It's not just the limitations of satellite tech or quantity. There's also just the fundamental limit of RF in shared airspace. You run into bandwidth limits due to interference even without overcrowding low earth orbit with a satellite network. When you're running signals over a wire/fiber, your signals are confined and interference is managed relatively trivially.
> Huh? People used satellites as an excuse to not wire rural America for electricity?
Obviously that’s what I meant. And I didn’t mean people used the excuse of “we shouldn’t be pulling cable to all these houses when X is good enough”.
There were endless excuses to not electrify rural America including “they don’t need it”. It was eventually solved through co-ops.
That’s exactly how most rural areas are trying to solve fiber, but of course they get to fight the combination of folks like you that think “satellite is good enough” (it isn’t), and legacy ISPs suing them to slow or stop deployment.
Starlink might not be as fast as fiber, but it's more than good enough.