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All these talks about Starlink -> Remember it's a bandaid solution to your governments poor planning and infrastructure rollout of a core utility / service. I

All these talks about Starlink -> Remember it's a bandaid solution to your governments poor planning and infrastructure rollout of a core utility / service. I say this as an Australian who watched one government plan a national rollout of fibre while another came in justifying most people don't need a connection better than 25/5 (based on usage data at the time) and went ahead and gutted the project. We're now trying to undo the previous government's mess up of the original roll out post COVID world when everyone discovered remote work is a good idea for many. Starlink's issue feels like history repeating itself with any service that becomes popular and goes too quickly into high demand

steponlego 4y ago
Last-mile rural connectivity will never reach everybody in the USA. It's just too many people to service. Obama's net "neutrality" which thankfully got shit canned was going to mandate free service for the poor for all new startups, among other considerations which would have made making a new a rural ISP a complete non-starter. If you want Internet, you can pay for it.
- ianlevesque 4y ago
  Last-mile rural electrification will never reach everybody in the USA. It's just too many people to service. Roosevelt would've mandated free service for the poor for all new startups, among other considerations which would have made making a new a rural electrical utility a complete non-starter. If you want Electricity, you can pay for it.
  - steponlego 4y ago
    Many rural areas do not have power and never will.
    - runarberg 4y ago
      But they still need internet?
      - crispinb 4y ago
        Internet without connected power is pretty common around here. Internet is obviously needed for those who work from home. And it's increasingly required for the needs of everyday life (government services moving online, bank branches closing). So, yes, absolutely - many people without connected power need the internet.
        fsloth 4y ago
        "Internet without connected power is pretty common around here." Oh, that's interesting! I always thought this to be an outlier scenario. What is "here"? Can you estimate the size of population to this applies?
        michaelt 4y ago
        Even in the south east of the UK - compared to the US, an very densely populated area - there are some homes that have wired telephones, but rely on generators for power [1] Presumably because at some point, it was cheaper to buy 30 years of diesel than to run a power cable, and yet cell coverage wasn't widespread enough to replace a wired telephone. Of course, we can debate whether providing telephone service is us beneficent city dwellers generously subsidising our backwards rural cousins for the good of their children; or us being taken for fools and subsidising the rich's gigantic holiday homes and rental properties. [1] https://goo.gl/maps/M1f69iet5mcmKXTr8 https://goo.gl/maps/M1f69iet5mcmKXTr8
        crispinb 4y ago
        Fortunately here we have sun and don't need generators ;)
        crispinb 4y ago
        "Here" is Northern NSW, Australia. I have no idea of the numbers, but it's not uncommon in rural Australia.
    - sliken 4y ago
      True, but those are typically rather low density/large plots, which makes them much easier to serve with a satellite based service.
  - midasuni 4y ago
    Does last mile electrification serve every property in the US? Or even every road frontage?
- rnk 4y ago
  We are talking about America. We decided everybody should get electricity and they got it with rural electrification. Should everyone lose the right to have electricity connections because you think it's too hard? Somehow other countries can do this with the US can't? We could decide just like we did for electricity that everyone should have 100 meg internet to their house.
  - notafraudster 4y ago
    Unfortunately there seems to be a bipartisan political consensus against the most profitable and useful elements of the New Deal (WPA, TVA, REA, CWA) which would be almost mandatory to go whole hog on this kind of infrastructure proposal, and as we've learned over the last 40 years public-private partnerships are thin gruel as a replacement.
    - thfuran 4y ago
      The US seems to have totally lost the ability to produce infrastructure at sane cost, which may be contributing to the decreased support for infrastructure projects.
crispinb 4y ago
> it's a bandaid solution to your governments poor planning and infrastructure rollout .. Well yes, but a needed bandaid. That's what happens when governments vacate their role - individuals are left to manage on their own (and the devil take the hindmost). Australian here like you. Generally appalled by the NBN debacle. Starlink's beyond my means, but if I had a remote job I'd find it a godsend where I live (rural Northern Rivers). Our "NBN" is SkyMuster, which is from all accounts not up to much (even if you can get the NBN to connect it).
- melbournegrad 4y ago
  I don't want to get off topic but the NBN hasn't even worked. I'm only offered wireless in my apartment 4km from the CBD, currently 1.7 Mbps
  - crispinb 4y ago
    Yes, fixed wireless has been vastly overused. Presumably when NBN were short of budget for an area, or where there weren't enough wealthy folk calling their pet MP.
- nikcub 4y ago
  Australia has a real problem with getting the last ~2% of residents connected. SkyMuster cost $2B and has 100k connections - so $20k per connection.
  - crispinb 4y ago
    It's very patchy though even for those in urban areas. Fixed wireless has been way over-used in areas that could easily have been wired. And SkyMuster is supposed to be a last resort, but is pushed anywhere local topography offers a mild inconvenience for fixed wireless. I'm 4km from a village, and 30km from Lismore - hardly the back of beyond. And the NBNCo is just an old-style Telco: bloated with plushly-remunerated suits, utterly indifferent to users, and grossly inefficient. Before I knew how bad it was I tried to get signed up with SkyMuster. It never happened. I had multiple appointments made by NBN with different contractors, none of whom knew anything about the other appointments. It never actually happened and I ended up cancelling the whole thing and making my own arrangements.
Nursie 4y ago
Australian resident here - Like the other poster I agree it's a band-aid. I agree it's not the world's best connection (there is considerable latency sometimes). I agree I shouldn't have to be paying Elon Musk 140 bucks a months to get a decent connection but ... I am, because that's all I can get here. We're just outside Perth, less than a k from a new(ish) suburb development and our only NBN option is "Fixed Wireless", which guarantees 25Mbit at least once in a given 24 hour period. WTF! There was one non-NBN wireless option which according to all reviews actually managed to be worse, and 5G here is bad, plus Telstra won't (yet?) sell us a 5G 'home' connection. AFAICT my options are starlink or paying $22k to get a fibre put in. So far it works well for us here, regularly exceeding 200Mbps, fingers crossed our cell isn't going to become oversubscribed anytime soon. I also hope that they spin up a Perth exit node, because AFAICT our traffic pops out in Sydney at the moment, adding to the latency. But really I hope the government gets its act together and sorts out the NBN for more people. Tony Abbott has a lot to answer for. (I understand from what I've read that the problems with starlink in the US are a lot less of an issue here, because the populations are an order of magnitude different...)
- killingtime74 4y ago
  I moved from Sydney to Auckland and now can get up to 7700Mbps. 1000Mbps costs 60 something AUD. One of my colleagues in Melbourne got the fiber upgrade (under 10k) and claimed the install on his tax so there's that to reduce it a bit.
  - Nursie 4y ago
    I moved to Aus from the UK about two years back. In Southampton I was getting 1000/40 for the equivalent of 100AUD a month, but a new fibre company had just started to offer 900/900 for 35AUD. It’s been a bit of an eye-opener moving back here! I left at the end of the Gillard government, when the future of the Australian internet connection was bright, and came back wondering what had gone wrong!
    - mrjin 4y ago
      You know, copper network is not a great option technically, but nothing better to just exhaust the budget.
teekert 4y ago
Meanwhile here I am in the Netherlands (semi-rural I'd say), having two fiber modems installed because we have 2 competing fiber networks here. At least one of them goes to 2500/2500 for about 75 eur a month. Probably it'll go much higher in the future.
- adriancr 4y ago
  which provider goes to 2500/2500?
  - teekert 4y ago
    Delta does, although I see now it's 8000/8000 (XGS-PON): [0] I need new gear ;) It's a bit annoying to find, everything is hidden behind area code filters. [0] https://www.delta.nl/internet/glasvezel/xgspon/ https://www.delta.nl/internet/glasvezel/xgspon/
    - adriancr 4y ago
      awesome, thanks, can't wait until they extend to my area
- killingtime74 4y ago
  Are the two fiber modems hooked up to different networks?
  - teekert 4y ago
    Yes, one is already sticking up from the ground and will be brought into the house in the next month. And someone just came by to see if a second one can be installed, that one still needs to be brought to the house, somewhere in the next weeks. It seems wasteful, I know, but it's nice to have competition at least.
    - c12 4y ago
      Where I live it's very similar to electric and gas supply, where you have a common carrier that you get your supply over. There is one fibre cable into the building that goes out to some kind of interface accessed via a manhole ourside; all the local telcos use that fibre as common carrier and either rent existing fibre thats already been laid and hooked up to that interface, or lay their own at their own cost. I have choice of half a dozen suppliers this way but only one set of hardware in the house.
me551ah 4y ago
Meanwhile in India, I am paying ~50$ a month for 1 Gbps fiber connection. On speedtest and fast.com, I easily average about 800+ Mbps download speeds on ethernet.
- ysleepy 4y ago
  In a rural town? Metropolitan areas have always been well served.
- sumedh 4y ago
  India towns/villages dont have reliable electricity. So not sure what is the point of bringing up India.
  - blntechie 4y ago
    Similarly Netherlands is not even as big as most provinces/states of the bigger countries where internet wiring challenges exists. So not sure what is the point of bringing up the Netherlands.
- Adiqq 4y ago
  In Poland I pay ~$15/month for symmetrical 1/1Gbps fiber and there's even possibility for 10/10Gbps at $25, but I can't imagine making use of it. It's not available everywhere, but it covers a lot of smaller cities, so I'm happy that at least that's one thing that is done correctly here.
  - anthomtb 4y ago
    $25 for 10/10Gbps is crazy cheap. If I were to get 10/10Gbps it would be $250/month. This is using a municipal-run service provider (not particularly common here in the USA) that offers their 1/1Gbps for the relatively fair price of $70/month for a new customer. I pay $50 due to signing up in 2019. I have no idea how Poland is pulling off such low costs but props for doing so. Other nations should take note.
mschuster91 4y ago
> All these talks about Starlink -> Remember it's a bandaid solution to your governments poor planning and infrastructure rollout of a core utility / service. Partially. The thing is, the US is so unbelievably huge that it is economically infeasible to serve extremely rural areas with high-speed wired (i.e. fiber, DSL) or wireless (microwave, 4G/5G phone) internet, even with massive government subsidies - and that applies for other large-area countries such as Germany or Australia as well. Starlink completely changes the equations there as (for the user) no investment is required other than getting a terminal, and for anything mobile (sea ships, RVs, emergency services) it blows the competition from geostationary satellites completely away.
- lstamour 4y ago
  Yes, the US is huge, but if an area can get power, we should be able to rollout fibre along the same routes. It just takes a bit of work.
  - pengaru 4y ago
    Starlink is delivering internet to otherwise off-grid homes... Solar+battery tech has made power lines not only unnecessary, but in some states arguably not worth the fire risk anymore.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      > Solar+battery tech has made power lines not only unnecessary, but in some states arguably not worth the fire risk anymore. Power lines aren't an inherent fire risk. Unmaintained power lines, however, are. Primarily, you need to maintain clearance from bushes and trees.
      - msh 4y ago
        Or bury the cables.
        4y ago
robertlagrant 4y ago
> All these talks about Starlink -> Remember it's a bandaid solution to your governments poor planning and infrastructure rollout of a core utility / service. Lots of core utilities aren't rolled out everywhere. You might need a different water source or use a septic tank rather than roll out central services everywhere, because it's so expensive per capita. Internet from a satellite seems a valid equivalent to that.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Electricity is pretty close to universal in the US (outside of summer cabins and the like) and traditional telephone service was pretty close behind. But beyond that water, sewer, natural gas, and internet are all case by case once you get out of metros. 50 miles outside of a large US city, I still have a septic system.
noirscape 4y ago
Starlink is also having a bad side-effect in other areas - apparently the frequencies on which it communicates muck up weather prediction technology[0]. I'm sure it works great if you're rural/have literally no other means but if you have the infrastructure for it, don't use Starlink. [0]: https://nltimes.nl/2023/01/27/dutch-meteorologists-say-musks-starlink-network-disrupts-weather-forecasting https://nltimes.nl/2023/01/27/dutch-meteorologists-say-musks...
- ejb999 4y ago
  it was never really intended for people that already had better options. Had it for a while and it was life changing for me coming from a 3MB DSL internet - but dropped it as soon as fiber found its way to my little town.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Notwithstanding the complaints of the OP, Starlink is still a gamechanger in many less urban areas. The alternatives are often not tenable for remote work or even, really, for many things that a lot of people consider near-necessities. You don't even need to be in the middle of a wilderness area. My brother has a house 10 minutes outside of a smallish Maine city. And his only Starlink options were a 1Mbps down DSL and a very data-capped cellular hotspot. But a good wired connection is almost always going to be better.
mrjin 4y ago
It's true for any shared media as the bandwidth is limited, thus wireless is really only suitable for where fiber is not a viable solution.
Jedd 4y ago
Also Australian - based in Hunter Valley (~ 200km north-west of Sydney). Definitely rural. I replaced our Skymesh (geo-stationary) satellite (the only barely viable alternative) two years ago with Starlink. Skymesh gave me ~600ms RTT to Sydney servers, and maybe 25Mbps down (at 3am, clear sky, etc). Data cap was around 120GB / month, IIRC. Pricing was probably 75% of what I'm paying for Starlink now. We can kinda sorta get 3G, but effectively only for voice & SMS - our nearest tower is ~ 10km away, and my yagi / repeater requires power to establish a very feeble back to that. 3G is being retired almost definitely in 2024, at which point I believe the national carriers' plan is to have no plan - as the replacement technology requires a much higher density of tower placements than rural areas will ever substantiate. The joy of a fully privatised communications industry.
- Panzer04 4y ago
  The 3G service will be replaced with 4G/5G - it will probably be better, in all likelyhood. The range is based on the spectrum used, not the technology. 3G was kept around only because of old mobile devices (eg. PoS terminals) that needed it to function, not because it was any good. It's kind of amusing to me that you blame our private telecom industry. I'm relatively sure Australia has some of the best mobile connectivity on the planet, with generally extremely high speeds, high data caps and usually, relatively good coverage. It is absolutely not a given that government service would be better.
  - Jedd 4y ago
    You're right, but I don't yet know, and haven't been advised by my telco (who also owns that tower) what will happen during that migration next year. My handset (Pixel 4A original) will need replacing if they go 5G only - I guess they will go 4 & 5 combined, but see above. I don't know if my Telstra-installed (~ 2 years ago) repeater will work with 5G, or I'll need to buy a replacement. I don't know if I have any recourse or remedy in the event that I lose all connectivity after the 3G retirement. Signal propagation is weird. When the tech installed my repeater and yagi, most of the time was spent finding the optimum direction - he ended up pointing it at a hill probably 10 degrees off the measured direction for the tower (line of sight is impossible for us). So, yes, you're right ... but still. Anyway, Australia has some of the best mobile service coverage in populated areas - that's why they talk about percentage of humans that have coverage, not land area. And I totally understand why. Reviewing https://www.telstra.com.au/coverage-networks/our-coverage https://www.telstra.com.au/coverage-networks/our-coverage - where I am, unboosted 3G, and to a lesser degree, 4G zones are asserted to be within several km of me - but the nearest 5G blob is ~60km. There's no 'coverage coming soon' zones within 300km of me. And yes, I blame privatisation. Prior to that, if you wanted a landline service, connection fee was flat, no matter where you were. If that had continued on, presumably the same policy would apply today for other services. Contesting for last-mile means it's now hideously expensive to the consumer - similarly for power connection - compared to a few decades ago.
davidy123 4y ago
Yes. I am in rural(ish) Canada. A community got together and with regional and national funding created https://fibreargenteuil.ca/en/ https://fibreargenteuil.ca/en/ It was intense, they had to fight, sometimes publicly, tooth and nail with the utility pole controllers. But I'm typing this from fast, reliable (knock the nearest of many trees) fibre internet with very reasonable (all things considered, though I wish they had a more basic tier for down and out folks) pricing. I follow a few rural internet groups, at first most members thought Starlink would be all they'd ever need, now they are very unhappy.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  One of the awful things I found here in (quasi-rural, near Hamilton) Ontario is this phenomenon: 1. No broadband from any of Rogers, Bell, Cogeco, etc. for multiple decades, and no real local offerings; despite being only a few km from a major centre 2. Nothing seems to be happening, so some local companies start offering point-to-point wireless services which fill a hole. They start putting up antenaes and stringing fibre all around. Fees are high but not awful. Bandwidth is low, but so much better than what one could get before. Also Starlink gets announced and deployed for some people. 3. Suddenly Bell shows up and starts running Fibe up and down the rural roads. What wasn't "economically viable" for them before suddenly super viable. Local wireless companies -- who took big risks to get a product to people -- lose hundreds of customers overnight. I now have 3gbps fibre optic direct to my house when I had a 15mbps wireless connection a few months ago. But I'm sure some local small ISPs are going to be out of business by the end of the year. I hate the way Canada is run.
  - oogali 4y ago
    That's somewhat similar to what happened in the US during the initial timeframe of DSL. Regional Bell says your DSL is $60-120/month. Your local ISP buys a circuit to a DSL aggregator (Covad, Northpoint, Rhythms, etc) and starts offering DSL for $50/month (their cost was $25-30/month). After increase in customers, regional Bell says "we're offering $29.95/month for 6 months to new customers". ISPs nationwide start losing thousands of customers. One by one, DSL aggregators start to go out of business which means ISP have no DSL connectivity and can't sell DSL anymore. DSL is dead from anyone but regional Bell.
JohnFen 4y ago
> it's a bandaid solution to your governments poor planning and infrastructure rollout of a core utility / service. Or, in the case of the US, it's what you get when you have private for-profit corporations doing all the planning and rollout.

steponlego 4y ago

Last-mile rural connectivity will never reach everybody in the USA. It's just too many people to service. Obama's net "neutrality" which thankfully got shit canned was going to mandate free service for the poor for all new startups, among other considerations which would have made making a new a rural ISP a complete non-starter. If you want Internet, you can pay for it.

ianlevesque 4y ago
Last-mile rural electrification will never reach everybody in the USA. It's just too many people to service. Roosevelt would've mandated free service for the poor for all new startups, among other considerations which would have made making a new a rural electrical utility a complete non-starter. If you want Electricity, you can pay for it.
- steponlego 4y ago
  Many rural areas do not have power and never will.
  - runarberg 4y ago
    But they still need internet?
    - crispinb 4y ago
      Internet without connected power is pretty common around here. Internet is obviously needed for those who work from home. And it's increasingly required for the needs of everyday life (government services moving online, bank branches closing). So, yes, absolutely - many people without connected power need the internet.
      - fsloth 4y ago
        "Internet without connected power is pretty common around here." Oh, that's interesting! I always thought this to be an outlier scenario. What is "here"? Can you estimate the size of population to this applies?
        michaelt 4y ago
        Even in the south east of the UK - compared to the US, an very densely populated area - there are some homes that have wired telephones, but rely on generators for power [1] Presumably because at some point, it was cheaper to buy 30 years of diesel than to run a power cable, and yet cell coverage wasn't widespread enough to replace a wired telephone. Of course, we can debate whether providing telephone service is us beneficent city dwellers generously subsidising our backwards rural cousins for the good of their children; or us being taken for fools and subsidising the rich's gigantic holiday homes and rental properties. [1] https://goo.gl/maps/M1f69iet5mcmKXTr8 https://goo.gl/maps/M1f69iet5mcmKXTr8
        crispinb 4y ago
        Fortunately here we have sun and don't need generators ;)
        crispinb 4y ago
        "Here" is Northern NSW, Australia. I have no idea of the numbers, but it's not uncommon in rural Australia.
  - sliken 4y ago
    True, but those are typically rather low density/large plots, which makes them much easier to serve with a satellite based service.
- midasuni 4y ago
  Does last mile electrification serve every property in the US? Or even every road frontage?
rnk 4y ago
We are talking about America. We decided everybody should get electricity and they got it with rural electrification. Should everyone lose the right to have electricity connections because you think it's too hard? Somehow other countries can do this with the US can't? We could decide just like we did for electricity that everyone should have 100 meg internet to their house.
- notafraudster 4y ago
  Unfortunately there seems to be a bipartisan political consensus against the most profitable and useful elements of the New Deal (WPA, TVA, REA, CWA) which would be almost mandatory to go whole hog on this kind of infrastructure proposal, and as we've learned over the last 40 years public-private partnerships are thin gruel as a replacement.
  - thfuran 4y ago
    The US seems to have totally lost the ability to produce infrastructure at sane cost, which may be contributing to the decreased support for infrastructure projects.

crispinb 4y ago

> it's a bandaid solution to your governments poor planning and infrastructure rollout .. Well yes, but a needed bandaid. That's what happens when governments vacate their role - individuals are left to manage on their own (and the devil take the hindmost). Australian here like you. Generally appalled by the NBN debacle. Starlink's beyond my means, but if I had a remote job I'd find it a godsend where I live (rural Northern Rivers). Our "NBN" is SkyMuster, which is from all accounts not up to much (even if you can get the NBN to connect it).

melbournegrad 4y ago
I don't want to get off topic but the NBN hasn't even worked. I'm only offered wireless in my apartment 4km from the CBD, currently 1.7 Mbps
- crispinb 4y ago
  Yes, fixed wireless has been vastly overused. Presumably when NBN were short of budget for an area, or where there weren't enough wealthy folk calling their pet MP.
nikcub 4y ago
Australia has a real problem with getting the last ~2% of residents connected. SkyMuster cost $2B and has 100k connections - so $20k per connection.
- crispinb 4y ago
  It's very patchy though even for those in urban areas. Fixed wireless has been way over-used in areas that could easily have been wired. And SkyMuster is supposed to be a last resort, but is pushed anywhere local topography offers a mild inconvenience for fixed wireless. I'm 4km from a village, and 30km from Lismore - hardly the back of beyond. And the NBNCo is just an old-style Telco: bloated with plushly-remunerated suits, utterly indifferent to users, and grossly inefficient. Before I knew how bad it was I tried to get signed up with SkyMuster. It never happened. I had multiple appointments made by NBN with different contractors, none of whom knew anything about the other appointments. It never actually happened and I ended up cancelling the whole thing and making my own arrangements.

Nursie 4y ago

Australian resident here - Like the other poster I agree it's a band-aid. I agree it's not the world's best connection (there is considerable latency sometimes). I agree I shouldn't have to be paying Elon Musk 140 bucks a months to get a decent connection but ... I am, because that's all I can get here. We're just outside Perth, less than a k from a new(ish) suburb development and our only NBN option is "Fixed Wireless", which guarantees 25Mbit at least once in a given 24 hour period. WTF! There was one non-NBN wireless option which according to all reviews actually managed to be worse, and 5G here is bad, plus Telstra won't (yet?) sell us a 5G 'home' connection. AFAICT my options are starlink or paying $22k to get a fibre put in. So far it works well for us here, regularly exceeding 200Mbps, fingers crossed our cell isn't going to become oversubscribed anytime soon. I also hope that they spin up a Perth exit node, because AFAICT our traffic pops out in Sydney at the moment, adding to the latency. But really I hope the government gets its act together and sorts out the NBN for more people. Tony Abbott has a lot to answer for. (I understand from what I've read that the problems with starlink in the US are a lot less of an issue here, because the populations are an order of magnitude different...)

killingtime74 4y ago
I moved from Sydney to Auckland and now can get up to 7700Mbps. 1000Mbps costs 60 something AUD. One of my colleagues in Melbourne got the fiber upgrade (under 10k) and claimed the install on his tax so there's that to reduce it a bit.
- Nursie 4y ago
  I moved to Aus from the UK about two years back. In Southampton I was getting 1000/40 for the equivalent of 100AUD a month, but a new fibre company had just started to offer 900/900 for 35AUD. It’s been a bit of an eye-opener moving back here! I left at the end of the Gillard government, when the future of the Australian internet connection was bright, and came back wondering what had gone wrong!
  - mrjin 4y ago
    You know, copper network is not a great option technically, but nothing better to just exhaust the budget.

teekert 4y ago

Meanwhile here I am in the Netherlands (semi-rural I'd say), having two fiber modems installed because we have 2 competing fiber networks here. At least one of them goes to 2500/2500 for about 75 eur a month. Probably it'll go much higher in the future.

adriancr 4y ago
which provider goes to 2500/2500?
- teekert 4y ago
  Delta does, although I see now it's 8000/8000 (XGS-PON): [0] I need new gear ;) It's a bit annoying to find, everything is hidden behind area code filters. [0] https://www.delta.nl/internet/glasvezel/xgspon/ https://www.delta.nl/internet/glasvezel/xgspon/
  - adriancr 4y ago
    awesome, thanks, can't wait until they extend to my area
killingtime74 4y ago
Are the two fiber modems hooked up to different networks?
- teekert 4y ago
  Yes, one is already sticking up from the ground and will be brought into the house in the next month. And someone just came by to see if a second one can be installed, that one still needs to be brought to the house, somewhere in the next weeks. It seems wasteful, I know, but it's nice to have competition at least.
  - c12 4y ago
    Where I live it's very similar to electric and gas supply, where you have a common carrier that you get your supply over. There is one fibre cable into the building that goes out to some kind of interface accessed via a manhole ourside; all the local telcos use that fibre as common carrier and either rent existing fibre thats already been laid and hooked up to that interface, or lay their own at their own cost. I have choice of half a dozen suppliers this way but only one set of hardware in the house.

me551ah 4y ago

Meanwhile in India, I am paying ~50$ a month for 1 Gbps fiber connection. On speedtest and fast.com, I easily average about 800+ Mbps download speeds on ethernet.

ysleepy 4y ago
In a rural town? Metropolitan areas have always been well served.
sumedh 4y ago
India towns/villages dont have reliable electricity. So not sure what is the point of bringing up India.
- blntechie 4y ago
  Similarly Netherlands is not even as big as most provinces/states of the bigger countries where internet wiring challenges exists. So not sure what is the point of bringing up the Netherlands.
Adiqq 4y ago
In Poland I pay ~$15/month for symmetrical 1/1Gbps fiber and there's even possibility for 10/10Gbps at $25, but I can't imagine making use of it. It's not available everywhere, but it covers a lot of smaller cities, so I'm happy that at least that's one thing that is done correctly here.
- anthomtb 4y ago
  $25 for 10/10Gbps is crazy cheap. If I were to get 10/10Gbps it would be $250/month. This is using a municipal-run service provider (not particularly common here in the USA) that offers their 1/1Gbps for the relatively fair price of $70/month for a new customer. I pay $50 due to signing up in 2019. I have no idea how Poland is pulling off such low costs but props for doing so. Other nations should take note.

mschuster91 4y ago

> All these talks about Starlink -> Remember it's a bandaid solution to your governments poor planning and infrastructure rollout of a core utility / service. Partially. The thing is, the US is so unbelievably huge that it is economically infeasible to serve extremely rural areas with high-speed wired (i.e. fiber, DSL) or wireless (microwave, 4G/5G phone) internet, even with massive government subsidies - and that applies for other large-area countries such as Germany or Australia as well. Starlink completely changes the equations there as (for the user) no investment is required other than getting a terminal, and for anything mobile (sea ships, RVs, emergency services) it blows the competition from geostationary satellites completely away.

lstamour 4y ago
Yes, the US is huge, but if an area can get power, we should be able to rollout fibre along the same routes. It just takes a bit of work.
- pengaru 4y ago
  Starlink is delivering internet to otherwise off-grid homes... Solar+battery tech has made power lines not only unnecessary, but in some states arguably not worth the fire risk anymore.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > Solar+battery tech has made power lines not only unnecessary, but in some states arguably not worth the fire risk anymore. Power lines aren't an inherent fire risk. Unmaintained power lines, however, are. Primarily, you need to maintain clearance from bushes and trees.
    - msh 4y ago
      Or bury the cables.
      - 4y ago

robertlagrant 4y ago

> All these talks about Starlink -> Remember it's a bandaid solution to your governments poor planning and infrastructure rollout of a core utility / service. Lots of core utilities aren't rolled out everywhere. You might need a different water source or use a septic tank rather than roll out central services everywhere, because it's so expensive per capita. Internet from a satellite seems a valid equivalent to that.

ghaff 4y ago
Electricity is pretty close to universal in the US (outside of summer cabins and the like) and traditional telephone service was pretty close behind. But beyond that water, sewer, natural gas, and internet are all case by case once you get out of metros. 50 miles outside of a large US city, I still have a septic system.

noirscape 4y ago

Starlink is also having a bad side-effect in other areas - apparently the frequencies on which it communicates muck up weather prediction technology[0]. I'm sure it works great if you're rural/have literally no other means but if you have the infrastructure for it, don't use Starlink. [0]: https://nltimes.nl/2023/01/27/dutch-meteorologists-say-musks-starlink-network-disrupts-weather-forecasting https://nltimes.nl/2023/01/27/dutch-meteorologists-say-musks...

ejb999 4y ago
it was never really intended for people that already had better options. Had it for a while and it was life changing for me coming from a 3MB DSL internet - but dropped it as soon as fiber found its way to my little town.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Notwithstanding the complaints of the OP, Starlink is still a gamechanger in many less urban areas. The alternatives are often not tenable for remote work or even, really, for many things that a lot of people consider near-necessities. You don't even need to be in the middle of a wilderness area. My brother has a house 10 minutes outside of a smallish Maine city. And his only Starlink options were a 1Mbps down DSL and a very data-capped cellular hotspot. But a good wired connection is almost always going to be better.

mrjin 4y ago

It's true for any shared media as the bandwidth is limited, thus wireless is really only suitable for where fiber is not a viable solution.

Jedd 4y ago

Also Australian - based in Hunter Valley (~ 200km north-west of Sydney). Definitely rural. I replaced our Skymesh (geo-stationary) satellite (the only barely viable alternative) two years ago with Starlink. Skymesh gave me ~600ms RTT to Sydney servers, and maybe 25Mbps down (at 3am, clear sky, etc). Data cap was around 120GB / month, IIRC. Pricing was probably 75% of what I'm paying for Starlink now. We can kinda sorta get 3G, but effectively only for voice & SMS - our nearest tower is ~ 10km away, and my yagi / repeater requires power to establish a very feeble back to that. 3G is being retired almost definitely in 2024, at which point I believe the national carriers' plan is to have no plan - as the replacement technology requires a much higher density of tower placements than rural areas will ever substantiate. The joy of a fully privatised communications industry.

Panzer04 4y ago
The 3G service will be replaced with 4G/5G - it will probably be better, in all likelyhood. The range is based on the spectrum used, not the technology. 3G was kept around only because of old mobile devices (eg. PoS terminals) that needed it to function, not because it was any good. It's kind of amusing to me that you blame our private telecom industry. I'm relatively sure Australia has some of the best mobile connectivity on the planet, with generally extremely high speeds, high data caps and usually, relatively good coverage. It is absolutely not a given that government service would be better.
- Jedd 4y ago
  You're right, but I don't yet know, and haven't been advised by my telco (who also owns that tower) what will happen during that migration next year. My handset (Pixel 4A original) will need replacing if they go 5G only - I guess they will go 4 & 5 combined, but see above. I don't know if my Telstra-installed (~ 2 years ago) repeater will work with 5G, or I'll need to buy a replacement. I don't know if I have any recourse or remedy in the event that I lose all connectivity after the 3G retirement. Signal propagation is weird. When the tech installed my repeater and yagi, most of the time was spent finding the optimum direction - he ended up pointing it at a hill probably 10 degrees off the measured direction for the tower (line of sight is impossible for us). So, yes, you're right ... but still. Anyway, Australia has some of the best mobile service coverage in populated areas - that's why they talk about percentage of humans that have coverage, not land area. And I totally understand why. Reviewing https://www.telstra.com.au/coverage-networks/our-coverage https://www.telstra.com.au/coverage-networks/our-coverage - where I am, unboosted 3G, and to a lesser degree, 4G zones are asserted to be within several km of me - but the nearest 5G blob is ~60km. There's no 'coverage coming soon' zones within 300km of me. And yes, I blame privatisation. Prior to that, if you wanted a landline service, connection fee was flat, no matter where you were. If that had continued on, presumably the same policy would apply today for other services. Contesting for last-mile means it's now hideously expensive to the consumer - similarly for power connection - compared to a few decades ago.

davidy123 4y ago

Yes. I am in rural(ish) Canada. A community got together and with regional and national funding created https://fibreargenteuil.ca/en/ https://fibreargenteuil.ca/en/ It was intense, they had to fight, sometimes publicly, tooth and nail with the utility pole controllers. But I'm typing this from fast, reliable (knock the nearest of many trees) fibre internet with very reasonable (all things considered, though I wish they had a more basic tier for down and out folks) pricing. I follow a few rural internet groups, at first most members thought Starlink would be all they'd ever need, now they are very unhappy.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago
One of the awful things I found here in (quasi-rural, near Hamilton) Ontario is this phenomenon: 1. No broadband from any of Rogers, Bell, Cogeco, etc. for multiple decades, and no real local offerings; despite being only a few km from a major centre 2. Nothing seems to be happening, so some local companies start offering point-to-point wireless services which fill a hole. They start putting up antenaes and stringing fibre all around. Fees are high but not awful. Bandwidth is low, but so much better than what one could get before. Also Starlink gets announced and deployed for some people. 3. Suddenly Bell shows up and starts running Fibe up and down the rural roads. What wasn't "economically viable" for them before suddenly super viable. Local wireless companies -- who took big risks to get a product to people -- lose hundreds of customers overnight. I now have 3gbps fibre optic direct to my house when I had a 15mbps wireless connection a few months ago. But I'm sure some local small ISPs are going to be out of business by the end of the year. I hate the way Canada is run.
- oogali 4y ago
  That's somewhat similar to what happened in the US during the initial timeframe of DSL. Regional Bell says your DSL is $60-120/month. Your local ISP buys a circuit to a DSL aggregator (Covad, Northpoint, Rhythms, etc) and starts offering DSL for $50/month (their cost was $25-30/month). After increase in customers, regional Bell says "we're offering $29.95/month for 6 months to new customers". ISPs nationwide start losing thousands of customers. One by one, DSL aggregators start to go out of business which means ISP have no DSL connectivity and can't sell DSL anymore. DSL is dead from anyone but regional Bell.

JohnFen 4y ago

> it's a bandaid solution to your governments poor planning and infrastructure rollout of a core utility / service. Or, in the case of the US, it's what you get when you have private for-profit corporations doing all the planning and rollout.