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Comment by db48x

4 days ago

Starlink is amazing, but not as amazing as an actual fiber running to your house. If you can get actual fiber then you should. The primary reason is that it has very high headroom for future expansion. You might be getting 1Gbps today, but any individual fiber can actually carry 100Tbps (or 100,000 gigabits per second) using commercial equipment. The speed record is higher still, so there is plenty of scope for further upgrades in the future.

Do keep in mind, however, that residential service is usually provided by GPON or XGPON. Instead of a single fiber running from every single customer to the ISP, optical splitters are used so that up to 128 customers can share a single fiber. The fiber is run at 50Gbps or 100Gbps or whatever, and the individual customers share that using TDMA. That does somewhat limit the available headroom. Speaking just for myself, I would be entirely satisfied by a 1Tbps slice of that 100Tbps of available bandwidth.