Comment on SpaceX Might Have Lost 200+ Starlink Satellites In Just 2 Months Shows Data
aBundleOfFerrets@sh.itjust.works 9 months agoLaying 200km of fiber for a town of ~1000 will always be more expensive than it is worth (for an ISP) and that math only gets worse when you look at last-leg hookups for people spread out ~5km apart around the area and not living directly in the town.
Terrestrial includes wireless solutions, which are better suited for many last-leg hookups in situations like these.
Sure, there's a lot of places where these won't work (eg. mountainous areas), but there are also questions about whether people living that remotely even want broadband or wireless.
Do you think xfinity grade router would do 5km?
Also, serving a community of 2k people as far as 1000 km might cost hundreds of millions. So I don’t believe the 2k community would be happy to pay $5k each monthly to make it profitable for the ISP.
Look up LMG when linus wanted to connect to warehouses meters apart with entry level networking solution.
First, no one is talking about standard home-grade routers, though there is technology to make those work at longer distances. We're talking about say a cellular network, which is considered broadband in most of the US and has an existing infrastructure. Many of these areas are already going to have cellular access, and upgrades to existing networks are significantly cheaper and easier to maintain. There are long-range wifi solutions, and those work too, but most require line-of-sight, so as i stated, aren't suited for say mountanous area.
Name one community that is stretched out over 1000k. That's not community, that's a fucking state or territory. Seriously, that's more than 10x the width or height of Rhode Island.
Again, as I said, it's questionable whether those people even want high-speed internet in the first place. You're probably not living remotely to be on-the-grid.
The LMG video is irrelevant. Linus is far from an expert.
In on starlink because it's now the only half decent option. There is a fairly strong 4g tower reception but it's underprovisioned and gives less than 3mbps downloads. 25 up though. We did have ADSL for a long time but they've shut that network down.
I'm on a farm 15km from town in hilly terrain.
Sorry English isn’t my first language so I meant 1000 km far from networking infrastructure. Not stretched out over 1000 km.
Linus isn’t professional. I just want you to have an idea of the cost. Specifically the fiber optic cables.
That doesn’t include maintenance, professional installation, and hardware to distribute the connection to multiple users / houses.
Even wireless solutions would not make it viable. I am not an expert but I would assume you need 100 towers for 1000 km (a tower for each 10 km) to relay data to keep speed and stable connection in check.
The average cost of a barebone cellular tower in USA is $250k without networking hardware. This would result in $25,000,000 just for towers.
If each person in the town of 1000 subscribed and paid $100 monthly it’d be $100k a month which I don’t think would cover the operation expenses of the service.
Over a long enough term it will be worth it. But as a said elsewhere neither electricity nor phone being run to rural US homes was cost effective for companies. So the US decided that was shit and paid for it to get done. Started to do the same for internet access. Phone companies refused, used the money for other purposes, inflated prices faster the inflation, etc. and yet neither FTC nor congress held them accountable. Other countries have done the same thing for power and phone, there is nothing fundamentally different about physical internet access stopping anyone from doing the same thing.
Sekoia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 months ago
… which is maybe why things that are essentially critical to a developed country’s lifestyle probably shouldn’t simply be companies. If we go off of “it’s not profitable”, public transport wouldn’t be any good, postal services would suck, etc.
The internet should be a public service like mail.
Also, in the US they paid the ISPs to hook everyone up to fiber, and then they just… didn’t.