partial_accumen

It depends on what you mean by robotic mowers. If you mean motors that drive the wheels and you don’t have to walk behind them (or sit on them), yes, these exist without any cloud service. However, if you mean autonomous, then I don’t think those are here yet. The non-cloud robot mowers use human held remote controls.

I can think of one that is autonomous and doesn’t require the cloud for operation, but does require the cloud for the inital setup and mapping. Once it has the map loaded in, it doesn’t need an internet connection.

That pretty well describes 1st generation robo mowers: lawn roombas.

Thankfully they’ve evolved significantly since then and are on 4th generation tech now.

Fiber wouldn’t be a one-time charge though. There’s regular ongoing maintenance needed for a fiber network.

There’s an old joke in the telecom world:

Q: If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and you could only take one thing with you, what would you take?

A: I would take a small bundle of fiber optic cable. As soon as I was on the island, I’d make a small hole in the sand and bury it. As soon as I turn my back there would be someone with a backhoe there to dig it up.

The cost of sending crew out to fix a 10 mile fiber run servicing a single household would wipe out any possible profit from that subscriber for more than 100 years. Now multiple that by how many 10 mile+ fiber runs we’d need to service all those widespread low-density rural customers.

Give them internet via a geo stationary satellite.

We have that already. Its comparatively very expensive, and also very very high latency simply because for the speed-of-light. The satellite at GEO sits at 20k kilometers. That by itself introduces 250ms of latency each way. So a 500ms latency is not uncommon for GEO satellite internet. Also, GEO satellites are very expensive because of how much energy (deltaV) it takes to get the satellite out that far and for how long they have to operate to make that money back.

First, Musk is a nazi-saluting asshole. Now that we have that established, this article is mostly rage-bait with selective truths on the Starlink service. I’m all for calling out bad behavior a company (and there is a little bit here, but not much regarding the customer billing concerns). This (mostly) rage-bait article is (mostly) distracting focus from the very important problem with Starlink regarding Musk’s influence on the government entities that are supposed to protect us from oligarchs. Not only does this include the FCC, but the SEC that let musk bend and break rules to IPO the SpaceX stock enriching himself at the cost of the American people

The narrative of the article is “Starlink has massive hidden fees! Look $1500 charge! Look $500 charge! Look $1000 charge!”

There’s three different reasonable explanations for the situations all three these.

1. $1500 charge - it was a billing software bug, not a policy change, and Starlink reversed the charges costing the subscriber nothing. Yes, I agree customer service could be better and faster.

2. $500 charge - Subscriber was trying to skirt the rules to save themselves money by subscribing to the [long term plan] for [short term] use. When a subscriber signs up for [long term plan] the extra charge is clearly shown before the service is subscribed to. Yes, the fee is there, but its not hidden. Yes the fee is high, but the prior version of how subscription works meant that the customer would simply be told “we’re at capacity for your area, no service for you at all”. Instead if service is that important for a user they can choose to pay the fee. Yes, there should be an extra warning when someone is changing their address for [long term plan] but this should be a minor edge case and the poster would not have even run into an issue if they had been subscribing to the appropriate [short term plan].

3. $1000 charge notice - See detail from the $500 charge explanation why this particular $1000 charge notice exists. The alternative is a possibly customer would just be told to go away with no recourse when they may desperately need the service even with the high priced fee. The fee was clearly labeled before purchase and the customer chose not to go forward, which is entirely their right if they don’t see the value.

Don’t be distracted by the rage-bait from the important concerns of Musk’s government influence.

You need to make sure you always use the “+consent” flag. Never move forward without it.