[bigbadfeline]

> I guess if you buy an entire house without checking

We aren't talking about people buying hoses now, these fees weren't there before, so it becomes a typical bait and switch. "Congestion charge" means the starlink network lacks sufficient capacity to accommodate the areas that need it the most and where it was advertised the most.

https://tech.yahoo.com/transportation/articles/elon-musk-cha...

Jul 5, 2026The congestion charge was quietly added back in 2024, starting out as a one-time $100 fee, depending on location. By June 2025, that number grew to up to $1,000 in parts of the country, as PCMag reported at the time. As of last month, surcharges can hit $1,500.

[wat10000]

They're not applying these retroactively. (They did so in the reddit link above, but that was a mistake that they fixed.) The only way you'd have this problem is if you check before you buy, see that it's not there, buy the place, then move in and find out that a surcharge was added in the meantime. That would suck, but I suppose it's a risk you run if you don't lock in your deal ahead of time, and you choose to move somewhere with only one good provider.

[r3trohack3r]

> Under Carr's leadership, Musk's rocket company has effectively been given carte blanche in its efforts to roll out its orbital Starlink broadband service to more Americans

This article is profoundly disturbing. The audacity to think the government has _allowed_ people to voluntarily purchase Internet service from a provider capable of servicing their geography. As if this is an assumption to be broken!

I’m sure glad my government has given me permission to purchase goods and services!

[vel0city]

What's the alternative? That anyone should just be able to be free to launch whatever into space or build whatever towers and have it blast whatever RF emissions it wants whenever and however? Sounds like a quick way to make the bands entirely unusable.

I'll go ahead and start a wireless home internet service. I'll just set my transmitters to 1575MHz, that'll be fine, its nice and quiet.

[r3trohack3r]

Except that’s not the argument being made or the problem being presented. The FCC does exactly what you asked by namesake, regulate communications.

> That's despite concerns over thousands or even millions of satellites cluttering our planet's already extremely busy orbit and the environmentally damaging rocket launches that send them up.

The article seems to be arguing that the FCC, whose namesake is exactly what you described, should be doing the namesake of the EPA and the FAA in an attempt to stop Starlink from creating a constellation.