this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
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A Boring Dystopia
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I'd like you all to consider that places where you'd use starlink are also significantly more than 30x farther away from civilization than the average land-based internet user.
Out in middle of nowhere Ohio, the only options are satellite and I'll be damned if I'm doing to give Dish or Hughes net more money for worse speeds. Starlink is it until they actually run fiber out here.
Are those places connected to the power grid? If yes then there is no reason they can't have fiber Internet. If we can electrify we can internetify.
Definitely, that's what we should do. But that will have a decent carbon footprint and more importantly our government (at least in the US) has utterly failed rural Americans (and more!) in terms of internet roll out.
That's one of the problems with Internet access being provided by private corporations. They're never going to service those people, because it's not profitable to run a hundred miles of fiber for one guy in Wyoming, unless he's crazy rich and pays for it himself. It's the same issue the mail has, one of the many reasons the USPS is so important
Fiber once it's installed requires effectively no maintenance and it will last indefinitely until physically broken. Copper corrodes and wears out, but glass will last longer than the people who install it or the people who enjoy its use. Satellite internet from LEO requires many rocket launches per year to sustain, meanwhile fiber means rolling a truck (which is usually relatively local) anywhere a backhoe or flood or digging animal has broken it every few months or years, and these trucks are already rolling to install and maintain all of the existing services (or install new ones)
No, many are not on the power grid.
We tried to run fiber everywhere in the US, spent billions of dollars, but it still didn't get built.
Actually it's been working brilliantly, it's just there's so much of the United States to Unite with fiber that it's taking time and continued investment. It used to be you couldn't find fiber anywhere, now most of the farming communities I live around have at least some fiber services and it keeps growing every year. My in-laws just this month were notified they have the option to change from their 8/1mbit DSL to gigabit fiber, and they live in the boonies outside of a town of 500 nobodies ever heard of.
Seems we're getting to where the next big hurdle is less rural fiber and more suburbs. I literally have significantly better internet options after moving to a small town of 10000 or so than my parents do in the suburbs of the capital city of the state.
www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5839394 https://newnetworks.com/ShortSCANDALSummary.htm