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this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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In Iowa, at least, the state had a pre-existing fiber network that got expanded to a shit-ton of rural communities and local (often municipal) ISPs. It's more expensive than what you'd get in the cities, but much better bang for buck than Starlink.
The only people still struggling to get service are those who live way, way outside those communities -- the kind of people for whom "neighbor" means somebody who lives a significant fraction of a mile away. And, outside of comfortably wealthy individuals, those people are a dying breed, at least in Iowa.
If Iowa of all places can pull something like that off, I figure it's not out of reach of any state (or nation, for that matter) whose inhabitants give a nano-fuck about access to technology.
Rural Iowa has phone lines and can easily put up p2p wireless as long as it’s above the tree line . It’s also easy to trench cable through most of the state . I used to live there.
Many places in the US are much more difficult.
Verizon offered me 3mbps/1mbps dsl for $60/mo 4 years ago and it was their best and only option. I had their LTE service and it was flakey due to mountain interference and distance from tower. Two p2p wireless services exist but 1 had 20% packet loss across all of their customers and after 2 years still refused to fix it and the other was offering single-digit speeds for $100+ per month.
Verizon put up a sign 3 years ago that said “high speed internet coming soon!” The sign has since deteriorated and blew away. It’s symbolic.
The fcc needs to support LEO so that areas like mine are serviced. Starlink doesn’t compete with any other terrestrial service. It’s for the people that don’t have another option, and there are a lot.
Yep, I was 2 miles from my town that had fiber, was considered rural. Called Comcast to bring out the line, which was 1700' from my property (not fiber, just coax) first quote was $7,500...mailed them the check for it. It sat on someone's desk for nearly 3 months before they finally told me the company they hired got it wrong and it would be 30k, so I got neighbors around me to jump on board....got signatures and all that. 6 months later they tell us it's not possible and will cost $250k to service the 15 homes 1600' from the hub....yea starlink has musk stink on it, but way to many don't realize what it has done for us "rural" people who have been lied to by all the big telecoms.
Iowa is pretty flat. It's all farmland that's been plowed a million times (making trenching much easier, and a lot more opportunity for things like directional drilling/conduit drivers).
Try running cable through somewhere with harder ground/rocks, trees, mountains, swamp (Mid Atlantic, Florida, Alabama, Minnesota, etc) dealing with right-of-way, over-populated poles, etc, etc.
Then there's the connection rate. In a more populated area there would be many more final connects, which can drive the cost a lot more than running the mainline. If you run fiber across 20 miles with no connects (just point to point), there's minimal hardware infrastructure along the way. Add in needing switching for 5 communities, now you need buildings, power, termination, switching, runs to houses, etc, etc.
It's not really a good comparison.