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.