I joined the Starlink beta as soon as it was offered in my area, only having access to spotty 4G previously. My census block ended up being awarded to Starlink via the infrastructure act. Thankfully there was a rule change and they removed that contract money from Starlink and awarded it to two different fiber providers.
Work got started last fall…
I now have redundant dual fiber connections going into my house, a 2.5GB/2.5GB and a 1GB/1GB backup. With the first year pricing it costs about the same as Starlink. This is in the middle of nowhere, rural America. I’m told that there is tons of capacity too and they’ll be able to increase the speeds of those offerings in the future, as the price for the technology comes down.
It has changed the entire calculus for living and working in this area and becomes a lot more attractive for remote work.
Sucks for all the people that could possibly have amazing internet getting screwed over by this grift. Starlink is a great bandaid, but not a long term solution.
What if we built a system of beacon transmitters that sent out pulses and then used recievers that would compare arrival times of those pulses to make a measurement, thus establishing positional location?
We could call it the Long Range something or other. I’m open to suggestions. Need a catchy name!