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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Why would they fall out of orbit?

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

Its not, light is the fastest AND isnt as interuptuble and lag induced as satalite. A wired connection will ALWAYS have lesslatency to a sat link.

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

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

Its not, light is the fastest AND isnt as interuptuble and lag induced as satalite. A wired connection will ALWAYS have lesslatency to a sat link.

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.

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

That's...not really a cogent argument.

Satellites connect to ground using radio/microwave (or even laser), all of which are electromagnetic radiation and travel at the speed of light (in vacuum).

Light in a fiber travels much more slowly than in vacuum --- light in fiber travels at around 67% the speed of light in vacuum (depends on the fiber). In contrast, signals through cat7 twisted pair (Ethernet) can be north of 75%, and coaxial cable can be north of 80% (even higher for air dielectric). Note that these are all carrying electromagnetic waves, they're just a) not in free space and b) generally not optical frequency, so we don't call them light, but they are still governed by the same equations and limitations.

If you want to get signals from point A to point B fastest (lowest latency), you don't use fiber, you probably use microwaves: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/private-microwave-networks-financial-hft/

Finally, the reason fiber is so good is complicated, but has to do with the fact that "physics bandwidth" tends to care about fractional bandwidth ("delta frequency divided by frequency"), whereas "information bandwidth" cares about absolute bandwidth ("delta frequency"), all else being equal (looking at you, SNR). Fiber uses optical frequencies, which can be hundreds of THz --- so a tiny fractional bandwidth is a huge absolute bandwidth.

Light in a fiber travels much more slowly than in vacuum — light in fiber travels at around 67% the speed of light in vacuum

I'm a complete laymen when it comes to this, but this sounds like it would pertain to latency rather than bandwidth. I expect that fiber would have a much higher data capacity than satellite.