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Comment by kevincox | Hacker News Reader

There are rumors that if Google was an ISP they would be the largest ISP in the world. I guess this makes Google an ISP. Unfortunately I doubt that we will see any evidence of their total network capacity.

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They were dabbling a bit with Project Loon and Google Fiber. A Starlink partnership gives them more reach with less capital. Not sure I would see enough value from shaving a few ms off an already long round trip to space and back to really move workloads to GCP just for one ISP.

Starlink will be great for underserved rural areas but just the difference between WiFi and a wired connection in my house makes me think terrestrial wired last mile distribution isn't going anywhere.

So I have a use case that makes it interesting vs. my current cable provider even when I have the business level service. The power goes out here, either from winds, fires or PG&E shutoffs. Okay cool, have generator, solar, etc. Internet still goes down after a bit and stays down until power comes back because the cable providers node does not have enough power to deal with 18 hours of no power. With Starlink, I am going to be good. I am in SV so it is not like I am on a farm in the midwest someplace.

Yeah I had this thought after posting my previous comment. I have cable and DSL now in the suburbs of Los Angeles because the cable is so flakey - switching to Starlink may be a good alternative to the maxed out 75Mbps DSL line as a backup.

They also run Fi, which is definitely a sort of ISP

Isn't that just an MVNO on top of T-Mobile? How much of the actual network do they run?

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