Despite the hate on the promo the tech they offer is still pretty cool. Only way I knew my in-laws were safe near Asheville was because one of their neighbors had starlink and a generator. Took a week for them to get power and cell phone service back and there is no way to get to them without a helicopter so if it wasn't for the product we would have just learned that they were alright.
In New Zealand we're very much natural disaster prone. I run a SaaS working out of home - we wired the house for generator backup and have a starlink unit that sits in a box exactly for this reason, even if the proverbial hits the fan for a week I can still keep on top of the business.
Every couple of months the geny gets sparked up and everything tested. For a very small investment it's very comforting to know we've always got power/internet, regardless of what happens.
Wondering if solar/batteries would do the same thing as a generator but cleaner and also useful in general ?
Because I've thought about solving a similar scenario but just assumed solar/batteries would be the play here.
If you spent 10 minutes running the numbers, you'd probably answer your question pretty handily.
If I fully decked my roof out I can generate a good 20kWp
I'm assuming OP isn't actually serving out of home (starlink won't help with it's CG-Nat), so it's not like they're running 5kW of servers. 10kWh a day seems perfectly reasonable amount to keep going.
Given just running a generator it going to eat 20 litres a day on lowest load, over 3 weeks that's 400 litres you'd need to store.
With a battery setup even if you had to charge from a generator you'd be able to run it more efficiently for a shorter period.
So having spend 10 minutes I reckon the answer is "yes, OP should certainly get a solar/battery system set up"
That's crazy. There are huge differences is costs and use cases.A generator is $500, and mine can run for 24hrs on 5 gallons of gas. A 5kw solar system is about $25k to 35k in my area before batteries.
Solar is far cheaper than that in my location - especially if you put the panels up yourself, and storing 100 gallons of gas (400 litres) to run for 3 weeks is far more expensive.
Depends on the price of batteries, which are rapidly declining. Within the next few years the numbers will change in favor of batteries. Though it also depends on the load and having enough space/sunlight for the solar array
Curious…it’s not been a week yet? It certainly feels longer. Glad to know they’re alright. My family is in Swannanoa, and still without power and water.
Edited to a week. I was actually shocked how quickly my in-laws got power back with how widespread the destruction was and how many of the roads are out. They have well water so as soon as power was back on they obviously have water.
In Asheville / if you're close to the river, it's still recommended to boil your water. (I'm in Marshall ~700ft higher than downtown, so I'm assuming it's fine where I am, but guidance has been non-specific.)
It has not. I have family impacted who still does not have power. One week will be tomorrow.
To ask a tech question: how much capacity does Starlink have? If every single person in US rural areas switches to Starlink, can the system handle it? What's the bandwidth/customers/capacity limit for the service? (I'm obviously not talking about emergencies, where degraded bandwidth is acceptable.)
The bandwidth is limited on a per-cell basis, somewhere around 700Gbps max per cell. Actual capacity at any time is somewhat less. If everyone is actively using theirs, you might get single digit Mbps or less at cell capacity limits, even if there aren't bottlenecks elsewhere.
It's fine, but it's highly dependent on having extremely low customer density. The system doesn't work well if everyone is using it all the time.
> 700Gbps max per cell
> having extremely low customer density
I think you need to define “extremely low” because 700gbps is plenty for several thousand people. And the question was specifically about everyone in rural areas switching.
If you go by rural being <1000 people per square mile and a cell covering roughly 97 square miles (assuming the larger 15 mile hex diameter), that lands at 7.2 mbps per person if there are 1000 people in every square mile all trying to use it at the same time.
That sounds fine considering standard consumer usage patterns mean you’ll get 10x that as an individual even in peak times. That’s also assuming maximum density for what’s considered rural.
> that lands at 7.2 mbps per person
Which is ridiculously poor.
This would simply create a digital divide further increasing inequality in rural areas.
>This would simply create a digital divide further increasing inequality in rural areas.
Not sure what you mean? The more remote you get the better your bandwidth gets because you are sharing it with fewer people. This is the opposite of most ISPs which tend to ignore rural areas.
Its about giving slow satellite to rural areas as opposed to fibre.
And how much contention is on that fibre?
At a typical residential contention of 50:1 that's 350mbit
At a really good residential rate of 10:1 that's still 70mbit
That number looks to be before multiplexing, so it's not that bad. If 10% of the people in the area are using the internet at the same time (as in are actively downloading at full speed, not just are scrolling through already downloaded content) it should go up to 72 mbps per person, and so on.
It's not actually those numbers. For one thing, bandwidth is split between upload and download. 700Gbps isn't the actual capacity either, just the theoretical bandwidth. It's less in practice, limited by things like gateway capacity etc. the bandwidth also isn't evenly allocated between terminals because starlink has service tiers like other ISPs. Terminals are also not people. They're usually shared by households that may encompass multiple users at a time.
There's very good reasons starlink has such low limits on terminals per cell.
Oversubscription is also an issue on wired networks. It might be a problem but usually you shouldn’t notice; on wired at least.
What is your extremely low customer density source? In theory they could reduce beam size and throw more satellites in space. How much they can handle is up for speculation, but your “extremely low” claim could use a source.
Do you really need a source? It's obvious from the numbers. Starlink limits to low hundreds (~300) of terminals per cell. We'll round that to 1k to be generous for future improvements. Let's say each terminal serves 4 customers. Cell size is in the neighborhood of 150 sq. mi. That's a customer density of 27 customers per sq. mi, or 9% of the density threshold for "rural areas" in the US. Using more reasonable numbers gives us an effective max density around the same as Mongolia, the least densely populated country on earth.
It's just the nature of the technology.
> Oversubscription is also an issue on wired networks
Wired networks can include fibre optic to the house like we have in Australia where the speeds can reach a consistent 1Gbps even in highly dense areas at peak times. And internal testing is happening on 10Gbps.
If US cares about supporting the internet of tomorrow satellite services like Starlink will never be capable enough.
1gbps to the house doesn’t mean you’re not oversubscribed. An ISP that has a 10,000 homes on 1gbps connections absolutely does not pay for 10 tbps of transit capacity or even internal capacity to carry all that to its peering points.
Cheaper fiber to homes definitely made last mile scale better bandwidth-wise, but it didn’t change the fundamental nature of needing to heavily oversubscribe to make it affordable.
Many major services e.g. Youtube, Netflix, Cloudflare have servers colocated with ISPs.
So they don't need to have equivalent transit capacity.
Which is not a capability Starlink can provide.
It's not just a question of transit capacity. Most residential PONs are still oversubscribed, like the fiber cable running down the street can't handle all clients maxing out their throughput all the time. With PONs you'll have multiple clients all sharing the same physical port, in the same way in coax DOCSIS networks. One single cable goes through multiple passive splitters to branch out to a lot of final clients. They almost always wouldn't be able to support all clients maxing out all their bandwidth even if that traffic never left the local office, because once again its still dozens of clients on a single actual physical port.
Fiber to your home doesn't mean you've got dedicated bandwidth to your ISP. You're still usually on a shared medium. You're likely to get all your speed most of the time though because most residential customers aren't constantly using anywhere near a gigabit of throughput constantly.
That said though, a regular ISP can just run another line out. Starlink can't just will additional useful frequency ranges out of nothing. There's only so much spectrum to be used in the giant shared medium of the sky. Beams are only going to be so tight at those distances (outside of using lasers), only so many useful orbits, etc.
Yep, in a few years these dishes will be $600 paperweights. We need real rural broadband.
You can have real rural broadband today. You just need to be willing to pay for installation out of pocket.
When an ISP runs fiber to a new building (be it in a business park or rural farm), the math is almost entirely based on recuperating their installation costs - which they often pay for entirely out of their pocket. Your entire first contract term is usually just paying back the installation costs alone...
For some perspective, at a previous building we tried to bring fiber across the street into our office. The installation costs were too expensive to make the math work - so the ISP offered to split the installation costs 50/50 instead. Our half was over $94,000. This involved directional boring and the works, to go ~200ft to the right-of-way vault and into our MPOE.
One can only imagine the expense of running fiber (or any type of cable) out to the boonies. It's totally feasible - but the costs make it not palatable in reality.
One wonders how we ran electricity out everywhere.
Running a fibre is about the same cost as running a power cable.
Cheaper labor and fewer challenges.
There is a lot of infrastructure where the cost to replace is an order of magnitude higher than the inflation adjusted original cost.
At least last time I looked into starlink it most definitely cannot. Definitely more ideal for very rural or very poor areas where you are gonna be one of a few dishes. That may have changed now though.
It depends how you define rural of course.
Starlink could pretty easily serve everyone whose only current option is 4G/5G/DSL/Satellite.
Basically everywhere where there is no Fiber or Cable. That's still a decent chunk of the population.
I don't know the specs, but since they control both ends of the link, (ie. the client-side router) they've done a remarkable job of smoothing out load imbalances to make it highly usable even under problematic conditions.
No they're already added a one time "congestion charge" of $100 dollars to some (unspecified afaik) areas to try to lower the demand. Or cynically maybe it's a profit taking maneuver get more money out of areas where it's most popular. I tend towards the former personally.
I don't know if that kind of information is public. Starlink is continually adding new satellites, and each one adds bandwidth capability. Likewise with end user ground station hardware updates and spectrum purchases (at least the former is happening on a regular basis), capacity likewise goes up.
I don't believe there is a theoretical or practical upper limit which would exclude very wide adoption of Starlink and similar competitors.
Put in another way, I think it is possible that in a decade or two the only cell phone/data service that doesn't come from orbit will be a few terrestrial towers in dense downtown urban areas and around things like sports venues.
5G is going exactly the opposite way to provide higher bandwidth, more cells with each less users.
With satellite internet you're sharing the medium with everyone, and that doesn't scale well. Beamforming probably helps a lot, but I don't how accurate it can be on that distance.
You can have essentially unlimited satellites the issue is the percentage of time each one spends over high density areas.
Design for NYC density and 99% of satellites would be redundant at any given moment. The solution for increasing density is dropping costs so it’s viable for satellites to be idle 95% of the time. At least as a first approximation, there’s some tricks with how you setup orbits after the basic network is done.
You're still sharing the medium (the sky), so at some point interference is going to be an issue. A quick search tells me the beams a satellite uses is measured in km, so you can only have one satellite serving several square km (you could have more channels of course).
Let’s be pessimistic and say it’s ~25km^2 with current designs. Surface area of the earth is 510,064,472 km² so you estimate limits things to ~20 million satellites X however they can slice up the available spectrum. IE essentially unlimited satellites.
As of September 2024 they have 6,371 operational satellites and ~ 4 million customers globally.
How is that relevant? Adding satellites over the Pacific doesn't improve New York's service. The question is how dense of a population they can serve, not how many satellites Starlink could theoretically have.
The only way to add one satellite over NYC on average is to also add several satellites over the ocean and other low density parts of the earth. If you want low latency individual satellites must be in LEO which means they spend most of their time over water and low density bits of land.
Which gets back to my original point where increasing the maximum density inherently reduces the average utilization of each satellite.
>Despite the hate on the promo
What does "hate on the promo" mean?
Likelihood of word "hate" appearing in musk-related topics is beyond sus
Offering a "30 day free trial" doesn't really feel like a gift as much as it's an ad for the service trying to onboard customers. It's not a bad thing per se, just kind of in poor taste.
There were just a few hours between Elon accepting to do it on X, and the update being deployed, I think they can be forgiven for not having it super polished. However, they've also explained that it's 30 days for now, as the end of that approaches, they'll re-evaluate to see if an extension is warranted. I recall them also mentioning refunds or maybe account credits for affected people if they've happened to pay already.
They probably used the free trial system for a quick release instead of having to build some new system for this.
It's nice that Musk and his companies always seem to be willing to provide free emergency services. Over various disasters they've provided free energy, internet, and cell service.
I can't believe people complain about charity when so many other companies do nothing. Same with Mr.Beast's charity acts. There's something wrong with people who do nothing and hate on other people doing charity.
> I can't believe people complain about charity when so many other companies do nothing.
It is possible that people are interpreting this 30 day promotional period as “Starlink offers hurricane survivors $120/mo internet access starting November 2nd”, which would not be factually inaccurate assuming today as the start date of the promotion. $120/mo is roughly double the average broadband cost in e.g. the Asheville area.
I think intention matters here. It’s great for those people who are helped by Mr. Beast, but it’s coming from a place of ego and profit, not charity. Happy for those helped, but it’s still a little unseemly.
However, I do think Musk genuinely likes to help people^ (e.g. Puerto Rico and Ukraine), but also I feel his response to the (valid) rejection of his help by the divers in Thailand was ungracious and maybe a little telling. Hopefully he’s grown since then
^ also it’s good PR
Musk is openly pro-Russia, pro-Trump and his help towards Ukraine has been reluctant at best ("I support the current thing" meme, his parroting of Putin talking points, the "Khrushchev error").
He likes to help people if he can come out as a hero, otherwise you’re a "pedo". And it’s been going downhill ever since. Given his recent stances and casual support to racism, sexism and conspiracy theories, what would make you reconsider seeing him as a genuinely helpful person?
You gotta have the hardware right?
Isn't this then just ... kinda a normal "free 30 days" offer?
This seems not far from handing out free AOL disks, except you also need some added hardware?
The action was taken in response to replies like this: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1841207137420132549
Wherein good samaritans are bringing hardware into the affected areas and having trouble/ delays using gift cards to get the accounts online and in service
Initial problem was payment processing with gift cards?
Not too surprising, seen that, must be a fraud thing.
They're mostly getting the hardware for free. A lot of people in TN and elsewhere are delivering and installing Starlink units for free to the disaster areas(more than the US govt), and begging Elon for free service. Seems like he or someone at Starlink was listening.
We've got people as far up as the top of NY sending truckloads of supplies down to the disaster areas and Starlink dishes are easy to throw on from local Best Buys/Home Depots/etc that have them.
> They're mostly getting the hardware for free.
No.
Ordering this costs $320 and takes 1-2 weeks. They even charge for shipping and handling.
By the time you get this, internet and cell service will most likely be re-established. I live 20 miles outside of Asheville, this is basically profiteering off a disaster imo.
Much easier for the richest man on Earth to simply install a hundred base stations himself. Instead, people who just had their lives washed away need to pay his company 300 bucks.
To be clear, I didn't mean for free from Starlink, I meant free via donation.
I follow a half dozen accounts in the area, and they're all donating a lot.
Here is one, for example. Ignore the politics and just scroll through the Starlink posts -
Here's another that claims Starlink drove the units straight out. Unclear if they were free or not.
Nothing personal but that's "a lot" of vague, qualified, and loaded phrases like "mostly free" "more than the US govt" and such ... but the source is just some guy's twitter page?
Understood. I'm trying to be careful with absolutes here. I can't attest that not a single person in the area placed a full price order.
As for the number, it's happening fast and I only happened to follow a few, so don't even want to provide a guess. More than 100 units just in what I've come across in the last week. Pinning down an exact number is likely impossible.
FEMA claims to have set up 40 units.
You are coming across as someone with an axe to grind. There are plenty of private people and organizations getting supplies to the areas in need. Starlink hardware is definitely included as it's the best way to get remote communication up and going at the moment.
I like accuracy, numbers, details. I see statements that seem to say something specific but with a lot of qualifiers and vagueness and I start to wonder.
I was satisfied with the other person's response.
No one is disputing that there are some people getting supplies.
But it's simply a lie to imply that everyone is.
> But it's simply a lie to imply that everyone is [getting supplies.]
It's a lie to say anybody implied that.
I am seeing nothing but misinformation and flat out lies.
And in terms of actual evidence only seeing a handful of Starlinks.
Either way it is completely wrong to say that they're mostly getting the hardware for free.
You don't need to wait weeks. My local home depot has 9 in stock with dozens more nearby.
SpaceX has been sending hardware as well.
Is this separate from what federal government is paying for? [1]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-he-spoke-musk-ab...
Yes it is separate. This program is about base stations that are publicly accessible wifi, which Verizon is also doing in the area. This is just a "first month free" promotion.
It appears that issues with payment setup were delaying relief efforts, as indicated by this tweet: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1841207137420132549.
After 30 days, start coughing up $120/month [1]
We have a free solution already but not as well known - Ham Radio. You can even send email over WinLink.
Someone in my family did some work helping set up a ham radio for a hospital. I don't know the details, but it sounded like it was part of a grant to help with emergency preparedness. The problem is finding people that can operate them. This was 10 years ago, and even then he was one of very few people in the area younger than 70 with a license.
Or just WiFi via long-range & directed antennas. Would require line-of-sight though. As far as I know that would be possibly without license and you can even use encryption! I've gotten it to work over a ~2.5km distance and that was some years ago, probably things are even better now.
Has using encryption on amateur radio been legalized?
Nope. And it probably won't ever be.
The bandwidth allocated to amateur radio is incredibly valuable. (All of the spectrum allocated to ham radio would probably be worth literally billions if the FCC were allowed to auction it off to the private sector.)
The only thing preventing folks from attempting to use up all that spectrum for commercial purposes is the lack of encryption, which allows the ham radio community to self-police. If the traffic is encrypted, you no longer have any way to distinguish legitimate amateur traffic from commercial interests.
The flip side of this is that the government really doesn't want amateur radio being used to set up otherwise legal transmitters that could potentially be numbers stations for foreign spies. So they consider this one a national security issue and kinda do pay attention to it.
If you want to encrypt, use WiFi mesh networks if you're okay with the range limitations. If you really need ultra-long-range communication, your options are either (a) no encryption so the government+community knows what you're doing, or (b) you pay for a private service, who then inherits the legal obligation to monitor what you're doing with it.
No, it's still illegal
No, it's forbidden by FCC 97
How is this even enforced? Don't you have plausible deniability by claiming you just wanted to send high entropy random noise?
The meaning of any messages sent over amateur radio needs to be clear to an outside observer. The specific rule is 47 CFR 97.113(a)(4): "No amateur station shall transmit: [...] messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning, except as otherwise provided herein."
So no, high-entropy random noise of substantial length wouldn't be allowed because the meaning of the message would be unclear and unknowable.
You also can't broadcast one-way messages per 97.113(b), and you're probably not having a two-way conversation with somebody via high-entrypy random noise. So there's also that.
What if you say it is to transmit high entropy random data generated at geographically remote locations, for peer to peer verification, for a well-announced long-running experiment to see if geolocation leads to biases in random number generation.
Let's have Princeton PEAR sponsor it. Call it NCC20 for NotChaCha20.
You could say that. If you're in a position to use it as a defense to being investigated, then you're already being investigated. Hope it's true, because making false statements to federal investigators can be a crime.
It is largely unenforced by the FCC directly, but ham operators can (and do) use directional antennas to find you in many cases. Once reported the FCC does take violations seriously.
No because that’s also not really something that’s permitted.
It’s true that there’s no [practical] enforcement of it, in much the same way there’s no enforcement of the OTH Radars from various militaries that take out large chunks of the HF amateur bands every now and then.
Ham radio people are Lawful Good types. Your Chaotic Good idea isn't well recieved by them. No way there is any ability to enforce that law in a disaster zone, they have enough trouble with looting and the like.
You're correct that most people who get ham licenses are good people, but, the venn diagram of licensed ham operators and people who bought a baofeng off amazon does not have a lot of intersection.
> the venn diagram of licensed ham operators and people who bought a baofeng off amazon does not have a lot of intersection.
There's quite the few young hams going for cheap-ass equipment from Amazon. Not everyone can afford an ICOM station from the get-go, you start with small cheap stuff and work your way up.
I think what you say is largely true, but here is an existence proof that at least one person is both a Ham Radio Operator AND Chaotic Good.
People abusing the airwaves with noise aren't chaotic good.
There is also a surprising number of stereotypical american self-identified “constitutionalist” types on there, which results in funny conversations when I speak to them (without a license, natch) about the 10th amendment and the FCC/access to spectrum.
Electromagnetic waves transit state lines pretty much constantly. Hardware which creates/receives radio waves pretty much constantly transits state lines as well, I don't know too many radio manufacturers which restrict sale to only the state they operate in. You should probably read the constitution first about things which are interstate and who has permissions to regulate it.
I'm grateful that I don't need a license to operate a Starlink dish here in Starlink's home country, yet.
A license is definitely required to operate Starlink, just not by you.
They tried not servicing Crimea due to an unwillingness to get involved in the war, and the DoD quickly made them toe the geopolitical line. (They are also a huge customer of a military-only service called Starshield, also run by SpaceX/Starlink, which either runs separately on the same Starlink satellites, or is dedicated Starshield satellites with very similar technology.) This is the same USG that issues the launch licenses for the entire rest of the business via the FAA, so, like Apple/China, they have little option if they don’t want to be dead in the water.
If the USG wants your dish off, it will be off. No license revocation is required, just a phone call.
Apparently in the US you require the "requisite character qualifications to be and remain a Commission (Amateur Radio) licensee."
https://www.arrl.org/news/fcc-upholds-decision-to-revoke-ama...
Starlink's character qualification is whether you pay their bill.
Starlink itself is the FCC license holder, not you as a private user.
This means that Starlink is the one that needs to stay in the good graces of the government, and inherits the obligation to monitor the activities of their users.
I guarantee you if you're using Starlink to commit crimes, they're going to drop you as a customer.
They haven't dropped me yet!
> They tried not servicing Crimea due to an unwillingness to get involved in the war, and the DoD quickly made them toe the geopolitical line
I am confused, it's illegal for Starlink to prove access to Russia and Russian occupied areas like Crimea because of US sanctions. So essentially the opposite of what you're claiming.
Actually insane that the FCC opted to cancel the rural broadband contract with SpaceX for Starlink, to placate ancient telecoms who wanted to spend 4x more doing it with fiber...
Not an elon fan, but the current admin / gov in charge is run by halfwits.
Still tricky to set up. Tried to get a Gen 2 working for an affected family yesterday, no beans.
Yes.
I bought the last two units left at any HD for a few hundred miles; drove them up there Monday.
Apparently my friend had to drive in and out of his (utterly destroyed) neighborhood in Swannanoa because it required the app and cell service to set up. And when they returned home it wouldn't work. Took multiple trips back and forth to get it usable in the area where it was actually needed.
Then of course the Helene intro deal requires an extensive form to fill out, so he just paid for it.
And, incrementally, we all give our money to another publicly funded, government protected, privately held monopoly. And yet... it's charity.
Anyway, the entire neighborhood is using it to coordinate resources to dig out their holler. So hey, she'll do for now.
> publicly funded, government protected,
How is it publicly funded and government protected?
> privately held monopoly
That's a weird complaint, would it be somehow better if it were a publicly held monopoly like Google, Amazon or Microsoft.
And what can SpaceX do to ensure Starlink is not a monopoly? Stop providing service and shut it down?
They have been even launching competitors satellites for them.
Some people suffer from Elon Derangement Syndrome and cannot think logically
Surprised by this, I think it has the easiest setup experience I’ve had in years for ISP tech. What conditions were you operating in?
For the base subscription types, your account needs to be "activated" with the dish associated, and the address on your account has to match the rough location of the Starlink. This gives you a giant chicken-and-egg problem where you need the Internet to set the account location and perform account activation, but you don't have the Internet because you have a Starlink that's not set up yet.
It's odd that Starlink don't offer a "walled garden" experience allowing you to perform activation using just the Starlink itself, like almost all DOCSIS providers send down to unprovisioned modems. I can't tell if it's an intentional protection/KYC kind of thing or just an unimplemented feature.
You can access the starlink.com site from none registered and unsubscribed units. But you need to use the Starlink provided DHCP/DNS servers to do it. Most people use other DNS settings on devices so the walled garden part might not work depending on user device config.
Strange, everything I've heard about the setup says that they do provide a captive portal for doing the initial setup stuff that needs a network connection.
Rainy, outdoors, no internet. You know. Disaster area.
Why doesn't the government have a few planes or blimps fly overhead with base stations from the major mobile carriers?
>a few planes or blimps
If we use the map from the starlink page I feel like it would be a lot more than "a few" and I'm not really sure you'd get the places that "need" it desperately.
https://api.starlink.com/public-files/HurricaneHeleneCoverag...
Definitely a lot of value in a drone/balloon/etc. fleet to 1) restore communications using satellite + mesh 2) overhead imagery for direct support of rescue/recovery/rebuilding 3) supporting rescue (and later recovery) operations by finding phones and sending messages in broadcast, etc. Augments what can be done from satellites or manned aircraft already.
Resurrect Google project Loon
FEMA has no budget for it
What did they spend this years budget on specifically?
I think the majority of this country views them as the go to for "Emergency Management" at the federal level.
Are they using their money on other things that are not related?
The recent spending bill did not include additional funding for the Disaster Relief Fund.
https://www.newsweek.com/johnson-house-passes-spending-bill-...
I appreciate the insight, this prompted me to poke around the FEMA site and see how transparent they are - to my shock, they actually did a good job of presenting the cost breakdowns and where the money goes.
This kind of surprised me though: https://www.fema.gov/grants/preparedness/shelter-services-pr...
I knew that the government was paying big money to buy up hotels and other migrant shelters, but had no idea $640 Million was spent out of FEMA's budget on this year alone.
This will surely turn into a powerful right wing talking point if the word gets out to that side of the media.. (assuming it hasn't already)
I'm not going to lie though, given the current situation and in hindsight how poorly Maui and East Palestine, OH were handled I think it's probably reasonable to ask whether this is what we want/expect from our Emergency Management services.
It seems at first glance like they are creating the emergency via deliberately imported avoidable costs, then short changing the tax payers when they are most likely to need their help in a genuine life or death situation.
It feels like this money should be coming out of the ICE budget or some other agency, but I'm just a proletariat.
The relevant bit: "For Fiscal Year (FY) 2024, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will provide $640.9 million of available funds to enable non-federal entities to off-set allowable costs incurred for services associated with noncitizen migrant arrivals in their communities.
The funding will be distributed through two opportunities, $300 million through SSP – Allocated (SSP-A) and $340.9 million through SSP – Competitive (SSP-C)."
I haven't even gotten to the other areas where they almost certainly had a similar level of waste, but I suspect over half a billion could be mighty useful right now.
EDIT: Looks like once you know the magic number the news talking about it is easy to find, and it's not just right wing media highlighting this issue: https://www.newsweek.com/fema-migrant-funding-hurricane-disa...
If this doesn't stir the pot, I don't know what will. No matter what happens, people are going to be irrationally (or I guess maybe rationally to an extent) angry.
Quibbling over $640M over something that will be dozens of billions of dollars. Katrina's costs to FEMA was >$100B. Good chance this will be even more.
The people complaining about the $640 million would still be complaining if it was $200M. Or $1M. Or one dollar.
> It feels like this money should be coming out of the ICE budget or some other agency
FEMA is the agency that's built-up processes and procedures for helping people get housing and other aid, because that is one of its main focuses. That's not what ICE does, they enforce immigration and customs. We're complaining about waste in government but you're wanting lots of agencies specializing in the same thing.
I think the people in Tennessee, North Carolina, Maui, East Palestine, and every other botched emergency the last 5+ years would have been pretty happy to quibble about a 'paltry' 640 Million.
Also it's not as if this is the -only- money spent on these endeavors. This is one agency in one year, doing something which was unprecedented until they could manage it via Covid 'emergency' measures.
You can stick your fingers in your ears if you want, but people are going to be pissed and have every right to be -- just like you have the right to handwave it away if you so choose.
I just said ICE off the cuff, but it could just as easily have been Border Patrol or some other agency. At the end of the day, I doubt if you asked many people "Do you want your countries emergency management fund setup so they blow their budget flying in people from other countries and putting them in hotels that you can no longer utilize, more cash benefits than disaster victims that grew up paying taxes here - or would you prefer that money be spent on national emergencies?"
I think you would have a hard time finding people who say "oh please, spend that on hotels and shelters and migrant flights! Their wants come before my family and friends needs."
And before you give me some spiel about how that's a 'false dichotomy', I'll remind you that FEMA is currently saying they can't afford another storm and are being raked through the coals in how badly they are handling the current one. So it is not a hypothetical situation - they literally said that American citizens are going to have to donate their personal already-been-taxed money to make it through this.
That's 640 million that could have not been taken on TOP of the taxes from Americans, because of course people are going to pony up to save their communities.
On top of taking at least 1/4-1/3 of every paycheck, they are TELLING us that we have to fund our own rescue.
Honest question - what number IS worth quibbling about in your mind? What dollar value legitimizes scrutinizing government spending? I didn't know there was a threshold we had to meet for the concerns to be valid. By that logic if an agencies budget grows large enough, there is simply no valid criticism that can be leveled, and the budget must always go up just like the stocks!
I haven't even heard of a single account of someone successfully getting the $750 'immediate need' funded, but I have seen dozens of videos of people crying or angry that they got denied immediately without any reason. Admittedly that's selection bias, but I actively looked for people who did.
I also have yet to see a single person who things this is being handled well... and I see a lot of active duty service/reserve members very angry they can't help their friends and family while they are standby to go die for another middle east war we have no business in.
Things I learned from this thread: 1) Elon Musk bad, despite using what resources he has to help -- any help is an automatic bait and switch to monopolize the internet (lol) 2) Government spending criticism irrelevant, you have to meet a hazy threshold for the concern to be worth 'quibbling about' 3) HN Users are largely in a very bubbled social circle (online and off), and are going to be shocked when reality penetrates that bubble.
Thanks for proving my point. Even $1 would have been too much spending for any of your points.
You'll probably also complain the government isn't helping communities affected by immigration crisises while also complaining about the help being disbursed.
So there isn't a magic number? Any criticism of spending at all is the same as criticizing a single dollar?
Got it. So we mustn't criticize policies and spending vel0city agrees with. I'll add that to the rulebook to make sure no one else wonders aloud if perhaps that money could be of use right now (or used better in general).
What number would you have been good with? $5?
That $20 could have been useful. Imagine how much more money the average taxpayer would have if the government didn't spend that 0.001% of it's budget.
You'd be complaining about any amount.
Or do you think they wouldn't have complained if it was only $699M?
Just be honest and state what you really feel: the government shouldn't spend any money assisting communities with migrants other than to get them out.
Hard to say, given I just found out about this situation. I think it's higher than $20 for sure, but probably less than half than a billion. I think a more in depth analysis of the circumstances that led to the need to spend that money in the first place would be in order.
Can you tell me why I am supposed to answer your questions, but you have successfully dodged all of mine while levying personal attacks however? Seems .... a tad imbalanced, dont you think?
Go ahead vel0city, tell us what number you think the threshold is for questioning governments spending of the money they took directly out of our paychecks? You have to have one in mind at this point. How could you not? How else could you backup your claim?
EDIT: Actually I should ask - are you an American citizen? Do you have a dog in this fight? Is this money even coming out of your check? If not, it would explain why you think these budgets are beyond reproach, given that it would mean it's not your friends, family, or neighbors being effectively sacrificed, nor is it your money being spent in that case.
Supporting millions of economic migrants, apparently.
If the government started this project tomorrow I would stall it in the courts until they could prove that they did the necessary environmental reviews. Besides, privacy is a big concern and we can’t have the government use the opportunity to become Big Brother as the sole Internet provider for so many people.
We must protect freedom. Sometimes that costs the lives of children and sometimes that of adults. But freedom is important.
Environmental review for blimps?
Of course! The shadow from the blimp might impact the habitat of an endangered newt living in the now-wetland.
I mean, it might not, but you won't know until the environmental impact assessment is complete.
What goes up must come down no?
What if it crashed on a squirrel?
because the government somehow lost its ability to execute any meaningful project especially under time constraints
More like because people ignorant of issues find it easier to chirp about why everyone is stupid.
The government has agreements in place with all of the carriers to reestablish cellular communications. The first phases are around emergency communications for first responders and recovery. The next priority is restoring power to light up recoverable infrastructure.
There a plan, and the people coordinating this stuff are good at what they are doing. That doesn’t mean your uncle will be back watching Netflix - the priority is restoring basic services so that you get closer to normal quickly.
It is weird what happens when you privatize so much and then find out too late it isn’t profitable for companies to have fleets of emergency internet blimps primed and ready to go 24/7.
https://www.domusweb.it/en/sustainable-cities/gallery/2023/1...
funny cause sergey is building exactly that - private companies for the win :)
So someone who doesn’t need to make money is building blimps to revolutionize air transport and you are proposing that company is going to then halt business during storms and travel to and float over hurricane recovery areas?
yep exactly. he has stated (as the article does) that delivering humanitarian aid to disaster areas is one of the main goals
I can see either a philanthropic/vanity project or (maybe? very optimistically?) a profitable business, but not both.
Areas in need of humanitarian aid provided by airships is a too-small niche to (re-)develop entirely new flight technology.
Geeks like blimps, and they need a story, that is all that is.
also read their 1 sentence mission statement ltaresearch.com
The only mobile provider in Costa Rica was government owned, hugely profitable, subsidized internet and landlines, and was mandated to provide internet to every single citizen. In urban areas, they had to make sure every single house had mobile coverage. And courts made them comply.
Then came the US around year 2002 and forced the country to a free market, and paradise was lost. Everything is US level now (more expensive, better service is even more expensive, nothing is guaranteed, you get bombarded by advertisements, and other spam types) and the company can no longer provide universal coverage and is now operating at a loss.
Did Costa Rica get an IMF loan around that time?
There’s a reason the US has the largest economy in the world.
It’s modern colonialism.
Oh yeah.
All of the 25 000 000 000 000 dollars the US generates a year is vacuumed right out of the palm trees of the third world.
unless, you know, it's about blowing stuff up
That sounds expensive and like it'd help Americans
You're probably right, they would gate it on having an ITIN or something.
The govt is sending satellites:
> an additional 140 satellites are being shipped to assist with communications infrastructure restoration.
From:
Biden-Harris Administration Continues Whole-Of-Government Response to Hurricane Helene https://www.fema.gov/press-release/20240930/biden-harris-adm...
There would likely be 20K starlink terminals available in the are had the FCC not revoked their participation. Would probably be handy about now.
FCC did so because SpaceX was unable to provide detailed information about how they would able to ramp up capacity to support all of the extra users.
And at the time the decision was made its internet speeds were declining.
Incorrect.
They were denied because they had not yet provided coverage in the area (years before they were required to, under the contract).
As FCC's Commissioner Brendan Carr wrote:
“Instead of applying the traditional FCC standard to the record evidence, which would have compelled the agency to confirm Starlink’s $885 million award, the FCC denied it on the grounds that Starlink is not providing high-speed Internet service to all of those locations today.”
“What? FCC law does not require Starlink to provide high-speed Internet service to even a single location today. As noted above, the first FCC milestone does not kick in until the end of 2025. Indeed, the FCC did not require—and has never required—any other award winner to show that it met its service obligation years ahead of time.”
You have it exactly backwards.
These extra terminals are available because the FCC revoked their participation. If they had not, right now those terminals would be in the Midwest or other areas far from Helene.
Criminal.
Isn't it also a $300 equipment payment and shipping time to get the equipment is 2 weeks?
I've seen multiple reports that the equipment was in stock and for sale in Home Depot stores in the surrounding area.
I hope we can focus on the human kindness that Starlink is showing and ignore the political overtones. Both Trump and the current administration are creating the impression that it was their idea. Maybe Elon or Starlink thought of it first? It doesn't really matter. Let's all just do what we can to help the hurricane victims.
Yes let's make sure we avoid the bad vibes that might emerge by understanding who's doing useful things and who's not.
Let liars lie, what's the worst that could happen?
… who’s lying?
I don't have any background on this story other than what has been provided but assuming Trump is ever truthful is naive at this point. If he told me the sky was blue, I'd go out and check.
So it literally doesn't matter to you if he is lying or not, you simply want to make your opposition to him known in a thread that has basically nothing to do with him.
Way to contribute - you are going places. (nowhere I'd want to be though)
Impossible to know for sure, but, https://x.com/TheShawnHendrix (who has a very interesting story) is one of the people driving starlinks (and other things) to the affected areas and was tagging elon incessantly asking him to do this and was asking his followers to do the same.
I would hazard to guess that's how Elon found out.
Most of the comments so far about the nuts and bolts usage. The downside of talking about not expressing "political overtones" is that you did bring it up, and I honestly don't even know exactly what those "political overtones" would be anyhow as it relates to this story specifically anyhow.
The political spin is in the article.
Edit: I was referring to this article: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-he-spoke-musk-ab...
I originally thought the HN post linked to that article, but I see now it was only in a comment. Sorry!
The star link page?
This might be good for responders, but not so much the victims. But then responders will have their own networks so won't need this.
When you've been hit like this, you aren't going to use your power for this. You have bigger issues. You have to dry out your house, demolition, etc. And that's when you get power. You might not get it for weeks. And honestly, once power reaches residences, power to other services has usually been restored already.
Either this is well-meaning but ill-executed. Or meant to be seen as well-meaning, but with the realization that is almost purely gestural.
> you aren't going to use your power for this
Sure you are. If you're, say, running off a gasoline generator, unplug A from it, plug Starlink in, make phone call, unplug Starlink, plug A back in.
BTW, nearly everyone in my neighborhood has a generator because the power company fails whenever there's a storm.
If you check out the people doing this, they are bringing other things and not just starlinks, generators, fuel, dehumidifiers, etc
One of the most interesting ones is Shawn Hendrix on X: https://x.com/TheShawnHendrix
While I'm sure having internet isn't their focus, a starlink draws a trivial amount of power especially relative to a dehumidifier/fans/etc and you can only work for so many hours a day. Being able to sit around at the end of the day and watch some youtube and being able to communicate with friends and family would be the difference between an awful situation and completely untenable one, personally.
Cell service is down. Wi-Fi calling/ text/ email may be the only thing working in many cases
You do realize people have generators/solar, right? That there are dozens of videos on Youtube of people setting them up and neighbors coming over to share bandwidth so they can communicate with family?
Purely gestural? Can you be any more thoughtless?
Why is this advertising-like stuff worth of hackernews?
It's newsworthy as it shows just how quickly Elon can 'gift his tech' compared to say Apple or Amazon. Elon also did this for superchargers a few years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17990007
Oh I see. Like when he gifted Ukraine starlink, except later turning off internet access to prevent strikes on the bsf. Except later whining about costs and asking pentagon to pay for it.
Anyway I still ask: where's the "hackernews" in this "news" ?
Are you talking about when he chose not to violate US sanctions when the Ukrainian government asked him to turn Starlink on for Crimea?
ton of astroturfing going on in this comment section lol, these threads always get buried when it's advertising for anyone other than Starlink/SpaceX
How long does it take to rebuild fiber infrastructure? This is not a kindness, it is a promotion. Six months would be a kindness.
It's for disaster relief efforts, not to provide the monopolies who will be rebuilding the infrastructure a free pass.
> a free pass
It’s pronounced a run for their money, i.e. competition.
I’m not sure how disaster recovery will be over in a month, or how monopolies will become major Starlink users undetected.
The monopolies are Comcast, charter, quest etc who usually have exclusionary rights to serve high speed Internet over cable/fiber.
Free starlink is meant to be a temporary patch to aid evacuation and lifesaving efforts until the communities can be reconnected physically.
If anything, the monopolists should be paying for their customers to get free starlink until their own networks are back up.
It can be both at the same time, nothing wrong with that. Win-win is real, not everything is zero sum.
My comment has little to do with zero sum, but I’ll assume you’re trying to imply that people in rural NC are going to re-subscribe to their local ISP and keep the promotional ISP, you know, once everything is repaired.
But let’s change the story a little: Local ISP has all their infrastructure destroyed, but Comcast’s network is still online. Comcast offers a one-month-free promotion but you have to purchase several hundred dollars in equipment, so you are strongly incentivized to continue with Comcast afterwards.
In what way is this win-win?
Starlink is bearing a real cost to service these new users. Yes they could donate more, but that is literally true for every single person providing relief right now.
Wouldn't it be better if more local people were subscribed to StarLink to begin with?
People like you literally cannot be happy about anything. Good grief.
I mean, Comcast and Xfinity will probably not go down the next time this happens, right? At worse this is nice gesture that will result in a slight market correction and better outcomes for all next time.
It might be extended, it might be extended for select terminals (people who are allowing general public access?), maybe only in areas which are still down in 30 days (once we actually know that).
30 days is just an obvious number to start with and give enough time to make a reasonable assessment for better next steps.
It's a start. This is a national emergency, there are still people unaccounted for and people who don't know if their family is alive or dead.
This helps setting up internet at regional centers that weren't devastated, for contact and comms. Not for browsing Reddit, taking Zoom calls, and playing Roblox.
Really considering how little power a mini draws (30 watts) it really doesn't matter how devastated a location is. You can effectively indefinitely power it with a fairly modest battery+solar setup.
I've been solar powering my mini since I got it with some old hardware I had laying around, just to see if I could.
