Fiber is less expensive than and more than 10x faster than starlink, in fairness.
Our 5g towers seem to run off the fiber lines, so it’s not really a backup (and gets overwhelmed anyway).
I’m considering getting fiber in addition to starlink, but I wish they’d just buried the lines.
I see telephone trucks repairing downed lines we’d rely on many dozens of times a year. Digging a trench would probably pay for itself in a year or two.
I know some people running independent community fiber ISPs. Digging trenches can be a nightmare depending on the neighbourhood. You can have property ownership issues, other utilities being present, permit nightmares, different ground/soil types, etc. That ignores the fact that when somebody else digs they can hit your lines and repairing that is a pain.
Digging is better, though. But it’s not necessarily as easy as one may think.
Where I work just acquired new property and are deploying a new site. It took 9 months, from date of first contact, before the ISP could come out, bore under the road, and run fiber to our building from two poles away. And that's just a short ~500 feet underground run.
I couldn't imagine the amount of permitting and logistics involved in trying to bury an entire run across town.