Could never have worked from up there.
I'm glad it worked for you! But the rural places where my friends live have lots of trees, tall ones, and they made Starlink totally unusable.
I'm not sure what the answer is in general. It's probably not realistic to expect universal wired broadband in very rural areas. Conventional satellite is by all accounts pretty bad. And cellular isn't really an option absent a good 5G signal.
But, other than a vacation cottage, lack of usable Internet isn't really an option either if you're going to be working from somewhere.
Is the infrastructure for low-broadband in low density areas inherently more expensive than POTS infrastructure was 75-100 years ago?
POTS bills also at least used to have a universal service charge line item, in part to subsidize rural service.
No? The process to transition the USF to covering broadband didn’t even start until the tail end of the Obama administration.
An example, in Carroll County, GA I live outside of Carrollton, GA and have 2 fiber options 1) Charter/Spectrum which I use 2) CarrollEMC/Crossbeam which looks like they just dropped fiber on our power pole within the last month. If you look at the FCC map of Highway 5 it correctly shows ATT DSL availability, incorrectly shows Comcast coax availability, and does not show either Charter/Spectrum or CarrollEMC/Crossbeam. There is only a process to challenge availability on the FCC map, like Comcast...that incorrectly shows availability, and no option to add new providers to the map. It is left up to the provider to claim availability.
There are now plenty of rural areas with symmetrical gigabit broadband available, while most cities are stuck with whatever pitiful options Cox or ATT decides to bestow.
I don't know why. It seems incredibly realistic to expect wired broadband in most rural areas. (We were able to provide them with power lines and telephone lines over 60+ years ago, there's no reason fiber would have to be any different)
Alternatively, perhaps the starlink antenna could be mounted on a large pole or modest radio tower. That would be ugly but probably a lot less ugly than chopping down your trees.
If close to the home doesn't work, depending on siting requirements, you can erect a tower in a clearing or where there is clear line of sight to the sky and then run power and network to the tower from the nearest structure. Don't neglect lightning surge suppression to protect equipment.
Similar to this: https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/mk4jfx/starlink_d...
Either way, I'd say Starlink is an enormous improvement over every other satellite solution I've tried. The lack of data cap alone puts it head-and-heels above the competition, and the speeds are good enough to coax people off 4G. I have some small complaints about CGNAT and the provided router, but the service itself is more reliable than some cable connections I've tried.
Having seen (and tried) a lot of the alternatives, there really aren't any pushbutton services that compare.
It’s much like a cell tower where a geographical area has finite capacity. You use your “priority” data that has speed guarantees, then it slows down, but is still unlimited. Apparently some users were reselling the link & maxing out the upload/download 24/7. (yeah, I get it, but in this case some kind of QoS probably needs to happen to turn a profit)
I’ve been a beta user since the first couple months of launch. They’ve had growing pains, but it has overall been light years ahead of our local WISP or Hughesnet/Viasat in terms of speed and reliability. Several of my neighbors have no other option than traditional geostationary satellite providers, and I don’t think any of us every want to go back to 600ms+ latencies!
edit: I just wanted to add that for many people, priority speeds for 1TB & having sub-100ms latency is far, far better than the alternatives.
Comcast has similar traffic caps for many of their plans. It's perfectly adequate for most typical users.
Don't worry though, once you hit your gratuitous 50gb/month limit, they only make your network 8x slower until you pay $10/extra gig... I wouldn't praise Starlink if it wasn't such a steal by comparison.
Don't you mean the other way around? Not that it's any better.
Customer volume for Starlink is arguably more valuable to SpaceX than profit per customer.
Dangerous also because the media industry insists that ISPs permanently cancel the service of customers after multiple unproven allegations of copyright infringement and without a single conviction. So far, the courts have been completely agreeing with them and ISPs who refuse to bow to the wishes of the media industry and terminate these users are being sued.
Anyone can lose the ability to have an account at the only ISP they have just because some third party P2P snoop, hired by a movie studio, forwarded a DMCA notice to their ISP with their IP address on it too many times (with "too many" being entirely unspecified in law and up to whatever the ISP thinks won't get them sued). Those third parties haven't exactly always been so careful about avoiding false accusations either. Actually doing anything to deserve a DMCA notice isn't required.
Incidentally the latency has really improved my web development practices.