this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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"$2.14 billion for a local company?! why don't we just have a foreign billionaire do it for $2.09 billion and then another $1 billion when he fucks it up?"
It's an easy reaction to have when you only read the headline. But if you do the math, Starlink already provides service to most of the north at less than $200/mo per person. There are less than 120k people in the northern territories. That 2.2bn works out to something like 85 years of Starlink service per person in the north (assuming everyone there needs an individual dish, which isn't the case). Myself and a couple of other commentors have done some looking into Telesat as a company and they launched one (1) LEO "test sat" in 2018 and haven't done a fucking thing since to get northern people online in a timely fashion.
If you actually talk to people who live in the north most of them who can afford to already have Starlink, because it works far better than Xplore which was the only option previously, for many years. Most northern mining, logging, and oil camps are also getting their workers online with Starlink and have been for a few years already.
I've not a fan of Elon, or the canadian libs, or the conservative party. But this whole discussion is kinda bullshit. As far as I'm concerned Elon Musk is guillotine lube, top of the list. The day after he is beheaded, Starlink as a company will continue operating. Which, frankly, is best-case scenario. idk what else to say about that.
I think you calculated 85 months, not years, which are almost exactly 7 years.
Yeah caught that. Appropriately apologetic for even trying to use a calculator. I'm a HS dropout, what can I say π
Thanks for fact-checking.
I think Starlink is stealing our sky and every C- level in the company should be shot and their holdings seized and sold to fund running fiber cables or whatever to rural communities.
I believe this to be a fair and equitable compromise between our positions, hbu?
You may want to double-check that math ;)
Yeah caught that. Appropriately apologetic for even trying to use a calculator. I'm a HS dropout, what can I say π
Thanks for fact-checking.
Have we learned nothing about putting all our dependence on foreign mega corps? Spending more to build up local talent is a good thing.
I'm with you on that. I really am. However I'm also for people in the north getting online effectively before another decades passes. The government (and that's not just the libs) have been promising this shit since the early oughts, and throwing money at it that seldom seems to do any good.