Honestly, if Australia could roll out a national fiber backbone (almost a decade ago!) across the same approximate landmass as the contiguous 48 states at less than 10% of the overall population; there is no valid reason that the wealthiest nation to have ever existed can’t also do so.

Did Australia lay a national backbone as you said, or did they connect individual neighborhoods, or individual homes? Because all three of those are very different situations with very different costs associated.

I mean the US has had a national fiber backbone since 1995, but that doesn’t really mean anything about fiber to the home. I’m not sure rolling out a fiber backbone 10 years ago is really anything to brag about. However, extending the backbone to connect neighborhoods would be extremely helpful in lowering the costs to get fiber to the home, if that’s what they did in Australia, then that would indeed be laudable. If at the national level, they payed for fiber rollout to every home or every street… Well that would surprise me, but that would also be awesome!

So yeah, what did they do?

Office apps looked like that in 1998 because it was an interface that worked. It never should have changed.

I mean, it’s not definitely a bad thing in principle… But given the current administration, I would worry about any company the government wants to get their hands into. I’d be worried if the us suddenly wanted to buy into Coca-Cola… But Intel is scarier.

Ok, so actual question, How useful are CDN endpoints these days with https everywhere? Because most encrypted content is unique to a single web user, caching isn’t super useful. Also you can’t cache live content like video calls or online games. I’d imagine the percentage of cacheable content is actually fairly low these days. But like I said, I don’t actually know the answer to this, i’d be curious to hear your take.

Edit: it’s weird to get down votes for a question.

Uh, how often are you using the Internet to connect to a computer in your home town? Maybe 5% of the time?

I’ve never used Starlink, but with a basic understanding of geography and optics, I’m going to bet that in most scenarios the latency difference between Starlink and fiber is negligible, sometimes even being faster on Starlink, depending on the situation.

That said, I’m not suggesting Starlink is a realistic replacement for fiber, just that latency isn’t the big issue. (It has other serious issues)