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Comment by frankreyes | Hacker News Reader

The whole point of Starlink is that it's economically unfeasible to reach everywhere. Specially in rural areas, neither cables, fiber optics or 5G will make it. Keep wasting money in Europe.

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If there is a point to bring electricity into a village, then there is a point to bring there also a fiber.

Infrastructure has to be self financed otherwise it's a waste of resources. That's why rural areas do not have internet. It fails every time

By this logic they should not have electricity and water pipes as well.

You're moving the goalposts. First came the cities and then came the public infrastructure. 200 years ago none of that infrastructure existed yet cities were already there. That's because there was a need for it, which was self financed.

Then someone had the idea to reverse the cause effect relationship in a way to promote moving people to smaller towns and away from big cities. To the point of Italy selling houses for €1 to motivate people to move back from big cities. It doesn't work.

This is a rather stupid comment.. so all public utilities are failed, wasted resources?

I don't know where you live, but in most of Europe, rural areas have internet too. It doesn't "fail every time".

There aren't really any rural areas in Europe, by American standards.

I think you should review the definition of "rural" then.

No he’s right and this is brought up here all the time. There are large swathes of America where people don’t have neighbors for miles (sometimes tens of miles) while there are comparatively few places in Europe that meet this definition.

I can't believe that Starlink is counting on those relatively few people to make money. There must be some other stream of revenue, right?

Presumably ships/airlines/us military are all a signicant potential revenue source. Only once they get the laser links working though.

Right. So it's not exactly about connecting those who are remote and need it... unless we consider that having access to TikTok on a ship is a fundamental need.

The comment you are replying too never said they were dependent on it. You’ve pivoted the discussion. The poster said Europe doesn’t have rural people by American standards. Revenue wasn’t mentioned.

They aren’t, those people are just benefiting from starlink which will make most money through enterprise and government programs.

Again, review the definition of "rural". Just pretending words mean what you want them to mean is quite literally, definitionally, bullshitting.

He said “rural by American standards” not just rural. No one is pretending the word rural means that, that’s why additional context was added to the initial comment.

Barely any infrastructure is self financed, anywhere.

In Europe sure. That's why Energy is so expensive compared to the USA.

But in general that's not true. In particular, public resources such as electricity and water are installed for a specific planned capacity... the limit of how much resources to install is how much we can pay it back.

Public infrastructure is financed from taxes which is financed from jobs, this there's a cause effect relationship between infrastructure and productivity. That's the very meaning of self financed.

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