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SpaceX says states should dump fiber plans, give all grant money to Starlink (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] -2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

It can’t, and the taxes you would pay to support fiber to my home would be extreme.

But fiber to a local wireless solution? Sure. But even that’s not possible for everyone, and they were expensive and unreliable until starlink started showing up. LEO internet has its benefits.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Except that US ISPs have already been provided upwards of $80b to roll out a fiber optic backbone for rural connections, and have instead largely pocketed the funds and sat on their hands.

    It has largely fallen to smaller communities to incorporate their own local ISPs and manage their own roll-outs, as such projects aren’t viewed as worthwhile for private companies.

    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.

    Even if a Federal program (not under this administration, obviously) was to just run fibre parallel to the existing interstate highways, and leave the last (20) miles to local utilities - it would be cheaper, faster and more reliable than LEO - and without all the additional negatives that come with that!

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    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?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago*

    Edited to add: sorry, backbone was probably the wrong term to use.

    The actual history of Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN) is actually needlessly complicated - primarily due to a (somewhat) successful sabotage attempt by our Conservative government in the early 2010s.

    But basically, every single new home is built with Fiber to the Home, and every single metropolitan and suburban home either has Fiber to the Home (or Premises), or at the very least Fiber to the Curb through a remediation process to replace the Conservative-implemented Fiber to the Node boondoggle.

    We also have a number of neighbourhoods stuck with HFC (again due to Conservstice sabotage) which while still delivering 100+ Mbit connections - are a bit of a technical dead end and will need to be remediated at some point in the future.

    Basically, nbnCo serves as a national broadband wholesaler providing high speed connectivity (100, 250, 500, Gigabit) to something like >95% of the population.

    The most remote communities are also serviced either through a fixed wireless option or satellite.

    Basically though, unlike the US we don’t have a significant number of people still on dial-up and haven’t had so for a very long time.

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