If they can get people to pay $1,500 fees for access, surely that money would be better directed towards installing fiber in these rural areas to circumvent the need for highly expensive satellite infrastructure?
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2026
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For the cost of these satellites, we could have full connectivity across the world with land based infrastructure, which would last longer, be easier and cheaper to maintain and recyclable at end-of-life. LEO internet should have been made illegal the moment it was conceived.
Unfortunately running cable is insanely expensive. $60k per mile to trench.
What till you hear about the rocket equation!
That just means the high up front costs of either trenching fiber or launching satellites need to serve a lot of people to recover that cost. That means the last mile for rural residents tends not to be cost effective for fiber, because there aren't enough connections served by any given segment.
But making it so any given satellite can serve lots of people in its footprint at any given moment might make it cost effective to serve rural residents.
One common strategy is to run fiber to a specific central location and run point to point microwave antennas to the individual houses/buildings served. That way the fiber itself can carry the traffic of hundreds of users, and each house just needs to have an antenna with line of sight to the place where the fiber is terminated. Rural WISPs have been doing this from before Starlink.
You only dig fibre once. You need new starlink satellites every couple of years.
Yeah, but if they spread the cost across many customers, the cost per customer is going to be much smaller, even if it doesn't last as long before needing a replacement.
If it costs $100,000 to build a fiber line to a single home for 30 years (360 months) that house will need to pay $278/month for 30 years to break even. Throw in interest rates/inflation, and it'll be more.
But if a satellite that costs $1.5 million to build and launch into orbit can serve even 200 customers for 5 years, that's only $125/month per customer.
As it stands right now, Starlink serves something like 12 million customers on 10,000 satellites. So that's an average of 1200 customers served by each satellite, which is what makes $50/month service feasible as a business.
we have had a solution to this for ages ... I've lived in rural places without fiber where there is a Microwave repeater at the distribution point and you setup a dish in your house to receive it.
I was a good 2 - 3 miles away from the uplink and I still got gigabit speeds. It was very sensitive to weather .... but it beats not having broadband at all.
why would a billionaire or the politicians they pay for be concerned with what's best for everyone?
Don't hold your breath, there's little chance of USA's regulators going after the oligarch's company.