Unfortunately running cable is insanely expensive. $60k per mile to trench.
Zedstrian@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
If they can get people to pay $1,500 fees for access, surely that money would be better directed towards installing fiber in these rural areas to circumvent the need for highly expensive satellite infrastructure?
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Peppycito@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
What till you hear about the rocket equation!
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
That just means the high up front costs of either trenching fiber or launching satellites need to serve a lot of people to recover that cost. That means the last mile for rural residents tends not to be cost effective for fiber, because there aren’t enough connections served by any given segment.
But making it so any given satellite can serve lots of people in its footprint at any given moment might make it cost effective to serve rural residents.
One common strategy is to run fiber to a specific central location and run point to point microwave antennas to the individual houses/buildings served. That way the fiber itself can carry the traffic of hundreds of users, and each house just needs to have an antenna with line of sight to the place where the fiber is terminated. Rural WISPs have been doing this from before Starlink.
Peppycito@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
You only dig fibre once. You need new starlink satellites every couple of years.
EpicFailGuy@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
we have had a solution to this for ages … I’ve lived in rural places without fiber where there is a Microwave repeater at the distribution point and you setup a dish in your house to receive it.
I was a good 2 - 3 miles away from the uplink and I still got gigabit speeds. It was very sensitive to weather … but it beats not having broadband at all.
Luminous5481@anarchist.nexus 3 weeks ago
why would a billionaire or the politicians they pay for be concerned with what’s best for everyone?
warm@kbin.earth 3 weeks ago
For the cost of these satellites, we could have full connectivity across the world with land based infrastructure, which would last longer and be easier and cheaper to maintain. LEO internet should have been made illegal the moment it was conceived.