this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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I don't particularly like Elon, but I think a lot of people are forgetting what Starlink has done for rural areas, and areas that don't have highspeed internet. I live in the Southern US, and the only other options at my address are AT&T DSL or other satellite companies. We don't have 5G towers in the area so I can't go that route, most satellite companies have extremely low data caps, Hughesnet has a cap of 200Gbs for $150, with horrible connection, and AT&T DSL makes a 200MB download take 30-45 minutes at the fastest. My town has a population of 10k, and we're still dealing with those being the only choices. If you go 30 minutes over to the next town they have Satellite, and that's it. ISPs don't care to fix the problem unless there's another company taking customers from them with better service. Starlink has opened up a lot of the internet, and the possibility to work from home for a lot of people.
The real problem there is all of the government handouts that have gone to the other ISPs for the purpose of wiring up everybody... Taking the money and then not delivering. And I know some years ago it was said that Comcast's internet division was running at over 90% profit margin... And like other companies that were regarded highly successful operate around 30% or less.
I think I've read about two occasions that the government handed money to ISPs to get Internet out to rural areas, and both times the results were essentially "ISPs pocket the money, nothing changes." It's infuriating, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's happened more than twice.
Way more than twice, we've provided them around 1 trillion to wire all homes in the USA...and yea. No where near that has been done.