Ok.

What about everyone else?

It's still worthwhile.

Who's going to pay for it?

Where? In the US? It's already been paid for multiple times over, through government grants and subsidies.

Can you tell me more about this? Is it true that government grants and subsidies were given out to specifically expand fiber to rural America?

Oh, please explain the complexity to me like I’m a system administrator with only 25 years of experience. I didn’t realize that computers could connect to each other over a network until 3 days ago, imagine my surprise.

You could start with the fact that many online game servers (ex: Valorant, Apex, Overwatch) artificially increase everyone’s latency at the server, except for the people with higher network latency in order to compensate for lag through a technique called lag compensation. So having 10 ms ping and 50 ms ping just means the server introduces a 40ms delay on the player with 10ms ping so both players experience the same latency.

Or maybe you could explain how game state updates happen with a set frequency and the gap between the state updates can also be adjusted by the server for each client so that state updates are sent to higher latency users earlier in the update window. I mean this technique is essentially lag compensation as well, but it applies to how the client updates are sent instead of being applied to incoming packets.

Or, you could avoid all this and simply declare me incorrect by pointing at a game that doesn’t use lag compensation or otherwise move the goal posts so that you don’t actually have to explain the complexity that you were hinting at.

You have the same issue with Starlink…

No, because the Starlink satellites are 350 miles above the Earth while geosynchronous satellites are 13,000 miles above the earth. Because of the Inverse-Square Law they can transmit a signal that is orders of magnitude stronger.

In addition, geosync satellites are locked at a single fixed position and received by a single dish antenna so any obstruction along the line will disrupt the signal.

Starlink’s recievers use a 1200 element x-band phased array so it can lock on to multiple sources and track them as they move across the sky. Each satellite link is its own channel. Losing contact with one satellite simply causes the data to be routed to one of the 4-5 other locked satellites.

The people on the call do…

30ms of latency is less than 1/3rd of the latency of most Bluetooth headsets that people use every day to talk on their phones. It is not noticeable at all.

You're putting words in my mouth. I was speaking in generalities about physical connections, not specifically about fibre.

And we already have physical connections, even in rural America.

Traitor: male supremacy is good

Decent: no it is not

Traitor: you’re a sexist bigot

Honestly, if Australia could roll out a national fiber backbone (almost a decade ago!) across the same approximate landmass as the contiguous 48 states at less than 10% of the overall population; there is no valid reason that the wealthiest nation to have ever existed can’t also do so.

Did Australia lay a national backbone as you said, or did they connect individual neighborhoods, or individual homes? Because all three of those are very different situations with very different costs associated.

I mean the US has had a national fiber backbone since 1995, but that doesn't really mean anything about fiber to the home. I'm not sure rolling out a fiber backbone 10 years ago is really anything to brag about. However, extending the backbone to connect neighborhoods would be extremely helpful in lowering the costs to get fiber to the home, if that's what they did in Australia, then that would indeed be laudable. If at the national level, they payed for fiber rollout to every home or every street... Well that would surprise me, but that would also be awesome!

So yeah, what did they do?