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.

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0xffff2 7 months 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 7 months 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

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threeseed 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

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

It's a solved problem.

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fragmede 7 months 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.

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verzali 7 months ago | parent [-]

Aren't these the same problems for Starlink?

	▲	fragmede 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		Climbing one tree to get Starlink to see the sky is less work then having to climb multiple trees to align a dish and a repeater so it's entirely terrain dependent so all we can say in the general case is we have to take a look at your land/situation before saying which would be preferable to you.