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Fibre can go about 100 km without a repeater which in the grand scheme of things isn’t very far. Keep in mind that Starlink works best with a fibre base station inside of the coverage cone. A few of those stations in northern Quebec built next to existing cell towers gets you a lot of connectivity for cheap.

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You can do 400 km with unrepeated systems.

However, very seldom do you need or want to go that far on land since very, very few places worth connecting are more than 400 km from somewhere else.

Repeatered systems can go thousands of miles and the repeater sites are handy for local breakout.

Seems like a repeater could be powered just from induction with neighboring powerline, or solar+battery.

Subsea cables have built-in repeaters and they span thousands of miles.

On land it’s usually easier and cheaper to use huts with power.

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