Ah yes, who needs fiber when you have an inferior product that will be worse in every calculable way?
Pay no attention to the person who stands to benefit from this deal. There’s definitely nothing illegal about it.
So what if the owner of Starlink just happened to spend a quarter of a billion dollars to get the current president elected? That surely has nothing to do with the abysmal Starlink service stealing away funding for critical infrastructure.
But just think how blazing fast the speeds will be! When they’re hurtling out of orbit and crashing into your house!
Why would they fall out of orbit?
Pros of fibre:
- cheaper: much cheaper than copper or satellites.
- faster: latency is faster than copper and wireless (to satellite).
- very high bandwidth: theoretically unlimited. In practice a commercial fibre optic multicore run for domestic use at street/town level will be pushing ~800Gb/a, and this number generally doubles every few years as tech advances. The new spec being finalised is 1.6Pb/s.
- high stability: does not give a crap if it’s cloudy, foggy, or rainy, or if the trees have wet leaves, or if it’s just a very humid day, unlike all forms of outdoor wireless comms. Does not care about lightning strikes, as copper does.
- long life: 25 to 30 years life quoted for most industrial in-ground fibre, but real life span is expected to be much longer based on health checks on deployed cable in countries with large fibre rollouts. Upgradable without replacing the medium throughout that lifecycle.
- lowest power usage: fibre optic uses far less power and energy than 4G 5G and satellite infrastructure.
Cons of nationwide fibre:
- billionaires who launched thousands of satellites make less money.
- monopoly Internet Service Providers won’t be able to fleece their cable internet customers some of the highest charges for net access in the world.
- people will tell you “uhm acktually wireless internet is the speed of light also as it communicates via photons”, but will usually leave out all of the interference it experiences.
There’s nothing better than fibre optic infrastructure for general public Internet connectivity. Wireless/satellite should only be a last resort for remote users.
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.
