution of consumer preferences.”

Defending the consumer's alleged preference for slow internet? Sounds more like technological DEI to me!

US continuing this weird obsession with moving back to the 1950s.

My Starlink can get up to 350mbps on a good day. But I imagine in more congested areas it’ll be lower. I’m sure it’s unrelated.

Terrestrial wired internet with speed capacity at minimum 1Gbps should be the requirement for federal funding.

I hate gigabit internet. It's fast and gets everywhere.

Probably not super far from at least a partial truth with that.

Falls very in line with the "if trump [et.al] were actively trying to disrupt the stability of the US, what would they do differently?"

You know who really likes us having slower, less capable tech? Any possible adversary.

Didn't they already do this? I remember being shocked in the 2010s to learn they'd redefined broadband to allow them to lay coax and call it broadband.

I hate gigabit internet. It's fast and gets everywhere to some densely populated areas.

Can the isps give back the billions in tax payer dollars they got for this then?

Next up: Automobiles limited to 10 km/h to not be unfair towards horse-drawn vehicles.

Let me say it louder for the people in the back of the room:

TRUMP IS KILLING THE COUNTRY BECAUSE WE MADE HIM KILL EPSTEIN TO KEEP EVERYTHING FROM COMING OUT.

It’s a narcissistic revenge lash-out. Why is every hire literally (like actually literally, not figuratively literally, not hyperbole literally, but actually literally) the worst possible person? Why is every move the most destructive and destabilizing? Why is everything a grift to con the most rube of rubes?

He can’t just bomb the place, he knows he’d be stopped; so he’s just slowly boiling the pot. He has no good intentions, he’s out for blood and he’s flexing on all of us.

There are isolated farming villages in Korea with faster Internet speeds than many places in the US. That gap is about to widen.

Oh if it’s impossible to predict long term technological developments then why are my fucking tax dollars subsidizing data centers.

Two faced fucking ass politicians

Republicans need to convince people that government is incompetent and wasteful, and should be dismantled and sold to private enterprise.

Problem is, government can do a lot of good when it has good leadership. So, Republicans fix that by bringing the worst possible people into leadership. So when everything falls apart they can shrug and say "see we told you! Let's have this contractor/private business take over these services. Government can't do it."

It is unfair to slower technologies, intentionally, because they're inferior. Jfc. We should allowed to improve society somewhat.

I'd be down for that.

Thanks MAGAts

That claim isn't just a lie regarding the consumer preferences, but also the technological developments. It's not impossible to predict at all; when talking about long term limits the picture is pretty clear.

We already know that a fiber can carry 20 terabits per second, because it's already doing it in backbone ISP connections today. If necessary and economical this can be done towards individual houses in 40 years. The only hard thing to predict is the speed of price decay. But as a sort of anchor value I can tell you a pair of transceivers for 100 Gigabit per second over 10 km can be bought for 500 USD right now.

We also know that radio links are fundamentally limited by the Shannon limit, which relates the possible bit rate to the spectral bandwidth given a noisy channel (like our atmosphere). Maybe you'll get a few dozen GHz of spectrum usable from space, in the mmWave region. And with that you probably reach dozens of gigabits per second. There is still a lot more to be had than today, sure, but with a definitive limit not too far off.

To be clear the Shannon limit applies to the optical transport in fiber too, but there we are working with around 4500 GHz of usable spectrum just between 191.5 THz and 196.0 THz (the conventional band for DWDM), way way way more than radio will ever have by the nature of things. And people are expanding that range downwards to 184.5 THz already, and that's in the market, not just in research.

We shouldn't cure diseases it's unfair to the people dying

which time?

I know right? You can’t have healthcare but we can make sure one of the most hated by consumer industries have a big taxpayer payday

Yes the FCC ought to be fair to those ISPs running their network on RFC 1149.

Trying to push people to use the space Nazi network rather than laying the fiber connection to ensure quality connections. These cables can be supplemented with transmission towers in regions where laying the cable is impractical.

When you realize these low orbital system have to continuously launch forever you see it is an enormous waste of resources compared to laying a cable.