The sheer amount of government funding makes you wonder why there isn’t a publicly operated telecom option these days. These companies insist that funding is required to cover rural areas yet many of us still have nothing while the companies are making billions in profit.

As an example, Ontario is “investing” 4 billion to have 50mbit down and 10mbit up available across the province by 2025. I’m in a region that already met those requirements and yet my DSL barely manages 6mbit down. When checking with ISPs what my options are, it turns out the best I can actually get is fixed wireless at 25mbit down and 5mbit up.

While Starlink performance has degraded over the past 18 months or so, I have noticed it slowly recovering as more satellites are getting up to orbit. My worst case speed tests are hovering around 40mbit down and 5mbit up while some good days can occasionally hit 300mbit down and 20mbit up.

I had to work around daytime bandwidth caps for a couple years so being able to download content overnight was pretty handy.

Tube Archivist is “Your self hosted YouTube media server”. I follow several youtube channels and so this will automatically fetch videos and serve them locally which is great. - https://www.tubearchivist.com/

On a similar note LanCache is also handy at providing a local cache for Steam and Windows Updates when you have several PCs on the same network - https://lancache.net/

Pi-hole is a popular DNS based ad-blocker that can cut down on some ads and trackers - https://pi-hole.net/