They were never building that, let's be honest.

Edit: rural broadband is like the new affordable housing, high speed rail, or better public transit... It's something that's completely possible to do but they'll always find some excuse to do nothing so they can campaign on it again next cycle

But just think how blazing fast the speeds will be! When they're hurtling out of orbit and crashing into your house!

If your nationwide fibre internet plan rollout was even half as bungled and bullshit as ours here in Australia, it must be a shitshow. It was used as a political pawn, with one party wanting to NOT finish it so they could use it to help get them re-elected endlessly, and the other party opposing it because it wasn't their idea, and pushing an alternative terrible plan that was far slower and far more expensive in the long term. In the end we got a terrible mix of both.

Why would they fall out of orbit?

This is proof of why Direct Democracy is better than "Representative" "Democracy"

I think it's mostly because they're told to.

Every single time the land line ISPs have gotten money for rural broadband, they use it for something else and don't build anything. Starlink actually built a network that works. Many places have gotten decent 5G home internet too.

I have been promised fiber for over a decade yet the only wired connection available is a DSL network that's been so poorly maintained that it barely even functions.

It was basically up to the states this time around, they could allocate BEAD funds more or less as they wanted and absolutely build fiber out to the vast majority of residences (look at North Dakota, it's evidently possible) through models like municipal fiber.

Ultimately it's a political issue more than anything else, Americans just can't get anything done anymore, politicians would rather enrich themselves and voters only care about the culture war.

Counterpoint: the fact that the moral "don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs" even exists is proof that people are indeed greedy and/or stupid enough to do that very thing.

I don't recall labor not wanting to finish it? My recollection was that it was the libs not wanting to go through with it and that's how we got fibre to the node after they were elected.

I get that running fibre all the way to every premises in rural areas like Alice Springs would have been ridiculous though.

Wireless data transmission should only ever be used for nomadic, temporary, and/or sacrificial links.

They’re useful for quick deployment, but are intrinsically brittle and terrible for resiliency and efficiency.

The longer the dependence on them for a given use case, the less defensible arguments in support of them become.

I’m all for the use of satellite delivery of internet services, but only when it’s used in conjunction with a broader roll out of hardwired infrastructure, at which point it can reasonably be relegated to serving as a secondary, backup diverse path.

Labor could have finished it easily if they wanted to, but they dragged their butts because they knew it was a vote winner. Just like almost every big issue, they never want to actually implement it fully because they want to continue using it to get re-elected.

Interesting, I had a lot of other things going on at the time so didn't follow the issue as close as I would now. At least we're finally getting FTTN transitioning to FTTP at the moment, 10 years too late.

Here I am WFH just fine on a 25/8 Mbps 4G cellular internet connection though. I do wish I had better connection but unfortunately not possible in my situation.

We've already given telecoms well over $100 billion, over the last 25 years, and they've done fuck all

there's nothing better than optic fiber because nothing can be faster than light

Edit: as comment below says optic fiber isn't actually faster, but still better because it has lower packet loss, is cheaper and not owned by elon musk

Do you mean works or falls out of the sky routinely to litter the earth? We build lots as far as smaller ISPs go. You just don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.

Light in glass is actually surprisingly slow

After some distance, starlink would have better latency, as while the signal needs to go through a bunch of km of slow atmosphere, it would make up for that by having a big part of the signal go through vacuum between satellites

But latency isn't everything

Fiber (when properly installed) is very stable. Satellite and mobile is always at least a little bit flaky

St*rlink orbits at 500 km so you would need to be like 1800 km by land away from your destination to have a better latency. At that point your latency will be terrible anyway

Hard to calculate exactly.

Latency is lower through the atmosphere than in glass (I thought that air was worse, but turns out it's not. Makes sense. Glass is solid after all)

So it could be even closer than that. But there's also the problem of the SL base station having to do the last bit of the route through fiber to the destination again. Do it also depends on where the base station is located in regards to the destination

I've heard starlink is faster than fiber by a few nanoseconds and big finance really wants that for their high-speed trading

most of its signals move though space, compared to the glass in fiber so it sorta makes sense