How many big empty rural areas in Asia have fiber optics internet relative to big empty rural areas in the US? I thought starlink was heavily used by a lot of counties where people didnt have great access to internet?

The US has a weird mix of big emplty spaces, really fucking expensive existing underground utilities and roadways, and private property (easements ain't free) that makes new underground utilities stupidly expensive to run.

You have to buy big easements, negotiate utility contracts with local and state governments (to use the public right-of-way), dodge existing infrastructure while repairing what you break, and lay a fuckton of cable.

I work on the municipal side, and despite Google Fiber having a utility agreement with us for years they still have yet to lay a single foot of underground fiber because we won't allow them to cut across roads that we just replaced in the last year, require their microtrenches to follow engineering standards, and they need to show existing underground water, gas, wastewater, and electrical services on their plans because they're famous for just running a trench and making it the water district's problem when they cut 7 public lines in an hour.

Same reason rural places in the US also haven't discovered electricity yet. Oh, wait…

This is how it was where I grew up in Washington State. We were not rural enough for our neighborhoods to qualify for grants, but not densely populated enough for it to be financially worth it to lay cable. I moved out in 2018, where the best options were still dial up or conventional sattelite.

I did discover that by voiding Cricket Wireless' TOS you could use your BYOD as a hotspot with unlimited data and you'd just have to change sims/numbers every few months when they caught on. Of course now Starlink and T-Mobile home internet exist instead and hey, maybe they laid cable in the past 8 years, it's possible.