| There's 3 small independent WISPs in kittitas county in addition to Charter cable in Ellensburg, and whatever Consolidated (the ILEC phone company) is doing. Definitely some more rural parts of kittitas the only thing you can get is a consumer-grade vsat terminal, but those are really quite small amounts of population. For okanogan, Google NCI datacom, they're a wisp that covers much of the county. But not out to the fringes. Okanogan county itself and the PUD have fiber along the highway all the way from Brewster to the Canadian border, with POPs in the towns along the way. Several WISPs make use of it. If you were using either of those counties as an example because you actually know people who are finding it difficult to get last-mile broadband, let me know and perhaps I can help put them in touch with the right people. If we were going to use a very rural Washington State location as an example of where starlink might do well, somewhere such as people who live on acreages outside of Republic might be a better example. Or somewhere like Stehekin. If I had to guess, the reason why Washington state is a good test market for them, is a combination of relatively low cost and easy to provision lit transport services they can buy from each earth station back to Seattle, reasonable driving times and hassle for people to come and go from the Redmond facility to the test sites for physical install and modification of equipment, and a fairly good sized base of consumers in very rural locations presently dependent on hughesnet/wildblue type cheap consumer VSAT. |
And yes I do know people who have had problems in these counties. I also had an absolutely miserable experience using Charter due to their poor infrastructure in the valley. Internet on nights, weekends, holidays, etc. was unusable due to their high utilization of low bandwidth lines