If that happens, wouldn't it be potentially worse than the current situation?

Surely your local neighborhood isn't going to deploy its own dedicated satellite constellation.

If/when satelite broadband becomes widespread, it will likely be consolidated and provided by 1 provider (maybe 2?) which might end up resulting in higher costs for everyone all around.

So? We trade a terrestrial based monopoly for a space based one?

It might come even sooner as mobile internet becomes faster and gets lower in latency. I used to have Cox, and the service availability was so bad it was nigh unusable. Switched to TMobile home 5g and in some cases, it's actually faster. That shouldn't be a thing but here we are. I don't play twitchy games so latency isn't really a concern for me. By the time 6g or whatever it's going to be called is well established, I think we'll see the incumbents get blockbuster'd.

Is the total possible bandwidth available on these even comparable to optical fibers?

This has a "Bitcoin will solve finance" feel to it. Not to be super dismissive, but there's just as much likelihood it will help as it won't.

But in your corner:

It's true that right now space-based deployment of broadband will provide broadband in locations where it's not currently available - perhaps spurring competition.

It's also probably true that space-based broadband will be able to compete directly with urban / dense areas where Comcast & company have an effective monopoly - also a good thing!

But there's no reason to think it will put comcast/company out of business at all. Has cell-tower based intenet service at all displaced comcast? Verizon and T-Mobile canvas my neighborhood claiming to offer the best internet, but as far as I can tell, everyone still uses Xfinity, even if Centurylink is much, much better.

Im extremely jealous of this techno optimism perspective. In my view at no point has there been a decrease in monopolisation or increase in democratisation since the hopeful cybernetic 90's, so i just don't see this as good, more like some Tyrell or state owned corporate almost fascist dystopia where everything is owned and censored by the few, and just because it's "awesome and space based" only adds to the exclusivity. It's already leaked Musk is working for the US military, so it isn't some benevolent, utilitarian or even broad scaled project it's a project for world domination and enslavement.

Shannon says no.

Starlink has insufficient capacity for metropolitan areas. I don't think this is easily solvable, given the shared medium and the bandwidth constraints.

Or maybe, if we’re lucky, they’ll have to compete on quality as well as price.

When Verizon laid down fiber optic cable in my (former) neighborhood, it was so much better than Xfinity’s service, and everyone I knew switched.

Not to say that the type of physical cable matters as much, DOCSIS 4.0 is in the cards, but latency and bandwidth will always be better on a (good) wired connection.

One quirk worth mentioning, though, is that WWAN did leap-frog WLAN with 5G and especially with ultra-wideband (which isn’t everywhere). Until I installed 6GHz Wi-Fi, the fastest wireless speeds I saw were on ultra-wideband connections to my phone.

I hope so but I don't think any constellation can handle even a medium sized town without significant throttling.

It takes 5 minutes of back of the envelope calculations to realize that this is a pipe dream. Starlink isn't a substitute for fiber internet, it's a substitute for no internet.

No. Satellite (except when they use lasers, but nobody is proposing space lasers) is a broadcast medium and wire is point to point. Wires will almost always be cheaper and more reliable and faster on a per-customer basis and have less interference.

We don't even need space based broadband for this. Terrestrial radio (5G and LTE) already will gradually drink the milkshake of most cable and fiber based ISPs.

? What does "space-based broadband" offer that's so attractive?

AFAIK, latency sensitive games like CoD and Fortnite suffer badly on Starlink. Don't you think that would have a massive impact on adoption in areas where you can get "wired" internet?

No one says this.

"Corruption" isn't a binary.

It exists in the West. It's bad that it exists in the West. But it exists less in the West than in some other places, and that difference matters.

I don't think that anyone, anywhere, ever says that. Not even in the West.

When trying to convince a Russian engineer a few years ago that the west has plenty of corruption, his main counterpoint was "yes, but it's not the same; you guys have a kind of corruption that's at least able to function." He made a big deal about how severe it is even in very minor roles.

With recent events I imagine the difference is going to decrease a bit, but I don't think it'll be the same within 4yrs.

This debate about regulations is alway interesting. There are regulations which help protect the environment, like not being allowed to dump dangerous chemicals into your local stream or river.

Then there are regulations like these which are aimed at protecting the investment companies have made into infrastructure, effectively granting them a monopoly.

When people debate this, they often are thinking of the first class of protective regulations that are too onerous on companies, but I think most people like clean drinking water and rivers that no longer catch fire.

Whereas the second class of protection is really harmful to the consumer, and the powers-that-be have effectively been given a monopoly, and with that the money and power to protect their place in the market through continued influence on elections and other things to maintain these rent seeking businesses. We all hate the latter, but these companies have a lot of sway over politicians.

These are state laws, the Presidential election has nothing to do with this.

Money in politics is root cause of most politically-caused problems.

That works out great until some capital pool decides to start acquiring smaller isps to roll them up into a larger corporate behemoth. As has happened in multiple other industries from groceries, animal vets, rentals, software niches, to hospitals and these days nursing homes

Then the "efficiency" becomes how much can be extracted from the business and customers

They also have a state owned bank. ND once had a very strong "Democratic Farmer Labor party". Not to get into R vs D here, as the parties have flip flopped a lot since then & the Limbaugh movement changed the state from a very purple state (all Congress members were D in the 80s-90s). The only way you win in the state now is with a R next to your name, so the Rs are having an identity crisis.

The real good call out is the coop attitude that has been very strong in ND for decades. Sadly I have seen some of those coops start to spend a lot of money on creating talk shows with extreme political personalities who have little actual knowledge on things.

I would love to see the state go back to being more neighborly & community building. Either way the history of the coop attitude is a great one for building strong communities. Every community should take notice of this.

For rural communities, especially in the early 90s & 00s, having internet access was equivalent to access to an elite private school.

And there's more good news. Minnesota is not on that map, but Minnesota has moved in very good directions re: ISPs. My rural neighbors have community internet, and it's _good_. High quality fiber.

I have centurylink - ok not a community plan, but it competes directly with T-mobile, Xfinity (comcast), and other cell-based providers, and provides an excellent product for much cheaper.

And I know for a fact that colorado has been fighting the good fight. https://communitynets.org/content/colorado-passes-new-broadb...

If I recall the original law in North Carolina to limit community-owned broadband was called "Saving North Carolina Jobs Act" or something similar. It came about as a backlash to powerline broadband. Ironically all the people that seem to be laying fiber are contractors from Florida.

> Unimaginable in the US

With good reason. Building codes in the US prevent disasters like the one that happened at Grenfell Towers in the UK. Run plenum-rated wires through an appropriate space for safety's sake.

There was a great book (that I thought was called Nerds 2.0, but now I can't find it again) that I read decades ago that described how Cisco got there start. Running wires through gutters on Stanford's campus and hoping no one asked any questions. Built their own routers and what not. The official story now looks like Stanford knew what a great idea that was, but the history that Lerner provided in the book suggests that their initial response was pretty negative and only positive once they formalized the project and made a company around it.

That you can do what you describe is why I love the Internet! There is effectively no limit to the scale and topology of the network, and with a well-configured system you can literally yank cables out and find the network operating without more than a second or two of additional latency. I play chess on lichess.org, and when the Wi-Fi signal drops out my device switches to LTE without even interrupting the game!

The fact that all of the above is possible with only a single kind of cable and generic, 'dumb' switches is icing on the (seven-layer) cake.

Odds are those connections weren't sanctioned by the building management and were the result of lax enforcement. There are actually plenty of smaller apartment buildings in the US where tenants could get away with this as long as they didn't damage the building or cause frustration for other tenants.

You're describing the sort of daydreams I had about running a cable between my home and my friend's home when I was 14 years old. We were too far apart. But playing Descent matches would have been awesome. We got by on dialup, but a kid can dream.

I also dreamt of ISDN. Looking back, it seems such a paltry offering, but that tells you what an old man I've become.

Not from Russia, but nearby.. It was very common - kinda wild east and nobody cared. As soon our telecom started providing DSL - we (neighbourhood kids) got a commercial DSL into my apartment and shared it between 2 five story apartment buildings. Our set up was tiny and not very reliable. Some local networks like this grew and became almost proper internet providers. But they continued this gray practice of pulling cables in the air, between buildings. They'd also do other sketchy stuff like installing hubs/switches into electrical boxes and tapping supply from the building. We learned about it when a technician from a provider like this dropped a screwdriver on live wires and knocked out power for half of the building.

That's how I learned the limits of hub cascades ;) Add collision domains on top and you are in not-funny-land.

Lots of co-workers in Serbia do this today. Someone gets a fast fiber connection and they run an Ethernet cable to their friend in the building across the way. They both split the costs.

> Unimaginable in the US.

Not at all.

Even in the US, rural folk have been beaming directional wifi to each other for a couple decades now (at least), and sharing utilities by personally running electrical, coax, telephone, or ethernet throughout a shared building or across houses stretches back for as long as those services have been available.

Sharing ("stealing") Cable TV by just running coax around was huge before those systems transitioned from simply using sometimes-encrypted broadcasts to a more authenticated/addressable scheme. For decades, party lines (for the telphone) were both official installations from the telephone company and de facto local networks run by one's handy neighbors. Countless people punched ethernet between walls in apartment units just the way you describe to share upstream connections. Same goes for power in squatted urban units or among trailers/shacks where they would be clustered tightly.

What made it unfamiliar to you (and perhaps many here) was probably just the class and finances of your family and the people they mingled with.

Highly relevant is this article about an unsanctioned internet network built by students at Moscow State University: https://scribe.rip/p/moscow-state-university-network-built-b...

I did that in college in 1997 (in the US). :)

I wired up 1/2 of our building by just throwing cables between rooms via the windows. We got our upstream via a commercial DSL connection, which when split 11 ways, was about the same price as dialup, but way faster.

Having the "last mile" be owned by the community just makes complete sense; in fact it should be a requirement of future government subsidies (perhaps with an option for the existing infrastructure, if "good enough - fiber" to be sold to the community) as it reduces overlap and waste.

Around here we have had THREE separate companies drop fiber in the last year (technically not to everyone's house as they only do that last connection when you subscribe) - so my yard now has five fiber lines through it. That's a bit overkill.

They could have had the municipal electric utility run fiber to everyone, and then designate a single building as a POP/exchange and let any company that wanted to run a fat pipe to that and start reselling.

Communities own the roads, trucking companies are commercial.

What you're talking about is called local loop unbundling - the government owns the last-mile infrastructure, then leases access on FRAND terms to ISPs. It's a perfect alignment of incentives and a huge win for customers, so naturally ISPs fiercely oppose it and look to immediately crush any move in that direction whenever they can.

AT&T uses the same contractors your municipality would have.