To become an ISP in an area that requires underground utilities you need a good stash of money, as it will take at least two years from start of negotiations with the city to providing service to your first customer. Call this about $2,000/customer passed for bridge funding. You also need to be able to spread your investment out over ~10 years to make good use of resources.

That comes to about $2MM cash in order to serve your first 500 customers with 50% penetration, plus access to about $4-6MM in financing after your network is operational.

Above ground utilities are much easier, as there is only about a 6-month lead time for stringing a new cable. $2MM should be able to get you a build-out that can serve 2,000 customers with much lower risks, and no need for financing unless you really want to grow from there.

But in the end, you really need something that gives you an edge in the market, especially something that the incumbents cannot replicate quickly.

Not sure why I am feeding a troll here, but your arguments are akin to "let them eat cake." Things that consume time for no real value are a tax; Internet service helps you avoid that tax so you can spend your time doing things that are economically, socially, or emotionally productive.

The energy solution is fairly straightforward: focus on diverse sources of energy at the local scale. Electricity, natural gas, solar, wind, and in a pinch diesel can all be used for the same purpose, and you can "load balance" between them.

Unfortunately, at the residential ISP level it is much more cost conscious. You can easily have a land-line solution and mobile, or even multiple mobile solutions, but it is much like using the diesel as a backup for home electricity-- good in a pinch, but expensive. Having multiple land-line services just adds cost since they are not billed on a usage basis. Maybe if two networks each offered only 99.5% availability it would make sense, if costs were sufficiently low.

Google's investment is actually fairly small , especially if their network is transformative. At $600 for the wiring per house passed, 50% penetration, $500/subscriber in NRC, and a $50/month service charge you get a 14-15% 5-year rate of return. Add an extra $10/month to cover legal fees and it is a pretty solid investment. If you drop penetration to 25% though it is hard to make it work for less than $80/month, which is really why there is limited competition.

They are a product before their time, but there are other good reasons to go with this type of setup. Most of them come down to the complexity of dimming control.
-Daylight Harvesting: dim lights by the window while allowing lights further away to be brighter.
-Night lighting scenarios: ever want to just have the light by the toilet be dimly lit so you don't wake the wife when you pee in the middle of the night?
-Coordinated Scenes: while a Lutron Grafik Eye (or similar products) can provide scene control for a room, they were never designed for scenes across rooms.
-Demand Response control.
-Color moods. Harder sell for most, but colder color temperatures at night with the TV on, and warmer in the morning. More reds on a cloudy day or for dark adaptation, blues for less detail.

Personally, I prefer Insteon over Hue, but when you want individual lamp control Insteon gets very clunky. Hard wiring controls is tricky as well, especially when lights may only be 2-5W, and the controls don't work as reliably at low power.

My big problem with everything on the market now is that there is a good chance it will be obsolete within 5 years, and hard wiring things gets impossible.

Regarding privacy... I was downmodded on another thread for stating the obvious, but it is the Pilot's union that does not want longer cockpit voice recordings. The logic is reasonable enough; two hours before an accident should be sufficient to give adequate information for crash investigators. The issue here is that it isn't an accident, it really should be a criminal investigation into the activity in the cockpit.

An airline pilot is a professional, and they don't want to work in an environment where every conversation can be analyzed later, independent of the outcomes.

Efficacy... "it's just metadata." The same reasons we dislike the NSA dragnet is the reason why it is a bad idea for every detail to be recorded and stored indefinitely.

Air transportation is traditionally extremely safe. A very substantial amount of money is put into it to get this outcome. The issue with trying to make marginal improvements is that the return on investment is extremely low.

And back to cost, at $2/message, a message broadcast every 60 seconds on a 6-hour flight with 300 passengers is a premium of $24 per passenger. That would roughly cover position, heading, altitude, and any alarms only. If you wanted to add voice data you are likely looking at something in the range of $60 more per passenger for the flight.

What was needed here was a detachable ELT that activates on impact/submersion and floats on the surface. The logistics of making this sufficiently robust are non trivial, but it would be substantially cheaper than 10 flights with real-time voice streaming from the cockpit, and provide substantially more useful information.

Money, privacy, and efficacy. An Inmarsat message apparently costs $2-3 for the equivalent of a tweet. Recording every word said will likely prevent much from being said, which could reduce CRM. Sending all this data to the cloud for what purpose exactly? So that one CVR every 10-20 years that isn't recovered can be addressed?

More can be done, but it isn't as easy as just "putting it in the cloud."

You still have to flair on touchdown; gliding level into the ocean (slight nose-down attitude) is messy. The tail needs to touch first.

SATCOM is not ACARS. SATCOM is used for more than ACARS, and ACARS doesn't just use SATCOM for uplink.

Unions and privacy concerns.

The CVR only records for an hour or two of audio. In all probability, nobody in the cockpit was making noise the last two hours. The FDR would have the whole flight, and will likely show the cause of the crash being fuel exhaustion.

As best I can tell, there is nearly zero chance that there was a fire that turned off ACARS message transmission, then caused corruption in the flight management computer to add several waypoints off the programmed course, then slowly proceeded to short out the transponder 5 minutes later, then caused the VHF radio to stop working immediately after handoff from Malaysian ATC, all the while not impacting the ability for controlled flight of the plane.

Unfortunately, the bat-shit scary truth of the matter appears to be that the pilot decided to kill himself and everybody else on the plane, and there really isn't much that passengers or other flight crew can do to prevent the outcome.

Quite honestly, in the current market the pay gap (in my industry) between a 45 year old and a 28 year old is as small as it ever has been. Similar small gap between a 23 year old and a 28 year old. The challenge in a few years is that there really isn't much in the cards except cost of living adjustments because the value provided doesn't improve as much over time.

Digital or analog? I doubt analog is protected, but looking at Walmart's website the only one under offer that looks like a Fluke... is a Fluke. The SparkFun unit looks like a Fluke.

Actually they are a grey faceplate with an orange or red border. Fluke equipment is easily identifiable with the yellow/grey. I always wondered why some of the other color schemes were out there.

My only issue with things like this is small production runs. Is 2k units small? Seems borderline to me. For $30k should they have thought about it? I would think at least on a cursory basis, which should have made someone say "nice, it looks like a Fluke."

NOW, if they made it red with white lettering like their retail boxes and got in trouble I would be completely sympathetic. Or, if they infringed on a less dominant player's trademark in any form it could be easily excused.

The link is not (just) for engine monitoring. The ACAMS module can be controlled from the cockpit, and was supposedly shut off ~10 minutes before the transponder.

Presumably the satellite transmitter is powered from a DC bus somewhere that has battery backup. If the only thing running is a few strobes and the transmitter pinging periodically then the battery should last a long time...

The problem with my theory is that a high-g (crash) landing should activate the ELT. Not sure if there is a way to disable that, but I would think it is impossible based on the Ethiopian 787 fire last year.

Great explanation.

It sounds more like like the fuselage floating with battery power available for 4 hours, but time will tell on that one.