Most homes already have a phone line and can support a DSL network... and in some countries a phone line is mandated by law, so the infrastructure already exists.
But, DSL is not nearly as "sexy" as thousands of satellites...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL#:~:text=VDSL%20offers%20s....
Starlink is susceptible to cloud cover, rainstorms, lightning and other things that would interfere with signal quality (or render it unusable for periods of time).
Seems buried lines (either POTS for DSL, Coax for Cable, or Fiber) is the best solution. We just need to figure out how to incentivize it being built.
Our DSL and cable options were limited, Comcast said they offered cable, but when they got to the line near the house, the signal was so poor they were unable to make it work without 50k in labor.
Then ATT came with DSL, the connection has routine outages for hours at a time. There is a technician servicing the DSLAM pretty much every week, there is literally no way ATT makes money where I used to live. Everyone owns 20+ acres, there's basically 10 homes in 1 square mile. And then the Hurricanes... Every 4 years all of the lines get blown down and it takes ATT 1-2 months to get it back online... There is way too many advantages for satellite in rural areas.
If I had to guess, there was over 200 outages (anything over 10 minutes IMO is an outage) in the 6 years I lived there.
Digging cables is what's expensive. You can use telephone poles for fiber too, but it exposes it to more outages. You can secure the lines with steel cables but that ads cost, and if you are deploying to poles then you were looking for going cheap.
Helps that pesky Huwawei/5G problem the US keeps complaining about as well.
It seems VDSL2 can achieve maximum throughput at run lengths under 1000ft from the DSLAM, with maximum performance beginning to degrade after. That sounds sufficient for most of the people currently stuck with slow access right now in the US (more rural areas outside major cities, but not actually remote as-in nearest neighbor is 1 mile away).
Also... surely solving this problem is cheaper than sending thousands of satellites into orbit every few years as they decay.
I would guess that this isn't right, but honestly I don't have the data either. My rough guess would be that only around 5-15% of people have <1000' of copper to their DSLAM, and I from what I've experienced with other technologies the speeds degrade very quickly after the max length, and only even work up to the max length in absolutely ideal scenarios. What I've seen of current copper infrastructure in the U.S. is pretty bad - lots of hand twisted copper lines with the ends exposed and rusting out, for example - that kind of thing would add the equivalent of at least several hundred feet of additional cable, and is very difficult to fix en-masse.
Honestly my gut feeling is that you pretty much have to run new cables to something like 80% of the U.S. to get good Internet service everywhere, and obviously if you're running new cables you should just run fiber. Looking at the cost of that compared to launching satellites - and accounting for the additional benefits of the satellites, like connectivity in extremely remote places and on the ocean - I'm not sure the satellites don't come out ahead.
EDIT TO ADD: A comparison point on the 1000 feet number is that this is in the same ballpark as how close a 5G tower needs to be to get real 5G service to your home or your cell phone. Current 4G towers are nowhere near that dense, and it's going to take huge amounts of money to get them that dense, even in the most densely populated areas.
There are folks with dial-up connections still, unfortunately, and not always because they have no other option. The more technically-inclined people here on HN wanting to work remotely and stream multiple 4k videos at once - they aren't majority of, say, AT&T's customer base. AT&T won't build this out if they think 1 in 100 potential customers will actually upgrade.
This will change over time, as a generation of folks that grew up with technology age and move into more rural areas. Hopefully demand will drive these network upgrades over time, and make it make financial sense to run new fiber in rural areas.
This could even be expedited with some sort of National Infrastructure Bill to fund it today, subsidized by tax payers since the benefits are ultimately so great.
I still think that's ultimately the better (and long term, cheaper) option verse thousands of satellites being launched every few years.
My take on the situation is that what most people want is more Internet for the same or less money. That means the only way to get infrastructure improvements is with competition. If AT&T did a bunch of upgrades and then gave their customers better service for the same price their customers would take it, but the customers aren't going to pay more than they're paying now and they're only going to leave if there's something better.
Also many of the places I have been looking at moving to don't even have POTS lines. This would fill the gap where POTS and VDSL is not available. I would certainly use VDSL if that were an option and use Starlink as a fallback in a very remote area.
Where are you, if you don't mind telling. I had thought, perhaps incorrectly, that in the US it was required by law to have POTS lines run to all homes - which led to it being installed during construction.
> The universal landline requirement has been repealed in Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin. There, new homeowners have no guarantee that they could order phone service at affordable rates, consumer advocates say.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/landline-rul...
The language, however, of "guaranteed access to an affordable line" does seem to imply a TELCO will have to run a line to your property at your request? Without fees (since that wouldn't be affordable)?
Perhaps, in practice, this resulted in all new construction having lines run since that was cheaper than doing it ad-hoc upon demand.
> I suppose we would need a land developer here to chime in.
Yes, hopefully someone out there knows more! Honestly curious now, since I had always assumed this was how it was.
I live in the suburbs of Paris and the length of the phone line is still too long for VDSL2 (it's only available for distance less than 1 km) so I am not sure how feassible that is in rural areas.
I strongly disagree with CCP's policies here, but that's not for us to decide.
But I mean once a Chinese citizen gets their hands on the equipment, I'm not sure how China would stop them. I suppose they could have roving bands of listening posts looking for the uplink signals.
I'm sure someone could figure out a way to take payments for them. Many rich Chinese citizens already have bank accounts outside of China.
Regarding an American traveling to China - I think you're still beholden to the host country's laws, no? You can't break their local laws just because you're from out of town.
Not to mention the punitive actions CCP could take against Tesla (as they try to build out a business there) to put pressure on SpaceX to stop allowing Starlink access in China. That wouldn't be fair either, but Musk is CEO of both organizations and I'm not sure the CCP would distinguish them separately.
I think this is pretty likely.
In the US the FCC has a whole set of systems designed to locate interference sources [1], and I've heard stories that they're extremely good at it. They even have a whole facility in Maryland dedicated to satellite monitoring!
[1] https://www.fcc.gov/over-air-spectrum-observation-capabiliti...
People earning an equivalent of a couple USD a day, or nothing at all, aren't going to be able to afford to pay some US corporation for fast internet.
Fast internet probably isn't even a concern in wartorn countries, honestly.
Let's be honest - Starlink is almost exclusively going to be used by people living in rural areas within developed nations.
Why would the US Government (aka. Taxpayers) pay for internet use in other nations?
We already have expensive problems domestically that people would rather spend that coin on.
You drop access to the internet as whole in places where the internet is suppressed or non-existent and the populace learns just how bad they have things then they might revolt on their own.
I wouldn't say I 100% advocate for the idea but thats the thought process behind it.
You would also have to deal with the real possibility that those countries would simply shoot down any planes observed dropping Starlink base stations.
The Human Rights Foundation even collects flash drives to load them up with content to smuggle into North Korea: https://flashdrivesforfreedom.org
For a government to do this? How could that not lead to an armed conflict?
I would very much like to see a headline of a neutral nation airdropping supplies into a country engaged in war without getting dragged into the conflict. I'm not aware of that having occurred in the past 4 decades.
You're not wrong, information/propaganda warfare is aggressive. Sometimes it makes more strategic sense then open warfare, and sometimes states can get away with it when they can't get away with open warfare.
We don't drop satellite modems into war torn countries now, and we're not going to start doing that just because Elon Musk needs to check off one of his PR claims.
And at $2000/pop, they're at least as expensive as the equipment we're currently not randomly dropping around the globe because of the expense.
10 MHz wide channel with 256-QAM can push 100 Mbps down.