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.

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?

SpaceX will happily launch satellites for competitors. OneWeb has bought launches from them, for example.

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.

Do the way LLVM does it.