Trump plan to fund Musk's Starlink over fiber called "betrayal" of rural US

The scale of fibre is the problem. Fibre makes sense when you're serving places where a single neighbourhood rivals the population of entire rural towns. They're close to backhauls, technicians, and enough customers to justify the cost. Which is why companies have dragged their feet on it in rural areas where the nearest full-time technician is a half-day's drive away. I mean shit, my mother lives less than an hour outside the capital city of my home province and can't even get DSL. It's too much copper for too few people to justify maintaining it at a price people are able to pay.

I've been using Starlink in rural Canada, prairies and mountains, where most people are either using Starlink, horrible past-gen satellite links, or microwave LOS systems. My father's been using a microwave LOS system at his farm for a decade.

All of them are affected by weather to some extent, but Starlink is the least affected, and no Starlink user I've talked to has been affected by congestion issues. Yes it's absolutely slower than fibre, it's slower than the DOCSIS 3 cable internet I was using before this. Microwave is usually cheaper, but Starlink is much faster (unless you're wealthy enough to get a beefy uplink). And importantly, Starlink ready to go right now.

Rural users often have to choose between nothing and a very expensive something. Fibre would be nice but wiring up every rural customer to fibre is a ridiculously time-consuming and expensive proposition. On the off-chance that a rural town grows instead of dies, then fibre would be better for them but at that point the economics of running fibre would make sense without the need for subsidies.

Rural people need alternatives to Starlink but fibre isn't it.