[rsynnott]

https://www.ookla.com/articles/ireland-national-broadband-pl...

> The pattern is unambiguous. In townlands still unserved by mid-2026, LEO provider Starlink has grown relentlessly and now accounts for 14.3% of fixed samples, approaching one in seven. In townlands where fiber arrived in 2021 and 2022, Starlink’s share has remained below 2% for five years, with no growth despite the same marketing, pricing, and availability.

(The context is that Ireland has spent the last six years building a fibre network for every rural premises in the country, which is now almost done; it will be complete late this year or early next.)

The problem for Starlink is, it works okay as a business model... Until fibre arrives. Then it's dead. So, long-term, Starlink's market is, essentially, countries which are too poor to do a rural fibre rollout (and bear in mind that it has become much cheaper to do so). Like, what's the bull case for Starlink? In a decade, you've got to assume that areas unserved by fibre won't really be a thing in the developed world.

[Brendinooo]

>Like, what's the bull case for Starlink? In a decade, you've got to assume that areas unserved by fibre won't really be a thing in the developed world.

Fiber is better once it's installed, but installing it is hard.

Rural areas in the United States have been promised fiber for a very long time and it's still nowhere close to universal. Some policymakers have decided that we should fix this with massive federal subsidies but the rollout botched so thoroughly that it became the anecdote of choice for Ezra Klein as he promoted his "Abundance" book.

I was just at my in-laws' in rural PA; unreliable Internet that runs at about 6Mbps down costs around USD$70 a month, and that was after my father-in-law haggled to get the bill down. I pitched him on Starlink, which is now cheaper than that.

It's a lot cheaper to put up a 5G tower than to run fiber. I'm not sure about Starlink's costs to launch but I know for sure they don't have to deal with the provincial fights that happen over trying to be the second service provider in a municipality.

[crummy]

There are plenty of places in the developed world where it just doesn't make financial sense to roll out fibre. In NZ about 90% of the country has fibre access... probably that number will creep a bit higher. But I doubt it'll ever reach 100%.

Whether or not Starlink can build a business on selling broadband to <10% of the developed world I don't know.

[rsynnott]

I mean see above. The Irish rural fibre programme was specifically for premises where it would not be economic for the other fibre networks to roll out. It was _expensive_ (probably about 4000 euro per premises in the end), but it worked.

I was pretty sceptical of NBI when it was announced, but it really does seem to have worked out. If Ireland, which is historically very bad at big state projects and which has an unusually dispersed rural population (we were much later to restrict ribbon development than other developed countries), can do it, I don’t see why any rich country can’t.

[gunapologist99]

Ireland is actually pretty compact compared to Africa or Siberia or South America or central Asia, and those are almost certainly not as wealthy as Ireland per-capita.

Are you arguing that there's no economic value to bringing internet to underserved regions like vast territories? Or that those people would be unwilling to pay for it? (They seem to be quite willing to buy mobile phones.)

[rsynnott]

I don’t think they’re likely to pay enough to justify a high valuation. And remember you’re basically talking just very rural areas in the long term; towns and villages can be hooked up increasingly cheaply. Like, Starlink is maybe a viable medium-sized telco. Maybe even a large one; they might hit Vodafone scale (though probably with a worst cost structure; a lot of Vodafone’s business is just reselling other peoples’ fibre). Note that Vodafone isn’t valued at multiple trillions.

Ultimately, it’s hard to be high margin as a telco.

[9cb14c1ec0]

Nah, a friend's fiber bill just went from $50 to $100 per month. He is switching to Starlink.

[rsynnott]

Is this a setup where the same company owns the infra and provides the service? That’s probably best avoided.