Happy With Elon

The chief concern about Elon Musk’s various enterprises isn’t that they have made him rich and will make him richer, but that what he puts out is becoming so good that he could one day hold us victims to monopoly pricing and then slack off.

I don’t say that entirely tongue-in-cheek. It could happen.

It’s tempting to say it happened before, with Microsoft Corporation, but I stay my hand because Microsoft was never much good. It did achieve a kind of monopoly, but its products have become so bad that the company has just had to extend its support for an old version of Windows for yet another year, so great is the customer hatred of its latest product.

Microsoft sucks. SpaceX doesn’t.

(If you’re still running Microsoft anything, you really do need to look at a Linux distribution. It is difficult neither to install nor use and hasn’t been for years. There are many, many different flavors — “distributions” in the trade — though I think the smartest play is to go directly to Debian, because it is reliable and we cannot know which of the others are. We’ve been disappointed before.)

Microsoft managed to cook up its monopoly by strong-arming computer makers, which was a lot easier (one supposes; Microsoft has never tried it) than producing a great product. That’s where the comparison to Musk and his projects falls apart. He’s responsible for the best electric cars in the world. Also the best and most reliable — once they’re tested — rockets. I can testify that he has built the best internet distribution system, with second place being so far behind it’s over the horizon. (About which more in a minute.)

I must digress a little. Every day we see the cranky, decrepit senator from Vermont attacking Musk for having money. The senator has yapping uneducated socialist and communist puppies scurrying around his creaky old feet. If Bernie Sanders has produced anything, it’s a daily bowel movement, and judging from his attitude, he doesn’t do even that as regularly as he’d like. Sanders would have hated Thomas Edison, too, for having made the world better and for having grown rich doing it. Besides, Edison’s electric light took away what would have been a potential market for the artisanal methane Sanders produces. (Don’t worry — Sanders is a millionaire. He just hates you if you are, too.)

The senatorial whining is enhanced by that of amateur genealogist Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, whose accuracy record in genealogy and other fields makes us tremble for those unfortunate enough to have been her students. She, too, believes that money isn’t earned. (Yes, she, too, is a millionaire and yes, she, too, did nothing useful to get it.)

But Musk seems unconcerned with New England parasites. He’s too busy making new stuff. (Also, providing communications free of cost to disaster areas.)

Most businesses seeking a fuel supply for their fleet of rockets at their “space city” Starbase, would have complained to and made demands of local governments that a supply system be built for it. Musk’s company SpaceX is building it’s own eight-mile natural gas pipeline instead. “Starpipe,” as he calls it, will allow for perhaps hundreds of launches per year. (You know — what NASA said the space shuttle would do. But NASA has never had to make a profit, or, really, succeeded at much of anything in the last 50 years.)

Lately, it’s come dribbling out that Musk plans something even cooler: satellite telephones for all!

Nothing has been announced, but officials did discuss it in the lead up to last month’s SpaceX initial public offering. It makes sense, and it seems to be an obvious step. The talk is growing, and if I were to bet, it would be (though not much — I’m not as rich as a geriatric senator) that Mush will do it. SpaceX has bought a lot of cellular bandwidth. The company already has a limited satellite phone agreement with T-Mobile. It doesn’t provide voice service, but it does allow text messages and location services from nearly anywhere in the world, making it especially useful in emergencies. It costs $10 per month on top of one’s regular cellular subscription. And you don’t need even to be a T-Mobile subscriber to get it!

My phone service is the $15-per-month T-Mobile spinoff Mint Mobile subscription, and one day recently in a part of the county that has no cellular service at all I glimpsed a tiny satellite icon on my Pixel 6a phone (which isn’t supposed to be equipped for satellite service). It wasn’t there for long and hasn’t to my knowledge come back since, but the icon was there for a reason, and it came on for a reason.

The T-Mobile partnership tells us that Musk’s swarm of 10,000 satellites, with many more enroute, can communicate with ordinary cellular telephones, no additional hardware required. Does anyone think that having come this far, they will stop with a dinky texting service, offered by one carrier? I think satellite voice phoning is coming and it’s probably coming soon. This means you will be able to make phone calls pretty much anywhere in the world, without need of a strange satellite phone (or a nearby cell tower). I’ve seen a lot of science fiction come to life, so I shouldn’t be surprised by anything, but this blows me away.

As noted repeatedly, I’ve been using Starlink home satellite service for several months now and am entirely satisfied with it. There was a time, last week, lasting a few minutes, when I lost service. This does not worry me in the slightest — it happened during thunderstorms so severe that it rained more than 5 inches in a single hour. And the loss of signal was a lot shorter than the storm was.

I’m sufficiently confident in Starlink that I get my telephone, internet, and television all over Starlink. My home phones are now extensions of my $15 cellular subscription, via a gadget called “Cell2Jack.” I do not deal with the phone company at all.

Nor is there cellular service here. I make and receive my cellular calls at home over Starlink, too.

But wait — there’s more. While television service via Starlink has been more than adequate, this week I improved upon it. The company offers the ability to create a mesh network by chaining multiple Starlink routers together. Unlike the wireless access points available to many wifi systems, mesh networks extend the range of a wifi system seamlessly, no handoff from one to another requiring you to log on to a new network.

So I sprang $60 for the Starlink Mini mesh router — I wanted to see if I could make the signal reaching my televisions even stronger.

I was surprised at the result.

The tiny router arrived and within a couple minutes I had it plugged in. The only cable needed was the line from the wall wart power supply. Then I fired up the Starlink app and within five minutes had the new router — now in service as a “mesh node” — running. The signal to my living room television had almost doubled. That was all it took.

One of the reasons the project lured me in was that my home-made televisions are actually tiny Raspberry Pi 5 computers, with the big television screen acting only as a monitor and audio switcher. While the Pi has built-in wifi, its antenna is dismal. Having a router closer than the 30 feet it is from the main router might, I thought, overcome the deficient antenna. It did.

It didn’t stop there. The little router has ethernet sockets to connect it by cable to other devices. There’s one socket in and one out. What if I used an ethernet patch cord — cat 5e or better; I used cat 6 — to connect the Mini router to the Pi, circumventing its antenna entirely?

I conducted speed tests. Before, just using wifi with the Mini in the middle, I got great speed. But by using the cable instead of the Raspberry’s built-in antenna my internet speed more than doubled. And this is with 30 feet of the two routers talking to each other wirelessly.

Now my wifi extends far into the yard, too (though that has nothing to do with my hardwiring the router to the Raspberry). It all required no technical skill at all beyond my having read that I should use a cable that is better than ordinary cat 5. (The cable announces what it is in printing on its outside.)

The result is the highest quality internet television reception I’ve ever enjoyed.

I should be delighted, and I am. But, as mentioned far above I am also slightly uneasy.

I’ve consigned a lot of my life to the benevolence of Elon Musk. The product I get from him is so good that I can’t imagine anyone who has tried it getting something else. There are copycats — the anything-but-benevolent Amazon is trying to do the satellite thing, too, for instance. (Amazon’s owner, Jeff Bezos, it trying also to take on Musk’s SpaceX. In both endeavors SpaceX is far ahead.)

I hope that the copycats do well enough to stay in business and be competitive. That’s because if it comes to pass that Musk owns the field, he’ll be able to charge anything he wants, and we’ll pay it. That’s not desirable.

And it could happen. It has happened before. When it has, once the company has achieved a monopoly, it no longer has to deliver good products because the competitive pressure will be gone. I turn again to Microsoft as an example (though, again, its stuff wasn’t all that good to begin with). By going public, Musk has turned control of his enterprise to a board of directors who do not care about you beyond what money they can collect from you. That’s not necessarily at cross purposes with value for money, but it could be. It’s why the company having competition is good.

It’s worth keeping an eye on.

In the meantime, if Elon Musk gets a few cents of the price I pay each month to Starlink, that’s fine with me. As far as I’m concerned, he earned it.