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EricHiggin on 20 March 2019
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shikamaru317 said:
EricHiggin said:

You would think they could charge more to the urban customers who get the first crack at the upgrades, and use that to offset the extra installation cost for most if not all of the rural customers who would always get served second and have to wait. Crazy idea I know.

It's almost as if MS would actually like for people to be able to use that cloud thing they're always talking up eh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_(satellite_constellation) 

Tesla is also working on Starlink, a low orbit satellite program.

"Starlink satellites would orbit at ​1⁄30 to ​1⁄105 of the height of geostationary orbits, and thus offer more practical latencies of around 25 to 35 ms, comparable to or exceeding existing cable or fiber networks."

"In November 2018, SpaceX received US approval to deploy 7,518 broadband satellites, in addition to the 4,425 satellites that were approved earlier."

You would think. They are already charging a ton to urban customers as it is, seeing some of the other posts in this thread, in many other countries people pay like $40 a month for speeds that are faster than I'm getting paying Comcast $80 a month. It's a total ripoff, they are just pocketing that money and getting rich instead of reinvesting it to improve their technology and bring access to rural areas. 

Yeah, Starlink also has promise, I agree. There is also the 5G rollout coming as a possibility for bringing high speed internet access to everybody, though the government would likely need to step in and force the carriers to get rid of data caps for it to become a primary internet source for people. 5G frequencies move so fast that there is just 1ms of lag, the download speed of 5G should be 100 mbps or more at release with the possibility of exceeding 1 gbps eventually (plenty fast for game streaming), and 5G signals have greater range than 4G so they can get enough subscribers in rural areas to cover the costs of putting towers into rural areas. 

Of all the things the Governments could do for the people right now, in terms of the internet, would be forcing companies to spread the network upgrades more evenly. Just imagine a world today where the cost of fresh produce was twice as much in urban area's, and the quality was seconds or thirds. I somehow doubt people would simply pass it off as business as usual.

I don't put too much faith in wireless. In our area Bell tried to offer it quite a few years ago, and while the speeds (10 mbps) were double what we have now, the cap was like 50GB and the price was $99 a month. We use 3x-4x that much data, and have consistently since we got DSL. $99 a month for that, plus $1 per GB overage charges? No thanks. They stopped offering it after just a year because few bought into it. The only other wireless option, the local ISP, has offered wireless for about 5 years now, but its 2.5 mbps max for $60 a month, unlimited. They cover a large area in the county, and it's largely rural, so they have a monopoly on wireless, aside from the larger towns. I don't see 5G ever coming here. I'd bet Starlink is our best chance at a worthy, affordable, upgrade in the next 10 years.