> But it’s not totally clear whether rural America is a viable customer base for Starlink. The biggest issue is cost. A Starlink subscription is $99. Speeds can

> But it’s not totally clear whether rural America is a viable customer base for Starlink. The biggest issue is cost. A Starlink subscription is $99. Speeds can vary greatly, but the average user should expect 50 to 150 megabits per second. You’d have to pay traditional satellite internet companies like Viasat (which operates geostationary satellites) double that amount to get the same speeds. Not bad. "Same speeds" - sure, if latency wasn't a thing? (Latency was though discussed before this.) Fact is, it is impossible to buy the same service for _any_ price at the moment. In fact, if random internet folks are to be believed, people in rural regions are already paying more for worse service. While it doesn't make sense to serve high density areas with Starlink, it would make seem to make sense to provide an uplink for a small local ISP. One could perhaps get a bit bigger chunk than 50..150 Mbps for such a commercial venture, but everyone would be happy; Starlink would get money, local ISP co-op would do the local setup of fiber/wifi and deal with user support, end users would get decent internet connectivity. And competitors would get nothing. However, the big test for the system is when the rural subscribers actually start using services such as Netflix. Too bad Internet proxies are a dying breed, otherwise such a local mini-ISP could easily address the problem for the most popular series. Maybe they can participate in the appropriate CDNs?