Well “good broadband in rural areas” is subjective… my mom lives in an area with no cell service and no real broadband options (Centurylink offered me a 1.5 meg T1 line for like $700 a month 15 years ago). Since I was a kid, I was always trying to get better internet there — Started with a Diamond Shotgun Modem like 25 years ago and got 40-60k using two phone lines, then one-way DirecPC for 400k, then once I had moved out and it became available, set her up with WildBlue for 1-2 megs but awful ping times, and around 10 years ago that became Excede now ViaSat for around ~12ish megs (usually more like 8-10) with the same 600 ms pings…
After nearly 2 years waiting on Starlink, got that out there — and aside from setting it up in the middle of a cow field with a fence around it so they won’t use it as a scratching post — she gets around 20-50 megs down, 10-15 up and ping times that are unseen out there — in fact it’s so good that WiFi calling works on our phones and I can now go out there with modern connectivity.
That said — even Starlink isn’t the most ideal solution — and if CenturyLink ever gets even halfway reasonable 10+ meg DSL out there (right now there’s nothing except the insanely expensive T1) I’d drop the Starlink… we had to put it in her field, cow-proof it, trench the cable, run conduit — and it cost about $1500 to install once that was all done, and $110 per month which is similar to what I pay Comcast for ~500 megs and unlimited data… it’s “relative” compared to a $700 per month T1 with 1/15th the bandwidth….
All of that to say… how many people in the sticks with similar situations want to watch Sunday Ticket, and how many people will go through these lengths to fix it? For all I know next year CenturyLink might use some kind of rural broadband funds to run fiber down her little 5 house dead-end road… but I’ve heard this for 25+ years… so I gambled that she (and whoever else lives out there after her) will probably be relying on Starlink for a long, long time.
This is why the “move to streaming” seems so far out to me — either Apple will do a deal to allow truly rural people (and those with demonstrated broadband availability under 5-10 megs — people 3 miles closer to town than my mom get 1-3 meg DSL from CenturyLink — that won’t cut it either) do pass-through on DirecTV or Dish for a long time to come;… or they have calculated the revenue isn’t worth it and some people will be angry regardless.
N