Think how much easier it gets to stand up a tower when all you need is electricity on-site.

I offered $1/yr lease to the providers, all of them, to put a tower on my farm and not one of them is even a little interested.

I know that I feel ripped off every single day by what we pay for mobile data compared to the rest of the world. If Starlink suddenly shows up there is an alternative to Bell Rogers Telus. They should be shaking in their boots. It should be easy for Starlink to undercut their business because they made a business out of customer gouging.

Obviously you meant “bars” but I found myself wondering what kind of throughput a single Bard has, assuming they sing at maximum speed...

Assuming a single (very talented) bard can sing five words per second at maximum speed, and assuming each word is a few bytes, plus some kind of checksum occasionally, we are looking at very roughly 200 bps.

So “two bards” is about 400 bps, or far, far slower than my first modem :)

If it's not sensible, I'm sure the speed will also be correspondingly slower.

The big ISPs make things like municipal broadband very hard to bring about. This leaves connectivity of these communities in the hands of an executive many miles away, and they will always place more attention to the massive profits of bringing 5G to people in rich cities (themselves included) than servicing low or even no-profit markets.

At this point some level of internet access could and maybe should be considered a public utility.

I routinely drive through a tunnel that’s 4.5km long, sometimes at 30kph due to traffic.