I live in the suburbs in the bay area in California, and starlink offers a significantly better quality of service than charter spectrum cable service, which is my only other option. Considering the current state of our government, I don't see things improving anytime soon.

Here in rural USA, we were paying $150 for very slow DSL, and now we're paying about $50 for quite fast Starlink.

In Asia I was paying $50 for very fast fiber, but that was in a major city; out at the farm you're on the mobile networks. So if I build a house out there and can do Starlink, I will do it.

Plus, there's the whole Starlink Roam thing: in California this summer, I see more and more vans with the little Starlink rectangle on top. "Work from Campsite" is pretty compelling, honestly.

How much did EU taxpayers spend to make that possible?

i live a few miles west of core Palo Alto (technically, still in Palo Alto); Starlink is my only real choice for broadband, and it's great.

one difference is that fiber isn't mobile.

Though all these satellites might give fixed-location folks higher bandwidth, they could also service many more concurrent mobile customers. Connectivity would probably be better too because more satellites would be in view.

Also, don't underestimate the benefit of robust competition, even if you don't use starlink.

Starlink is a military project, but they dont say that in public.

I am also in rural EU and have 1 house that has fiber, and another, 10 minute drive away has nothing, not even cell signal and it won't get anything any time soon. Starlink is basically the only option.

I live in an area of the US where the only alternatives are 3.5 megabit DSL which stops working when it rains or Hughesnet, so basically no real competition at all.

Most people hate Comcast’s and att duopoly so much that’s reason enough to get starlink. I just got it in ca and it works very well

In America for my lifetime I have never been able to get fiber and it’s because America is too large and I live in an affluent suburb.

India has one of the fastest and cheapest internet in the world. In fact you can get an extremely fast download atop Himalayan mountains in comparison to remote USA

Maybe it’s about the power to control the internet (and what is does and doesn’t serve) worldwide.

It's closer to only 10% the money to spend on such things, and that gap is closing rapidly. The poorest African countries these days still have a GDP in the low thousands per capita, and poorish central Europe trends to have low tens of thousands per capita. I could see 5 families in rural west Africa or something deciding to pool their funds to get one shared Starlink connection if they didn't have cheaper internet available some other way.

Moreover the utility of internet connection faces an extreme amount of diminishing returns - hear me out on this. You can very easily download an entire plaintext book on a subject you need to study up on in a few seconds with even a 100 Kbps connection, from any where and for any reason, and that's immensely valuable if previously you didn't have access to it before. You can't stream YouTube on it, but a YouTube instructional victory makes whatever you're doing merely easier, not possible.

WhatsApp and text messages, as well. It's very cheap to send a couple bytes back and forth to coordinate eg local market prices in fish, and so if you and a couple buddies team up to get one starlink connection you can very quickly tear the volatility of your local first market prices to shreds. I'm extrapolating from an earlier study that found just such an effect after cell phones were introduced to rural areas.

I guess my overall point is don't rule out the transformative effects that a few very reliable low bandwidth connections can have on an area. If the Romans discovered AM radio (possible given their late tech) we'd probably all still be speaking Latin, even though they couldn't play Fortnite.

How much did it cost to have fiber ran to your house from the road?

Not all of us live in places with EU funding. I worked at a rural farm in California and the EU refused to fund our network infrastructure. We had few reliable options, and Starlink turned out to be the best.

This was always the sour economics of satellite internet.

Satellite internet works for a low density of customers spread evenly across the globe. But customers are not spread evenly they mostly live in megalopolist regions that can be served more efficiently with land infrastructure.

Worse most of the people not in the megalopolists have less money to spend on internet services.

So your customer base are limited to people who aren't already served by better/cheaper terrestrial internet, but who can pay for better internet.

Those people exist but the history of satellite internet service hasn't been a massive money printer. Most providers have struggled to stay solvent let alone produce great returns for shareholders.

Paul Allen wanted to build a megaconstellation back in the 1990s but then Iridium went bankrupt twice.

Iridium ended up being rescued by the US military. I wonder if this is ultimately SpaceX's plan.

Everyone at sea, uses them now.

I have a friend who does not live that remote in Australia and his choice is either "satellite" internet or starlink.

It's not even a choice because "skymuster" (the satellite option) can't even be considered internet. I remember him taking about getting 7 seconds of latency at one point. It's actually impressive how terrible it is.

> EU funding brought fiber to my farm area

Yes, boondoggle subsidies allow you to un-economically bring fiber to a subset of random places. I say this as the beneficiary of one such boondoggle. It doesn't scale well

seems like starlink is useful for armed conflicts

This is a military tech.

I live in Norway. Starlink is cheaper than FTTH by a country mile. At the very least it's going to force down prices for fiber providers.

Also just because FTTH exists does not mean it's reliable.

India? LOL, India has internet connectivity of scale the kind most other countries couldn't dream of. Though most of it, sadly, is IPV4 and concentrated in oligopolies (which for now are still "generous" enough to give us 5G for cheap).

24/7 high fidelity radar of the entire earth’s surface. Probably used by NRO’s sentient system and similar classified skynet projects

People in rural parts of America where ISPs don't want to expand into.

> the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India

Which together have four times more people than the EU. Needs of the many outweigh, you know

India? It has the world’s cheapest data rates and nearly 90% of the population have 5G coverage. They don’t need this.

I suspect what is going on is just a matter of relative density. I'm not sure what you mean exactly by "central EU," but just guessing from a map I get Romania as the least population dense country that I would think of as Central Europe at 83 / km3. That is more than double the US pop density and if it were a US state only 15 out of 50 would be more dense. So then taking the least population dense region of the least dense country I get Tulcea with 23 / km3. That's 66% of the density of the US (37) which would come in at 34 / 50 if it were a US state.

So the most sparsely populated region of the most sparsely populated country in Central Europe is just a bit below average for the US. Our least dense state is Alaska at 0.5 / km3 or almost 50x less dense than that. But that's almost cheating. So lets take mainland only and that's Wyoming, with 2.3, so 10x less densely populated than the outlier in Central Europe.

So basically the US is just really damn empty to the point there just isn't any comparison in Central Europe and that's why it's so hard to get internet access out there.

Elon is probably setting sup the infra for space data centers.

India can lay some fiber. The secret is that every time a road gets repaved it gets dug up a week later so easy conduit pathway.

(Citation: lived in Gurugram for a few years where I witnessed the same 100ft of sidewalk get rebricked and torn up monthly at least 20 times)

My parents live in New York State, 8 miles from the main east-west transportation and data corridor. They still have no high speed wired internet options. No fiber, no cable, no DSL, and dialup ISP has been retired long ago. Their only option is satellite. This is in 4th most populous state in the US, and #1 highest GDP/capita. Internet across the United States does not have the penetration many think, the US is vast.

I live not to far from NYC and I think it’s fantastic. Comcast was charging me 75 a month and Starlink charges me 40 for the same service which is generally excellent

You are in a dense population. A large chunk of the world (and many people even in the US) are in low density environments where fiber rollouts are too expensive.

You’d be surprised how poor broadband Internet coverage is outside of major metropolitan areas in the United States. Some places are simply off-grid, or have to rely on dial up. All you have to do is drive an hour out and there’s no more Internet.

But would that have happened that way if Starlink hadn't come about?

It's good to have option in case your own government turns rogue.

the next generation of satellites base stations that are currently going up remove the need for base stations

you’ll have similar throughout and latency direct to your phone

but since this dream has been mired by delays, the starlink base station is still convenient

lots of people that would otherwise be stationary for reliable internet can go on the road

week long festival campsites have lots of people who aren’t taking any PTO that connect to their teams during the day time, while everyone else has nonexistent cellular service solely due to the overloaded networks

I would wager that most don’t unsubscribe to starlink in between time they just increase their mobility since its suddenly practical

speaking of PTO, if they are accumulating it but now travelling and never using it then its functionally a raise, all because they keep a starlink subscription

bigger satellites will bring that to everyone

You’ve clearly never lived in the US! Big place, not a lot of fiber.

You’re not dumb. It has come up in extremely sophisticated valuations of SpaceX pre-IPO, if I recall off the top of my head, the only business that actually had any value, StarLink, assumes an irrational TAM.

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Surely funding cell towers in Africa / India is cheaper and easier to maintain than 100k satellites in space.