It means I now get to feel really old for the rest of the day.
If you imagine a modem handshake sound I wonder what baud rate it is.
Before we had cables dedicated to internet, we reused telephone cables for both telephone+internet, so adding digital data on top of the existing network, hence Digital Subscriber Line :) It was the fiber of the 90s.
Surely a large # of North American internet users are still using DSL?
I mean, I live rural and even I have fiber now, but that's new.
The island I grew up on in Sweden (with a population of ~700) got broadband in 2007 sometime I think, and in 2013 got fiber optics. Surely most of North America has to be using better stuff than DSL at this point? Although geographically and politically it is probably a bit harder to get high performance internet access everywhere there.
Starlink has created a lot of property arbitrage opportunities
Unfortunately for the world, it seems like it's run by some unhinged person which leads to it not being an option for many people. I personally know one family that didn't get Starlink because of that, and another that return theirs for the same reason.