How is it inefficient? This is the whole point of government: how much economic activity is happening over 56k? Virtually none. You could make the same argument for paving the street and repairing the sidewalk in front of your house. Chances are the property taxes from the average single family home don't cover just the basic street repairs, let alone all the other services your local government provides. Yet we do it, because it turns out that having a happy, well-served population by way of redistributing wealth through services is a generally good thing.

If we assume $20k to run the fiber, you could do starlink for a long time. There are internet options other than fiber. Unless there is no other options in France than fiber. What if France got a contract with starlink? Brought the cost down of that.

Why do you assume $20k as the cost to run the fiber?

The cost is the contractor's hours to get up a ladder on each electricity pole from the closest PON splitter to the customer's home, plus the fiber itself which is peanuts at volume.

Everything else (permits, pole rent, etc) is accounting money that can be negotiated. If there's a strategic national program to fiber up the whole country, this could be exempted on a pen's stroke, or depreciated in many decades.

Yeah, I'd absolutely _love_ that my tax money goes to funding a US company. What could go wrong with depending on a hostile country for someone as basic as Internet ?

If I found out my government blew 20k to slobber on Musk's balls instead of using that money to create work for our own people, I'd personally go blow up that antenna.

Why should Starlink get that business? Why shouldn't France run its own fiber that it controls that isn't dependent on a US-based corporation?

And you said it yourself: Starlink already exists. They don't need a subsidy. You bring the cost of Starlink down by forcing them to compete on the merits of their own service, not by throwing money at them.

Starlink goes out of business and ... you don't have Internet anymore.

The local fiber guy goes out of business... you still have the fiber line there.

Its investment, not subscription.

> how many thousands of taxpayer dollars

$0. It's taxpayers euros.

But it's not inefficient if this fixes a chicken-egg problem: overcrowded big city and underpopulated rural area sucks.

Nobody can/wants to go in rural area if they can't make a living there. A fiber speed Internet unlocks lifestyle for many.

It's the same as investing in say a high speed railway between major cities A and B and adding a middle-of-nowhere stop C midway. That C then can flourish to become a medium/major city... So while the initial investment looked like a waste, it's beneficial to provide a better life for people living in both A,B, and C.

You can bring internet to these other places other than by running a 1km fiber cable, which may be more efficient. Think about it, run. A cable super long to one house or use a dish? Unless there is truly no other options in france

Unless France is going to launch the satellites themselves (which is also very expensive), you become dependent on another party, which is much worse.

I don't know how it works in France, but in many European countries phone/DSL lines and fiber is highly regulated. Even if it is run by a company, they usually have to provide fair access to other providers so that there is competition. For instance, we have a XGS-PON connection to home (used to be AON) and I can probably choose at least from ten ISPs. This is nice, because they try to compete on prices and bandwidth (e.g. the company that owns the network we are on offers 4Gbit symmetric max, but a competitor offers 8Gbit over the same fiber).

Much harder to accomplish that with satellite internet and foreign companies.

Indeed, in France the first to connect a home or a building of appartements has to let the other isp access

You keep saying Starlink may be more efficient without providing any actual evidence that it is.

Also ignoring the political implications of a country spending tax money to buy services from a highly political company from a country whose politics and world influence are in flux right now.

Starlink is good because it is easy to deploy quickly. But the entire constellation and service will be dead within 5 years without constant launches of new satellites.

Forget efficiency. That sounds like a very poor investment of tax dollars to me. The fiber laid will provide lower latency and higher bandwidth connections for the next 40 years.

Good governance is sometimes taking the money/income from dense areas (cities) and investing it in rural areas. Also, similar to how copper lasted many decades, a fiber network is a one time large investment cost and then you reap the benefits for decades.

Not everything has to be a capitalist 'minimize cost, maximize profits' game.

Zero. We pay out taxes in Euros.