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Comment by viig99 | Hacker News Reader

This + remote work is a boon from gods, i will happily go enjoy life in the wilds.

I believe the antenna's + gear you will need will be larger than you'll want to haul around. Starlink is mainly for permanent rural installations where cable+fiber sees no profits.

5G will also help some but it's become pretty clear that there isn't the public interest to generally bring broadband to rural areas the way telephone and electricity was (in the US among other places). The only real option today is conventional satellites, which for a lot of people are unacceptable because of latency/data limits/cost especially as video is increasingly not really optional.

Of course, we'll have to see how good these efforts of relative to normal broadband but they do offer hope that you won't have to choose where to live based on the broadband options.

I suppose by 5G helping you mean non-mmWave having more bandwidth to go around per tower? (If that’s true, I’m just guessing it is.)

Which I suppose does help, but only for people who probably already have 4G. So, not very rural.

Yes, primarily bandwidth--so that 5G will likely be a legitimate alternative to wired in some areas. And there's a pretty big build-out in general going on around 5G so maybe coverage gets better.

But you're right. A lot of places that are pretty patchy or non-existent today for cell service, especially 4G, will likely have the same problem even after 5G rolls out.

Once the gear is available for purchase, people who need 5G in particular places will install it themselves without interference from the Daughters Bell. (This won't just be rural users; more typically it might be industrial or commercial users who have lots of Io-Things.) Backhaul, where required, typically will be over fiber, as it should be. Eventually, since spending on radio equipment will be tied to how it's used rather than how ATTVZN would like to distort the market, 5G will be as normal as Wifi.

I see this view a lot. May i ask you a question that comes to my mind when I consider it: do you worry about access to modern medicine, living out in the middle of nowhere? Having an ambulance take 2 hours to get to you in case of a heart attack would be a death sentence, for example.

You don't need to get nearly that far out to be without reasonable internet.

I just looked at a property this week that's 15 minutes from a major regional hospital and has no access to reasonable wired internet.

My dad's property in Maine is similar. 15 minutes outside of a small city which has a perfectly good hospital etc. He gets about 1Mbit broadband--so you basically can't use for video--and very marginal cell service. And houses further down the road can't get broadband at all.

I think a lot of people here assume you're either in Manhattan/SF or in some remote section of Wyoming. But, as you say, you don't need to get far away from dense civilization for broadband to be problematic.

I live about 40 miles outside of a major city off a somewhat main road. While I do get Comcast, Verizon FIOS isn't available at my address (in site of the fact that they constantly send me mailings).

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