I don't think we are. Starlink is better than pretty much all of the alternatives if you can't get good wired broadband. (And can be a real game-changer in rural areas.) But it's mostly worse than good wired alternatives.
The ways to make it available involve stringing hundreds of miles of line. Of course it's possible, it's just prohibitively expensive because of the extremely low density.
But most rural consumers aren't ready/able to pay the outlay needed for the build. Normal suburban/urban residential broadband costs >$1000 per household to build, but rural broadband where you need many poles or lots of trenching is many times more expensive.
In some places the cost could easily be over $15k per home passed.
It doesn't have to be better than fiber. 100 megabits is more than enough bandwidth for almost anyone, especially people accustomed to having no bandwidth.
Talking about what people deserve is a fun way to avoid the actual question of who will pay for it. You can buy a starlink satellite for $600 today, then get broadband service for $120 per month.
People here are obsessed with fiber but I don't think the bandwidth I get from Comcast in an exurban Boston community is a lot better than Starlink.
Bandwidth needs could certainly increase in some manner in the future that makes a gigabit connection to every home in the US that gets electricity a practical necessity. But, for now, Starlink or the equivalent is a perfectly reasonable alternative at a cost that is on par with various other utilities.
Neighborhood congestion is the bane of every ISP, and starlink is no exception here. It definitely gets slower during Netflix hours, but it never becomes unusable.
Same as fibre? No. Same as broadband generically? Pretty much. I've used it and it pretty much lets most people do what they consider normal internet stuff (including streaming video, video calls, etc.) I'm not a gamer so can't speak to stringent latency demands.
Note that Starlink is LEO satellites so different from geosynchronous satellites in terms of latency.
Latency is surprisingly good, usually under 20 milliseconds. Not the same as a wired connection obviously, but plenty good enough for almost every application.
$120 per month is well within the range of most monthly internet plans. The article doesn't say how much monthly service for this county-driven initiative will cost. Yes, there's an upfront cost (though cable providers typically have a hookup too) but it's not huge in comparison to monthly fees.
We got starlink for our rural property. We were previously paying over $200 a month for vastly inferior service (long range Wi-Fi), much slower and dropped out all the time.
If you can get a wired connection, get it. Starlink is for people who can't, and it's far and away the best option for those people.
I wrote "many." And, yes, many people do not have good wired Internet access and paying a relatively small premium to get the equivalent of wired broadband access at all is worth it for a great many of those people. No one is asking you to pay if you have better options.
