Starlink, unfortunately, will not present meaningful competition. It will really only be viable in sparsely populated areas--even once the full constellation is deployed, there simply won't be the bandwidth for large numbers of users in densely populated areas like major cities--and both Starlink spokespeople and Musk himself have not been particularly coy about that fact...though I suppose neither have they tried particularly hard to push back against the prevailing tech-media narrative that once Starlink is fully armed and operational it will have Comcast, Spectrum, Cox, et al. quaking in their boots.
I think Starlink has a chance to raise the floor in rural areas.
Telcos (usually) do an OK job when there's a competing cable company, and vice versa, but when it's just one offering, there's often low reliability, low speed or both. This is most often in rural areas, where Starlink should be viable.
Some urban areas do fall into the same single provider, low quality offering, and Starlink won't be viable there.
Starlink will be good for people in rural areas, but it won’t positively change the existing economics of terrestrial internet service.
Frontier doesn’t offer slow DSL to rural areas because they’re rolling in cash from having no competitors. And when they lose customers to Starlink, it’s going to make their subscriber revenue to infrastructure expenditure ratio even worse.
If I'm Frontier, why spend on infra to provide a better product to people in areas with no competitors? That's just money spent with no change in revenue.
Now if there's a viable competitor, it's a choice between spending the money to keep customers or not spending the money and losing the customers over time. Terrestrial networking can easily beat Starlink on bandwidth, availability, latency, jitter, etc, all the quality metrics (except portability), but only if the terrestrial network makes the effort.
Telcos have the ability to quickly roll out new networks when they're inspired. AT&T ran fiber to the home (GPON) in several markets within about 18 months when Google Fiber announced they were entering those markets (which they then decided not to). Telcos have an army of people (many consultants) who can run outdoor wiring and do home installation, they have easy access to poles, and (mostly) a decent database of addresses and line lengths to get multifiber lines factory manufactured to roll out with minimal field splicing.
And that's the hard way; things like better remote terminal equipment and/or backhaul don't require a lot of capital or labor individually (but may in aggregate), or just more adaptive DSL speed profiles just developer labor and configuration pushes. I could probably get 50% more downstream speed and 2-3x my upstream speed, but my ISP has inflexible speed profiles; that's probably not the issue for people on 1.5 M dsl, but it's got to be an issue for some.
If you're not familiar with Frontier -- they currently aren't profitable and recently filed bankruptcy. Their network consists mainly of the old rural systems that the big telecoms didn't want due to a lack of profitability. The big and profitable telecoms have concentrated their service to denser areas, and pulled out of lesser profitable rural areas entirely, even though they had a monopoly in those areas.
Their bad service is not the result of a lack of competition, it's a lack of a profitable business model. It is simply more expensive to connect 1 customer with a mile of wire than it is to connect 100 or 1000 customers with a mile of wire. I don't think there's any way to solve this problem without subsidization of rural internet.
> Frontier doesn’t offer slow DSL to rural areas because they’re rolling in cash from having no competitors.
They actually do. The reason they’re going bankrupt is because competitors have started showing up due to the Connect America Fund causing them to lose customers in droves.
Simultaneously they took funds themselves and didn’t bother using them to upgrade infrastructure.
Source: previous frontier customer who couldn’t leave fast enough. Also convinced every single neighbor to do the same, even the ones who thought it was “fine” and wanted to be “loyal”.
Rural broadband (non-satellite) has always required more infrastructure per subscriber. More revenue, like through the subsidies you mention, are the only way to fix the problem. The lack of competition in rural areas is more of a symptom of the inherent infrastructure problem, rather than the cause.
The Connect America Fund is also known as the "universal service high-cost program"
Isn't the point to target sparsely populated areas? I haven't seen anyone saying it will replace fibre optic networks in high density areas. 1Gbps is becoming common in New Zealand major centres and I've seen 4Gbps offered recently as well (with some minor upgrades required)
My parents live an hour out of our city (2 with traffic) and their service is around 3Mbps and it has just slowly degraded over the time they've lived there and been left behind by ISPs. They do have a great view of the sky though for their connectivity issues. I love the night sky there and soon I hope to love it even more knowing that its no longer a frustrating trade off for them.
Rural broadband and satellite providers are the ones looking to be disrupted with their low speeds, low data caps and high costs.
