Starlink is equally great no matter where you live :)
But you’re right, in urban areas it should be possible to do better. If you can get 1Gbps symmetric fiber then get the fiber. Sadly in the US it is not always possible to do better than Starlink, even in urban areas. It’s gotten better in the last decade, but many cities are still stuck with really bad options due to bad choices in the past.
Or at least they were while anti-trust still had some teeth. Trump's DOJ is highly unlikely to go after Starlink for refusing to launch for a competitor, let alone another nation's military.
To be future proof for more administrations you don't want a monopoly at any step. you really want at least three competitors at minimum. Large companies in tech have realized this by now since the 90s. Recently TeraWave was launched by SpaceX due to the inherent risk (and this is a direct competitor to SpaceX. See
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/21/bezos-blue-origin-satellite-...
What's confusing about that is Jeff Bezos is funding TeraWave to also compete with Amazon who is also launching their own Starlink competitor for satellite Internet?
I’m not even sure that anti–trust laws come into it; they just want as many launch customers as possible. Better to earn some money off of a competing constellation rather than earn nothing, right?
Most roads in the US used to be split between neighboring properties like that. in the 1800s the US was surveyed into 1×1 mile sections, with no gaps between them. Homesteaders could improve the land and claim ownership. As they moved in they built their own roads. Most got together with their neighbors to split the cost and built the roads along their shared property lines.
When people got together to found cities, they would usually all donate or sell ownership of the new streets in the city to the city itself. New residents moving into the city would then buy plots of land that were next to roads but didn’t overlap with them. Counties and states that wanted to build larger roads usually bought the land occupied by existing roads along the route.
But scattered all over the countryside there are still huge numbers of private roads maintained by individuals or small neighborhoods. They’re technically private just like those in North Oaks but the residents just don’t care to keep uninvited people out. You have a pretty good chance of finding some just by picking a random spot west of the Appalachian mountains and zooming in.
You don’t need your ISP to assign a static prefix just to have static addresses on your home network. Instead choose your own prefix inside the fd00::/8 block. There is a procedure using hashing that you can follow to help guarantee that your prefix is unlikely to be shared with anyone else, but you don’t actually need to use it. Configure your router to advertise that prefix in addition to any prefix assigned by your ISP and all of your computers will give themselves an address in both prefixes. If you set your servers to base their address on their mac address, then every one of your servers will have a single unique address. Your client machines can keep their privacy–aware addresses that change frequently.
> You don’t need your ISP to assign a static prefix just to have static addresses on your home network. Instead choose your own prefix inside the fd00::/8 block.
I do have a ULA network I chose for myself. But when I'm not at home I would like to be able to reach things I self host (e.g. my Navidrome server), and I need routable IPs for that. My /60 from Comcast is stable but not guaranteed to be static, and it would be nice to have a truly static allocation so I won't run into the need to redo my DNS records if Comcast ever changes my prefix. I know I could script something to do that, but static is a bit nicer.
Ah, of course. They probably want you to pay extra for that. :)
An HE.net tunnel has advantages, but they’re also quite bandwidth–constrained. If you need anything more than ~1MB/s then you should build something yourself instead.
No, this is just making excuses for not building them. Once you start using them in an area even the drivers that have never used them before will figure out how they work. It’s not rocket science.
> there's going to be pushback from the accidents and injuries that will certainly happen in the interim.
In areas that have actually built lots of roundabouts the accident and injury rate dropped immediately. There was no interim period with higher accident rates.
Texas for example must have too much lead in the water because people seem to chronically get them wrong.
Indiana drivers seem to much better in general with a lower incident rate of "omg that guy almost hit me".
With this said roundabouts that service a fixed area, such as a neighborhood without much cross traffic seem fine in general. Whereas roundabouts in areas that pick up new traffic are far more prone to incidents. And god help you if the roundabout is in a tourist area.
One of the problems with roundabouts in the US is there are too few of them so you're always running into someone who has never dealt with one before which increases the risk of unexpected behavior.
Anecdotes are meaningless. I’ve driven in Texas where there were roundabouts and it wasn’t ever a problem.
Don’t forget that at a roundabout the risk of injury from unexpected behavior by other drivers is _lower_ than at a signalized intersection. There’s a good reason why the injury rate goes down wherever they are built.
As with most things, it’s just history. Roundabouts were invented here in the US, but the inventor made a tiny but critical mistake. Originally drivers inside the roundabout had to yield to drivers entering it. Obviously we know now that this leads inevitably to gridlock during heavy traffic, but back then it wasn’t so obvious. The result is that roundabouts were written off as a bad idea, and signalized intersections (also invented around the same time) took off instead.
But you’re right, in urban areas it should be possible to do better. If you can get 1Gbps symmetric fiber then get the fiber. Sadly in the US it is not always possible to do better than Starlink, even in urban areas. It’s gotten better in the last decade, but many cities are still stuck with really bad options due to bad choices in the past.
reply