LEO satellite internet service is life changing for people who live in underserviced, rural, and remote areas - but it’s a tragedy that it’s controlled by billionaires and the USA. Growth at all costs mindset cannot accept that they should exist only as an ISP of last resort, so they’re servicing urban areas and planning data centres.

It would be better to support public fiber infrastructure (through PUDs) in almost every way. I know not all remote areas can be reached with fiber, but most rural areas can be. My county has done exactly that with the rural portions - they focused on rolling it out to underserved rural areas first (even though it was more expensive to do that up front). Now, those rural areas have gigabit fiber and they didn’t have to pay tens of thousands to wire it up to their homes.

Try dragging fiber to a ship. Starlink is a game changer for the shipping industry and removing it now would be a mess.

I know not all remote areas can be reached by fiber

Did you miss this part? You’re arguing over something I didn’t claim, and didn’t say.

But since you brought it up, SpaceX received nearly $1 billion in subsidies from the FCC in 2020 to support rural customers. That money is what I’m talking about. It wasn’t for ships. It was to connect rural customers because it would otherwise not be profitable for large ISPs to serve them. This billion should have gone to supporting county PUDs, not a rich nazi fuck’s company. It should have stayed with the public.

Unless you’re saying that the billion from taxpayers should have been given to him to support ships in international waters?

As a bonus, fiber doesn’t lose capacity just because it gets cloudy. Try using Starlink when a cumulonimbus cloud is overhead.