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Wonder if Starlink and other LEO internet services will make rural living accessible to high salary remote workers. While the rural lifestyle isn't for everyone

Wonder if Starlink and other LEO internet services will make rural living accessible to high salary remote workers. While the rural lifestyle isn't for everyone, it's the extreme that would also open the door to exurban and small town living. Add in online shopping and ever evolving streaming entertainment options, it wouldn't be surprising if many small towns and rural areas saw new migration into them.

ghaff 7y ago
I've known people who have remote worked in tech with just satellite. It's not ideal/cheap and there are definitely compromises especially as video becomes more and more part of everything. So it can be done today, albeit with compromises. 5G could potentially improve the situation as well.
- Mountain_Skies 7y ago
  A few years ago I saw a video on YouTube of a developer at Microsoft who lived in a yurt in rural Montana or Idaho. Seemed to work pretty well for him and his girlfriend. Though they never said it, I got the feeling that they did sometimes go into town for a bandwidth run now and then, probably for large uploads. If I'm not mistaken 5G is line of sight. If so, might be more useful in flat areas than up in the mountains though repeaters could make that work.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Certainly none of today's alternatives to broadband are great. And I don't really know to what degree and under what circumstances 5G will help. But, yeah, it can be done even in the context of a lot of tech jobs. It does require making compromises though. Probably little or no streaming video, for example.
- that_jojo 7y ago
  I couldn't even imagine. My family upgraded from dialup to satellite around 2006 as a luxury, and the latency was basically unworkable for anything remotely realtime. Even for a reasonably decent plan, the caps were also ridiculous as well. I could realistically watch maybe 45 minutes of YouTube per month.
  - 0xffff2 7y ago
    I have a rural house with satellite internet. I work from there several weeks a year to stretch my time away from the hell that is the Bay Area. It works fine as long as all I need is access to the git server, despite the fact that I usually blow through the bandwidth soft cap within a few days at most. I usually take at least two trips into town (7 miles each way, pop. 700) to get cell service for conference calls over the course of a week.
sgt101 7y ago
There's rural and super rural. I live in the UK, 15km from the nearest big town, 90km from london, surrounded by fields and woods, but 2km from a rail station and with 300mbps fttp. I can work just as effectively as colleagues in London with folks in India, China and the USA... My point is that extreme changes to infrastructure aren't needed for cities to become much more distributed and for urban movement to become much reduced and changed in pattern.
- that_jojo 7y ago
  Yeah, as someone who grew up on 12 acres off a dirt road -- in the comparitively populated SE corner of Michigan and still within the suburban area of a small city as well -- I think a lot of the more Eurasian crowd have a hard time understanding the true scope of situations like North American rural communities. Cable didn't even come up to our street, and this is ~4mi from the local town -- pretty far from 'super rural' in local terms.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    My dad has a property in Maine, likewise just a few miles from the nearest small (~10,000 population) city. He's the last house on a dirt road that can still get ~1Mbit DSL and cell reception is really marginal too. And that's barely rural by Maine standards.
    - sgt101 7y ago
      The economics of DSL are driven by the physics and physics is harsh. Basically the signal to noise for high frequencies drops through the floor after 2km and for low frequencies after 10km... with good copper and lots of clever DSP (that's long range adsl btw) The good news is that I think MIMO will make a lot of properties more economic to serve with radio in the next few years.
- ghaff 7y ago
  I'm about the same distance from Boston in a fairly rural town in the middle of about 3 houses on 100 acres. And that's not especially unusual for this area. So I'm just a little over an hour from the city and am even near a commuter rail line. I think a lot of people imagine larger cities and their immediate suburbs on one hand and rural Wyoming on the other. There are plenty of places--many with pretty affordable housing--that are comfortably within the radius of major cities (in terms of jobs, culture, amenities, etc.) but which are not urban living.
efa 7y ago
Not sure why this is being down voted. In all the discussions about cars and congestion I always think in the future so many more people will just work remotely. That seems like the best fix. I'd love to live rural and have access to high speed internet and consumer goods. Only issue I have with rural life is access to good schools and doctors for my kids.
- 0xffff2 7y ago
  >I always think in the future so many more people will just work remotely People have been saying this for over a decade now (probably much longer, but that's when I started paying attention) and I've yet to see any evidence at all that it's true. As the owner of a rural house where my only internet option is satellite, I'd love for it to be true, but I still rent and apartment in the Bay Area where I live most of the time because that's where my employer wants me to be.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    It varies a lot by company and other factors but both numbers I've seen and anecdotally the numbers are up in the software industry. More and more people I know who switch companies end up just remotely if they weren't already--including at companies that weren't historically remote-friendly. Of course, lots of employers aren't really remote friendly and others are probably better described as being OK with some WFH but not as much 100% remote. (I'm pretty much all-remote at this point but I'm technically attached to an office even if I don't have a desk there any longer.)
  - efa 7y ago
    Interesting. My last two jobs (including my current) working from home is very common. We have several 100% remotes and others work from home 2-3 days a week. My friend's company is nothing but remotes (no home office). People have been saying this for a decade but just recently the infrastructure is there. Today's it's so easy to jump on Skype or Google Chat and video conference with people. 10 years ago we weren't quit there.

ghaff 7y ago

I've known people who have remote worked in tech with just satellite. It's not ideal/cheap and there are definitely compromises especially as video becomes more and more part of everything. So it can be done today, albeit with compromises. 5G could potentially improve the situation as well.

Mountain_Skies 7y ago
A few years ago I saw a video on YouTube of a developer at Microsoft who lived in a yurt in rural Montana or Idaho. Seemed to work pretty well for him and his girlfriend. Though they never said it, I got the feeling that they did sometimes go into town for a bandwidth run now and then, probably for large uploads. If I'm not mistaken 5G is line of sight. If so, might be more useful in flat areas than up in the mountains though repeaters could make that work.
- ghaff 7y ago
  Certainly none of today's alternatives to broadband are great. And I don't really know to what degree and under what circumstances 5G will help. But, yeah, it can be done even in the context of a lot of tech jobs. It does require making compromises though. Probably little or no streaming video, for example.
that_jojo 7y ago
I couldn't even imagine. My family upgraded from dialup to satellite around 2006 as a luxury, and the latency was basically unworkable for anything remotely realtime. Even for a reasonably decent plan, the caps were also ridiculous as well. I could realistically watch maybe 45 minutes of YouTube per month.
- 0xffff2 7y ago
  I have a rural house with satellite internet. I work from there several weeks a year to stretch my time away from the hell that is the Bay Area. It works fine as long as all I need is access to the git server, despite the fact that I usually blow through the bandwidth soft cap within a few days at most. I usually take at least two trips into town (7 miles each way, pop. 700) to get cell service for conference calls over the course of a week.

sgt101 7y ago

There's rural and super rural. I live in the UK, 15km from the nearest big town, 90km from london, surrounded by fields and woods, but 2km from a rail station and with 300mbps fttp. I can work just as effectively as colleagues in London with folks in India, China and the USA... My point is that extreme changes to infrastructure aren't needed for cities to become much more distributed and for urban movement to become much reduced and changed in pattern.

that_jojo 7y ago
Yeah, as someone who grew up on 12 acres off a dirt road -- in the comparitively populated SE corner of Michigan and still within the suburban area of a small city as well -- I think a lot of the more Eurasian crowd have a hard time understanding the true scope of situations like North American rural communities. Cable didn't even come up to our street, and this is ~4mi from the local town -- pretty far from 'super rural' in local terms.
- ghaff 7y ago
  My dad has a property in Maine, likewise just a few miles from the nearest small (~10,000 population) city. He's the last house on a dirt road that can still get ~1Mbit DSL and cell reception is really marginal too. And that's barely rural by Maine standards.
  - sgt101 7y ago
    The economics of DSL are driven by the physics and physics is harsh. Basically the signal to noise for high frequencies drops through the floor after 2km and for low frequencies after 10km... with good copper and lots of clever DSP (that's long range adsl btw) The good news is that I think MIMO will make a lot of properties more economic to serve with radio in the next few years.
ghaff 7y ago
I'm about the same distance from Boston in a fairly rural town in the middle of about 3 houses on 100 acres. And that's not especially unusual for this area. So I'm just a little over an hour from the city and am even near a commuter rail line. I think a lot of people imagine larger cities and their immediate suburbs on one hand and rural Wyoming on the other. There are plenty of places--many with pretty affordable housing--that are comfortably within the radius of major cities (in terms of jobs, culture, amenities, etc.) but which are not urban living.

efa 7y ago

Not sure why this is being down voted. In all the discussions about cars and congestion I always think in the future so many more people will just work remotely. That seems like the best fix. I'd love to live rural and have access to high speed internet and consumer goods. Only issue I have with rural life is access to good schools and doctors for my kids.

0xffff2 7y ago
>I always think in the future so many more people will just work remotely People have been saying this for over a decade now (probably much longer, but that's when I started paying attention) and I've yet to see any evidence at all that it's true. As the owner of a rural house where my only internet option is satellite, I'd love for it to be true, but I still rent and apartment in the Bay Area where I live most of the time because that's where my employer wants me to be.
- ghaff 7y ago
  It varies a lot by company and other factors but both numbers I've seen and anecdotally the numbers are up in the software industry. More and more people I know who switch companies end up just remotely if they weren't already--including at companies that weren't historically remote-friendly. Of course, lots of employers aren't really remote friendly and others are probably better described as being OK with some WFH but not as much 100% remote. (I'm pretty much all-remote at this point but I'm technically attached to an office even if I don't have a desk there any longer.)
- efa 7y ago
  Interesting. My last two jobs (including my current) working from home is very common. We have several 100% remotes and others work from home 2-3 days a week. My friend's company is nothing but remotes (no home office). People have been saying this for a decade but just recently the infrastructure is there. Today's it's so easy to jump on Skype or Google Chat and video conference with people. 10 years ago we weren't quit there.