How so? How do this people landed in this place without a road and electricity? Rural homes must have roads to reach the city to buy fuel and food. There are also wireless terrestrial ways to transmit internet too.
They might rely on generators for electricity, and access might involve a boat, or a quad bike trail that would need enlarging before you could bring construction equipment in and run a cable along it.
> There are also wireless terrestrial ways to transmit internet too.
I mean ultimately the proof is in the pudding; if it were practical to run internet some other way they would already get it that way.
Who are this people? ARe they poor farmers or rich dudes on islands?
>I mean ultimately the proof is in the pudding; if it were practical to run internet some other way they would already get it that way.
It might be practical but not obscenely profitable. I double that Elon sells his stuff only to the above people, the people living in isolated environments with no roads and electricity are too few. In many places it is legal to put cables on the electricity polls and connect a village 25Km away in 1 single day, from what I read this is not allowed in US so you have no internet or a monopoly.
You know, there are poor dudes that live on islands too.
Like one of my friends. It's a river island, it's only about five kilometers to the nearest cellular tower, and as you might guess running fiber across a major waterway is out of question.
So we built a 20-meter tower with a 1.5-meter parabolic dish on top just to get 3G-ish speeds on the site.
Quit the condescension, please.
There are a LOT of people living in such environments. Hell, when we were doing rural cellular in Africa, it was like three days over non-existing roads to get to the installation site. No electricity, only satcom, and that with 1-second rtt. Starlink is the best thing that could've ever happened for those applications.
Well you opened up by talking about "just one launch".
> To provide internet service to ~250,000 people - about one quarter the population of a major east coast city.
But people who are currently very hard to supply internet to and extremely car-dependent. Building housing in cities would probably be a better solution, and I'm all for efforts to make that legal, but realistically it's going to be extremely difficult to overcome upper-middle-class opposition to that and so other ways to mitigate the impact of those people's lifestyles are very much worthwhile.
> Starlink is horrifically bad for the environment compared to ground-based infrastructure. As witnessed by the very high cost of Starlink service, which is likely losing mountains of cash despite that.
On the contrary, running cable to many of these places would be overwhelmingly environmentally damaging (in many cases you'd have to build a road through a forest or blast through a mountain), and that's reflected in the high (sometimes infinite) cost of internet services. People are buying Starlink because it's cheaper (in the places they live) than ground-based alternatives, and as you've observed, the environmental cost is generally closely correlated to the monetary cost.
> That's not how that works.
That's exactly how it works. You've got to look at the net impact. For people who don't travel internationally, reducing car usage is the most effective single lifestyle change they can make to reduce carbon impact; if Starlink reduces trips to the extent that e.g. people shift from a two-car to a one-car household, that's huge. (And note that if it's reducing travel into towns or cities then that's benefitting the rest of us as well, by reducing congestion and parking usage, which in turn lets us turn more land over to productive uses).