Steph Debour

I did the math on Starlink vs AT&T Fiber because I couldn't help myself. Almost the same number of customers, 13.6M vs 13.31M. Same bill, about $70 a month. Starlink built its network for about $1,070 per customer. AT&T spent about $4,200 digging trenches. But satellites burn up after about 5 years, and fiber just sits in the ground for 30. So Starlink spends about $17.80 a month per customer replacing satellites, while AT&T pays about $11.70. Cheap Starship launches could flip that math. My money's on the sky.

Huge milestone for Robotaxi. Robotaxi runs 24/7 in any city is has been launched. Also means Tesla is getting more confident with safety.

Starlink roundup Starlink's US growth is moving to cities. Ookla's says urban speed test users is up 73% year over year vs 33% rural. It grew faster in every state except Alaska and Hawaii. Uploads jumped 14.63 to 20.73 Mbps, up in all states. Download rose 12% to 119.71 Mbps but fell in 16 states plus DC. Busy markets like Texas and Florida are among the slowest. About 9 in 10 new users came from cable, DSL, or fixed wireless, not fiber. Also today: Starlink mini 2: swappable battery good for up to 4.5 hrs, wifi 6, invite only US preorders at US$999 with a year of roam. Sweden's norrtag is putting starlink on its whole train fleet in 2027, tests showed 58-78% more capacity alongside telia and telenor. The pentagon's SDA gave Spacex a US$9.92M study contract for a starlink based laser terminal. Friday: Starship flight 15 with 26 V3 starlinks at 5:45 PM Montreal time, and amazon leo's first vulcan launch the same day.

4 in 5 Canadian businesses still don't use AI to make their goods or deliver their services. And that's after it tripled in two years, from 6.1% in Q2 2024 to 19.2% in Q2 2026. Not surprised, to be honest. I still only have access to Copilot at work. Budget 2026 plans to help AI firms get access to 500 MW of compute. What would help me more, is my employer letting me use more than Copilot.

9 in 10 new Starlink subs came from DSL, cable or fixed wireless, so fiber is really a differentiator in the market.

Imagine staring at video all shift, hunting for stray bits like metal shavings left inside rocket parts. I'd miss things too. SpaceX says Grok now does it at 99.9% accuracy. Insane. Human inspectors watching the same video are about 94%. That's roughly 1 miss in 1000 vs 6 in 100. Perfect kind of job for AI.

Starlink roundup flydubai is putting free Starlink Wi-Fi on its 737s, about 50 of its ~100 planes by end of 2026 and the rest after that. that's actually behind, the original plan was 100 planes this year other Starlink stuff today: Frontier opened First Class bookings for flights from Mar 5 2027, Starlink Wi-Fi going in plane by plane through 2027 (no word on whether it's free) BT says its UK Starlink service is ready but it's waiting a few months for the Ukraine noise to die down FCC accepted SpaceX's 800 MHz deal with Grain for review, which is not approval yet, comments due Dec 1 Direct to Cell test in NZ got 2 stock LTE modules online at ~2.2 Mbps down Starship Flight 15 is targeted for Nov 13 with 26 V3 Starlinks on board, if it gets the OK would free Starlink Wi-Fi make you pick an airline over a cheaper fare?

As long as I have Grok Bot or similar AI assistant, I'm never paying a financial advisor again. Kind of sad. I had a great relationship with mine, and I'll miss her checking whether I actually did what she recommended. Grok bot reminders and notifications should should cover that. Here is my set up, 5 bots:

Starlink Mini 2 has a swappable battery, 4.5 hours a charge, and gets online in 60 seconds. The first Mini still needed a power source. This one's basically a satellite hotspot you just toss in your bag. xitter.twitterapi.xyz/Starlink/status/212020…

Not sure what to think about this one. BT, the UK's biggest phone and internet company, says its Starlink home internet is ready. The hold up is Starlink's bad press over the Ukraine outages. Their CEO told Financial Times they'll launch 'when we feel the noise has died down a little bit on Elon Musk and Starlink". It's for rural homes BT's fibre doesn't reach. Promised for the second half of 2026, now"in the coming months". I guess a few more months isn't a big deal.

I've been wondering how Optimus would ever learn enough jobs. This might be how: Nvidia's new robot model learned mostly by watching videos of people. Only about 5% of its training was real robot data. Show it a new task five times and it gets it right 95% of the time, after 30 minutes of extra training on one gaming graphics card. Tesla made the same bet with Optimus last year, swapping remote control for filming workers. One of its engineers: "teleop does not scale! But turns out human video does!" They just need to watch us now.

Starlink roundup Biggest one: Starlink's demand-based pricing went nationwide in the US and is showing up in Canada. Residential prices can now move up to 20% either way depending on how busy your local beam is. Max at +20% is US$156 a month, US$312 more a year, starting with the first bill on or after Nov 30. Portland, Spokane and Lafayette show +20% and Toronto +10%, while new customers in Boston, SF and NYC are offered 30% to 50% off. So the same dish can cost very different amounts depending on how many of your neighbours have one. Also this week: Brussels Airlines flew its first Starlink flight today, Brussels to Copenhagen. 15 planes by mid-2027, part of Lufthansa Group's roughly 850-plane rollout. SpaceX is pushing Australia for 2 GHz spectrum for direct-to-cell voice and data. No decision yet, and SpaceX opposes an auction. Fibocom got two standard IoT modules working on Starlink direct-to-cell in New Zealand, about 2 Mbps down on stock firmware (vendor test, open sky). Rakuten and AST SpaceMobile formed Rakuten AST, Japan's direct-to-phone network, with up to ¥148B (about US$1B) in government funding and service targeted by March 2029. No Starlink launches this weekend. Next up is Starship Flight 15, targeted for Friday

Gemini 4 Carbon now tops the Artificial Analysis intelligence index, and it's also way less likely to make things up. When it didn't have the right answer, it gave a wrong one only 11% of the time, versus 50% for Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra. Quite impressive.

SpaceX found a smart way to keep permits from slowing then down in Bronwnsville. They want 35 gas turbines and about 748MW, and somehow they still land 1.14 tons under the NOx line that would trigger tougher federal review.

I run about 15 Grok Bots for my inboxes, taxes, bookkeeping, rentals, so I'll notice quickly if this works. I'll post a before and after today.

A week after Forth Worth, Tesla launched Robotaxi in San Antonio today with a 274 sq mi zone and grew Austin to 442 sq mi. In both cities, Tesla's zone is now about 3 to 4.5 times bigger that Waymo's. Tesla vs Waymo: Austin: 442 vs 151 sq mi San Antonio: 274 vs 59 sq mi Driverless now: Austin, TX: since June 2025, about 442 sq mi San Antonio, TX: from today, about 274 sq mi Houston, TX: since April 2026, about 254 sq mi Fort Worth, TX: since Nov 2, about 143 sq mi Dallas, TX: since April 2026, about 81 sq mi Miami, FL: since July 2026, about 31 sq mi Orlando, FL: since July 2026, about 26 sq mi Tampa, FL: since July 2026, about 24 sq mi The Bay Area still runs with a safety driver because of California rules.

Just four Uber rides booked by third-party AI agents in a whole week, plus about 500 Uber Eats orders, according to Uber’s CFO. Uber handled roughly 320 million trips and orders that Halloween week, and I get why so few went through agents. Personally, I’d rather save my Grok Bot usage for something I can’t do in a few taps myself.

Musk thinks 20–30 million robots could produce as much as the entire US, where about 164 million people work and earn an estimated US$17 trillion a year, including the self-employed. Using his US$30,000 build cost per robot, that’s US$600–900 billion to build them all, about two to three weeks of what those people earn, but that leaves out the cost of running the robots or whether they could actually do it.

Was Cybertruck a commercial flop, even with more orders than Tesla can build before tearing down the Texas line next June or July for Cybercab? Tesla reported a positive gross margin in Q3 2024, but that doesn’t tell us whether the truck earned back the development and factory investment Forbes estimated at over US$2 billion.

Starlink roundup, Musk is aiming for another 10x jump per satellite with Starlink V4, including 10-terabit-per-second laser links. That is a target he described at Baron, not performance delivered in orbit. India: Starlink, Jio and OneWeb have licences, but government sources say all three still await security clearance and spectrum allocation and pricing before commercial rollout. Canada: 30% off Residential and Roam in eligible areas if you sign up by Nov 30. The reduced price lasts while the subscription stays active. Check your address. Viasat: US fixed broadband subscribers are down to about 100,000 from 603,000 in Q3 2020, an 83% fall. That does not mean every lost customer switched to Starlink.