[GeekFortyTwo]

Yup, the only reason I live in the rural house that I do is because it got fiber for some reason. Starlink speeds would have been enough(I would be fine with 25meg) too. We actually had as a condition of sale a requirement that sufficient internet was confirmed(I was expecting a challenge on that, turned out nicely). With Starlink I would not have hesitated.

I'm not far from a big city, and closer still to a small town. Property prices in that town have gone insane during the pandemic. People want their own space. With remote work and good internet, any town can see a boom. If this pandemic had happened once Starlink was fully operational, it would have really changed some of those numbers, I think.

[Diederich]

Are you me? We moved from paying $4800/month for an apartment in Mountain View, CA to paying about $3100/month mortgage 10 minutes outside of Olympia Washington. Here we are gaining equity on a big, beautiful home on five lush acres.

Early last year, slightly before the pandemic, we decided to make the permanent move out of the SF bay area. In fact, when the pandemic hit in February, we were in Oregon looking at a property.

Prior to that, we were planning on waiting until Starlink became a thing, but decided to push forward without it, with the requirement that the new place have high speed Internet.

We made a big spreadsheet and put almost 500 properties in it. The very first thing was to check its Internet speed. My wife spent...many many hours...on the phone with xfinity and a couple of others, going through addresses.

When we found this place, the first thing we had our on-site agent do was get the wifi password and run a couple of speed tests. We required that prior to even being (remotely) shown around.

We are out in the country here, so there are power and Internet outages, but not too frequent. I did signup for and get a Starlink dish, and it acts as our secondary Internet connection in case comcast is out. It's connected to one of our generator backed up circuits.

From what we've heard over the seven months we've been here, property prices are going up all over Thurston county. The contractors we've had in tell us that there are TONS of people like us, largely from the SF bay area, arriving....people with money they're willing to spend.