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Comment by fluidcruft | Hacker News Reader

Streaming video on airplane flights?

Most of Starlink’s customers are simply rural people who want Internet access at decent speeds. There are wide swathes of the US where Starlink’s best competition is measured in kilobytes per second.

Seems like a case for the US having better fibre deployment than it does for leaking interference from unshielded poorly made tin cans.

Fibre rolls in a dense city have different economics from somewhere with just a few people per square mile.

and yet Western Australia, 3x size of Texas with less than a million people in 1980 had a telephone network that covered the population.

The "sums are different for rural V urban" doesn't make leaky tin cans a better solution over fibre to population, particularly given the downsides.

Pretty sure we achieved that level of coverage here in the US a decade or more earlier than that. A lot of those same rural customers still rely on the telephone system for Internet access. They might be able to get DSL now, but the speeds are going to be low; often just a few hundred kilobits per second.

So pull modern fibre; as should be done.

And who pays for those miles of fiber? That one customer, because he chose to live there?

I assume you understand that it that's the case, Starlink is a much better option as it won't cost them 5 figures upfront

This is beside the point. Starlink exists and provides excellent service to customers who have no alternatives.

Don't even need fiber. Starlink is only on par with 5G.

It's a leaky tin can system interfering with radio astronomy, that's not "on par" with either fibre or ground based 5G.

Shield it properly (as promised) or ditch it.

Or... hear me out: put up a cell tower and don't waste energy throwing devices that literally burn up in the atmosphere in a few years. Yeah, that doesn't really help boats or people in the middle of the Amazon. Satellite internet is not long term infrastructure.

~80% of Starlink customers are not in the US.

That'd be a point to make to the GP db48x

No, I mean globally most of their customers are rural. Starlink is limited primarily by customer density rather than by absolute numbers. They can provide service to just so many people per square mile before the speed drops below the customer’s tolerance. Most of the square miles in the world are rural, therefore most of the customers are as well.

Plus cities have Starlink’s best competition. Starlink is amazing but FTTH is even better. If you can get FTTH at all then you probably won’t even consider Starlink. Nor should you.

Suburban+Urban is more than rural.

Rural more than Urban

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