> They do? I live in northern New England an hour so from the border and have some Canadian friends who complain that they have at best the same sort of mediocre 5-10/1-2 ADSL I did up until a year or two ago

People are often better at complaining than at remedying their situation.

Some years ago now I was at a friend's flat. He lamented that ASDL was poor. "They'll never offer anything better here" he said. I thought that was odd because I thought I'd seen a cabinet for his section of the district where we both live. So I suggested he check. He waved me off, no need to bother right because he's sure it isn't an option. So I typed his address into the checker and it said he could buy 80Mbps vDSL.

As a result of course he has 80Mbps vDSL. Now, if I'd just agreed "Yeah, it sucks" how long do you think he would have taken to realise he could buy faster service? A year? Five years? Maybe he'd still be moaning now on our Friday Jitsi call instead of complaining that the terrible webcam setup he cobbled together back in late March sucks?

This is kind of a weird response, do you disagree with that coverage map or something? I don't know about your friend, but it's not unreasonable to give technical people on HN a little more credit then that. I kept thoroughly abreast of every possible broadband option even in my area and I know they do too. "A friend's flat" doesn't sound like a semi-rural or rural zone, where as simple geography you can be miles away from even the nearest village. DSL falls off pretty hard with distance, when you're at 15000+ feet/5000+ meters there isn't much to be done, even with bonded lines (if that's even an option). Nearest cable TV service to me is about 3.5 miles off and has been that way for 20 years now at least. Various WISP efforts have added new possibilities in the last 5 years, but mountainous regions still result in very hit/miss service and since many of them are quite ad hoc and local performance is also hit/miss (though they're often a lot of fun to actually deal with, good technical enthusiastic people you can have a real conversation with and come up with creative solutions with like the old days). It's a real miracle that fiber came through here via our great local ISP, though another few houses/mile away and I'd have missed it. And now everything is on hold again due to lock down.

Starlink definitely will be able to at least smooth out the current total patchwork. The question will just be if it's a low density area and (while constellation is building and before optical interlink sats) if it's in a covered zone. Won't always be the best option I'm sure, but it won't be the case that two people a mere half mile away as the crow flies with a small hill between them have to deal with total feast/famine differences.

But it's legitimately bad in a lot of places. My dad's house is on the coast near Acadia National Park and within about 10 minutes of what passes for a city in those parts. He's the last house on a road off the main road that gets broadband at all and it's ADSL that gets about 1Mbit down. You can't really do video. Houses further along the road need to do satellite or try their luck with pretty much equally mediocre cellular.

And people have investigated because basically not having internet is something of a pain but it is what it is.

You can't always trust the online address checker. In this case it was likely right, but CenturyLink's checker for our address has never been right. For a while it said far higher than what the tech said we could get, and now it shows lower than what we actually have.