Starlink has about 4 million customers right now, but considering that Starlink is struggling with congestion in the US, there will be a gap of millions of rural US households who would be best served by fiber. And regardless, fiber is the best long-term internet access medium, because whatever latency problems fiber has now can be improved by changing the devices sending data through the fibers without replacing the fibers themselves.
Personally I think 5g is the way to go. Free more spectrum from the old TV channels (DVB-T is a lot more efficient in terms of spectrum use), this will cover rural use.
10 years ago I would never think I would say that, but I'm happy with LTE at 50MB down, 15up. The problem? No new lte equipment manufactured in western countries. You want cat 16+ modems? ZTE and Huawei are the only ones to sell you one. And their software not only spies for the Chinese Communist Party. It is also shit (I know, I bought a zte modem to marvel at my 100MB down speeds, o ly to rip it out 2 days later in discust after all my voice calls sounded as if I was on half a Meg if I didn't restart the thing daily (no, it only has automated restart as a weekly option in software). So my old tp-link was installed back in its box on the mast.
So we need more work done here to make 5g happen. Chinese will no do it for us (especially now that their economy is failing).
5G networks need wired infrastructure to send internet data to towers within a few miles of the customer; fiber is the best option for those wires. And for the last few miles, fiber still has throughput and latency advantages over 5G [1].
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2024/10/01/capacity-crunch-causes-m...