As someone who wrote their CS thesis on networks I find starlink infuriating. Its such a terrible option that basically persists through memes and highly niche use anecdotes.

You can literally cover entire landmass of earth with fiber and cell towers for pennies on a dollar what low orbit satellites would get you.

Not to mention is objectively better technology which we would have to setup anyways if we want low latency networks and why wouldn't we want that in the future? There are countless benefits to reduced latency so it's really unavoidable. Now some want to prioritize worse technology when it's at peak cost. It's so fucking stupid.

This has got a scary amount of up votes, especially considering that this is the 'technology' community.

Radiowaves are also 'light' and infact as many others have mentioned so eloquently, light travelling through air is faster than light travelling through glass. The reasons why fiber is better are - better stability because of lower packet loss and interference, better efficiency because of lower attenuation and losses due to diffusion, reflection, and other processes when traveling in a fiber optic cable, and more bandwidth because we can use more favourable frequencies in optic cables (@[email protected] explains it perfectly in another reply to the parent comment)

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 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

Inb4 "The satellites are beaming mind control into your head"

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.

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

I don't, dial-up sucked.