If an area could be wired with phones in the past, it can be wired for fiber now even cheaper and nearly all of rural areas were wired with electrical and phone lines before. Fiber is cheaper and lighter than copper lines, bucket trucks have never been more common, and there are very few existing utilities to contend with. This fiber is WAY cheaper than any satellite internet, works even when the weather is shitty, and doesn't require investments into proprietary gear.
The cool thing is that since they often own the power right of way, they can run fiber on it without any change.
The way coops work is that we're the owners, we vote for initiatives, etc. The local power company is now our region's #1 internet provider, hands down.
You need to vote and encourage others to make fast internet an election issue.
And even if every house has fiber, there are still many cases for mobile and robust Internet that can't be covered by cellular networks.
The reality is that Starlink needs a competitor. And besides, satellite Internet from LEO satellites is a viable competitive option to fiber, based on infrastructure costs alone. It's all nice to convince slow moving bureaucracies to lay out fiber, but nobody wants to wait the five to ten years for that to happen, when you can subscribe today and get it within a week.
It cost me $15,000 to establish my co-op membership 1,000 ft it went to the next guy. Our bylaws require all members to pay 100% of the full unsubsidized cost of extension up front.
This is fairly common. Not a lot of co-ops are built where prior entrants foot the full cost of new entrants.
The real cost of extending fiber can be $10+ a foot overhead or $30+ underground, which is a hard sell to prior entrants as a freebie to toss out.
>they can run fiber on it without any change.
I thought it said without charge, my bad. High cost but no change I guess.
This doesn't work once you get really remote, nor does fiber.
In any case none of them beat the experience of pulling an antenna out of a box and it pretty much just working.
I'd take fiber -> Taara -> Tarana 3.65 CBRS any day of the week over any LEO. Way faster, way lower latency, and way lower total cost to deploy. Also scales massively better.
To what? Starlink is getting you to a major exchange in two direct shots. When I was testing it in North Dakota I was getting lower latency to Google and Cloudflare through Starlink than I was through local fiber providers (likely due to their long circuitous route to Minneapolis).
Same reason a lot of HFT uses microwave vs fiber paths - fiber paths are following the ROW, the microwave paths are the physically shorter paths.
LEO is a niche technology, but not and shouldn't be the default for tons of reasons.
b) In Australia they are trialing 100g over the existing fibre network.
c) Everyone was fine with dialup at one point as well.
You dont want to use us as an example of internet speeds or leading the world on anything in this space.
Our internet infrastructure/speed etc is considered sub optimal by many. It is (slowly) getting better - but it has been years of lost oppoutunity.
b) Our internet infrastructure was sub-optimal but is being upgraded to full fibre to the door across the country. 1g is available to consumers today, 10g to businesses, 100g in testing. And it’s future proof.