If you want Internet, you can pay for it.
If you want Electricity, you can pay for it.
Oh, that's interesting! I always thought this to be an outlier scenario. What is "here"? Can you estimate the size of population to this applies?
Presumably because at some point, it was cheaper to buy 30 years of diesel than to run a power cable, and yet cell coverage wasn't widespread enough to replace a wired telephone.
Of course, we can debate whether providing telephone service is us beneficent city dwellers generously subsidising our backwards rural cousins for the good of their children; or us being taken for fools and subsidising the rich's gigantic holiday homes and rental properties.
I know Australia does keep population statistics, and surely if it is indeed not uncommon for people to do remote work from areas without connection to grid power, somebody must have done a survey, otherwise you’d just be guessing.
As for remote work, I have to question the decisions of someone that moves to an area without connection to the electricity grid and expects to do remote work from there. IMHO they are putting them self into an extreme scenario which shouldn’t be accommodated for, neither by government nor private enterprise.
You may bring up rural communities that have been neglected for decades as a counterpoint here. To that, I go to ancestor post and state, that those communities deserve traditional infrastructure, paid for from our common funds, not to be forced into a magic solution from a startup looking to make money from them.
> I have to question the decisions of someone that moves to an area without connection to the electricity grid and expects to do remote work from there.
That's just silly, closed-minded, and ignorant. You must just have very limited experience of the world. I can off the top of my head list hundreds of scenarios where remote work might become the only option for someone already living in the bush. And many other reasons (which I know first hand from people living here) why people may be entirely unable to move from here. These are real facts on the ground, and not subject to your lack of imagination and propensity towards narrow-minded curtain-twitching judgements about whole classes of people you know zip about.
> 4g has very patchy coverage in rural Australia
This goes back to the claim in the original post. Starlink is an excuse not to rollout proper infrastructure.
> schooling and healthcare
Really? Are there honestly scenarios in the real world where people don’t have power but need to do school and healthcare via the internet. I find that hard to believe. Honestly if there exist rural communities where this is a concern than they deserve infrastructure, which goes back to the original post which claims:
> All these talks about Starlink -> Remember it's a bandaid solution to your governments poor planning and infrastructure rollout of a core utility / service.
> I can off the top of my head list hundreds of scenarios where remote work might become the only option for someone already living in the bush.
Do you mind listing some of them? It might be because of my lack of imagination, but I have a hard time seeing someone living in the bush, unable to relocate, suddenly finding a job that requires the need for high speed and low latency connection.
Well yes, but a needed bandaid. That's what happens when governments vacate their role - individuals are left to manage on their own (and the devil take the hindmost).
Australian here like you. Generally appalled by the NBN debacle. Starlink's beyond my means, but if I had a remote job I'd find it a godsend where I live (rural Northern Rivers). Our "NBN" is SkyMuster, which is from all accounts not up to much (even if you can get the NBN to connect it).
And SkyMuster is supposed to be a last resort, but is pushed anywhere local topography offers a mild inconvenience for fixed wireless. I'm 4km from a village, and 30km from Lismore - hardly the back of beyond.
And the NBNCo is just an old-style Telco: bloated with plushly-remunerated suits, utterly indifferent to users, and grossly inefficient. Before I knew how bad it was I tried to get signed up with SkyMuster. It never happened. I had multiple appointments made by NBN with different contractors, none of whom knew anything about the other appointments. It never actually happened and I ended up cancelling the whole thing and making my own arrangements.
Like the other poster I agree it's a band-aid. I agree it's not the world's best connection (there is considerable latency sometimes). I agree I shouldn't have to be paying Elon Musk 140 bucks a months to get a decent connection but ... I am, because that's all I can get here.
We're just outside Perth, less than a k from a new(ish) suburb development and our only NBN option is "Fixed Wireless", which guarantees 25Mbit at least once in a given 24 hour period. WTF! There was one non-NBN wireless option which according to all reviews actually managed to be worse, and 5G here is bad, plus Telstra won't (yet?) sell us a 5G 'home' connection. AFAICT my options are starlink or paying $22k to get a fibre put in.
So far it works well for us here, regularly exceeding 200Mbps, fingers crossed our cell isn't going to become oversubscribed anytime soon. I also hope that they spin up a Perth exit node, because AFAICT our traffic pops out in Sydney at the moment, adding to the latency.
But really I hope the government gets its act together and sorts out the NBN for more people. Tony Abbott has a lot to answer for.
(I understand from what I've read that the problems with starlink in the US are a lot less of an issue here, because the populations are an order of magnitude different...)
It’s been a bit of an eye-opener moving back here! I left at the end of the Gillard government, when the future of the Australian internet connection was bright, and came back wondering what had gone wrong!
It seems wasteful, I know, but it's nice to have competition at least.
I have choice of half a dozen suppliers this way but only one set of hardware in the house.
That's what you get when you let your politicians sell you out to monopolists.
With the shift to cloud computing, at least in the awkward hybrid phase, that won't suffice for a business of that size, but it really isn't obvious what a single person would _need_ a gigabit connection for. Perhaps you can elaborate.
The download part is great because now it's faster to buy a game on steam for instance and download it than getting in the car, driving to the closest store to purchase a physical copy and bring it home.
Regarding the upload, I built a small utility that stores the videos from the cameras I have at home to the cloud in a rolling window (I didn't want to pay the service from the cameras provider). So at any time I am uploading something like 7 1080p streams (it's more bursty as I chunk the streams every 10 minutes and upload the resulting files). So, while 1Gb is still an overkill, once you have the bandwidth you find uses for it.
On the one hand, I have two competing cable providers (RCN/Astound and Comcast/Xfinity). Being able to swap between services as offers change has been huge (hey, competition is a thing!) Currently I’ve got 1400/40 (measured) on Xfinity.
But fiber? Totally absent. AT&T seems to serve other areas nearby but not mine. Why? No clue. But I’d sure love having a symmetric connection.
Incidentally, there are multiple fiber cables strung on the poles in the alley behind my house. Presumably they are the infrastructure for our two cables cos.
It's cheaper than Ziggo' coax though (300 mb).
To be honest, I still have to research that.
I too am in Australia
Proportion of urban population 92.57%
https://www.statista.com/statistics/276724/urbanization-in-t...
People forget. The numbers tell a really great story.
You could have a gigantic nation which is completely centralized into one city, giving you a super low population density on paper.
It's not the case in any of your example, so not really an issue here. Nonetheless...
Only trying to provide context for the economics of density in places like Singapore and the a Netherlands, not necessarily prove the opposite use case. I just wanted to highlight a contrasting factor that is very important for fiber and other high speed service viability. There are many others!
These criticisms are totally valid.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/260498/degree-of-urbaniz...
The base 300/300 service is price capped at 38 euros/month as well. I'm paying a few bucks more for higher speed.
We have a pretty different scale in a lot of ways: Australia is huge and basically empty, density wise.
It's a bit annoying to find, everything is hidden behind area code filters.
> (semi-)rural
Pick one.
How many hundered km are you from the nearest settlement of >10,000 people?
People in England, Netherlands, etc don't really get what remote means.
It's not available everywhere, but it covers a lot of smaller cities, so I'm happy that at least that's one thing that is done correctly here.
I have no idea how Poland is pulling off such low costs but props for doing so. Other nations should take note.
Partially. The thing is, the US is so unbelievably huge that it is economically infeasible to serve extremely rural areas with high-speed wired (i.e. fiber, DSL) or wireless (microwave, 4G/5G phone) internet, even with massive government subsidies - and that applies for other large-area countries such as Germany or Australia as well.
Starlink completely changes the equations there as (for the user) no investment is required other than getting a terminal, and for anything mobile (sea ships, RVs, emergency services) it blows the competition from geostationary satellites completely away.
Power lines aren't an inherent fire risk. Unmaintained power lines, however, are.
Primarily, you need to maintain clearance from bushes and trees.
The exception to the "usually only" is, once again, our beloved "german redneck" government in Bavaria who insisted that the new North-South line Südlink got buried on Bavarian soil to quash local NIMBY resistance [2] - at the price of taking ages longer to build and costing ~8x the amount of pole-run lines.
[1] see page 64, https://www.amprion.net/Dokumente/Dialog/Downloads/Studien/E...
[2] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/bayern/energiewende-warum-erdkab...
and due to the way the laws are written, we had to pay to have an engineer prescribe what work needed to be done to each pole - up to and including replacing it - then submit plans to the utilities, and then pay the utilities to pay 'their' engineer to do the same study - and then when it was agreed that a pole needed to be replaced, we had to pay the full cost of replacing it, and then when the work was done, the utility still owned the pole and rented it back to us for a yearly fee - repeat several hundred times.
Several million dollars for about 500 households.
Orders of magnitude. I actually once worked in construction, specifically in trench digging for German Telekom.
Putting up poles is easy, drill a hole in the ground for the pole, put the pole in, string a fiber on it, done. Even cheaper if you already have poles, all you need there is a truck with a lift. Downside is, unless you own the poles, you have to rent them from the local utility and some of these charge extortion rates for third parties. And there are always drunkards or people with shoddy cars taking down entire series of poles, not to mention adverse weather events and vandals taking pot shots. Phone and electricity lines are easy to fix, you can probably train apes to do that, but splicing fiber still involves specialists.
Trench digging is a whole different beast: you need to pull permits, dig the trench, hope you don't hit something else that's buried, deal with bad soil (sometimes straight out rock) or shit like WW2 bombs, lay down your cable, bury the cable in a first layer of fine sand, place a warning band, bury and fill up that with the coarse soil you removed, restore asphalt/plaster where needed... it takes weeks and multiple dedicated crews - usually you have one crew that deals with cutting up and removing asphalt, one that deals with placing and removing anti-traffic barriers, one with doing the actual dig and backfill, one that runs the cable, and one that restores surface.
There is a third way however, it's virtually "underground poles" - earth displacement hammers. These "rockets" can shoot up to 70m through the soil in one go. Nice shit but needs the right soil to operate and it will cut through anything already buried, including solid water and wastewater mains.
Does any of this calculus change when you're talking about really rural areas, like in the desert of Australia? My guess is that would mean higher cost of sending someone out to fix a pole (point against poles), but also lower likelihood of running into existing infrastructure (point in favor of digging).
For power at least, running it buried is no good idea at all because capacitive losses are larger, so at least as long as an area has a grid connection it makes sense to "dual use" the already existing poles.
Based on popular memes I can imagine, especially in Australia, that it might not be a good idea to bury lines in the open desert because you will get animals burrowing and chewing through the cables.
Putting Germany in the same category as Australia or the US seems a bit weird when the former two have truly continental dimensions whereas Germany is a bit smaller than California, although there's an interesting twist: Going by population-weighted density, Australia definitively comes out ahead and even the US is somewhat denser than Germany in that regard.
Though on the other hand the United Kingdom is much denser population-weighted-wise than all three of them, and yet from what I've gathered it's no perfect shining example of highspeed broadband rollout either…
I believe there will still be a rural segment relying on cellular for a while yet, but it's a shrinking minority.
Economics aren't actually that different for villages (very rural single dwellings are though of course). Most villages of say 1k ppl already have fibre going to them (for VDSL cabinets), so they can buy the backhaul from Openreach.
Then it's a case of adding the actual fibre which they can use existing telegraph poles for.
There isn't really a huge difference in economics between urban suburbs and villages.
London is actually not as cheap as you'd think, because a lot of properties are apartments and that requires expensive wayleave agreements to be negotiated with the freeholder. This has significantly increased the cost, as many freeholders don't care and don't respond or want a lot of money for the permission, meaning you have to dig up the street regardless and miss a lot of properties and hope they can be added later.
Plus the cost and complexity of closing roads/streets is much higher in London than other areas.
In the past few years though there has been an explosion in FTTH build. 75% properties can get gigabit service now which is increasing by around about 1% every month.
The priority a decade ago really was on getting the entire country up to 'usable' internet speeds, rather than having a lot of FTTH in some areas and then very slow DSL in many other areas. Only 0.35% of UK properties are below 2mbit/sec down now (unusable), which doesn't include 4G/5G coverage, so in reality it's likely only 1 in 1000 households have utterly terrible connectivity.
So while the UK doesn't rank top of the list of median download speeds it is far less likely you are going to have bad connectivity, which IMO is a greater priority than raw download speeds.
Very few people actually need more than say 100mbit/sec day to day. It's actually hard to get gigabit around the house; most powerline adaptors and wifi solutions top out around 300mbit/sec in my experience, so unless you have ethernet in your house (very rare), the limiting factor is now on in home connectivity, not the external ISP.
It's not that it's economically infeasible. It's that it's just not as profitable for the ISPs as running a smaller, closer network in a populated area. So they won't do it. Why would they care about covering a huge area that doesn't make as much money? All they care about is money over all else.
Lots of core utilities aren't rolled out everywhere. You might need a different water source or use a septic tank rather than roll out central services everywhere, because it's so expensive per capita. Internet from a satellite seems a valid equivalent to that.
[0]: https://nltimes.nl/2023/01/27/dutch-meteorologists-say-musks...
You don't even need to be in the middle of a wilderness area. My brother has a house 10 minutes outside of a smallish Maine city. And his only Starlink options were a 1Mbps down DSL and a very data-capped cellular hotspot.
But a good wired connection is almost always going to be better.
I replaced our Skymesh (geo-stationary) satellite (the only barely viable alternative) two years ago with Starlink. Skymesh gave me ~600ms RTT to Sydney servers, and maybe 25Mbps down (at 3am, clear sky, etc). Data cap was around 120GB / month, IIRC. Pricing was probably 75% of what I'm paying for Starlink now.
We can kinda sorta get 3G, but effectively only for voice & SMS - our nearest tower is ~ 10km away, and my yagi / repeater requires power to establish a very feeble back to that. 3G is being retired almost definitely in 2024, at which point I believe the national carriers' plan is to have no plan - as the replacement technology requires a much higher density of tower placements than rural areas will ever substantiate. The joy of a fully privatised communications industry.
It's kind of amusing to me that you blame our private telecom industry. I'm relatively sure Australia has some of the best mobile connectivity on the planet, with generally extremely high speeds, high data caps and usually, relatively good coverage. It is absolutely not a given that government service would be better.
My handset (Pixel 4A original) will need replacing if they go 5G only - I guess they will go 4 & 5 combined, but see above.
I don't know if my Telstra-installed (~ 2 years ago) repeater will work with 5G, or I'll need to buy a replacement.
I don't know if I have any recourse or remedy in the event that I lose all connectivity after the 3G retirement.
Signal propagation is weird. When the tech installed my repeater and yagi, most of the time was spent finding the optimum direction - he ended up pointing it at a hill probably 10 degrees off the measured direction for the tower (line of sight is impossible for us).
So, yes, you're right ... but still.
Anyway, Australia has some of the best mobile service coverage in populated areas - that's why they talk about percentage of humans that have coverage, not land area. And I totally understand why.
Reviewing https://www.telstra.com.au/coverage-networks/our-coverage - where I am, unboosted 3G, and to a lesser degree, 4G zones are asserted to be within several km of me - but the nearest 5G blob is ~60km. There's no 'coverage coming soon' zones within 300km of me.
And yes, I blame privatisation. Prior to that, if you wanted a landline service, connection fee was flat, no matter where you were. If that had continued on, presumably the same policy would apply today for other services.
Contesting for last-mile means it's now hideously expensive to the consumer - similarly for power connection - compared to a few decades ago.
...what about Starlink's performance over the last 2 years?
My use case is web, remote desktop, video conf, phone (carrier->wifi voice is a transparent feature for me), streaming audio, syncthing.
Only a couple of those things are sensitive to the few seconds per hour that my dish seems to lose connection, and I suspect part of that is poor placement of my dish.
To your question, and TFA's point, though - I've not noticed any change in the frequency or duration of those ephemeral outages, nor any feeling of overall performance degradation.
I might have occasionally noticed evening drops in throughput, but little of my use case is impacted - I put that down to other customers in my cell ramping up their video streaming services that time of day.
The (mean) ~40ms latency has not changed over those two years (as expected).
I follow a few rural internet groups, at first most members thought Starlink would be all they'd ever need, now they are very unhappy.
1. No broadband from any of Rogers, Bell, Cogeco, etc. for multiple decades, and no real local offerings; despite being only a few km from a major centre
2. Nothing seems to be happening, so some local companies start offering point-to-point wireless services which fill a hole. They start putting up antenaes and stringing fibre all around. Fees are high but not awful. Bandwidth is low, but so much better than what one could get before. Also Starlink gets announced and deployed for some people.
3. Suddenly Bell shows up and starts running Fibe up and down the rural roads. What wasn't "economically viable" for them before suddenly super viable. Local wireless companies -- who took big risks to get a product to people -- lose hundreds of customers overnight.
I now have 3gbps fibre optic direct to my house when I had a 15mbps wireless connection a few months ago. But I'm sure some local small ISPs are going to be out of business by the end of the year.
I hate the way Canada is run.
Regional Bell says your DSL is $60-120/month.
Your local ISP buys a circuit to a DSL aggregator (Covad, Northpoint, Rhythms, etc) and starts offering DSL for $50/month (their cost was $25-30/month).
After increase in customers, regional Bell says "we're offering $29.95/month for 6 months to new customers". ISPs nationwide start losing thousands of customers.
One by one, DSL aggregators start to go out of business which means ISP have no DSL connectivity and can't sell DSL anymore.
DSL is dead from anyone but regional Bell.
That 2019 decision was reversed in 2021.
[0] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-crtc-chair-...
"Fake" a local internet company in order to provoke Telcos into rolling out fibre.
It seems to work well enough for fake "grassroots" movements.
You would need something like a political party to hire them.
Law has been modified recently https://www.canada.ca/en/radio-television-telecommunications...
Or, in the case of the US, it's what you get when you have private for-profit corporations doing all the planning and rollout.
I say this as an Australian who watched one government plan a national rollout of fibre while another came in justifying most people don't need a connection better than 25/5 (based on usage data at the time) and went ahead and gutted the project.
We're now trying to undo the previous government's mess up of the original roll out post COVID world when everyone discovered remote work is a good idea for many.
Starlink's issue feels like history repeating itself with any service that becomes popular and goes too quickly into high demand