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Comment by devin | Hacker News Reader

I've written it elsewhere, but: it is such a shame that the United States saw fit to run electricity _everywhere_, no matter how rural your location, but instead of do the same for rural internet we had to wait for... a private company to launch a global network of satellites. Yes, this post is about internet access while traveling 500mph, which is a different problem, but it is so messed up that people fall over themselves about Starlink for rural connectivity when it is an incredibly complex and expensive technology with huge ongoing costs that could have been solved once and for all by simply running some wires.

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You have it exactly backwards. It is far less complex and expensive and resource intensive to build Starlink than to run a new copper or fiber line with associated telecom equipment on both sides to every rural residence in the US, let alone worldwide. Yes, despite the large cost of launching satellites. And it's especially good that we don't have to force everyone to subsidize inefficient monopoly utilities with our tax dollars to get everyone connected. Plus the benefit of mobility is enormous and shouldn't be ignored.

As solar and batteries become cheaper, eventually we can transition to most rural residences being entirely off the grid and self sufficient. This will also be cheaper and less resource intensive than maintaining the electric grid in those rural areas, let alone building it in the first place, and we can all stop paying hidden subsidies for those users.

The HN groupthink is to hate on anything Elon adjacent, satellite internet included.

hopefully that include his business partners , airlines in this case.

It's not groupthink to believe that the guy sucks and is a threat to humanity. He constantly fights against the type of programs that could have possibly given us satellite internet, the same way we all get to enjoy GPS.

> It's not groupthink to believe that the guy sucks and is a threat to humanity.

Wow, that’s a wild misstatement; that is exactly groupthink nonsense.

You (people) loved him before he went in for Trump.

Before he went in for Trump he was running a factory with an alarmingly high injury rate, where employees were regularly called the N-word, and union busting. People who liked him then weren't paying attention at all.

Before he went in for Trump he created an obviously fake, insanely expensive system that could never work in practice (Hyperloop) just to slow down California rail projects

California rail projects fail because it’s California

For what it's worth, I hated him well before he had anything to do with Trump. Most concretely when he called the cave diver a pedo for not wanting to use his stupid submarine, but I remember thinking that the Hyperloop thing he was proposing was pretty stupid too.

Oh, and when he lied about taking Tesla private so he could quickly boost the price of the stock. That sucks too. He's always sucked.

> You (people) loved him before he went in for Trump.

The inflection point for the public was Musk calling the cave diver, who helped orchestrate the rescue of a dozen trapped kids, a "pedo guy" and then doubling down on it, again, twice in front of his audience of millions.

The inflection point for anyone in tech with two eyes and a brain was Musk insisting his companies produce products that do more than they are, still to this day, capable of.

First was around 2018, the latter was ~2016, although anyone who was familiar with machine learning knew models were not as capable as Musk was insisting they were, and that the hyperloop was a scam.

And yet this discussion seems to be driven by a load of TSLA maximalists.

Elon is a busted flush. He promises the world, delivers somewhat less, somewhat late, if at all. And then layers it with deeply unpleasant politics.

Not groupthink, a sane reaction. Belated, but sane.

this.

Except it's no longer only in rural areas, grid connected utilities are now costing more than being off grid in the cities too. Starlink residential 100 Mbps is cheaper ($69/mo AUD) (ignoring hardware and setup costs) than 50 Mbps fixed line internet ($80/mo AUD). Depending on location, home solar + batteries will usually work out cheaper than being on the grid within the battery warranty period too.

Where are you? In the suburbs of Atlanta I paid $80 for AT&T Fiber 1Gbps u/d.

If they're paying Australian Dollars.. probably not Atlanta

Man, I pay $50USD/month for 1Gbps up down in Wisconsin.

Wicked, I wonder what the most juiced option would cost amongst your upgrade options.

“When in Wisconsin.”

Grid prices are going to start coming down in some of the most expensive parts of Australia due to SAPS, home generation and storage, and microgrids.

I wouldn’t rule out the grid just yet.

If you find Starlink cheap they just haven't gotten around to the bait and switch in your locality. It'll come.

The question that comes up then is: how much traffic can Starlink handle until it gets saturated? I'm not sure it can handle even a significant percentage of the users that currently use wired connectivity. And if they see that demand for their services starts overwhelming supply, they will definitely raise the prices...

_Lots_ of traffic. It's going to end up being the global Internet backbone.

Citation definitely needed.

Internet traffic today is estimated to be a few tens of exabytes per day. Even if you assume 100000 Starlink satellites (we're far from that), each satellite would have to handle hundreds of terabytes per day. That's tens of gigabits per second per satellite, assuming traffic is split evenly among them (will never happen in real situations).

Starlink V3 can pump out some seriously impressive speeds and handle thousands of clients. Starlink is both a great leap forward in rocketry and radio technology. I do still think funny how we are going back to the pre war technology tree for a re-visit

That's not even sufficient to handle the needs of a single large city. The limitation is that even with the much larger constellation they hope to deploy there won't be enough satellites visible at once from any given large metro area.

Starlink has, essentially, fixed capacity per area. Thus, sparsely placed rural users are "cheap" to Starlink.

Densely placed city users would strain the system, but cities also favor wired connectivity.

That makes the two complimentary. Wired makes the most sense in urban formations, satcom makes the most sense in Bum Fuck Nowhere.

This is because Australia has high internet prices. Partly because it's huge, but partly because the NBN got stuffed-up by the Liberals because they didn't believe the country should be investing in what they called at the time "a glorified video delivery service", so put the tech back a decade, and the country ended up paying more for a worse rollout.

Your comparison point is also a bit weird to me. If I want a decent speed, my choices are fixed wireless NBN at ~250Mbit (400 in theory, 250 in practice), or Starlink at ~200Mbit, and they cost around the same.

If I were just a few km closer to the city I could get 500Mbit fibre for ~$90 a month.

So while it's definitely not out of the range of other plans, I wouldn't say it's definitively cheaper. And I wonder if the recent price drops are down to people not wanting to have much to do with Elon Musk any more. I know it's worth a few bucks a month to me not to be a customer of his.

Starlink recently hit 10k satellites. I'd hazard a guess that's not anywhere near enough getting everyone in the US, let alone worldwide, online.

While having more satellites sure does help serve more people, there’s a second issue which arises when trying to serve high density areas, where you run into bandwidth limitations. The solution there is not more satellites but either bigger satellites (which can make smaller beams) or more FCC allowance on the spectrum.

Not everyone. But it's enough for rural areas, which are the most expensive and least practical to serve with wires.

As far as electric goes, that's a nice thought but the reality is prices will not go down in such a scenario. I'd rather my bill go to subsidizing rural areas than to pure profit. Nevermind there are benefits helpful to rural areas that grid service can provide versus solar+battery.

Maybe today, but internet over radio cannot defeat physics. There is only so much bandwidth, so much space in the RF spectrum for data. But landline internet is effectively limitless. You can always lay a second, or twentieth, fiber run. A 10cm bundle of fibers can carry more bandwidth than the entire starlink network many times over, with much lower running costs.

The most effective in rural areas is generally a combination. Fiber to a central location and wifi radio out to customers. I am monitoring a property on the west coast connected via such a setup. The last relay is actually solar powered atop an island.

You can beat the physics here though. There are several techniques in signal processing and beam forming that can be used to make insane high-speed transmissions, the days of geostationary broadcast for all radio traffic are over when it comes to advanced radio communication.

Radio technology is truly the closes thing to black magic. I wish there were more places to learn and read outside of an EE degree

I do wonder about what happens when Starlink grows its customer base a lot bigger like many of you are predicting here, since Elon Fucking Musk, the king of over-promising and under-delivering, is at the helm. We might end up yearning for the days of the (slightly more) regulated utilities instead.

Ideally the other couple low orbit satellite based ISPs will get to a decent place by the time of irrecoverable enshittification.

Oh good, so we’ll be in the same place as we are today with a duopoly or similar, where every option sucks. Sounds lovely.

Isn't this even more of a monopoly utility?

In theory you could have multiple providers but it just doesn't happen much due to market dynamics and incentives.

In this case if I understood it well there's a limit to the amount of satellites we can send into space at those heights and that space is essentially privatized for free uncontested and ESA and China's CNSA already complained about near collision events.

So not only do you get the same market dynamics but practical limitations too and an externalization of costs.

ESA and CNSA were always going to complain, real problems or not.

Why would that be? Having to pull tricks to dodge satellites seems like a valid one.

> And it's especially good that we don't have to force everyone to subsidize inefficient monopoly utilities with our tax dollars to get everyone connected.

Again*.

In some ways we did subsidize the initial public phone network that put ma bell in the position to take over as an Internet backbone as "the Internet" became a thing. In some ways we're subsidizing starlink like direct grants of taxpayer sourced funding for rural broadband expansion and contracts that subsidize the spacex launches.

I do wonder sometimes if it's actually cheaper to connect a rural farm to the Internet by blasting a satellite into space vs setting up some kind of terrestrial radio based network like lora or microwave. That's not my knowledge area so maybe there are real, unsolvable issues that prevent terrestrial radio as a solution, but I have to assume blasting rockets into orbit is expensive both short term and long term, especially considering space trash.

For just ONE Starlink v3 it weighs around 2000kg and right now falcon heavy has an estimated cost per kg of $1,500 dollars so $3,000,000 per unit to orbit and let's say around $1,000,000 for the v3 itself. According to SpaceX each satellite can support 60 Tbsp downlink (I highly doubt this just purely based on the compute required) but assuming that is true that's 60,000 Gbps or 60,000 customers at 1 Gbps. The biggest issue here is that each satellite only lasts for approx. 7 years in LEO before its deorbited vs a fiber link last basically forever

The externalities need to be weighed into the cost too no?

How much global warming and environmental destruction is caused by launching rockets? A grid is built once and can be maintained for a very long time at a much smaller operating cost. Space stuff is expensive...

People in the United States can choose to live in very rural and sparsely populated areas, far more remote than most OECD countries.

It’s not clear to me that we should necessarily massively subsidize their choice to live in the sticks these days. Starlink and 5G are great for this, as is solar energy and batteries.

We already subsidize sprawl’s expensive-per-person infrastructure with tax revenue from dense cities. As a country we need to make a decision about which choices we want to encourage and discourage.

People can't afford to live in cities? Well, they should simply choose to live elsewhere.

People choose to live outside cities, but want access to basic utilities of modern life? Well, fuck 'em.

Ah yes, one step outside of New York City, and I'm immediately in the boondocks.

that’s a bit pendantic, there exists such a thing as suburbs. even some rural communities are perfectly reasonable in terms of municipal infrastructure. but we are specifically talking about houses that are miles and miles from the next house that is then miles and miles away etc

Even in "rural regions", there are typically some small towns where infrastructure could be provided to them decently efficiently. It's when every single house is a good distance away from their neighbors that things like running fiber cabling become grossly inefficient.

Small towns exist, and ones far away from major metro areas are usually quite affordable.

Small towns are or can be made to be efficient in terms of basic infrastructure/services, whereas truly rural areas where everyone is very spread out, it's somewhere between difficult and impossible to do that.

Small town are usually quite affordable because they offer fewer high-paying jobs. Remote work is by far not yet common enough.

Many of the aspects of life "outside the city" are subsidized by the city. It's affordable because of this, and the cities are extra unaffordable as a result.

There are many small towns who will never generate the tax revenue to cover their $50M highway off-ramp and associated infrastructure. The thread was about internet, which has also been subsidized. We subside oil so driving long distances is cheaper. We subsidize food production. Electricity and water distribution is subsidized by urban customers. Even health care is subsidized.

If rural people actually had to pay market-rate for these resources, it wouldn't be cheaper than the city.

So if 10 million people from rural towns moved to their nearest cities, the cities would become cheaper?

What would drop in price exactly?

Yes, if you compare the efficiency of China’s economy to America, you’ll find that their giant cities save them a ton of money on everything overall. As long as you’re willing to build a lot of dense housing very quickly.

And not give people much of a choice. Chairman Mao would like a word.

Well, we'd stop having to spend so much taxes on redistributive efforts, again, like subsidized internet. It's up to voters and politicians to actually change the tax rate to save the money. It'd reduce government debt at least.

Electricity would be cheaper. Here in California, a significant amount of the (very high) electricity costs are used to maintain rural power lines. If rural people moved away, we'd be able to decommission them and no longer maintain the lines.

It wouldn't happen immediately, but as more people become urbanites, we'd be able to move gas subsidies and government road maintenance spending to the urban environment, where we'd spend on more drivers-per-mile roads, OR shift to public transit funding, or simply reduce that government spending.

Over time, we'd be less reliant on cars, which reduces everyones costs, but will mean we aren't so desperate to protect oil interests, so we'd be able to stop paying for wars in the middle-east. Honestly this alone has so many positive side-affects it'd be hard to actually enumerate.

> We subsidize food production. Electricity and water distribution is subsidized by urban customers.

These things usually happen far outside of the cities. Without infrastructure for the countryside these things would not happen.

Some people will be really mad about this comment, but it's absolutely correct.

Broadly speaking, very rural living is generally a lifestyle choice. Yes, not everyone can afford to live in big cities, but there are typically small towns in the general vicinity of rural areas that are quite affordable.

Of course, there are exceptions where you truly need the space, like if you're a farmer, but that's not most people in rural areas.

Edit: to be clear, I don't think it's fundamentally wrong or anything for people to choose the rural lifestyle, I just don't think we should be heavily subsidizing it.

Buddy, many of the people who are being served by Starlink are by no means "very" rural at all. If you get into "lives in a shack in the mountains", then sure I agree, but a HUGE number of people are barely outside of an immediate service area and have no access for one dumb reason or another. This is a demonstration of the failure of our country to do simple, pragmatic things that would benefit our citizens' lives. The "fix" was for some private company to launch things into orbit. It's an expensive fix to a simple problem.

Generally speaking, private companies want to make money by getting customers. Obviously there can be edge cases, but if there's profit to be made by hooking people up, they'll want to do it, and if private companies don't want to get more customers, you have to ask yourself some hard questions about why.

I think we both know what's usually happening: people in an area who, as a whole, are rural enough and poor enough that the economics don't really pen out well. And I'm sure said corporations would be happy for the local government to pay the cost of running those lines out -- if that's not happening, ask yourself why those local governments don't want to pay for it either.

Now if you want to say, "well I don't care if it scales badly, the federal government should just subsidize it until it works", that's your prerogative. But another option would be to encourage zoning and similar rules that impact how people live to change towards better scaling of infrastructure and services, so that spending on these kinds of things is more sustainable and fair.

this

people here don't understand how large USA is -- connecting every corner with copper/fiber, with all the intermediary networking devices means tax money...

Yes, it does mean tax money. Stop corporate welfare and bump the corporate tax rate back to a reasonable value.

A better option would be to eliminate corporate income tax entirely, and raise taxes on the highest income employees and investors to make the change revenue neutral. Corporations waste a lot of resources on financial engineering to minimize tax liability, and that's a pure deadweight loss for the economy as a whole.

Savvy executives can also keep their income near 0 by borrowing against their stock holdings.

So what. They pay interest on that loan, and those interest payments eventually flow to the employees and investors of the lender. Who can be taxed.

Yes, but we've already done it, twice, and the benefits were quite significant.

We paid $900 million in taxes to subsidize rural access to Starlink in one year lol

We also paid $42 billion in taxes for ISPs to roll out broadband access in a 2021 bill, and it hasn't connected a single person to the internet

Before that, we paid $400 billion to ISPs to do the same thing with the same results

wtf was this a upfront lump-sum money?

well even if I was the ISP, I'd just take the money and make the job "take forever"

Generally agree. I live in a location that had (still has?) PSTN service, electricity, and natural gas services, but never got any kind of broadband besides the network I paid for and deployed myself, and subsequently of course StarLink. I think the issue isn't so much that people are demanding internet service in random places, more they're expecting internet service in the places you get all the other regular services.

My parents have Starlink. They live in an area surrounded by dairy farms. It's half a mile between mailboxes. The nearest town is 7 miles away (though only 3 as the crow flies - lots of hills between here and there).

None of the neighbors have cable TV. You've got to either go into town or t'wards the highway 7 miles the other direction).

Three years ago, the utility ran natural gas that far out. Prior to that, it was propane tanks (for the past 50 years) for heat in the winter.

The state capital is 30 miles away... so its not that far away from civilization (this isn't Montana or the north woods of the upper midwest).

When nano-cells came out for cellphones my father and I were the first in line at the store (that was 2010 if I recall correctly). It let the house be able to use a cell phone in the yard - before that it was the landline (and it was DSL for the nano-cell backhaul).

In 2020 when school was remote, their grandkids were there. Prior to Starlink my father got a Firewalla (for network load balancing) and got a second DSL link (it was barely qualifying as high speed internet) so that it could support two zoom calls simultaneously (don't stream music or watch YouTube while the kids are on Zoom School).

5G cell coverage sounds great... but those hills I mentioned earlier? You can get cell phone coverage at the house without the nano-cell... if you get a ladder out and climb up to the top of the roof.

So yes, to support the person I'm replying to - there are a lot of people who are 30 minutes outside of a city of appreciable size and are without wired high speed internet.

In https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/location-summary/fixed?version=... the area that they live in has 0% for 100 Mbps for the majority of the northwest part of the county.

Looks like they may be getting fiber from Bertram Communications soon:

https://maps.psc.wi.gov/portal/apps/experiencebuilder/experi...

That or Starlink may be getting a wad of cash just to keep serving them, courtesy of this administration's NTIA.

The area south of Highway 19 in Dane County to north of Highway 39 in Green county is still rather bare of awards.

Being a farmer is also a lifestyle choice.

So what, you want to give them everything for free? They make good money, they don’t need further subsidies beyond what they receive for farming

You need to examine economics of being a farmer these days…. They do not make good money

'Median total farm household income has exceeded the median U.S. household income in every year since 1998'

'In 2024, median farm operator household income exceeded median U.S. household income by 22.7 percent'

'In 2024, the median U.S. farm household had $1.6 million in wealth'

'In 2024, fewer than 3 percent of all farm households had wealth levels that were lower than the estimated U.S. median household level and over 97 percent had wealth levels higher than the U.S. median'

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-household-...

I think this is very short-sighted, on the order of "Why should we subsidize package / letter delivery to people in the sticks?"

The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself.

> "Why should we subsidize package / letter delivery to people in the sticks?"

Good point, it doesn't make much sense to do that either.

> The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself.

Or, we could zone areas to encourage people to live in towns where it's feasible for both corporations and the government to provide infrastructure and services at a reasonable cost.

> Or, we could zone areas to encourage people to live in towns where it's feasible for both corporations and the government to provide infrastructure and services at a reasonable cost.

This is assuming there isn't a good reason why we might want some percentage of the population to be rural. To have farms and ranches, for example.

Sure, if we restrict the subsidy to farmers and others where we need them to live in rural areas, that's fine.

But not the educators teaching the farmer's kids, or the doctors and nurses treating their wounds? What about the clerks at the grocery store serving those farmers? The liquor store?

Trying to create an elaborate regulatory regime to decide who is justified to live in a rural area is absurd and a waste of money. Especially considering that most people living in rural areas are either employed in a necessary industry that needs to be rural, or work in professional or service industries either directly supporting said rural industry (e.g. tractor repair) or indirectly supporting it's workforce.

Furthermore, the marginal cost of providing broadband to all those "slightly-less-necessarily-rural" people is minuscule. Skipping every other house doesn't save you much when the majority of the cost is building infra to get broadband to the town/road in the first place.

> But not the educators teaching the farmer's kids, or the doctors and nurses treating their wounds? What about the clerks at the grocery store serving those farmers? The liquor store?

They can be in a small town in the region, which is where the school and liquor store probably already are.

Farmers and ranches don’t need any more incentive to live there on top of the boatload of money they make selling their produce

The situation with the electric grid is pretty crazy. The cost to supply power to houses in sparsely populated communities is orders of magnitude higher than urban apartments. Not just the power infrastructure itself but all sorts of little ongoing things like maintenance visits, as well as losses from transmission and distribution. I worked on smart grid systems and getting apartment buildings online was a piece of cake, with one simple connection handling multiple buildings with hundreds of meters, meanwhile suburban homes required much more expensive equipment that was more difficult for technicians to install and serviced only a handful of homes. Everyone talks about this as if these were humble shacks out in the boonies but the bulk of these service points are suburban McMansions built on cheap land at the margins of the cities. Broadly speaking this results is poorer ratepayers significantly subsidizing services for wealthier ones.

And it’s not universal. Just heard a talk today from someone who lives off-grid along with a well, rain collection, and septic.

Not sure what you mean exactly. In the jurisdictions I have experience the utility is legally obligated to provide service to any residence within the territory. That resident can then decide to use 100% solar with batteries and pay us nothing, or use solar during the day and rely on the grid at night, or in our case we had net metering so resident were able to treat the utility as a free battery, producing excess kWh during the day and drawing it back at night, paying only the difference in total draw (or receiving a credit even).

I have not worked in water/sewage, but the characteristics are quite different compared to electricity--electricity cannot be stored, it needs to be sent directly from the power plant to the consumer at the exact moment it is consumed, but on the other hand electricity can be produced more or less on demand with the quantity limited only by your willingness to pay. Water is finite, and is simply being managed by the utility rather than created on demand. Someone collecting rainwater is still impacting the local water system and depending on the environment this still needs to be managed by someone.

No, it is not at all certain that it pays for itself. What evidence do you have for that assertion?

Dubious when you consider how few people this is.

If you’re on the electric grid why can’t you be on a fibre grid.

well for electric grid, you only need "local" connections -- eg. just your town and the generator...

The problem isn’t running a fibre to a town, there aren’t that many towns in the US which are completely disconnected from the road network.

It’s the last mile (or miles) to farm houses.

>It’s not clear to me that we should necessarily massively subsidize their choice to live in the sticks these days.

Last year I had a chance to talk to Gregg Coburn, author of Homelessness is a Housing Problem. We agreed that remote work and improved public transportation were the real solutions to many of our housing problems, allowing greater distribution of population back into more rural areas. This is an area where rural broadband investment could make a difference. Likewise, when we talk about American competitiveness in manufacturing et al, that isn't going to happen in our cities, but rather in more rural areas.

other than introducing public policy to encourage building more housing, i assume?

The problem is that in places like Seattle and the Bay Area, there are hard geographic limits to construction, even if you turn them into endless high-rises. Having watched the WA state legislature go through several years of attempts to fix housing by throwing random policy ideas into the void, I'm not convinced any of it matters nearly as much as a) more money in the state housing trust to help people with down payments and b) a robust economy so more people have more money that they can apply toward housing.

So, sure, yes, by all means do things like pass residential-in-repurposed commercial changes, ADUs, greater density in transit-oriented neighborhoods - do all the things. But, getting more people able to move to parts of the state (in my case, Yakima, the Tri-Cities, Spokane, etc) where there are houses just sitting around relative to King / Pierce / Snohomish... that's just as viable a solution and solves a whole bunch of other water / energy / land use / political / social type problems.

You offer cities with aggressive anti-development regulations, like max height restrictions, and then suggest things would be the same if they instead had endless high-rises?

Sounds like you've found an infinite-value hack: let developers build infinite housing yet prices stay the same.

How many of those "random policy ideas into the void" were to lift regulations to allow people to build housing? Which sounds a hell of a lot simpler than figuring out how to make everyone wealthier without proportional increases in market prices.

Subsidizing down payments doesn't do anything to improve housing availability or affordability in the long run. It just artificially inflates real estate values and acts as a wealth transfer from taxpayers to property owners.

>The problem is that in places like Seattle and the Bay Area, there are hard geographic limits to construction, even if you turn them into endless high-rises

Over three quarters of all residential land in Seattle is zoned single family and the population density of the city is less than a third that of NYC. The geography is not the hard constraint in this city.

Jesus Christ the replies to this are stupid. Have any of you three spent any time in Olympia or working on housing? No? Then shut the fuck up.

i'm realizing i don't have a great knowledge base on like,, exactly how many people live in a suburb but would rather live in a city and vice versa. anything you can point me towards? you can make sure the whole state has access to the basic living amenities required to, say, do remote work effectively, but my gut tells me that a significant number of people are drawn to urban areas for the types of amenities only possible with higher population density

Decentralizing population seems at odds with goals like better public transport and infrastructure.

Who said those two were the ultimate goals to work towards?

You think cities exist for the sake of buses, and not the other way around?

Countries subsidize rural living because it enforces their control over the frontier.

The United States is difficult to invade because of the oceans surrounding it and the many people with guns in the interior that'll take shots at armies.

If you put everyone in a few cities on the coast, the USA becomes easier to invade.

No country capable of landing a single troop on the lower 48 is scared of undisciplined men with AR-15s.

In fact I am not sure if any country can get a troop transport near the US coast without being nuked to the ground first.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Mexico wanted to invade Texas and reverse the Mexican American war.

I can't find any source suggesting this was actually a thing in the 30s and 40s. All I can find is the Zimmerman telegram from a hundred years ago which the Mexicans weren't exactly enthusiastic about.

In any case, I doubt there is any realistic threat of a Mexican invasion beyond fantasizing from political fringes.

Quite the contrary: an empty countryside would make invasions harder because there would be no infrastructure: no roads, no bridges, no tunnels, no electricity, no water supply, no opportunities for shelter. Everything would have to be shipped from outside or built by combat engineers, putting an immense strain on logistics and slowing operations to a crawl.

Moving is incredibly expensive. First+Last month rent up-front, plus a deposit equal to one month rent up-front. That could total around $10,000 up-front costs if you are targeting a major city.

Conversely, having quality utilities in smaller communities could incentivize the building up of those areas and they would become less rural.

lol I paid 17K for NYC - two months rent, extra month for being foreign, 2K since they removed blinds since they showed me the apartment and everyone in NYC could see into my house.

I don’t think we should subsidize internet, but your framing here rubs me the wrong way. People in these rural areas usually live among family and have lived there for generations, reducing this to a choice feels very elitist. People aren’t “choosing” to not pack up their entire lives and move to a city or town.

We shouldn't subsidize internet, it should be provided. The internet is necessary to participate in modern society, and to only provide it to people who can afford it is what's actually elitist.

Last we checked we pay for water too. It’s abundant. It still makes sense to have a price on it because it’s a resource like anything else.

In the same way, we pay for the internet. Free wifi exists if you can’t afford service.

Rather than elitist, it’s just… not communist.

And your water is subsidized... Subsidies don't have to make something free.

what is the point of a society that doesen't have common utilities? and where does one draw the line at what is necessary for a decent life in a modern society?

Who needs all of the damn farmers anyway?

The corporations buying up all of the land formerly owned by these bankrupt farmers probably do.

I don't think the math works.

There are 23 million rural homes in the US and about 3 million miles of rural public roads. Let's say you wired just the public rural roads (ignore going from the road to the house).

It costs $30,000 per mile to put up aerial wiring. $60,000 per mile underground. So we're already at $90 billion for wired poles and $180 billion for underground. And that's just for the wires--we're not including any of the switches and routers for actual internet.

By comparison, the Starlink system cost about an order of magnitude less ($10 billion).

I appreciate you actually taking a moment to think through the cost, but I think we could start with some pragmatism and look to run wires to people who are within a reasonable range of existing systems, of which there are many.

Clearly not every public road needs wiring. Then, consider that you could run wired connections to wireless access points to increase high speed wireless coverage. 1 wire to light up dozens of homes in areas which currently have no service beyond DSL.

Doesn't Starlink have some annual upkeep costs? Maybe $1-2 billion per year to replace aging satellites?

Yes, but Starlink needs to exist for military, planes, boats and other essential very rural services as well. So the upkeep should pay for itself.

And of course Starlink has to be for the whole planet, so just comparing it to the US would be a false analysis.

Of course you also need to upkeep the physical infrastructure. Specially if you don't put all those lines underground.

But one would need to do some more real work to compare. I would also say that a real program for urban fiber makes a lot of sense in more places. But I would love to see somebody take a shot at this, what would be the best if you started from 0 today?

You don't think aerial lines have upkeep costs? ice, tree branches, hurricanes, etc

Would 5G towers be a better alternative?

>I've written it elsewhere, but: it is such a shame that the United States saw fit to run electricity _everywhere_, no matter how rural your location, but instead of do the same for rural internet we had to wait for... a private company to launch a global network of satellites.

Actually whats crazy is that you guys had private and public power run everywhere, and those companies had private and public fibre companies run fibre through those power lead ins almost everywhere that's practical. A feat thats honestly not been achieved anywhere else that I have seen. Lots of people in other countries stomp around wondering why private fibre doesnt just materialise in their house, when they have no access to national public utilities. The answer was local utilities. But there's not even an ounce of appreciation for it outside of the ISP space.

Internet still has a "moral vice" label associated with it that I don't think electricity ever had.

In the popular person's imagination, electricity is the revolutionary technology that enables cheap and safe lighting, as well as instant access to information (through radio). The telephone is the revolutionary technology that lets you call a doctor in an emergency or negotiate crop prices. The internet is the revolutionary technology that lets you go on dating sites and stare at pretty girls on HotOrNot, talk to fellow netizens on discussion forums, and waste hours playing Mmorpgs. It's "that weird technology that the young people use for God knows what." It's for entertainment, not serious business use, except if your business is in providing the entertainment.

Of course none of it is true, especially these days as so much non-tech-adjacent business is happening over the internet (and especially internet-enabled smartphones).

It used to be cheap and possible to build things. The USA no longer can.

Are there any countries that have actually done an exhaustive job of this? I'm from the UK, and I'd say they are pretty good, my parents live in a 300 person village, and they can get 50ish mbit internet through wires. But "rural" in the UK is very different from "rural" in some parts of the US. And this was done by a private company (although it was based on infrastructure built by the government).

It's not a shame. The US, like most countries who sort of want rural internet, just gives money to massive companies who do a tiny bit of rural internetting every 4 years. They don't want to solve the problem because then there's no more free money coming their way. Starlink gets paid to solve their customers' problems, not to perpetuate them.

The only way rural America got landline service was by the government forcing it. The market had no solution.

its literally cheaper to create a low earth orbit satellite constellation than deal with bureaucracy

Why is wire better than terrestrial wireless? Isn't terrestrial wireless how most of Africa caught up to more earlier-developed regions in telecom?

Matter of fact the feds have been spending billions of dollars onbrural internet projects for decades.

Those have just resulted in ya know... almost nothing.

Municipal internet is something the ISPs lobby against like there is no tomorrow. It is a shame, but that's how the US government works.

Blame rural America who continuously votes for politicians who oppose it.

Let me guess, it would be a 512kbit/sec service.

Eh, I think we'll look back on this in 10-20 years and conclude that wireless transmission was always going to make more sense than running millions of miles of wires. Especially so for rural access.

Wired will definitely be the rich, elite way to go.

Satellite internet can get several orders of magnitudes more capacity.

Your understanding of the history and economics of it all is very confused.

> simply running wires

Lol. Yes let's just ignore the most expensive and complicated part of the whole endeavor.

Weird take. The vast majority of US electricity infrastructure is privately owned and financed.

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