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Comment by euio757 | Hacker News Reader

> how many thousands of taxpayer dollars

$0. It's taxpayers euros.

But it's not inefficient if this fixes a chicken-egg problem: overcrowded big city and underpopulated rural area sucks.

Nobody can/wants to go in rural area if they can't make a living there. A fiber speed Internet unlocks lifestyle for many.

It's the same as investing in say a high speed railway between major cities A and B and adding a middle-of-nowhere stop C midway. That C then can flourish to become a medium/major city... So while the initial investment looked like a waste, it's beneficial to provide a better life for people living in both A,B, and C.

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You can bring internet to these other places other than by running a 1km fiber cable, which may be more efficient. Think about it, run. A cable super long to one house or use a dish? Unless there is truly no other options in france

Unless France is going to launch the satellites themselves (which is also very expensive), you become dependent on another party, which is much worse.

I don't know how it works in France, but in many European countries phone/DSL lines and fiber is highly regulated. Even if it is run by a company, they usually have to provide fair access to other providers so that there is competition. For instance, we have a XGS-PON connection to home (used to be AON) and I can probably choose at least from ten ISPs. This is nice, because they try to compete on prices and bandwidth (e.g. the company that owns the network we are on offers 4Gbit symmetric max, but a competitor offers 8Gbit over the same fiber).

Much harder to accomplish that with satellite internet and foreign companies.

Indeed, in France the first to connect a home or a building of appartements has to let the other isp access

You keep saying Starlink may be more efficient without providing any actual evidence that it is.

Also ignoring the political implications of a country spending tax money to buy services from a highly political company from a country whose politics and world influence are in flux right now.

Starlink is good because it is easy to deploy quickly. But the entire constellation and service will be dead within 5 years without constant launches of new satellites.

Forget efficiency. That sounds like a very poor investment of tax dollars to me. The fiber laid will provide lower latency and higher bandwidth connections for the next 40 years.

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