Keith Whyte @keith@tic-ac.org

The #surveillance #advertising industry is dominated by a handful of companies including Google, Meta, and Amazon, which together control nearly three-quarters of the global digital advertising market.

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/how-capitalism-not-a-few-bad-actors-destroyed-the-internet/

The dismal outcome of this #journalism crisis, writes Victor Pickard, is “a lack of public access to high-quality information, a loss of diverse voices and viewpoints, and the evisceration of public service journalism.”

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/how-capitalism-not-a-few-bad-actors-destroyed-the-internet/

Concerns about #starlink

3) Resource extraction.

The internet is a colonialist tool, like roads that are built into jungles to extract precious minerals, the info superhighway does the same, while you might expect here one would say "for personal data", actually we can just focus on the simple hard-earned MXN $1100/month transferred to USD via SpaceX.

Is this any worse that paying the local WISP that pays #Telmex or #Totalplay for their uplink?

My knowledge of economics of this is limited.

Concerns about #starlink

2) USA centralised infrastructure.

We build community networks, for community communication.

Starlinks Downlink/Uplink ratio is huge. That is to be expected, the network is designed primarily for beaming the likes of Netflix and "social media" into hearts and souls.

Still, we can ignore that and route SIP/RTP over it, and reach community services running on our servers, albeit only by routing our data through #SpaceX teleports.

Concerns about #starlink

1) Yet another complex dependency about which we know very little.

Will it last?
What happens if there's a massive crash in space?
How will performance be as the number of terrestrial antennas increases?

What about the environmental, scientific and political issues of the implementation of starlink, and supporting the #mars colony project. As often, not for me to say, but once again in this work, there is the task of facilitating the making of an informed decision.

Yesterday I did some very "manual" tests of VoIP call quality with #starlink. Works 100%.

So, for the moment, it would seem like the perfect solution to remote communications. For #Rhizomatica/TIC this has been a major block for years. We have been unable to install local #2G #telephony service in quite some number of communities, due to being unable to provide reliable backhaul.

However, I do have some concerns about it.

Well, there's really not much to say about #starlink.

You take it out of the box, place the dish on the roof, plug it in. It takes a few minutes to find itself, align the dish and then it just works.

You do not strictly need the #Android app (I don't have a device that would run it) to get connected , although I suppose it might help on a site with many obstructions.

#LEO latency is, as advertised, low, RTT to space and back is ~40ms. Even when loaded up it's not that bad.