That's the point of the subsidy: to make the equivalent of fiber runs to rural areas (and presumably local WISPs) cost-effective. The main intent of the subsidy was not to subsidize the development of new, uncertain technologies.
Musk still managed to slide in and loot a few billion dollars before they realized that Starlink can't meet their definition of "broadband." No other satellite internet could either.
By no means does the program make the claim "to make the equivalent of fiber runs". You're just making claims up to rationalize what in all likelihood, was politically driven. Even the votes from the FCC members were along party lines.
There were speed targets of 100Mbps available to 20M households. They're currently at a median of 65Mbps [1] and they already have more than 99% of the U.S. covered [2]. It's an egregious, questionable, partisan claim by the FCC that they can't reasonably be expected to hit the speed target by 2025.
It sounds as though these new mitigating standards were brought out after the grant was already awarded which is where accusations of political malfeasance come into play.
In my parents county (very rural), the local electric coop is running fiber on all their poles. Its possible that my parents living 10 miles from the nearest town (2 4-way stops, a grocery store and a couple of gas stations) will get gigabit fiber before my friends that live in a well off suburb in a dense urban area will.
About 5 years ago I moved from Silicon Valley to rural Vermont. I have 750 symmetric fiber on my dirt road, and have had more reliable internet here than I did in the South Bay for the decade I lived there.
Where politics doesn't impede the growth of municipal and co-op internet solutions, it is absolutely possible for rural communities to end up with very capable internet access.
same here. - I don't live far from you, in a town of less than 1000 people - and more than 40 miles from even a modest-sized city - and we now have 1GB symmetrical fiber-to-the-home for less than $100/month - and it hasn't gone out even once in over 2 years.
In my parents not-so-rural any longer home (although it was when I was a kid), despite being located less than a mile from a 100K+ population community, they still cannot get more than 1.5 Mbps and DSL is the only wired option available to them. They have an AT&T hotspot card that they use, but it gets throttled (dramatically) after 30GB of data usage, and itself has to be positioned in very specific areas of their house in order to get 1 or 2 bars to eke out a 10Mbps connection speed.
It's nice that your parents have a co-op that is actively rolling out such infrastructure. That's not the rule though, and the U.S. has massive swaths of low density population areas with substandard internet speeds.
There's some kind of disconnect here, because 85% of the service areas covered by the RDOF have winning bidders committed to providing at least 1000/500M service.
Musk still managed to slide in and loot a few billion dollars before they realized that Starlink can't meet their definition of "broadband." No other satellite internet could either.