> 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.
> 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.
Utility poles may exist, but they may be structurally inadequate so the fiber installer may have to wait years for the pole owner to get around to replacing a string of poles before the fiber can be hung.
The poles may have been placed along the back property line without an easy way for a new utility to get in there without nicely asking each household on the street to let them into their back yard.
Spend a little time reading Sonic's "Access" forum. There's a very real have-vs-have-not dynamic going on there because there are areas where Sonic just can't deploy fiber any time soon that are just blocks away from people with service. Estimated service dates keep slipping when they run into unknown unknowns. There is significant engineering and construction work required in each and every neighborhood.
That have-vs-have-not dynamic creates niches for satellite internet service -- rather than having to wait until all the fiber ducks are in a row, you can just pick up a kit at a hardware store or get it delivered, plug it in, point it at the sky, and you're done.
Yes. This is also why people are talking about doing space solar power beaming. The cost of regulation and access has gotten so high that it's actually getting close to becoming cheaper to launch those solar panels into space instead of just installing them on the ground.
> 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.
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.