Or you just use free-space optics. If you use lasers you can even (in theory) use DWDM and get xxx separate connections of 25, even 40 Gbps each. Line of sight is required but at some point someone will get it working with satellites. I believe line-of-sight >100km 400 Gbps links have been done.

Oh and once you get past ~900km the fact that via the satellite you have a straight line with ~100% the speed of light (as opposed to 2/3 speed of light with fiber) the satellite connection to LEO is actually faster than fiber. In practice it's less since there are no zero-delay zero-loss regen stations. Every 300km the signal needs to be converted to electrical and back, which adds (a lot) of latency. With satellites this isn't done, saving further time. And all of that is ignoring that when putting fiber of the surface of the earth you cannot just follow a straight line, so you have to add distance for avoiding other people's property too.

And perhaps relevant to an internet shutdown article: laser free-space optics cannot be located unless you're directly in the path of the laser. These links cannot be "denied" to anyone with sky access.

It's just reliably aiming a beam at a moving satellite that's currently beyond our technology.

Currently 40-50gbps to a satellite is the practical limit.