>A few more words: they’re struggling to find a niche where their ungodly expensive product makes more sense than the readily available alternatives

pretty obvious you never worked for an ISP and forgot about all the `middle of nowhere` customers who have no high speed internet.

even for me, in houston texas, we cant get fiber to the home and were stuck with AT&T DSL which was like $60 per month and ungodly slow. Also my GF and I both work from home and she does massive file uploads.

had xfinity not been available starlink would be an easy choice. ive tried 5g hotspots and they are not super reliable.

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overfeed 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In all fairness, it was a qualified statement: "readily available alternatives". That immediately disqualifies customers stuck in the boonies, or a few hundred feet away from service coverage.

	▲	Wyverald an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Just noting that the phrasing "readily available alternatives" by itself is slightly ambiguous: it could be read as subsetting ("the alternatives that are readily available") or just attributive ("the alternatives, which are readily available").
	▲	mattmaroon 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		He has readily available alternatives, but they suck. There are other, far worse forms of satellite Internet, so everybody has a readily available alternative. That makes it not a qualifying statement at all.

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kdkdkrjrj 27 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

To be fair: this is an america regulatory capture problem.

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nradov 17 minutes ago | parent [-]

Regulatory capture is only a secondary reason why many parts of the USA still lack cheap, reliable broadband Internet access. It turns out that running fiber everywhere is expensive, and in some areas the potential customer base doesn't justify the cost.

	▲	rconti 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It doesn't justify the cost when they can just rip you off, charging the same amount for a fraction of the bandwidth.. unless and until there's competition. Funny how quickly my internet options went from expensive cable internet, to 1 gig symmetric fiber for $90, to 10 gig symmetric fiber for $50. And now, magically, Xfinity has 1Gbps+ service for $50 as well.