5 ms·

With satellite internet from starlink (and I think amazon is attempting their own version?) I don't see how running internet over wires to rural housing could e

by esaym 1y ago

With satellite internet from starlink (and I think amazon is attempting their own version?) I don't see how running internet over wires to rural housing could ever be seen as a good expenditure of money. That said, I've always felt satellite internet to be yucky but I'm used to "satellite internet" adding 1000ms to your latency and uploads that actually run over your telephone line. I am curious if good satellite internet will lead to an exodus of people from cities and subdivisions. I actually live in my current house because the place I wanted to build on didn't have any form of internet access. Also, I'm not really aware of anyone that is truly without "internet access" as cell phones have basically filled that area in years ago.

bdcravens 1y ago
> With satellite internet from starlink (and I think amazon is attempting their own version?) I don't see how running internet over wires to rural housing could ever be seen as a good expenditure of money. Couldn't the same be said of expanding the electrical grid, when solar panels and batteries are an option?
- tracker1 1y ago
  Depending on where you are, that's an entirely valid option IMO... There are lots of houses with septic tanks without centralized sewers.
LocalH 1y ago
Satellite has a lower cap on latency, until we figure out faster-than-lightspeed radio transmission (if that's even possible)
- mxuribe 1y ago
  Upon reading the latter portion of your comment, a potential story for XKCD comic immediately sprang to mind...something along the lines of a tech person or team invent faster-than-lightspeed technology, but abandon their work on a spacecraft warp-style engines to improve satellite internet....because its just so much easier to make tons of money doing barely the minimum within the ISP monopoly business. lol :-D
garciasn 1y ago
My rural cabin has access to: 1. 25/2 DSL for $140/month (12 month contract with $40/mo seasonal disconnect) 2. 5G (60/0.03 which was 100/20 last summer until the nearby tower became overloaded). 3. LTE (see above) which I routinely get ~100/30 but which Verizon, at least, will not allow their boxes to use if it can connect via 5G, regardless of usability of the connection. 4. Fiber (100/100) at $89.95 (12m contract with $25/month seasonal disconnect). The fiber has higher speeds, but I didn't price them out. The costs were originally listed at $34.95 before they ran the lines, but they have upped them to $89.95 now that they are run to my lake home. 5. Starlink (supposedly 150/20 for Residential Lite which is available in my area) at $80/month on a month-to-month with purchase of a dish (I got mine refurbished for $135). I am routinely seeing ~400/40 with 25ms ping even though I shouldn't be. That said, the speeds are more variable (low as 120/7). --- I would LOVE for there to be reasonably priced and very stable Internet for month-to-month, but there just isn't except for Starlink--at this point.
- nullc 1y ago
  I am doubting the level of rural that has that level of connectivity. Your options there are far better than what I had living adj to downtown mountainview not so many years ago.
  - garciasn 1y ago
    It's in Central MN. It is 11 miles, straight line, from a town of 2200 and 15 miles from a town of 4400. The closest town is 8 miles as the crow flies of 700 and only has a gas station and a couple of bars. There's a bar and volunteer fire department 4 miles as the crow flies that has a population of 48. Believe me: this is rural. Until investment from the federal government and/or forced lower-bound limits on 'broadband' back about 6 years ago, the only option was 768/300 DSL.
  - addaon 1y ago
    I'm in a small town (5000 people) on the Utah/Arizona border. The internet options are better, cheaper, and more reliable than I had in old town Mountain View, Palo Alto, or Sunnyvale. I go with the symmetric 1 gig with static IP, but symmetric 8 gig is an option as well. Silicon Valley's home internet options just suck.
evanjrowley 1y ago
Having spend several years under the thumb of a rural wireless internet service provider, the thought of all my neighbors sucking up shared Starlink bandwidth to stream Netflix in the evenings makes me nauseous. How is it a reasonable expectation that Starlink can really support entire rural areas?
- lenerdenator 1y ago
  It's not, but we've never cared anyways, so why start now with this?
  - thinkcontext 1y ago
    > but we've never cared anyways Rural areas in the US have enjoyed disproportionate communications (and infrastructure in general) subsidies since the founding of the USPS. More recently, the Universal Service Fund has spent around $5-8B per year since the 90s, first on phone service then adding broadband. And there are more recent broadband efforts for broadband in the tens of $Bs.
    - lenerdenator 1y ago
      How effective have these efforts been at getting broadband access in rural communities? And comparatively, how effective have they been at giving a revenue source for telcos that they haven't had to really deliver on promises for?
- wmf 1y ago
  It's not an expectation; it already happened. People love it.
NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
>With satellite internet from starlink (and I think amazon is attempting their own version?) I don't see how running internet over wires to rural housing could ever be seen as a good expenditure of money. There are two perspectives on this. From the user's standpoint, when I finally wired up my house and we were no longer using wifi, all the streaming video was just flawless, no more stuttering. And I was only sharing that air with devices in my own house and the two closest neighbors. I wouldn't want to have to share it with all of North America. The other perspective is from the point of view of the ISPs themselves (the ones not Starlink). Can they pay off the cost of the infrastructure, and then make a profit? And it turns out that they can. Just not a quick one. If they can't profit on it this quarter, many see no incentive. Someone needs to light a fire under their asses. These are both obvious, and if you "don't see how", maybe you need to look.
lenerdenator 1y ago
> With satellite internet from starlink (and I think amazon is attempting their own version?) I don't see how running internet over wires to rural housing could ever be seen as a good expenditure of money. That said, I've always felt satellite internet to be yucky but I'm used to "satellite internet" adding 1000ms to your latency and uploads that actually run over your telephone line. Depends on what you declare a "good expenditure of money". The thing about running fiber is that it's not particularly expensive to do. dig trench, install infrastructure, rebury it. Hell, if you have a utility pole, you can omit steps 1 and 3, so long as you're okay with the line being exposed to the elements. Launching satellites is very expensive to do. There are very high barriers to entry that prevent meaningful competition from occurring for satellite internet providers, which is why HughesNet was crap for all of those years. It took NASA funding a commercial crew program to get a rocket built that could put payload in LEO for "cheap", and there's only two or three options that can reasonably be expected to operate that way. I'd rather have a lot of competition for installing and operating fiber infrastructure than having an effective duopoly for running performant satellite internet. I'm under no delusions that will occur in rural areas under the present regime in DC. As for an exodus from cities and suburbs, no. There's no amount of internet speed that would make me move to a place where there's reduced services and infrastructure in every other category, like schools, hospitals (this is a big one), water, sewer, transit, etc. and there are millions more like me.
- legitster 1y ago
  > The thing about running fiber is that it's not particularly expensive to do. dig trench, install infrastructure, rebury it. Hell, if you have a utility pole, you can omit steps 1 and 3, so long as you're okay with the line being exposed to the elements. Uhhhh.... it can cost several hundred dollars just to dig a trench across my yard. If the plan involves providing broadband to rural farmhouses that might be miles apart, that could be tens of thousands of dollars per customer. Obviously on utility poles (where they exist) is going to be much cheaper, but you still need an ISP to build and operate the thing and set up things like repeater boxes and deal with outages.
- toast0 1y ago
  > There's no amount of internet speed that would make me move to a place where there's reduced services and infrastructure in every other category, like schools, hospitals (this is a big one), water, sewer, transit, etc. and there are millions more like me. I moved to "rural lite", and have a well and septic. That part isn't so hard to live with; although no water for a couple days when our well pump went out wasn't fun. The hard part IMHO, is that everything takes so long to get to. We've got a good small town that's a couple minutes away, but if I need to go to a big box store, that's 30-45 minutes, each way. I like it here, and I have a 8 acre parcel, which is incompatible with suburbia, but it's an adjustment.
kibwen 1y ago
Satellite internet has its place but it's never going to be dominant. Any area with high density is better served by wires, and any area with medium density is better served by a combination of wires and cellular internet. Satellite only make economic sense for the truly remote; the astronomical and recurring infrastructure costs are just killer (Starlink satellites last for 5 years, buried fiber lasts for 50 at least (while providing better latency and throughput)).
natch 1y ago
Median latency 21ms over the last 15 minutes, Starlink.
legitster 1y ago
> Also, I'm not really aware of anyone that is truly without "internet access" as cell phones have basically filled that area in years ago. I mean, this is basically it. For paying bills, doing school work, messaging, getting news, etc the options these days are affordable and very convenient. Even video calling and streaming videos doesn't really affect my data plan too much. The only advantage of a hardline to your house is if you are going to do copious amounts of high-def streaming or you need a very stable connection. More of a luxury/hobby resource.
r14c 1y ago
Is internet access really the main determining factor for where people want to live? I know some people really dislike cities, but there are plenty of reasons to live in one if noise and crowds aren't dealbreakers.
tw04 1y ago
> With satellite internet from starlink (and I think amazon is attempting their own version?) I don't see how running internet over wires to rural housing could ever be seen as a good expenditure of money. That was the same excuse used when nobody wanted to wire rural America for electricity. It was a bad take then and a worse take now. Wiring those homes with single-mode fiber once will provide modern broadband for at least the next 50 years, if not longer. Satellite is not and will never be a replacement for fiber.
- 0xffff2 1y ago
  Huh? People used satellites as an excuse to not wire rural America for electricity? Starlink might not be as fast as fiber, but it's more than good enough.
  - jmb99 1y ago
    They were responding to: > I don't see how running internet over wires to rural housing could ever be seen as a good expenditure of money. In pure ROI, it's the same as running electrical service to rural areas. But still very important in general
  - WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
    > Starlink might not be as fast as fiber, but it's more than good enough. Users running up against oversubscription - this is a when not if condition. The capacity limits inherent to satellite tech are what they are. ref: https://kagi.com/search?q=starlink+oversubscribed&dr=4&r=us&sh=kbfdjKTzWd9NIFcxkeeshw https://kagi.com/search?q=starlink+oversubscribed&dr=4&r=us&... Between now and then, users' routine downloads run up against caps (eg:steam game packs).
    - thesuitonym 1y ago
      Search engine are not references, but how do you generate sharing links in Kagi?
      - 1y ago
rented_mule 1y ago
> cell phones have basically filled that area in years ago That doesn't work well in mountainous areas, which are often rural. There are three towers within a couple of miles of my house, but nothing close to line of sight to any of them. ~1/4 mile away I can get full service, but I have none at all at home. Luckily Comcast / Xfinity rewired our little town a few years ago so we don't have to rely on satellite (not great during the heavy snowstorms and thunderstorms we get). I'd love to use cellular as a backup as we have 3~20 full days of blackouts per year (most of us have generators and/or batteries) and Xfinity goes down 80-90 minutes after a blackout starts.
kjellsbells 1y ago
> Also, I'm not really aware of anyone that is truly without "internet access" as cell phones have basically filled that area in years ago Unfortunately very much not true. The US is a very large and sparsely populated place. As far as cell and broadband service goes, much of West Virginia, huge chunks of PA, upstate NY, and Maine all have limited or no cell service. In the Midwest the communication infrastructure is often delivered by community co-ops, not corporations, that also deliver electric power. And dont get me started on the vast Western states. The US has, frankly, an absolutely ludicrous patchwork of providers and infrastructure for telephone, power, and broadband. It looks reasonably peachy when you drive on the Interstate but get off there and youll see how limited it is. Sat internet would really help people get from zero to 1, but that said, its still kinda crappy compared to fiber. Having the bird in range for 15 minutes until you have to handover to the next bird is not conducive to smooth, glitch free Internet.
WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
> I am curious if good satellite internet will lead to an exodus of people from cities and subdivisions You seem to be imprinting wireline capacity onto satellite. This will always be an error. A core facet of satellite is it's inherent limited capacity. This has always been the case and no tech is on the horizon that will change this.
- mlindner 1y ago
  What makes satellite have an inherent limited capacity? Like there's no real physics limits on how big you can make a satellite. More reception power = more signal in the same frequency range.
  - WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
    > Like there's no real physics limits on how big you can make a satellite. There absolutely are. Launch weight, heat dissipation, energy storage and output are a few of the engineering boundaries that must be respected. You can't bigger one without impacting all the others. It also has to fit in the launch vehicle with whoever is sharing a ride with it. Our theoretically ginormous satellite might not much improve capacity (in the cell it's servicing) due to limitation in the assigned spectrum. You can only divide up time and frequencies so far. Whatever you're doing here, you will need to duplicate that to cover the nearby cells. Then multiply that by a region and that by a country and that by a planet. It takes a lot of satellites to cover a lot of area from a low-ish altitude.
WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
> I'm not really aware of anyone that is truly without "internet access" as cell phones have basically filled that area in years ago. Restated otherwise: You are not aware of the millions of Americans whose cell signal is weak to non-existent in places they routinely spend time at.
TinkersW 1y ago
Cell phones general do not work in rural areas unless you are very lucky or go climb the highest peak that happens to be in direct line of sight of a tower.
WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
> With satellite internet from starlink (and I think amazon is attempting their own version?) I don't see how running internet over wires to rural housing could ever be seen as a good expenditure of money. A number of replies here explain how deploying wireline is absolutely a good expenditure of money. Once you have read them, will you then understand?
kmeisthax 1y ago
[dead]
thesuitonym 1y ago
> Also, I'm not really aware of anyone that is truly without "internet access" as cell phones have basically filled that area in years ago. Then you clearly don't know anyone who lives in a rural area, because much of the US still doesn't have good cell coverage.
nektro 1y ago
you could not pay me to use starlink

by esaym 1y ago

bdcravens 1y ago

tracker1 1y ago
Depending on where you are, that's an entirely valid option IMO... There are lots of houses with septic tanks without centralized sewers.

LocalH 1y ago

Satellite has a lower cap on latency, until we figure out faster-than-lightspeed radio transmission (if that's even possible)

mxuribe 1y ago
Upon reading the latter portion of your comment, a potential story for XKCD comic immediately sprang to mind...something along the lines of a tech person or team invent faster-than-lightspeed technology, but abandon their work on a spacecraft warp-style engines to improve satellite internet....because its just so much easier to make tons of money doing barely the minimum within the ISP monopoly business. lol :-D

garciasn 1y ago

My rural cabin has access to: 1. 25/2 DSL for $140/month (12 month contract with $40/mo seasonal disconnect) 2. 5G (60/0.03 which was 100/20 last summer until the nearby tower became overloaded). 3. LTE (see above) which I routinely get ~100/30 but which Verizon, at least, will not allow their boxes to use if it can connect via 5G, regardless of usability of the connection. 4. Fiber (100/100) at $89.95 (12m contract with $25/month seasonal disconnect). The fiber has higher speeds, but I didn't price them out. The costs were originally listed at $34.95 before they ran the lines, but they have upped them to $89.95 now that they are run to my lake home. 5. Starlink (supposedly 150/20 for Residential Lite which is available in my area) at $80/month on a month-to-month with purchase of a dish (I got mine refurbished for $135). I am routinely seeing ~400/40 with 25ms ping even though I shouldn't be. That said, the speeds are more variable (low as 120/7). --- I would LOVE for there to be reasonably priced and very stable Internet for month-to-month, but there just isn't except for Starlink--at this point.

nullc 1y ago
I am doubting the level of rural that has that level of connectivity. Your options there are far better than what I had living adj to downtown mountainview not so many years ago.
- garciasn 1y ago
  It's in Central MN. It is 11 miles, straight line, from a town of 2200 and 15 miles from a town of 4400. The closest town is 8 miles as the crow flies of 700 and only has a gas station and a couple of bars. There's a bar and volunteer fire department 4 miles as the crow flies that has a population of 48. Believe me: this is rural. Until investment from the federal government and/or forced lower-bound limits on 'broadband' back about 6 years ago, the only option was 768/300 DSL.
- addaon 1y ago
  I'm in a small town (5000 people) on the Utah/Arizona border. The internet options are better, cheaper, and more reliable than I had in old town Mountain View, Palo Alto, or Sunnyvale. I go with the symmetric 1 gig with static IP, but symmetric 8 gig is an option as well. Silicon Valley's home internet options just suck.

evanjrowley 1y ago

Having spend several years under the thumb of a rural wireless internet service provider, the thought of all my neighbors sucking up shared Starlink bandwidth to stream Netflix in the evenings makes me nauseous. How is it a reasonable expectation that Starlink can really support entire rural areas?

lenerdenator 1y ago
It's not, but we've never cared anyways, so why start now with this?
- thinkcontext 1y ago
  > but we've never cared anyways Rural areas in the US have enjoyed disproportionate communications (and infrastructure in general) subsidies since the founding of the USPS. More recently, the Universal Service Fund has spent around $5-8B per year since the 90s, first on phone service then adding broadband. And there are more recent broadband efforts for broadband in the tens of $Bs.
  - lenerdenator 1y ago
    How effective have these efforts been at getting broadband access in rural communities? And comparatively, how effective have they been at giving a revenue source for telcos that they haven't had to really deliver on promises for?
wmf 1y ago
It's not an expectation; it already happened. People love it.

NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago

>With satellite internet from starlink (and I think amazon is attempting their own version?) I don't see how running internet over wires to rural housing could ever be seen as a good expenditure of money. There are two perspectives on this. From the user's standpoint, when I finally wired up my house and we were no longer using wifi, all the streaming video was just flawless, no more stuttering. And I was only sharing that air with devices in my own house and the two closest neighbors. I wouldn't want to have to share it with all of North America. The other perspective is from the point of view of the ISPs themselves (the ones not Starlink). Can they pay off the cost of the infrastructure, and then make a profit? And it turns out that they can. Just not a quick one. If they can't profit on it this quarter, many see no incentive. Someone needs to light a fire under their asses. These are both obvious, and if you "don't see how", maybe you need to look.

lenerdenator 1y ago

> With satellite internet from starlink (and I think amazon is attempting their own version?) I don't see how running internet over wires to rural housing could ever be seen as a good expenditure of money. That said, I've always felt satellite internet to be yucky but I'm used to "satellite internet" adding 1000ms to your latency and uploads that actually run over your telephone line. Depends on what you declare a "good expenditure of money". The thing about running fiber is that it's not particularly expensive to do. dig trench, install infrastructure, rebury it. Hell, if you have a utility pole, you can omit steps 1 and 3, so long as you're okay with the line being exposed to the elements. Launching satellites is very expensive to do. There are very high barriers to entry that prevent meaningful competition from occurring for satellite internet providers, which is why HughesNet was crap for all of those years. It took NASA funding a commercial crew program to get a rocket built that could put payload in LEO for "cheap", and there's only two or three options that can reasonably be expected to operate that way. I'd rather have a lot of competition for installing and operating fiber infrastructure than having an effective duopoly for running performant satellite internet. I'm under no delusions that will occur in rural areas under the present regime in DC. As for an exodus from cities and suburbs, no. There's no amount of internet speed that would make me move to a place where there's reduced services and infrastructure in every other category, like schools, hospitals (this is a big one), water, sewer, transit, etc. and there are millions more like me.

legitster 1y ago
> The thing about running fiber is that it's not particularly expensive to do. dig trench, install infrastructure, rebury it. Hell, if you have a utility pole, you can omit steps 1 and 3, so long as you're okay with the line being exposed to the elements. Uhhhh.... it can cost several hundred dollars just to dig a trench across my yard. If the plan involves providing broadband to rural farmhouses that might be miles apart, that could be tens of thousands of dollars per customer. Obviously on utility poles (where they exist) is going to be much cheaper, but you still need an ISP to build and operate the thing and set up things like repeater boxes and deal with outages.
toast0 1y ago
> There's no amount of internet speed that would make me move to a place where there's reduced services and infrastructure in every other category, like schools, hospitals (this is a big one), water, sewer, transit, etc. and there are millions more like me. I moved to "rural lite", and have a well and septic. That part isn't so hard to live with; although no water for a couple days when our well pump went out wasn't fun. The hard part IMHO, is that everything takes so long to get to. We've got a good small town that's a couple minutes away, but if I need to go to a big box store, that's 30-45 minutes, each way. I like it here, and I have a 8 acre parcel, which is incompatible with suburbia, but it's an adjustment.

kibwen 1y ago

Satellite internet has its place but it's never going to be dominant. Any area with high density is better served by wires, and any area with medium density is better served by a combination of wires and cellular internet. Satellite only make economic sense for the truly remote; the astronomical and recurring infrastructure costs are just killer (Starlink satellites last for 5 years, buried fiber lasts for 50 at least (while providing better latency and throughput)).

natch 1y ago

Median latency 21ms over the last 15 minutes, Starlink.

legitster 1y ago

> Also, I'm not really aware of anyone that is truly without "internet access" as cell phones have basically filled that area in years ago. I mean, this is basically it. For paying bills, doing school work, messaging, getting news, etc the options these days are affordable and very convenient. Even video calling and streaming videos doesn't really affect my data plan too much. The only advantage of a hardline to your house is if you are going to do copious amounts of high-def streaming or you need a very stable connection. More of a luxury/hobby resource.

r14c 1y ago

Is internet access really the main determining factor for where people want to live? I know some people really dislike cities, but there are plenty of reasons to live in one if noise and crowds aren't dealbreakers.

tw04 1y ago

> With satellite internet from starlink (and I think amazon is attempting their own version?) I don't see how running internet over wires to rural housing could ever be seen as a good expenditure of money. That was the same excuse used when nobody wanted to wire rural America for electricity. It was a bad take then and a worse take now. Wiring those homes with single-mode fiber once will provide modern broadband for at least the next 50 years, if not longer. Satellite is not and will never be a replacement for fiber.

0xffff2 1y ago
Huh? People used satellites as an excuse to not wire rural America for electricity? Starlink might not be as fast as fiber, but it's more than good enough.
- jmb99 1y ago
  They were responding to: > I don't see how running internet over wires to rural housing could ever be seen as a good expenditure of money. In pure ROI, it's the same as running electrical service to rural areas. But still very important in general
- WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
  > Starlink might not be as fast as fiber, but it's more than good enough. Users running up against oversubscription - this is a when not if condition. The capacity limits inherent to satellite tech are what they are. ref: https://kagi.com/search?q=starlink+oversubscribed&dr=4&r=us&sh=kbfdjKTzWd9NIFcxkeeshw https://kagi.com/search?q=starlink+oversubscribed&dr=4&r=us&... Between now and then, users' routine downloads run up against caps (eg:steam game packs).
  - thesuitonym 1y ago
    Search engine are not references, but how do you generate sharing links in Kagi?
    - 1y ago

rented_mule 1y ago

> cell phones have basically filled that area in years ago That doesn't work well in mountainous areas, which are often rural. There are three towers within a couple of miles of my house, but nothing close to line of sight to any of them. ~1/4 mile away I can get full service, but I have none at all at home. Luckily Comcast / Xfinity rewired our little town a few years ago so we don't have to rely on satellite (not great during the heavy snowstorms and thunderstorms we get). I'd love to use cellular as a backup as we have 3~20 full days of blackouts per year (most of us have generators and/or batteries) and Xfinity goes down 80-90 minutes after a blackout starts.

kjellsbells 1y ago

> Also, I'm not really aware of anyone that is truly without "internet access" as cell phones have basically filled that area in years ago Unfortunately very much not true. The US is a very large and sparsely populated place. As far as cell and broadband service goes, much of West Virginia, huge chunks of PA, upstate NY, and Maine all have limited or no cell service. In the Midwest the communication infrastructure is often delivered by community co-ops, not corporations, that also deliver electric power. And dont get me started on the vast Western states. The US has, frankly, an absolutely ludicrous patchwork of providers and infrastructure for telephone, power, and broadband. It looks reasonably peachy when you drive on the Interstate but get off there and youll see how limited it is. Sat internet would really help people get from zero to 1, but that said, its still kinda crappy compared to fiber. Having the bird in range for 15 minutes until you have to handover to the next bird is not conducive to smooth, glitch free Internet.

WarOnPrivacy 1y ago

> I am curious if good satellite internet will lead to an exodus of people from cities and subdivisions You seem to be imprinting wireline capacity onto satellite. This will always be an error. A core facet of satellite is it's inherent limited capacity. This has always been the case and no tech is on the horizon that will change this.

mlindner 1y ago
What makes satellite have an inherent limited capacity? Like there's no real physics limits on how big you can make a satellite. More reception power = more signal in the same frequency range.
- WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
  > Like there's no real physics limits on how big you can make a satellite. There absolutely are. Launch weight, heat dissipation, energy storage and output are a few of the engineering boundaries that must be respected. You can't bigger one without impacting all the others. It also has to fit in the launch vehicle with whoever is sharing a ride with it. Our theoretically ginormous satellite might not much improve capacity (in the cell it's servicing) due to limitation in the assigned spectrum. You can only divide up time and frequencies so far. Whatever you're doing here, you will need to duplicate that to cover the nearby cells. Then multiply that by a region and that by a country and that by a planet. It takes a lot of satellites to cover a lot of area from a low-ish altitude.

WarOnPrivacy 1y ago

> I'm not really aware of anyone that is truly without "internet access" as cell phones have basically filled that area in years ago. Restated otherwise: You are not aware of the millions of Americans whose cell signal is weak to non-existent in places they routinely spend time at.

TinkersW 1y ago

Cell phones general do not work in rural areas unless you are very lucky or go climb the highest peak that happens to be in direct line of sight of a tower.

WarOnPrivacy 1y ago

> With satellite internet from starlink (and I think amazon is attempting their own version?) I don't see how running internet over wires to rural housing could ever be seen as a good expenditure of money. A number of replies here explain how deploying wireline is absolutely a good expenditure of money. Once you have read them, will you then understand?

kmeisthax 1y ago

[dead]

thesuitonym 1y ago

> Also, I'm not really aware of anyone that is truly without "internet access" as cell phones have basically filled that area in years ago. Then you clearly don't know anyone who lives in a rural area, because much of the US still doesn't have good cell coverage.

nektro 1y ago

you could not pay me to use starlink