Hacker News Reader

Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

> With satellite internet from starlink (and I think amazon is attempting their own version?) I don't see how running internet over wires to rural housing could ever be seen as a good expenditure of money.

That was the same excuse used when nobody wanted to wire rural America for electricity. It was a bad take then and a worse take now.

Wiring those homes with single-mode fiber once will provide modern broadband for at least the next 50 years, if not longer.

Satellite is not and will never be a replacement for fiber.

View on HN

> Satellite is not and will never be a replacement for fiber.

Plenty of suburban homes don't have fiber availability and are just fine. I'd rather have 3 coax companies competing for my business than 1 fiber option. I just really don't care that much about speeds above what coax (and Starlink) have to offer. Honestly, I'm on the lowest tier offered by my cable company, and I'd go lower if it would cut my monthly bill by a commensurate amount.

> I'd rather have 3 coax companies competing for my business than 1 fiber option.

And I’d rather have the city or county pull a single fiber back to a pop where an ISP can compete for my business because it’s absolutely absurd to have multiple companies pulling the same cable to a single address and using that last mile as a moat.

Huh? People used satellites as an excuse to not wire rural America for electricity?

Starlink might not be as fast as fiber, but it's more than good enough.

They were responding to:

> I don't see how running internet over wires to rural housing could ever be seen as a good expenditure of money.

In pure ROI, it's the same as running electrical service to rural areas. But still very important in general

> Starlink might not be as fast as fiber, but it's more than good enough.

Users running up against oversubscription - this is a when not if condition. The capacity limits inherent to satellite tech are what they are.

ref: https://kagi.com/search?q=starlink+oversubscribed&dr=4&r=us&...

Between now and then, users' routine downloads run up against caps (eg:steam game packs).

Search engine are not references, but how do you generate sharing links in Kagi?

There's a share link (the < symbol with nodes at the point and tips) right to the bottom and right of the search bar on a results page.

It's not just the limitations of satellite tech or quantity. There's also just the fundamental limit of RF in shared airspace. You run into bandwidth limits due to interference even without overcrowding low earth orbit with a satellite network. When you're running signals over a wire/fiber, your signals are confined and interference is managed relatively trivially.

> Huh? People used satellites as an excuse to not wire rural America for electricity?

Obviously that’s what I meant. And I didn’t mean people used the excuse of “we shouldn’t be pulling cable to all these houses when X is good enough”.

There were endless excuses to not electrify rural America including “they don’t need it”. It was eventually solved through co-ops.

That’s exactly how most rural areas are trying to solve fiber, but of course they get to fight the combination of folks like you that think “satellite is good enough” (it isn’t), and legacy ISPs suing them to slow or stop deployment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com