> it's astounding to me that affordable broadband access is still an issue even in the United States

Not sure how to respond to this, other than to point out that by most metrics, the US is largely a 3rd world country:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/theres-a-third-world...

https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/study-by-...

https://www.fairobserver.com/region/north_america/poverty-in...

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/six-ways...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-develop...

etc., etc.

Except when it comes to broadband! The US is top 10 for average connection speeds in both Akamai’s and Ookla’s global surveys. This is the mind boggling thing to me. By objective metrics, our infrastructure is shit compared to other first world countries, except when it comes to broadband. Roads, schools, transit, etc. Broadband is like the single infrastructure thing we do better than say Germany. But for some reason broadband is the thing folks on HN complain about.

The US as a whole might have statistically great broadband, but that's cold comfort to folks paying $200/month for 10 megabits. Roads are better in some counties than others, but generally not two orders of magnitude worse on the other side of town.

Every hotel or airbnb I've been to in Europe has had pure shit internet. 1 Gigabit to every hovel or cabin in Europe seems to be a meme, not reality.

Yes, every (almost) hotel I've been to in Europe has had questionable internet. Homes are a completely different thing. Hotels provide enough capacity to be able to charge you for access, homes get enough to do the things they want to do.

Satellites will never fix the broadband penetration problem. There are fundamental laws of physics in the way. If you can change those, let me know.

If you want to solve broadband adoption, you have to get Congress to stop allowing broadband companies to lie through their teeth.

For anyone else curious... geostationary orbits run at an altitude of 22,236 miles or 120ms. Double that for round-trip and bump it by a bit more for the angle and I'd expect pings >= 300ms on top of the delays in the electronics.

current satellite internet is also in geostationary orbit (22k miles):

    IP Gateway REDACTED
    Packet Loss 0%
    Average Delay 621 ms
    Minimum Delay 570 ms
    Maximum Delay 650 ms

that's to satellite. here's a traceroute to show you actual times:

    traceroute to 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
     1  10.0.1.1  1.941 ms  0.933 ms  0.930 ms
     2  192.168.42.1  2.535 ms  1.232 ms  1.313 ms
     3  redacted  2.668 ms  1.366 ms  2.584 ms
     4  67.45.0.65  601.534 ms  569.407 ms  600.134 ms
     5  67.45.5.5  1483.616 ms  615.166 ms  620.347 ms

i managed to get this low of traceroute times as the clouds happened to be gone for the moment, but given that i live in the nw, that is a fluke :)

an article on LEO options from SpaceX notes the same latency: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/space...

i'd love something as low as 300ms (or the 25ms that LEO is promising), but it's just not going to happen.

Why don't you think the lower latency LEO is going to happen?

ah, my note was that i'd love something as low as the 300ms that math seems to think we'd have, and the 25ms that LEO should provide - that's where my skepticism lies.

as for whether an LEO solution will occur for rural americans? the monetary math for that doesn't make much more sense to me, but lots of things get deployed that don't make monetary sense so that's at least possible.

That's a lot better than existing sat based solutions. if the throughput could get close to 4g speeds I'd see it as a legitimate contender, but there are still some applications it will never really be viable for unless you can build some sort of network of the things and circumvent most of the terrestrial network entirely until you get really close to the destination, But even with that I doubt it could get much better.

What about low orbit satellites?

Local Loop Unbundling is the way to go

> Glad that new solutions like satellites [1] are coming online to solve this problem.

i wouldn't call satellite service in geostationary orbits (which was the subject of the article, though they did mention LEO options as competition) something that really "solves" this problem. you end up with fairly low bandwidth with current providers (for instance, hughesnet maxes out at 25mbit, which is theoretical since busy hours mean much less), with enough latency to make anything interactive extremely painful ... connecting to a remote shell without something like mosh is worse than 300baud dialup due to the latency - first hop to the satellite typically runs 800-900ms, and the next hop to a terrestrial gateway is 1200-1300ms.

streaming isn't exactly feasible either, given the latency and that a typical plan is measured in gigabytes per month (before you are throttled to an average speed of 1.5mbit).

but it works where there are no other providers and cell service doesn't reach.

The only solution is fiber optics. To the home everywhere its not cost prohibitive, and then via 5G everywhere it is (ie, anywhere there is insufficient development to congest wireless networks).

To make that happen will require substantial federal legislation that will need to overcome the lobbying and influence of a 500 billion dollars worth of big telecom parasites and near total change of leadership at the FCC.

It should be publicly funded, publicly owned, and done akin to the Eisenhower Interstate System of the 50s, because it is about as important as those highways were to the future prosperity of the country.