For a moment there I thought you and sennight were the same user. Heh.

Yeah, Canada is pretty bad too when it comes to having the last mile rolled out to every last town and village. We have tower based internet for those usually. If you are really out in the boonies, you might have something based on Xplornet's tech. Having starlink is only a new thing recently; and that's apparently touch and go for people as well.

Ironically, if you don't play video games at all, Cellular is the best kind of connection you can get out there in some places. Otherwise, get a dish and point it at the nearest tower. It's still basically a giant wifi connection at that point, so the latency will not be the best; but it's far better than Xplornet or cellular ever will be on that front. The only thing better than tower, is a proper line going to the house.

One of my old homes was supposed to have said line installed to that town as part of a province wide thing going on at the time. Sasktel was supposed to get EVERYONE connected with cable and internet...

That never happened. They stuck to the cities and bigger towns close to the backbone, and that was it. They then sold access to companies putting up towers and said "that's a wrap".

That said... they had to contend with the rail lines to get past them on multiple occasions, and that gets expensive.

Dunno enough about the situation in Australia to even pretend, but I imagine it could work if there is a coverage mandate plus taxpayer funding going to the carriers. In such a scenario it would be basically impossible to not massively overprovision bandwidth in rural areas, and the carriers would have zero incentive to cap data rates (beyond upselling - but there is a limit). Everywhere else though... telecoms are notorious for under provisioning to the point where major news events can result in the network failing under the load of too many people simultaneously wanting to make a call. Wireless took that to the next level. And it isn't simply a hardware issue, if they lease more backhaul capacity than they need - they burn money. So they're highly incentivized to screw with the top 20% of their heavy subscribers everywhere but the middle of nowhere.

So aus has the NBN which in theory covers everyone through a combination of FTTP, FTTN and high speed, high latency satellite.

Unfortunately the NBN organisation itself is a massive boondoggle (see also Australian politics for the last 10+ years) and their idea of 'coverage' often could be beaten handily by a pigeon and some string.

So people pay through the nose for alternatives like Telstra mobile broadband or starlink and given the current neoliberal firesale gov I'd say that's an intentional outcome...

Did they look at some of the direct wireless options? several of those in WA that put their dishes up on existing masts and just bounce around a high speed signal.

https://pentanet.com.au/

https://nodeone.com.au/

https://unitiwireless.com/internet/fixed-wireless-residentia...

To name a few

yeah, buried in the hills, no direct access to anything but trees. (and sky)

I live south of Brisbane and I have Starlink and 4G as primary connections. 80-180mbps on 4G with mounted antenna, and 100-350mbps on Starlink.

NBN is a backup. I get maybe 18mbps from that connection on a good day.