Why. It’s not like it’s in a remote location.
Elon Musk has lost a lot of money by palling around with Donald Trump.
My guess is that the high-profile “Donald Trump does a public pitch for Tesla cars on the White House lawn and says that he’s buying one” and probably now “the White House is publicly getting Starlink” is Trump’s way of trying to provide a favor to someone he sees as friendly, to help promote Musk’s products.
EDIT: He might have more luck with Starlink than Tesla cars. Rural areas, which vote more Republican, probably have less use for EVs than do urban ones…but the reverse is probably true for satellite Internet service.
EDIT2: On a related note, I would guess that it would also be cheaper for the US to subsidize rural satellite Internet service than rural wired Internet service.
In Washington, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation is receiving a $19.1 million grant to connect 165 people, six businesses and 20 farms across the Colville Reservation in Okanogan County.
$20 million to get wired Internet to 165 people is probably quite a bit more than it would cost to subsidize Starlink service, for example. Most of the costs are already paid to get satellites up there. At that point, adding more users in unsaturated cells is pretty cheap.
I’d give reasonable odds that if Musk were poking at that instead of mass layoffs of federal workers, he could probably simultaneously make money for himself, actually eliminate waste in the federal government, and get faster rollout of rural Internet service.
My work is installing it in case we lose internet
Hotline Moscow. Cooooool.
with the firehose of fiber installed there, why the fuck would this trickle of internet freakin matter. why would anyone choose to use it??
ohhh right… putin needs a back door into the country he bought.
Or alternatively Musk or one of his fascist fuck boys managed to somehow break the fiber connection either intentionally or accidentally. I wouldn’t be surprised if Musk went out of his way to destroy it because “it doesn’t look like the future” or something equally asinine.
There’s not even a good excuse for this lmao
It’s great for letting Russian agents spy on White House internet traffic
The call is coming from inside the house, they don’t need to spy anymore
Sure there is. Traffic they don’t want going through the official network will go through this now.
Ffs, you’re right.
There are 2 great uses for starlink.
- Your DR replacement ISP
- Remote locations with no other options.
Other than that, throw Starlink in the trash.
- Unmonitored back channel to kremlin for orders.
Lol
