Comment Rural Electrification (Score 1) 56
We seem to be in a parallel to Rural Electrification now.
If someone lives five miles from the nearest connection, currently on 100A AC and POTS, is the limited budget better spent on running five miles of fiber or dropping off a satellite terminal?
They'll be going from either 3Mbps DSL to 300Mbps satellite or 800Mbps fiber.
If we had unlimited money I'd say fiber almost everywhere. But that isn't realistic.
The flip side is some of these rulings which ought to be applied to edge cases may well be applied to areas where FTTH is entirely reasonable and achievable.
Government almost always sucks at applying broad rules without subtlety at both the median and the far sigmas.
I live in an area where welfare broadband is offered for about $15/mo for about 60Mbps. Frankly I could live with that almost all the time. I do download some massive datasets every few months but my smoothed average is probably 2% of my max.
But those welfare programs exist because society has decided that some Internet is required for participation so there is some responsibility to provide.
The bigger risk is probably dual-use dangers. Ukraine has been using Starlink for terrorist attacks and while Musk has said he cut them off the Russian FM has warned that Russia will take out the Starlink constellation if it continues because apparently it is.
So we don't run fiber and then Starlink goes away, and then what?
There are also ice storms, hurricanes, tornados, wildfires, etc. that can take out landines for months so having a few satellite terminals in an area would be more antifragile.
FCC is seemingly treating this as simple when it's complex.