Our experience differs from your view. We recently moved from the Bay Area to the Sierra Foothills, near Sonora. There is plenty of land with homes already in place, as well as land suitable for new construction. Land is available in sizes from 10,000 sq. ft. lots to 1,200 acres and everywhere in between. Electricity, propane, and water are commonly available. As a rule of thumb, prices are ~0.25xthe Bay Area.

Although Comcast is a thing in town, most of the otherwise eminently suitable locations have no cable access. The choices are old-style satellite or Starlink.

We have met an increasing number of people who have left the Bay Area and moved to our area. Nearly all of these are remote tech workers. They have generally held their noses and signed up for geosynchronous satellite while waiting for their Starlink service. Those who have transitioned to Starlink are very happy they made the move when they did.

I think Starlink will prove useful to so many people that it will increase pricing for rural real estate.

Starlink is incredibly useful for areas that didn't have traditional Internet. It's not perfect but it makes working in rural areas possible where it wasn't before.

It's not even rural. It's less than 3 hours from 3 major cities (and within an hour of a minor one), in a popular weekend vacation spot, and yeah, it's pretty mountainous but it's also got plenty of infrastructure already.

It is amazing how our traditional telcos have failed us. Buildout of broadband was fully-funded by the government in the 90s, and it flopped; They took the money and never built anything. These communities still do not have access to reliable broadband as it was defined then.

I so agree with you.

Comcast could have built out service in so many of our current residential areas, but chose not to. For no apparent reason but that it cost capex.

There was so much funding to extend internet access to rural areas. None of the major vendors engaged these funds and used them to provide capacity.

If Starlink succeeds, I'll raise a glass to the memory of Comcast and others.

> ...increasing number of people who have left the Bay Area and moved to our area. Nearly all of these are remote tech workers.

spot on:

>> a quality of life improvement for a small group of wealthy individuals

Only question is, will the money from this small group of wealthy individuals be sufficient to pay for the full system? We'll see in about 4 years the latest, when satellites will start falling down, and will have to be replaced by new ones...

Money from a small group of wealthy individuals might be sufficient to pay for this system and perhaps few competitors. However it is quite a long shot at calling that a game changer. Quite the contrary this might be a game stopper for a larger number of poorer folks in rural communities that have been asking for traditional broadband for decades and now have to battle the “Technology will solve it” issue their local politicians will inevitably bring up now.

Hey neighbor, we moved into town so Comcast is available. Other options will be great, though!

there are a number of rural areas in the USA that politically show very low likelihood of getting something like a proper last mile broadband service built by wireline infrastructure any time soon (fiber and GPON or active ethernet). some rural counties in eastern WA are the exception.

Under-served rural areas in the USA tend to be pretty poor, and as is starlink (or starlink-like) internet is pretty expensive both for the service fee and hardware requirements. Perhaps the price will come down as operators proliferate and this will be affordable for these communities. But I still fail to see how this is a game changer.

Serving these communities with traditional infrastructure and maybe a 5G tower is very possible today, and frankly not that expensive for a country like USA. I think you undercount the political feasibility a bit. Politicians in the USA make a huge buzz about serving rural communities, infrastructure is a political buzzword at the moment. A good politician could easily capitalize on rural broadband. They don’t even have to be that well intentioned since they could take some lobby money from the telecom companies and bid out the infrastructure build out with conveniently specific requirements for contractors their family just so happens to own stock in.

You seem to have very strict definition of rural that doesn't map to how the FCC or Census Bureau define the term. I live in an area that is very clearly 'rural', most of it has been built on in the past 30-40 years and the average home price within a few miles of me is ~$400k. I live by engineers, doctors, architects, technologists and none of us have had anything but 10M DSL and Hughes satellite options for Internet in the past 15 years.

Yes everything you've said about the possibilities is technically true, but it hasn't happened and there is no evidence it will happen. The RDOF has awarded another provider funding to bring fiber to within a few miles of my place but not directly to me.

Meanwhile I've been on Starlink since last February. I just checked and I'm getting 110M/12M with a 28ms ping time, which is 10x what I was getting for effectively the same price. Not only that, if I want to go on the road I can pack that little dish and take that bandwidth with me just about anywhere in the US. If I was broke I could pool funds with a few neighbors and we could split the cost.

With that available now, why would anyone spend millions of dollars to drop in a 5G tower to pick up another 50-100 customers?

Now my notion of under-served rural America might be biased. I have traveled quite a bit around rural America and by far the most people in under-served communities were on the poorer side. Now I did definitely see affluent communities with minimal infrastructure (particularly in California), but that was very much the exception (even in California).

> With that available now, why would anyone spend millions of dollars to drop in a 5G tower to pick up another 50-100 customers?

Your county would—and should—spend a few million dollars with some extra funding from your state and local telecom companies to drop a few 5G towers to pick up a few thousand more customers and voter happiness for sure. Your county counsel can call it something like Rural Broadband initiative and have a plan to bring a broadband connection to 30-70% of under-served rural households in the county before 2030. A good politician should be able to sell it even to city folks as serving the community.

that's true in terms of average income, but $110/mo USD for starlink is about the same as a 20GB quota per month consumer geostationary service that is absolutely a terrible and miserable experience (viasat/wildblue/hughesnet etc). Or at most, $10-20 more per month.

> Under-served rural areas in the USA tend to be pretty poor, and as is starlink (or starlink-like) internet is pretty expensive both for the service fee and hardware requirements.

It's a utility. If it costs twice as much as elsewhere you still need to pay it, until it starts getting really difficult.

> How is starlink going to be a game changer in ways publicly funded infrastructure (either traditional cables or cables + 5G towers) aren’t?

Starlink exists.

People spend money on things that aren’t “game changers” all the time. A business can certainly exist while only offering a quality of life improvements to a small minority.