[notquiteright]

Yet the US spends a greater amount EVERY year on building fiber into ever more remote areas (between FCC and NTIA programs, over $10 billion per year) than it has cost Starlink TOTAL to build a network that covers the entire country. Starlink needs more satellites to increase the max number of subscribers they can support, but their costs are actually going down.

Digging trenches in the ground is expensive. It’s a big country. You need immense amounts labor and at the end of the day, you just have a barely profitable fiber line, if that. Many of the new fiber lines will only survive on further government subsidies. Meanwhile, Elon builds a spaceship to launch satellites and people pay him handsomely for access to it. That’s not to mention that construction is heavily unionized, requires locality by locality planning permission and rights of way, etc.