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Comment by indoclay | Hacker News Reader

Why does it matter if they are getting government funding when the article is discussing government subsidy to the tune of $18B?

It might be more cost effective to service rural customers using Starlink. I know of many people working remotely using it. Some of which have fiber at the road in front of them, running it up to their rural home from the road would still cost tens of thousands out of pocket and opted for Starlink.

If we are all helping pay to deliver internet access to every part of this country, which I wholeheartedly agree with, could we do so in a way that maybe also helps R&D space travel instead of whatever Comcast or Verizon is doing?

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Some of which have fiber at the road in front of them, running it up to their rural home from the road would still cost tens of thousands out of pocket

I had to trench a quarter mile and it was about $2K it only goes up a little bit with more distance, biggest cost was getting the trencher here on the big rig. For what it's worth that trenching would have been free had I requested the service when the government grant was issued to the ISP as it also covered trenching. I waited too long and it snowed which pushed me outside of that window. That was entirely my fault.

I take it you did this yourself but that is definitely not the cost of paying someone to do it for you. There is no way you can purchase the fiber and pay someone to trench and lay it for you for under $1.50/ft.

I would have preferred a program where in rural counties the up front cost of acquiring the $599 kit can be claimed as a tax credit.

In the FCC press release above,

> Collectively, these companies are committing to deploy broadband service of at least 100/20 Mbps service to over 700,000 locations and to maintain or improve existing 100/20 Mbps service to approximately 2 million locations in 44 states across the United States.

That is Starlink bandwidth and that 18B would pay for 30M install kits instead of just 2.7M homes.

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