Welcome! The Future of rural Internet plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

Welcome!

Craig discusses Elon Musk's Starlink Satellite Project and the future of rural internet 

For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] If you are tired of these crazy cable bills, we've got a couple of articles that are going to talk about right now. we're going to start with one on our friend Elon Musk, who's going to save you a lot of money, at least by the looks of it.

Hey, welcome. This is Craig Peterson, of course. Thanks for listening to me and visiting me online at craigpeterson.com. You probably saw my newsletter last week. We had a great little note. From one of our listeners, he, his name is Dick and he was trying to figure out a couple of things. We had a few more this week and I had a great little conversation as well another listener, he has some really cool old cars, and he was lamenting the demise of the Buick Roadmaster. You might remember that car and that whole generation. And we kinda got back and forth talking about my 1980 Mercedes that I drive. That's actually my daily driver, believe it or not, and it's got more than 200,000 miles on. It needs a little bit more work. I'm not going to restore it. He was suggesting, he watches, not Pawn Stars, American pickers, which I really enjoy as well. Having a car that's in original shape has some real value to it.

Of course, in this case, it's in the Northeast and although it's spent its initial part of its life down South, quite a ways, still on the coast, it has a lot of rust. So I'm not going to really try and restore it to that sort of a condition.  I'm trying to bring it up to make it look really nice. Needs a new paint job, but it's got some unseen rust.

We fixed the major stuff like in the rocker panels, but it's just so much fun. I love driving these old cars. It just handles so well drive so well gets good fuel mileage, nothing like diesel for that. For longevity. In fact, this generation of the car that engine in it is known to go for a million miles before it even needs a rebuild. It's just absolutely incredible. Yeah, we'll see where that goes. It was fun chatting with him about that. So I'm like a shout out to you.

So let's get into this whole thing. Elon Musk, we're talking about cars, right? Is that what you think of when you think of Elon Musk? Do you think of a, one of the world's richest men?

Do you think about somebody that is just, maybe yeah, a little too caffeinated or too much red bull or something? You've seen the guy, And he's into almost everything. You've got the Tesla cars. He also has a solar company where they'll put solar tiles.  on your roof now as well as regular solar panels.

He'll also sell you if you want it a trip up into space. He ran Bob and Doug astronauts up into space. The first time ever we had a commercial endeavor, take us, astronauts, up. I thought that was really cool. I totally watched that. I was in Kentucky at the time, but it was very cool. He's been doing a lot of neat things. A boring company, which has been contracted to put in a tunnel out there in Vegas. They've been trying to get, tunnel a high-speed tunnel. We're talking. More than a hundred miles an hour, closer to 200. They've been trying to put in a tunnel, going from Vegas to Los Angeles as well. And they tried to get one going up the interior, California, basically uproot five LA up to Fresno, or maybe all the way up.

To the San Francisco area. He is amazing. He's been driving this stuff. He's got his huge battery plant. He's moving some of this stuff out of California. Hopefully, he's not bringing a single Californian in with him. Don't poluteTexas or some of these other great States, by bringing in these Californians.

As you might know, I lived there for a decade and my wife was born and raised there and we managed to escape, which is, I think, a testament to her ability to recognize idiocy all around her in California. It's really changed over the years.

 But he has another endeavor that you might not have heard of. Part of what he does, of course, is he launches satellites into space, not just our spaceman. and eventually women as well. I'm sure there's a lot of amazing women that are in the space program, but as SpaceX is preparing to launch Starlink. The big question is how well will it work in the real world.

Now, if you've been on a WebEx call, for instance, lately, a WebEx team interaction, you might've noticed, sometimes some people have very slow connections. You might have noticed even on the telephone, like when I'm talking to certain people on the radio, the delay between me stopping saying something and the host responding can be a couple of seconds, and then it gets very annoying. That's called round trip time, just keeping all those stuff simple and knowing what the round trip time is between you and somebody else is really going to help you determine whether or not you can use the phone. These internet-connected phones, which by the way, if you have a cell phone nowadays, most of them actually make calls over the internet when you're at home. Or if you're connected to wifi over at a coffee shop or something, I've got T-Mobile and it is always trying to use wifi and I get really great connectivity.

But if you have a lot of jitter, it's a problem for gamers. It's a problem with telephones. It's a problem for video conferences and the longest phone calls. Is it certainly, isn't what it used to be. Yeah. Where are you call up the long-distance operator and they try and connect you across the country and you're constantly being dropped and losing it? Heaven forbid you try to go over the pond. So when we're talking about these low earth satellites, we're talking about a much different type of connection. Historically, all of our connections have gone over landlines are undersea cables and they've been. scratchy and it gets worse.

The further that call is being made, and then they switched to digital. The phone company had digital technology long before CDs came out. These remember CDs. Yeah. Where you buy a CD, you can listen to music. So the phone company was using CDs for that type of technology, not CDs, but digital audio for a very long time.

And it was a huge advantage for them. It still is because now instead of having to have all these switches with the bucket switches, these round switches. I don't know if you ever were in a central office, but it was loud in there. It was really cool.

 Instead of all, in that it was all done on computers and computers just transferred your data around. So from your phone to the phone, on the other side, there were no amplifiers that were causing problems with your signal. There were no bad lines that had a bad connection on them and really could have had some contacts clean. none of that stuff. It's just nice and clear on both sides. In fact, it's so clear that the phone company started introducing a little bit of hiss, a little bit of noise. So people did not think that they got disconnected. That's how good it is.

That is the technology of today. There was also a microwave in the middle of there. They'd use that for a long haul. There's still a lot of microwave antennas up. You might remember MCI. I used that for quite a while. They had their own little network and anyways, nowadays we are using all kinds of data lines.  In some cases, if you have a satellite phone, you are actually talking through a satellite and these satellite phones can be great almost anywhere in the world.

But what we're talking about with Elon Musk's Starlink is actually something. Different than that. These are a completely different breed of satellite in a completely different orbit than almost all other satellites that are out there and they're going to provide us with a completely different experience.

And you can be a big winner with all of this that's going on. So I'm going to tell you how you can win this. Okay. Why you might want to get involved if you're in the Northern part of the United States. Elon wants you. So when we get back, that's exactly. What we're going to talk about.

What is SpaceX satellite, internet doing? What's it going to do? Then we're going to get this slightly geeky or talking about a new NSA and FBI warning.

You're listening to Craig Peterson. Thanks for being with me.

We'll be right back, stick around.

Of course, you can find me online. Craig peterson.com.

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