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▲ threeseed 15 hours ago

Honestly not sure why they would want to.

The world is continually moving towards being centred around cities where it makes sense to simply rollout fibre.

Especially with gigabit speeds being the new standard.

And even in Australia they are starting to move remote areas onto fibre.

▲jampa 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You are right for on-grid systems. If you can get power from the grid, it is easy to get fiber. I have friends working remotely from very rural zones in Brazil, and they got fiber for a lower price than it was for buying up the transformers/posts to route power to their farms.

But, there are still niche use cases, like ships and planes, that would pay a premium for fast LEO satellite connections. For people I know who live on islands, going from barely being able to use WhatsApp to entirely using the internet (YouTube / Netflix) is game-changing.

▲fragmede 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think Starlink has caused rural fiber deployments to accelerate because a friend's property in rural Oregon just got fiber, but the challenge remains: after you get fiber to the corner of your 22 acre lot, how do you cover the rest of the 21 acres? With fiber and using wifi as your backhaul you have to get a chain a bunch of nodes to get Internet to each building/area you want wifi. Starlink (business) lets you just stick a starlink mini dish in each place without having to worry about all that.

▲0xffff2 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Centurylink ran fiber down the nearest highway to my rural Oregon property a couple of months before Starlink became available. AFAIK the timing was more coincidence than anything, but you're entirely right about the logistics of fiber being non-trivial. As usual, last mile is the hardest part. Even with fiber at the highway, the only service Centurylink would offer us was 10Mbps DSL. I bet they would have tun fiver to my house for $$$$$, but Starlink is plenty fast and it would almost certainly take a decade or more to recoup the one-time costs of getting fiber installed all the way to my house.

▲fragmede 13 hours ago | parent [-]

you're probably right about the timing being coincidental. it would have been nice if they'd gotten there before buying the Starlink hardware

▲threeseed 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are long-range e.g. 20km WiFi transmitters/repeaters.

It's a solved problem.

▲fragmede 13 hours ago | parent [-]

that solution isn't without issues. specifically, you have to climb trees and run power or do solar, and then if there's a heavy storm you can have issues. those aren't insurmountable problems but being able to get Internet anywhere there's liner of sight to the sky is easier (or harder!) depending on the terrain.

▲verzali 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Aren't these the same problems for Starlink?

▲panick21_ 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Are the also rolling out fibre to ships and planes?

▲threeseed 9 hours ago | parent [-]

If Starlink is a technology just for ships and planes then that's great.

But I assume we are talking about use cases beyond tiny niches.