Exactly. Pass a law that requires to lease the last mile (connectivity between POP and your home) for reasonable cost (i.e. maintenance cost) and we will start seeing actual competition.
We had huge selection of ISP in early 2000 exactly because telcos were required to do exactly that.
Not entirely. There are no terrestrial internet options in the middle of the ocean, for example. Starlink covers areas that are impossible to cover with terrestrial internet even if you completely ignored the economics.
The sheer amount of government funding makes you wonder why there isn't a publicly operated telecom option these days. These companies insist that funding is required to cover rural areas yet many of us still have nothing while the companies are making billions in profit.
As an example, Ontario is "investing" 4 billion to have 50mbit down and 10mbit up available across the province by 2025. I'm in a region that already met those requirements and yet my DSL barely manages 6mbit down. When checking with ISPs what my options are, it turns out the best I can actually get is fixed wireless at 25mbit down and 5mbit up.
While Starlink performance has degraded over the past 18 months or so, I have noticed it slowly recovering as more satellites are getting up to orbit. My worst case speed tests are hovering around 40mbit down and 5mbit up while some good days can occasionally hit 300mbit down and 20mbit up.
Probably going to have to move to radio telescopes on the dark side of the moon or something. I mean, I seriously doubt that terrestrial users are going to let frequency go unused.
For some users, maybe we could switch to lasers, which are more-directional -- like, a hypothetical Laser Starlink would have one or a handful of lasers on a station that physically track a satellite or satellites. Problem is that that doesn't work well with clouds -- visible light is obstructed by them.
Maybe it's possible to use masers, but I assume that if it were technically easy and cheap, it would have been done by now.
I mean, the opportunity cost of not being able to use part of the frequency spectrum is also pretty big. And some of the structural elements are there to stand up to terrestrial conditions, like precipitation, wind, and much-stronger gravity. They wouldn't need those on the Moon.
I think a more-fundamental issue is that it imposes constraints on the direction in which one can be pulling data from. No great fix for that.
EDIT: If this NASA project makes it to deployment, then there will be at least one up there.
If completed, the telescope would have a structural diameter of 1.3 km, and the reflector would be 350m in diameter.[3][4][5] Robotic lift wires and an anchoring system would enable origami deployment of the parabolic reflector.[6]
The tradeoff being done here that makes me really excited for the future of astronomy is that Starlink is funding the development of Starship, which will in turn make space-based telescopy a hugely easier thing to do. So I'd gladly hand off a bit of spectrum pollution here on Earth (which comes with vastly improved global internet access) for Starship's launch capacity.
The number of telescopes capable of doing astronomy will get smaller, the available hours on that scope will need to be shared among all academic astronomers, and therefore, the number of people able to do astronomy will get reduced.
Having a few telescopes floating in space is not a solution. Not when there is so much space unexplored. Mankind does not own the night sky, only a few billionaires do.
These growing pains suck, but the future of space exploration is in space. Any future of humanity is a future in which earths night sky is filled with stations and spaceships and satellites.
We ain't flying to anywhere the telescopes are pointing.
The future of astronomy is not in plopping people onto asteroids. That's the future of mining, and increasingly that future is looking dark and dystopic.
that's a great vision, but we don't have to trade ground-based astronomy for space-based astronomy. that would put us in a 'dark age' of astronomy for the rest of my lifetime, until all these yet-to-be-launched telescopes get built.