I've been using Starlink as my primary internet provider for the past year. I'm just outside of Eugene, OR and prior to Starlink my only internet options were Viasat or dial-up.
I definitely notice the variability of Starlink. My download speed ranges from ~40mbps to ~200mbps, and my upload speed ranges from ~5mbps to ~50mbps. This doesn't really seem to be connected to time of day or what I would expect to be typical use patterns. My internet is never unusable for Zoom, streaming video, or other average use cases.
A lot of people complain about decreased speeds, my personal experience hasn't really shown this to be true. What I have noticed:
* Over the past year, I've seen a huge improvement in latency and packet loss. I used to have latency in excess of 130ms, and I would typically see a few dropouts lasting ~30 seconds per hour. My latency now is rarely more than 60ms, and I never have dropouts.
* Being behind an IPv4 CGNAT is annoying. I get a lot more captchas and fraud prevention techniques being applied in my browsing.
* Geolocation is way off. I wish SpaceX did a little bit more effort to dedicate IP geodata to specific cells in their network - everything defaults to their Seattle POP for me.
* The adoption of Starlink out here is astonishing. Virtually every house near me has gotten it in the past 2-3 months. It's a huge game-changer for people. It's pretty amazing what the Starlink team has built out in a relatively short amount of time.
Willamette Valley here — it's been nothing less than a game changer.
I checked the speed tests for the first week but until the brief outage yesterday I haven't thought about it. The internet just works, and we're able to stream, download, work, videoconference.
Viasat is like the Stone Age in comparison. Low data caps, very long latency, nearly twice as much money.
People don't realize that even in areas not that far from population centers connectivity can be virtually nonexistent.
Datapoint of one here, but I recently visited a friend in Willamette Valley, and their area had fiber. Is that not an option for most people in your hood?
I'm on a farm, so while there's fiber in many of the towns, if you go ten minutes drive outside of them it's not really an option. Maybe they'll get there eventually.
It's amazing how many companies assume geolocation is perfect, for consequential decisions. I wasn't allowed to book a COVID vaccine by Walgreens because they said I was booking from a different state (I wasn't).
>This allows local devices to use the Starlink lat/long that dishy uses for satellite targeting.
How does this solve the geolocation issue? The parent poster mentioned IP based geolocation, which isn't affected by the starlink terminal providing some sort of local debug api to get the current lon/lat.
> This doesn't really seem to be connected to time of day or what I would expect to be typical use patterns.
I'd expect somewhat typical time of day use patterns on Starlink as a whole [1], but you're probably seeing variable congestion/capacity because the satellites are in motion and you'll have varience in which satellites are in view and how many other users are using the same satellite as you, as well as how many users are connected through the same ground station as you. I'd bet there are some really interesting network graphs.
[1] although I wouldn't be willing to guess if it looks like office, residential
> This doesn't really seem to be connected to time of day or what I would expect to be typical use patterns.
This has been my experience too which I've assumed they are capping speeds. Often I work late so am up in the am's so would have little competition for bandwidth and if I do a speed test it's lower (~60Mb down) than when I first got it and would regularly be 100Mb+ sometimes over 200.
Also recently we've been getting more network dropouts.
All that said, it's been a game changer for me as I was living with 3.5Mb down before starlink and a significant overall improvement.
Is it worth it in your opinion? I had it preordered for almost a year but cancelled it when they raised their prices and never took delivery. I've read the 2nd generation dish is faster with a bit more stability, but I'm not entire sure.
Not OP, but my parents use it in northern california because they live in a spot that the standard ISPs have decided isn't worth running connectivity to - gigabit cable is available if they lived 3 miles closer to town. No utilities other than electricity.
They had HughesNet before, barely ever got more than 1 Mbps. Latency was ~1000ms on average. They paid for the 100 Mbps service for awhile but HughesNet oversubscribes their satellites to a disgusting degree and they rarely saw more than that 1 Mbps.
Even when the bandwidth was ~10 Mb, the latency levels caused basically all of the streaming services to not function.
When they first got it, it was ~100 Mbps on average. Now it's around 50 Mbps. Latency is still holding around 40ms. Still at least an order of magnitude better on all fronts compared to their competition. I was able to play some competitive shooters with decent success ... although CoD had a tendency to occasionally boot me when satellite switches happened. Seems to trip the anticheat, but I can't really blame Starlink for that.
I have two connections - one "standard rural WISP" sort of thing, 25/3 on paper, what it delivers varies wildly. And then Starlink. My network is set up so I can easily switch systems between the two.
Starlink is far worse about "Random sites decide that I'm evil." Even things like Lowes have, at times, utterly refused to work, throwing nonsensical server error messages of the "Go away and quit scraping our content!" variety that go away when I use the same system, on the same page, just literally routed out the other ISP.
The benefits of CGNAT are that you're hiding in a lot of other traffic, but the downsides are exactly the same. And Starlink is far worse than cell data in terms of it.
Starlink is seeing heavy use in Ukraine with most stocks in the neighboring countries getting bought up. The reason for that is russian strikes on our infrastructure causing electricity blackouts to the extent of regular internet or 4G being down/highly degraded. As a result, many companies, individuals, offices, etc. are procuring their own sources of energy (diesel/gasoline generators, portable power stations, etc.) and reserve internet connections via Starlink or powerful 4g modems that can reach further cell towers with access to good connection. That with already prevalent use of Starlinks on frontlines (they are very hard to jam and far surpass other satellite offerings).
We do not have access to data but it's not unreasonable to assume that such a spike in use must have eaten into overall network capacity.
Even with the link it makes no sense to route Ukrainian traffic all the way back to the US. All they'll do is route to the nearest downlink. Otherwise the intra-sat connections will become a bottleneck, not to mention the added latency.
If the ground station is near the server, then latency would actually be lower with Starlink. One use case of Starlink is HFT on the NYSE from London, a use case that terrestrial networks are too latent for. This is because the speed of light in a vacuum is 50% faster than the speed of light through fiber, and the distance traveled is just as often shorter as it is longer - depending on satellite position.
That's no different that a terrestrial network, in fact it's likely quicker as for better or for worse they're likely not using HTTP between the birds but rather a more efficient protocol.
Additionally Satellite and Microwave links aren't new technology and are likely used by both sides of military for communication, so there's probably some existing value in making sure you're hitting the right thing.
It's not powerful enough of a source, different frequency bands and, as with GPS too when it comes to jamming, the signal goes mostly upwards so the missile won't be irradiated by it to respond.
For people who used to be on old satellite systems, Starlink is still the best value by far. The qualitative difference between 105Mbps and 53Mbps is much less than 2x: there's not much you can't do with one that you could with the other.
Not being an apologist, just trying to keep perspective. People who really need Starlink are still getting a great value compared to how it was a couple years ago.
It's probably also more beneficial from a policy standpoint to get twice as many people signed up at 50Mbps. As you note, the jump from 50Mbps to 100Mbps isn't that big, but the jump from 3Mbps DSL to 50Mbps Starlink means that you can suddenly use a lot of the internet that never really worked well before.
It could definitely be annoying to customers who had signed up and are now getting significantly less speed at the same price, but Starlink has a bit of a captive audience since they're mostly serving people without other options.
There's also altitude. Starlink is LEO at 550km, while all the legacy is GEO at 36000 km, ignoring Iridium of course. This is a huge latency difference, allowing normal video calls.
I moved from one room in the house to another room when working remotely, and I experienced a similar drop in my speed due to being farther away from the Wi-Fi access point. And yes, there's not much you can't do with one that you could with the other.
I made this choice voluntarily but tech geeks should visit the homes of non-tech people and see that (a) their speed is limited more by their connection to the Wi-Fi access point than by the ISP, and (b) they aren't bothered by it.
I pay $110 per month for internet at my farm land that I visit two to three days every 60 days. If they can pretend I deserve to pay as much as people who use it as their primary internet service, I should be able to pay a lower amount if they halve the bandwidth on me.
Well, the methodology is flawed, or at least it doesn't actually reflect what it says on the tin.
It's "consumer-initiated", i.e. what they are really measuring is which contracts people are using, not which speeds are available.
Example: I could book a 500/100 line at my house (1000 symmetrical available if I switched providers), but I stick with the cheapest plan, which is 50/12 simply because it's good enough for my personal use. Same for most of my neighbours. Most don't have more than 100/20, though higher speeds are readily available.
With StarLink there's only type of contract: you get what you get and that's that. In Europe for example, there's usually more than one option per ISP and you pay more for higher bandwidth. So if you're fine with the smallest plan (usually around 50mbps), why pay more? So in essence they actually answer a different question.
People were tossing traditional internet satellites from roofs, chopping off the old dried up copper from the side of the house and pushing the wisp tower down.
Starlink made remote living and work truly possible. No more turning off video, pixilating and worrying about data plans. And low enough latency to make up with skill in games.
But just like everything it got too popular, cellular carriers are trying to service that market though and t-mobile might be a last mile internet provider with decent speeds and unlimited data. But, fiber is also getting buried all over rural areas to help with this as well.
Between fiber/cellular and Starlink people are going to get interesting data plans for sure though. Wisp are regional and the market will shrink because the service is just inadequate and poorly maintained. The smart wisp that got federal high speed internet subsidies will survive building out fiber even in some pretty rural areas.
As someone desperately looking for connectivity options in a more rural area (though not that rural, I'm only like 20 minutes from one of the largest cities in the state) I won't hold my breath. My whole neighborhood is on the waitlist for Starlink still.
I've called every provider that could possibly service our area and nobody has any interest. T-Mobile is supposedly offering 5G home internet for people in this kind of situation but they are not available in this neighborhood either.
No idea what to do other than wait for Starlink availability. There is a WISP, but it is truly terrible and very expensive.
Starlink is game-changing for even somewhat rural. My brother's place is just outside of a small, but by the scale of Maine significant city, and Starlink turns it from a previously barely 1 Mbps download to somewhere he can actually work from.
I live 45 miles outside of a major Northeast city, have just one broadband option which is mostly OK but would still seriously consider Starlink as a backup. I barely get cellphone reception at my house without WiFi assist because I'm in the shadow of a hill.
> No idea what to do other than wait for Starlink availability.
Read the contract carefully to make sure it's allowed, start a coop & buy the commercial variant for a group of farms, with point-to-point wifi for local distribution? That should get you to jump the line.
(Though your problem may also be lack of a ground station close enough to you, but that's more rare.)
I'm always curious about details on situations like this. Really nerdy stuff like: what's the average housing lot size; what's the average driveway length; what kind of "largest city in the state" (since 20 minutes won't get you from LA to another part of LA and in most places I've seen 20 minutes won't get you far from a city at all which makes it sound like you're in a state where a top-5 city has 100,000 people and becomes rural fast). One of the problems a lot of the US faces is that the cost of infrastructure is shared by so few people: rural roads that have few homes on them, electric lines that have to travel farther to reach customers, sewer systems that require more feet per customer, etc. In a lot of rural places in Europe, people often live clustered in a town center, but rural America tends to spread out a lot more with a lot of distance to cover to connect people. It doesn't really matter how far you are from a city as much as how easy it is to connect lots of households in your area.
As you note, one of the problems that Starlink is facing is that everyone who wants Starlink generally lives in the same areas. Are there a few hundred households that want Starlink within a 7 mile radius of you (150 square miles)? Then there's likely to be capacity constraints, at least until Starlink can launch a lot more satellites.
All three wireless carriers are offering home internet in situations like yours, but with slightly varying offers. T-Mobile has an unlimited offering in areas where it has excess network capacity. T-Mobile also has a "Lite" offering that is available everywhere T-Mobile has coverage, but it has a data cap and costs $150 for the 300GB plan (https://www.t-mobile.com/support/home-internet/t-mobile-home...). AT&T has a home internet offering for $60 with a 350GB cap (https://www.att.com/internet/fixed-wireless/); overages are $10 per 50GB up to a maximum of $200/mo. I don't know if that's $200 total or $200 in overages + $60. At $200, it's certainly expensive, but Starlink isn't cheap. The average home internet user uses around 300GB of data (data from both T-Mobile and Comcast), but that's probably not people on Hacker News. Still, 1TB would be $170 which isn't that much more if you're desperate and doesn't have as high a startup cost (Starlink's being around $700 while AT&T's is up to $150). Verizon also offers home internet service at cheap costs (either LTE https://www.verizon.com/home/lte-home-internet/ or 5G https://www.verizon.com/5g/home depending on where you are), but availability is limited like T-Mobile's unlimited service.
Have you looked into Starlink's RV service? It's more expensive at $135/mo and you're deprioritized behind standard Starlink customers, but that might be a good option. I hate saying this, but once you're in for $110/mo, what's another $25? Well, $300 per year. But if you're desperate, it might be what you need.
Things will likely get better over the coming years. T-Mobile will be covering half of rural households over the next few months with mid-band 5G and they're also embarking on a huge rural coverage expansion with 10,000 new towers coming to improve coverage. Verizon and AT&T are behind on mid-band coverage, but it's coming. Starlink will be launching more satellites which will give them more capacity.
If you don't mind paying an extra $25/mo, Starlink RV might be the best solution. However, people have reported being annoyed that they haven't been able to switch to regular Starlink (and save $25/mo) when capacity becomes available. Definitely check Verizon and AT&T's offering and see if there's something right for you there (and available). It feels like a long-shot, but I'd rather mention them than not even if there's just a 1% chance it'll help. Over the next few years, we're likely to see AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile gain a lot of capacity in rural areas as they bring online a lot of spectrum and Starlink will launch more satellites. Right now, since you say you're "desperately looking", maybe grab Starlink RV or even AT&T's service.
Keep in mind that it maybe got too popular for an usable service, but it's far from being popular enough to be financially sustainable product. You're still at this point having a service paid by investors money, like cheap Uber rides in 2015.
> You're still at this point having a service paid by investors money, like cheap Uber rides in 2015.
Ouch! It's hard to tell if this is assertion based on some sort of familiarity with SpaceX's finances or just another of a seemingly endless stream of anti-Musk jabs.
Surely you can't put SpaceX and Uber into the same category when it comes to the state of their finances and where that money comes from. Surely a cursory glance at the slew of public, private and government contracts SpaceX already has, plus the ones they have lined up, not to mention the involvement in programs like Artemus, would demonstrate to most people that they are in league far and beyond the likes of Uber with their dubious Vision Fund and questionable private backers.
Or are you saying in this case that SpaceX, with all of its money and potential is basically to Starlink, what Softbank is to Uber?
If it's the former, I'd love to get a better understand of what you mean?
Not an answer to your question, but a vent-rant:
95% of anti-Musk "jabs" are reality and facts, and way over-shouted by Musk's fanatics, butt-kissers, and followers of his cult of personality. I have personally tried to set record straight with multiple instances of people in my private life (with legal documents, news clippings, timelines...) – nothing helps, they always find an excuse for him, it's like a bloody religion. And I'm sick of uncritical and butt-kissing media coverage, his fan club, and his egomaniacal loud existence.
It has always struck me that the people expressing the same sentiment that you just did put far more energy into it than the "fanatics, butt-kissers, and followers of his cult of personality"; to the point that you'd bother the "people in my private life (with legal documents, news clippings, timelines...)". It reminds me of the tech journalists who declared bitcoin dead in 2013, and how they'd get more venomous in their attacks year after year, presumably due to some kind deranged ego shielding.
The hobbyist community does estimates based on reported launch pricing and satellite manufacturing costs, but I don't think there's been any company books opened to reporters.
I believe webpass is based on line of sight wireless. And they connect a whole buildings with one shared radio package.
Remote areas often don't have lots of tall buildings with many inhabitants and line of sight above the treeline. I know my semi-rural area is full of trees and hills and line of sight wireless would really only have potential for people with waterfront, and realistically, only for people with waterfront and a view towards the nearby city.
Webpass is really only offered in largeish residential buildings as far as I'm aware (I have webpass service, though my condo building only has 90 units so it's not particularly large, and I suspect most people are with Xfinity anyway...).
I imagine the fixed cost for the microwave unit doesn't make sense otherwise.
If you're talking about microwave point to point to a cell tower that then provides 5g or LTE... Well that's how most cell towers work, I think...
Cook County MN is a little over 3000 square miles, half of which is water, and has a population a little over 5000 people. I own a patch of forest there. It has gigabit fiber service.
The local power company is a co-op because none of the usual power companies wanted to serve the area. About twenty years ago the co-op decided that this whole "internet" thing is probably not a fad, and they started pulling fiber everywhere through their existing utility corridors whenever they had to touch something. It was a good idea. It is _intensely_ rural, yet high speed internet access is now ubiquitous.
I guess it depends on your definition of remote. In my area theres fiber being run all over the place, and it's not like middle of Montana rural, but there was 0 internet providers here before and now there's awesome fiber.
Sunk cost at the same time as electric & water lines were trenched, while the road was built, paid for by the initial developers of the areas (and added to the cost of homes).
For this house, that happened somewhere in the early 90s. Digging it all open again is what would cost a lot.
Yes, if there's new development somewhere, they could probably get fiber in pretty cheap, if the developers though that was worth it. That doesn't help anyone else much.
Webpass and similar services work well with line of sight. Even Starlink wants line of sight, but it's generally easier to get that up than across. What happens when a neighbor a mile away has a 3-story home or there's a hill?
With wireless spectrum, lower frequencies effectively travel farther because they don't get disrupted by objects as much. So 600-900MHz frequencies provide lots of coverage that's the backbone of our mobile phone networks, 1700-2100MHz were used to add more capacity in cities and suburbs, and now we're seeing 2.5-4GHz being used to provide new high-speed 5G services (5G+, 5G UC, or 5G UW depending on your carrier). On top of that, there's millimeter wave spectrum. There's a lot of it, but it's also 28-40GHz and going to be blocked by so much. Even if you're near a millimeter wave cell site, your walls might prevent it from working indoors. Lots of things become issues at millimeter wave so it's hard to do it without unobstructed line of sight (including trees and such) or really short distances.
Mobile phone carriers are already beaming internet far distances. They just have limited capacity in a lot of areas and people hate having their home internet connection limited. What we're seeing with 2.5-4GHz spectrum is pretty good capacity with some decent coverage, but we're still just talking a mile or two in a lot of situations. Of course, there are people hacking their T-Mobile Home Internet devices with high-gain directional antennas and really pushing that farther when they have near line of sight. I think we're likely to see this mid-band spectrum become a big factor in rural internet because it has a decent mix of distance and capacity. Millimeter wave spectrum is just hard to do without line of sight and so it often becomes limited to large buildings that an ISP can put a professionally installed antenna on the top of.
It's also that these things take time. If you're one of the big three wireless carriers, you're looking to upgrade 70,000-100,000 cell sites around the country and that doesn't happen overnight. It takes 3-6 years. To really get home internet good in many places, they might need more cell sites to supplement those. Realistically, I think it's a lot more likely that the big three wireless companies will hook up rural areas than Webpass. This is their business. Webpass (and others like Starry and NetBlazr) are somewhat limited because they don't have the spectrum to cover larger areas or even within cities where they don't have a tall building to give them line of sight. They also don't have the money or workforce to deploy as quickly as the wireless carriers (yes Google has money, but they're not going to spend $15B a year when they don't have the spectrum to create a viable rural strategy; the big three are spending that kind of money because they have the spectrum and network and potential to expand into home internet).
Wireless has a lot of promise, but the lower frequency you go the less spectrum there is available and the higher frequency you go the less distance you're going to get and the more you need line of sight. The big three wireless carriers have the lower frequency spectrum and network to start providing more and more home internet in the future. We're just at the first point where the big wireless carriers are starting to see excess network capacity (beyond what their mobile users will eat up) which is why it didn't happen much before.
Most people really don't care about that. They want broadband where they didn't have a reasonable option for broadband before at pretty much any price.
From people in the small Arican villages to these people traveling to the big cities or even abroad, there is always an issue of being able to access the internet. (to use whatsapp for instance)
Broadband won't help here.
Starlink having global coverage would be much different. (if it manages to do so without being impeded at the regulatory level)
In even slightly rural Australia and Canada Starlink has been life changing. It’s easily the fastest internet available once you are a tiny bit out of a town.
In actually remote Australia it was crazy to see locals go to the pub to use it, having never had access to anything better than dial-up.
In rural and remote places, it’s changing the world, exactly as it was designed to do. If you live in a dense urban environment, Starlink was never really designed for you.
That is exactly what I am doing. The catch is that 4G data is horribly expensive in my area, download two youtube videos and you've blown a months Starlink fees.
In many-to-most cases 4G and especially 5G will simply outperform Starlink. If you have the 4G it may not even be necessary to bother with the Starlink. Unless you want redundancy of a 2nd connection or you can only get a really terrible data plan running both is not likely to make much sense. Starlink also has very onerous North-South field of view requirements that are actually often hard to meet even on completely remote sites (speaking as a Starlink customer with a handful of trees in the yard). Cellular is nowhere near as fussy about placement.
Starlink makes most sense when you have no 4G or 5G reception at all, generally speaking.
Not sure I agree about the 4G/5G comment. I got an unlimited 4g/5g hotspot through Calyx Institute that uses the TMobile network ( https://calyxinstitute.org/membership/internet ). I now also have Starlink. The Starlink service is faster and lower latency. I have noticed Starlink getting slower over the past couple months but it is still quite fast. In my experience the downside to Starlink is that several times a week it drops out completely for 10-20 seconds. I thought I was going to have issues with the trees near the location of my antenna but the app shows almost 0 obstruction in the FOV Starlink cares about. It was surprising to me how far north the antenna wants to point. I was picturing it pointing south like a dish would for a geo satellite but Starlink aren't geo.
I've also been a customer of two different local wireless point-to-point ISP. One worked great when it wasn't foggy and when the trees didn't have leaves - so only about 1/4 of the year. The other had 800ms pings and also went down frequently. Starlink has been game changing.
For most people unmetered 30-50 Mbps down is all they really need. Handle at least a couple streaming services or a video call. Stuff beyond that is basically luxury territory.
Yes and no. 30Mbps on a landline with zero packet loss and fixed latency is noticeably different than Starlink/5G/Wireless connections that are only mostly reliable.
It’s like how playing a game at rock solid 30 FPS is actually fine, but games with average frame rate of 30FPS that have significant random stuttering can be unplayable.
This is the opposite of my personal experience. For me, the service has been more reliably performing at higher speeds and since launching more satellites there are fewer drops in connectivity.
Good for you, but not relevant for the topic in the article. The FCC should make decisions based on data, like the data collected by Ookla (if the FCC can't collect its own), not based on anecdotes.
Of course it's relevant. The FCC doesn't make its decisions based on HN comments, so I'm not sure why the aggro response here. I'm stating my personal experience with the network, over the past year. I'm on the network now at peak time in Florida and clocking 80 Mbps.
The FCC is handing out billions of dollars to improve RURAL broadband so for those purposes it doesn't make sense to measure average speeds that include congested URBAN cells.
Nobody else thinks that the FCC decided to exclusively pull data from congested cities (I guess in order to intentionally fool theselves?), so they have no reason to look up the sampling method. You however do, so you should look it up, go through it, then give your evaluation of it.
When you make up an accusation from whole cloth, people are going to downvote it. They'll probably downvote even harder after you ask for other people to give you proof to refute the accusation that you made up from whole cloth. If you find the sampling method, and it turns out your suspicions were true, and then you write a comment explaining that, they'll give you hundreds of upvotes to offset these two or three well-deserved downvotes.
You misunderstand. I'm saying if they didn't look at only the rural cells then there's not much point in using that to determine whether to award funding for providing rural broadband...
Just because there's a lot of people in highly populated cells that drag down the speed for people in those cells has nothing to do with the speeds of the lowly populated cells.
tldr; it makes no sense to average all cells together, as the goal is to improve the areas where existing infrastructure have failed in specific regions.
(and in those areas, where hughesnet, or viasat, or old DSL were the few options, Starlink does it's best)
Cities vs rural has no impact on Starlink speeds. You fall into a "cell" which is a hexagonal region roughly the width of California. Each cell is served by a satellite that has a 20 Gbps downlink to a ground station. Everyone within that cell shares that 20 Gbps, and everyone using the ground station (4-8 cells) shares the backhaul capacity of that site.
(This is oversimplified but puts the capacity scoping in context)
How would city vs rural not have an impact on that??? If your cell happens to have a major urban area in it, you would have to share the satellite downlink with many many more people than if you were living in a cell that covers mostly ocean and a few tiny islands. (Or mostly deserts and some tiny hamlets, of course)
> If your cell happens to have a major urban area in it, you would have to share the satellite downlink with many many more people
In theory most or all of the people in a major metro area would be opting for faster, cheaper ISPs. Starlink is for people way out in the boonies that don’t have any other good options.
Providing broadband to rural america, what this whole FCC broadband push has been about, concerns those cells where there aren't many people over a large spread of land, where towers and laying down lines doesn't make sense.
So if you take a cell that has LA in it, it will be much more congested than if you took a cell in Wyoming, or Nebraska.
Are you in an area of relatively low population density?
I would guess that places like rural California and Texas have seen an increase of user density which would cause bandwidth decreases. If you're in a place with relatively slow user growth, you could be getting advantage of increased total bandwidth of the satellite constellation.
> Starlink's median US upload speed dropped from 12Mbps to 7.2Mbps from Q4 2021 to Q3 2022
I wasn't able to find an answer online. Is this the expected "ok" upload speed? 7-12Mbps seem low for typical WFH usage like video conferencing and sharing your screen.
Well, considering I've been using Starlink since Jan. 2021, the upload speeds have been more than adequate for typical WFH video/audio calls.
The download speeds dramatically falling over the last year have been a major annoyance when it comes to updating games via Steam or stuff like Microsoft Flight Sim, but streaming video has been perfectly fine the whole time.
Seeing the speeds drop is a bit of a disappointment, but given the reliability of the connection versus our previous ISP, it's 100% worth it for now.
Thanks! I've been wondering if exiling myself deep in Canada and using Starlink to be fully remote was viable. Do you notice any impact from the increase latency (compared to coax cable or fiber) in meetings/voice chat/video games or would it pass the blind test?
Additional question, do you get any connection degradation in bad weather events (if you have them)? Things like snow and storms.
I don't notice any increase in latency in meetings or voice chat. I don't play any real online multiplayer games, but I did do some summoning in Elden Ring the other night and I didn't notice any lag or weirdness with the other players.
We've noticed some slower speeds and satellite obstruction during heavy snow and super heavy intense thunderstorms, but otherwise it's been fine in most of the weather events we experience out on the eastern plains of Colorado.
General rule of thumb for 1080p video streaming = 8 Mbps
720p is half the size, so it should be half that rate = 4 Mbps.
I have no doubt that modern image compression algorithms can bring that down a bit further without too much impact on quality.
So with a median of 7.2 Mbps, that's probably enough for 2 users to have an acceptable video conferencing experience. But if that's the median, then half of their customers have a lower upload speed than that and may only be able to get away with a single user streaming at a time.
And that’s at full motion. Your bobbing head and fixed background takes a lot less.
Same with most screenshares.
I had a 15/1 connection for a while and found no issues with Zoom calls. Maybe an issue if you’re a professional cammer though.
I mostly work on CRUD virtualized apps (effectively screenshares) all workday long and will use well under 1gb in a day.
My biggest beef with Zoom and the like is being unable to restrict resolution/camera quality of myself and others (other than setting the others into small sizes).
I’m in Canada where mobile data is expensive, and therefore very fast. The provider is happy for you to chew your handful of gb per month at full speed and then you top-up with more or get hit with overages.
Beyond some minimal throughput, low latency is a bigger factor in video conferencing and screen sharing and Starlink has low latencies from my understanding.
My favourite was when Rogers couldn’t complete calls during the day at the beginning of the pandemic. They were saturated and pushed even more people onto web-conference software.
Is home internet pretty much "fast enough" for anyone else right now?
I used satellite internet for almost a full year. I was about 20 minutes drive from 3G.
Honestly, it was absolutely fine. Video conferences, online real time games, streaming videos...
Right now I'm on a copper line. Granted, it's only us villagers and country folk using it since the local big town moved to fibre. But again, the speed is fine.
I work at a rural farm and live in a big city. The farm had satellite which was okay, but they had a hard monthly data cap of 200GB, at which point they would severely throttle speeds. There was no option to pay for a higher cap. During summer time the owners (many) kids would visit and with all their video streaming we would hit the data caps about two and a half weeks in to the month. Then when the owner needed to do a video call for work, due to the throttling, he had to text everyone and ask them to stop using the network for an hour. It was a pretty fragile system. Now we have starlink and it’s a big improvement! Though the short drop outs (under 2 seconds) sometimes cause issues with video calls.
At my place in the city I get symmetric gigabit fiber for $39 a month. This is the first time I’ve ever had fiber. It’s pretty wonderful to upload a 10GB 4K video to YouTube in a few minutes, download a full movie while I make some popcorn, and pull down an OS image in seconds. I don’t “need” gigabit but I absolutely am happy to have it!
Not really, no. There are still huge swaths of the US with complete garbage and no other options (e.g. with 3mbps/<1mbps being the most an ISP will ever offer). If you have more than one or two people at home (and in rural settings, bigger families are more normal), it’s practically unusable.
Of course most people have ok internet for most use cases. But there are even places in cities where the only option isn’t great. And upload speed is often still abysmal. Comcast, which had a monopoly at my previous rental within Portland, OR city limits, offered very fast download. But upload was only 6mbps with no increase available. For content creation, like uploading videos or photos, that’s a pain in the ass.
The real problem is higher speeds allow for a wider variety of use cases, which starts locking out people from bandwidth-intensive activities. Game streaming, for example, or content creation. So in a rural area, that means some careers are harder to get into just because the internet isn’t very good.
"Fast enough" is a contentious point for many tech people.
There are very few consumer use cases that demand super fast broadband. I think basically you can say that you need about 15Mbps per person with 10Mbps overhead/margin. But 50Mbps is basically "fast enough" for the average household (browsing and streaming), it just means that game downloads or OS updates will be slower than you might like.
My experience is that 200Mbps is "more than enough for most" and above 500Mbps will barely be used in most normal applications, it just makes the internet /snappier/. Most websites and downloads don't actually support download at 1Gbps, well there's always all those ISO downloads...
If you have a house full of nerds then super speed broadband has value, but most people aren't as nerdy as that. That being said, Starlink is showing how over hyped it really was. Sure, they still need to launch more satellites, but it's a continuous obligation on SpaceX to keep replacing the infrastructure. I respect the need for those in rural areas, but suburban/urban folks (who will be affected by congestion the most) need good/affordable fibre. Even many of the rural folks (the less extremely isolated ones) could be supported by good mobile broadband infrastructure.
Starlink isn't for people who have decent copper broadband somewhere in the 10s of Mbps down that's reasonably reliable. It's for the people who can't get that and there are a lot of them.
Same. They actually just upgraded service near me, for 30$ more I can quadruple my internet speeds. I talked to my roommates and even with multiple heavy internet users we really see no need to at all.
Not even close. As an example, waiting for my consoles to update games and losing half my hour of free gaming time is terrible - and I have 10G wired around my house to a 1G Comcast connection.
This article relies on Ookla speedtest results. I don't think those are representative for satellite internet, when speeds vary throughout the day based on satellite positions relative to the user.
People usually go to test their speed when they feel their connection is slow, so it's not a uniform random sample.
> I don't think those are representative for satellite internet, when speeds vary throughout the day based on satellite positions relative to the user.
Huh? It's not Hughes, Starlink is not geostationary.
Starlink satellites are in low orbit, orbiting the whole globe in about two hours. The dish switches satellites every few minutes.
They move quickly enough that your variation would be on the time scale of minutes, not over a day.
(Earlier in the beta, I had a 20 ms hiccup every few minutes, during the hand-off to next satellite. I'm guessing the IP routing wasn't in sync with the satellite switch.)
Correct, and it's when users feel those hiccups that they're going to speedtest.net - so the results are not representative.
Terrestrial broadband doesn't have hiccups as frequently, so the speedtest.net results would have a better signal to noise ratio for terrestrial ISP's vs for Starlink.
I finally was able to get fibre in my area, so I dropped Starlink. Data caps are incoming, and the cells near me are over-subscribed. Speeds have been getting worse over time.
Since this is network and internet related, just want to chime in with some experience using non-standard internet connection methods. It may help in understanding what's happening here.
Starlink as I understand it, while using 'satellites' is more like 'terrestrial tower' based internet, but with low-orbit stations in use instead of towers erected on a high hill. I make this distinction, because of other 'satellite' internet companies having been used to compare it in the past, in my opinion, erroneously.
Satellite internet like Xplornet for example, do something else where you have just a few satellites only, providing line of sight connection for EVERYONE on the facing side of the planet for that satellite.
Starlink is more like terrestrial tower because you have essentially a choice of which satellites you want to use to connect through, since there are many that could be connected to at any time. This is like terrestrial tower, because your home might be closest to a tower in a town near you, but the other tower just off the side a bit further away gets less usage and so you have less issues connection due to congestion or 'things' getting in the way. Things could be tree canopies, house roofs, etc.
So what I figure is happening here after reading the article, is that their current configuration is reaching levels of congestion that can't keep up with the demand they expected, and so they are going to start launching more satellites to keep up with the demand. They are also looking to increase the broadcasting signals strength to help ensure a higher quality connection to those who do connect to their system.
That's basically terrestrial tower internet itself in a nutshell from my experience using it in the past. Even their ping times are similar.
Now for those who get their knickers in a knot because 'thing orbiting planet in space is always a satellite'. Yes, I know. It's technically satellite internet in that right. But my point is that this isn't how we should be thinking of it.
We should instead be calling it Aerial internet, since it helps differentiate from the other satellite internet (which in my usage experience is crap and should only be used in the worst case scenarios) and terrestrial tower which is also not the greatest, but is better than stuff like Xplornet.
I've never met anyone who likes using services from folk like Xplornet, except obviously ignorant people who never have had anything better. The moment I show them the difference between their connection and mine back at the farm, or here in urban life; they immediately try to make up excuses for it instead of accepting it isn't that good.
But that's besides the point. My point is that Starlink is doing pretty good if they are only seeing that much of a drop in speeds and latency. It's still a usable connection by rural standards, which was its intent mostly to begin with. It wasn't meant to be used by urbanites who have access to much better; as I understand was what was intended by Elon in the first place.
For comparisons sake: Most rural internet only ever gets UPTO 50mbps at best, in the best locations. You can expect to get much worse in rural areas with terrestrial tower based internet. And while many including Xplornet may falsely advertise they can achieve higher speeds; latency kills their performance. It doesn't matter if you can get 300mbps, if your latency is a full second or higher of ping time. not milliseconds. Seconds. Even minutes sometimes. Depends on how bad the situation is for you.
So, with that all in mind, despite all the Elon hate going on right now; I think Starlink is doing pretty good still.
I don't have it, yet; since I don't need it. But if they keep on this path they are on right now, when I move back to the rural areas I am probably going to get Starlink as a backhaul connection, and a terrestrial tower setup as my main connection. Or perhaps vice versa. Depends on which one has the better and more stable connection in that area.
But I would never use traditional satellite internet like Xplornet. If I ever did, it would be because I have enough money that I can throw it away and not care; all just to make sure there is a redundant connection to ensure that I have a backup for my backup. Even then... I'd rather just get a second company on terrestrial to hook me up instead.
Well, atm., yes. From the very beginning I thought that's it's a very risky idea to focus on end users, though. Ships, airplanes, mining operations, emergency services, etc. - that's where the real benefit and money is.
Ships have rates of up to $60k/mo for low bandwidth satellite internet. StarLink maritime is only $5k/mo and every maritime plan basically equates ~50 residential users in terms of turnover. Special deals with airlines, cruise ships and so forth could easily bring in as much money as tens of thousands of end-users - including much less hassle with regulators and billing.
The problem is that satellite internet (no matter if LEO or GEO) scales very poorly and creates an economic death spiral (hence the need for Starship) - more users means less available bandwidth, thus requires more satellites. More satellites require more rocket launches, which costs money and requires more users to pay for it, etc.
It remains to be seen whether the current path StarLink takes is sustainable from a business perspective. A 30k satellite constellation is certainly economically unsound using current rockets (e.g. Falcon 9), given that it took 3 years to get ~3300 into orbit and the average lifetime per Gen1 satellite is planned to be around 5 years.
This means 3300 Gen1 sats have to be replaced within the next 5 years while another 7500 or so have to be launched on top of that. With Gen2 sats being heavier, F9 can only take maybe 25 (this is a guess) instead of 50-60 sats per launch. That'd amount to about 87 F-9 launches per year just for StarLink and I don't think that's economically feasible (hence Starship). But we'll see.
I think you need to add US regulatory and political considerations when considering the liability of targeting consumers versus business. In the US, rural users are over-represented in congress and are by far the biggest beneficiaries of Starlink (vs other available options). In my area, I can only WFH because of Starlink, so you better be sure that I contact my swing state Representatives and Senators anytime I hear about something that might negatively impact Starlink service.
Although it's reasonable to ask whether Starlink is charging enough. Of course, I'd be the first to admit that it comes from a privileged position to state that I'd pay a lot to be able to live with decent Internet access somewhere that I wouldn't otherwise be able to.
Personally, I'd be willing to pay more for Starlink, but that willingness is capped by the price of unlimited 4G plans in my area.
From a business perspective, I suspect that the number of potential consumers living (at the moment) in areas with wireless ISPs and no wired ISPs is quite a bit larger than than areas with no wireless ISP. However, with time, I suspect that WFH and Starlink will encourage some people to move farther out from current infrastructure and they will be almost entirely dependent on Starlink, since HughesNet and other geostationary satellite internet providers aren't really comparable in bandwidth or latency.
I've been using Starlink as my primary internet provider for the past year. I'm just outside of Eugene, OR and prior to Starlink my only internet options were Viasat or dial-up.
I definitely notice the variability of Starlink. My download speed ranges from ~40mbps to ~200mbps, and my upload speed ranges from ~5mbps to ~50mbps. This doesn't really seem to be connected to time of day or what I would expect to be typical use patterns. My internet is never unusable for Zoom, streaming video, or other average use cases.
A lot of people complain about decreased speeds, my personal experience hasn't really shown this to be true. What I have noticed:
* Over the past year, I've seen a huge improvement in latency and packet loss. I used to have latency in excess of 130ms, and I would typically see a few dropouts lasting ~30 seconds per hour. My latency now is rarely more than 60ms, and I never have dropouts.
* Being behind an IPv4 CGNAT is annoying. I get a lot more captchas and fraud prevention techniques being applied in my browsing.
* Geolocation is way off. I wish SpaceX did a little bit more effort to dedicate IP geodata to specific cells in their network - everything defaults to their Seattle POP for me.
* The adoption of Starlink out here is astonishing. Virtually every house near me has gotten it in the past 2-3 months. It's a huge game-changer for people. It's pretty amazing what the Starlink team has built out in a relatively short amount of time.
Willamette Valley here — it's been nothing less than a game changer.
I checked the speed tests for the first week but until the brief outage yesterday I haven't thought about it. The internet just works, and we're able to stream, download, work, videoconference.
Viasat is like the Stone Age in comparison. Low data caps, very long latency, nearly twice as much money.
People don't realize that even in areas not that far from population centers connectivity can be virtually nonexistent.
Datapoint of one here, but I recently visited a friend in Willamette Valley, and their area had fiber. Is that not an option for most people in your hood?
I'm on a farm, so while there's fiber in many of the towns, if you go ten minutes drive outside of them it's not really an option. Maybe they'll get there eventually.
Geolocation is way off
Some might consider this bug a feature :-)
It's amazing how many companies assume geolocation is perfect, for consequential decisions. I wasn't allowed to book a COVID vaccine by Walgreens because they said I was booking from a different state (I wasn't).
> I wasn't allowed to book a COVID vaccine
Some might consider this bug a feature.
(not me, but some :D )
They added a feature to enable better geolocation (if you want).
In the Starlink app: Settings > Advanced > Debug Data > Starlink Location > Allow access on local network.
This allows local devices to use the Starlink lat/long that dishy uses for satellite targeting.
>This allows local devices to use the Starlink lat/long that dishy uses for satellite targeting.
How does this solve the geolocation issue? The parent poster mentioned IP based geolocation, which isn't affected by the starlink terminal providing some sort of local debug api to get the current lon/lat.
I turned it on, and now geolocation works. That's how it's related.
So when you go to https://ipinfo.io/ it reports your lat/lon to be correct under the "loc" entry?
> This doesn't really seem to be connected to time of day or what I would expect to be typical use patterns.
I'd expect somewhat typical time of day use patterns on Starlink as a whole [1], but you're probably seeing variable congestion/capacity because the satellites are in motion and you'll have varience in which satellites are in view and how many other users are using the same satellite as you, as well as how many users are connected through the same ground station as you. I'd bet there are some really interesting network graphs.
[1] although I wouldn't be willing to guess if it looks like office, residential
> This doesn't really seem to be connected to time of day or what I would expect to be typical use patterns.
This has been my experience too which I've assumed they are capping speeds. Often I work late so am up in the am's so would have little competition for bandwidth and if I do a speed test it's lower (~60Mb down) than when I first got it and would regularly be 100Mb+ sometimes over 200.
Also recently we've been getting more network dropouts.
All that said, it's been a game changer for me as I was living with 3.5Mb down before starlink and a significant overall improvement.
If you keep terminating in Seattle, maybe it's worth trying a VPN provider with ingress in Seattle to keep latency low? Just a thought.
Is it worth it in your opinion? I had it preordered for almost a year but cancelled it when they raised their prices and never took delivery. I've read the 2nd generation dish is faster with a bit more stability, but I'm not entire sure.
Not OP, but my parents use it in northern california because they live in a spot that the standard ISPs have decided isn't worth running connectivity to - gigabit cable is available if they lived 3 miles closer to town. No utilities other than electricity.
They had HughesNet before, barely ever got more than 1 Mbps. Latency was ~1000ms on average. They paid for the 100 Mbps service for awhile but HughesNet oversubscribes their satellites to a disgusting degree and they rarely saw more than that 1 Mbps.
Even when the bandwidth was ~10 Mb, the latency levels caused basically all of the streaming services to not function.
When they first got it, it was ~100 Mbps on average. Now it's around 50 Mbps. Latency is still holding around 40ms. Still at least an order of magnitude better on all fronts compared to their competition. I was able to play some competitive shooters with decent success ... although CoD had a tendency to occasionally boot me when satellite switches happened. Seems to trip the anticheat, but I can't really blame Starlink for that.
> My latency now is rarely more than 60ms, and I never have dropouts.
That's definitely better than I expected. Why do you think this handles streaming and video conferencing so poorly?
I think you might've misread, he said it's never unusable for those things?
Doh! I read too fast! Thanks for the clue stick!
Large amount of automated data vs. single anecdote...
Not everything is measured properly by statistics, some times anecdotes ARE important, or at least interesting.
Regarding the CGNAT, can you not punch through it with a VPN?
Sure - but I'd rather not tunnel everything through a VPN, especially given the fact that I already have relatively high latency.
Some users reported having IPv6 now and there is a site hosted on starlink via IPv6.
I'm interested, do you happen to know what it is?
Its a grafana dashboard and IPv6 only. not mine. http://starlink.awlnx.space/
And concerns about the frequency of captchas (unless you have a truly private/personal VPN).
based on the reply post description, I'm not sure this would be different from the experience without VPN ...
It is.
I have two connections - one "standard rural WISP" sort of thing, 25/3 on paper, what it delivers varies wildly. And then Starlink. My network is set up so I can easily switch systems between the two.
Starlink is far worse about "Random sites decide that I'm evil." Even things like Lowes have, at times, utterly refused to work, throwing nonsensical server error messages of the "Go away and quit scraping our content!" variety that go away when I use the same system, on the same page, just literally routed out the other ISP.
The benefits of CGNAT are that you're hiding in a lot of other traffic, but the downsides are exactly the same. And Starlink is far worse than cell data in terms of it.
Starlink is seeing heavy use in Ukraine with most stocks in the neighboring countries getting bought up. The reason for that is russian strikes on our infrastructure causing electricity blackouts to the extent of regular internet or 4G being down/highly degraded. As a result, many companies, individuals, offices, etc. are procuring their own sources of energy (diesel/gasoline generators, portable power stations, etc.) and reserve internet connections via Starlink or powerful 4g modems that can reach further cell towers with access to good connection. That with already prevalent use of Starlinks on frontlines (they are very hard to jam and far surpass other satellite offerings).
We do not have access to data but it's not unreasonable to assume that such a spike in use must have eaten into overall network capacity.
Given that Ukraine is nowhere near the US, even for satellites, that's hardly likely, given that their v1 satellites don't have inter-satellite links.
Even with the link it makes no sense to route Ukrainian traffic all the way back to the US. All they'll do is route to the nearest downlink. Otherwise the intra-sat connections will become a bottleneck, not to mention the added latency.
If the ground station is near the server, then latency would actually be lower with Starlink. One use case of Starlink is HFT on the NYSE from London, a use case that terrestrial networks are too latent for. This is because the speed of light in a vacuum is 50% faster than the speed of light through fiber, and the distance traveled is just as often shorter as it is longer - depending on satellite position.
But you're not accounting for the latency added by the many satellite hops needed to get there :)
Every sat will need to do queueing and signal processing.
That's no different that a terrestrial network, in fact it's likely quicker as for better or for worse they're likely not using HTTP between the birds but rather a more efficient protocol.
Here I've got 18 hops from my office to HN:
One would expect the missiles be a bit more picky about what they target, or setting up fake targets to defend against them would be way too easy.
Additionally Satellite and Microwave links aren't new technology and are likely used by both sides of military for communication, so there's probably some existing value in making sure you're hitting the right thing.
It's not powerful enough of a source, different frequency bands and, as with GPS too when it comes to jamming, the signal goes mostly upwards so the missile won't be irradiated by it to respond.
For people who used to be on old satellite systems, Starlink is still the best value by far. The qualitative difference between 105Mbps and 53Mbps is much less than 2x: there's not much you can't do with one that you could with the other.
Not being an apologist, just trying to keep perspective. People who really need Starlink are still getting a great value compared to how it was a couple years ago.
It's probably also more beneficial from a policy standpoint to get twice as many people signed up at 50Mbps. As you note, the jump from 50Mbps to 100Mbps isn't that big, but the jump from 3Mbps DSL to 50Mbps Starlink means that you can suddenly use a lot of the internet that never really worked well before.
It could definitely be annoying to customers who had signed up and are now getting significantly less speed at the same price, but Starlink has a bit of a captive audience since they're mostly serving people without other options.
There's also altitude. Starlink is LEO at 550km, while all the legacy is GEO at 36000 km, ignoring Iridium of course. This is a huge latency difference, allowing normal video calls.
I moved from one room in the house to another room when working remotely, and I experienced a similar drop in my speed due to being farther away from the Wi-Fi access point. And yes, there's not much you can't do with one that you could with the other.
I made this choice voluntarily but tech geeks should visit the homes of non-tech people and see that (a) their speed is limited more by their connection to the Wi-Fi access point than by the ISP, and (b) they aren't bothered by it.
I pay $110 per month for internet at my farm land that I visit two to three days every 60 days. If they can pretend I deserve to pay as much as people who use it as their primary internet service, I should be able to pay a lower amount if they halve the bandwidth on me.
Then why do you pay basically $110 a day for internet? Can't be a day without on the farm? No 2G/3G either?
Interesting:
“Starlink outperformed fixed broadband average in 16 European countries”
https://www.ookla.com/articles/starlink-hughesnet-viasat-per...
Here are their methods: https://www.ookla.com/articles/how-ookla-ensures-accurate-re...
They do not separate between rural and city speeds.
Well, the methodology is flawed, or at least it doesn't actually reflect what it says on the tin.
It's "consumer-initiated", i.e. what they are really measuring is which contracts people are using, not which speeds are available.
Example: I could book a 500/100 line at my house (1000 symmetrical available if I switched providers), but I stick with the cheapest plan, which is 50/12 simply because it's good enough for my personal use. Same for most of my neighbours. Most don't have more than 100/20, though higher speeds are readily available.
With StarLink there's only type of contract: you get what you get and that's that. In Europe for example, there's usually more than one option per ISP and you pay more for higher bandwidth. So if you're fine with the smallest plan (usually around 50mbps), why pay more? So in essence they actually answer a different question.
People were tossing traditional internet satellites from roofs, chopping off the old dried up copper from the side of the house and pushing the wisp tower down.
Starlink made remote living and work truly possible. No more turning off video, pixilating and worrying about data plans. And low enough latency to make up with skill in games.
But just like everything it got too popular, cellular carriers are trying to service that market though and t-mobile might be a last mile internet provider with decent speeds and unlimited data. But, fiber is also getting buried all over rural areas to help with this as well.
Between fiber/cellular and Starlink people are going to get interesting data plans for sure though. Wisp are regional and the market will shrink because the service is just inadequate and poorly maintained. The smart wisp that got federal high speed internet subsidies will survive building out fiber even in some pretty rural areas.
As someone desperately looking for connectivity options in a more rural area (though not that rural, I'm only like 20 minutes from one of the largest cities in the state) I won't hold my breath. My whole neighborhood is on the waitlist for Starlink still.
I've called every provider that could possibly service our area and nobody has any interest. T-Mobile is supposedly offering 5G home internet for people in this kind of situation but they are not available in this neighborhood either.
No idea what to do other than wait for Starlink availability. There is a WISP, but it is truly terrible and very expensive.
Starlink is game-changing for even somewhat rural. My brother's place is just outside of a small, but by the scale of Maine significant city, and Starlink turns it from a previously barely 1 Mbps download to somewhere he can actually work from.
I live 45 miles outside of a major Northeast city, have just one broadband option which is mostly OK but would still seriously consider Starlink as a backup. I barely get cellphone reception at my house without WiFi assist because I'm in the shadow of a hill.
> No idea what to do other than wait for Starlink availability.
Read the contract carefully to make sure it's allowed, start a coop & buy the commercial variant for a group of farms, with point-to-point wifi for local distribution? That should get you to jump the line.
(Though your problem may also be lack of a ground station close enough to you, but that's more rare.)
I'm always curious about details on situations like this. Really nerdy stuff like: what's the average housing lot size; what's the average driveway length; what kind of "largest city in the state" (since 20 minutes won't get you from LA to another part of LA and in most places I've seen 20 minutes won't get you far from a city at all which makes it sound like you're in a state where a top-5 city has 100,000 people and becomes rural fast). One of the problems a lot of the US faces is that the cost of infrastructure is shared by so few people: rural roads that have few homes on them, electric lines that have to travel farther to reach customers, sewer systems that require more feet per customer, etc. In a lot of rural places in Europe, people often live clustered in a town center, but rural America tends to spread out a lot more with a lot of distance to cover to connect people. It doesn't really matter how far you are from a city as much as how easy it is to connect lots of households in your area.
As you note, one of the problems that Starlink is facing is that everyone who wants Starlink generally lives in the same areas. Are there a few hundred households that want Starlink within a 7 mile radius of you (150 square miles)? Then there's likely to be capacity constraints, at least until Starlink can launch a lot more satellites.
All three wireless carriers are offering home internet in situations like yours, but with slightly varying offers. T-Mobile has an unlimited offering in areas where it has excess network capacity. T-Mobile also has a "Lite" offering that is available everywhere T-Mobile has coverage, but it has a data cap and costs $150 for the 300GB plan (https://www.t-mobile.com/support/home-internet/t-mobile-home...). AT&T has a home internet offering for $60 with a 350GB cap (https://www.att.com/internet/fixed-wireless/); overages are $10 per 50GB up to a maximum of $200/mo. I don't know if that's $200 total or $200 in overages + $60. At $200, it's certainly expensive, but Starlink isn't cheap. The average home internet user uses around 300GB of data (data from both T-Mobile and Comcast), but that's probably not people on Hacker News. Still, 1TB would be $170 which isn't that much more if you're desperate and doesn't have as high a startup cost (Starlink's being around $700 while AT&T's is up to $150). Verizon also offers home internet service at cheap costs (either LTE https://www.verizon.com/home/lte-home-internet/ or 5G https://www.verizon.com/5g/home depending on where you are), but availability is limited like T-Mobile's unlimited service.
Have you looked into Starlink's RV service? It's more expensive at $135/mo and you're deprioritized behind standard Starlink customers, but that might be a good option. I hate saying this, but once you're in for $110/mo, what's another $25? Well, $300 per year. But if you're desperate, it might be what you need.
Things will likely get better over the coming years. T-Mobile will be covering half of rural households over the next few months with mid-band 5G and they're also embarking on a huge rural coverage expansion with 10,000 new towers coming to improve coverage. Verizon and AT&T are behind on mid-band coverage, but it's coming. Starlink will be launching more satellites which will give them more capacity.
If you don't mind paying an extra $25/mo, Starlink RV might be the best solution. However, people have reported being annoyed that they haven't been able to switch to regular Starlink (and save $25/mo) when capacity becomes available. Definitely check Verizon and AT&T's offering and see if there's something right for you there (and available). It feels like a long-shot, but I'd rather mention them than not even if there's just a 1% chance it'll help. Over the next few years, we're likely to see AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile gain a lot of capacity in rural areas as they bring online a lot of spectrum and Starlink will launch more satellites. Right now, since you say you're "desperately looking", maybe grab Starlink RV or even AT&T's service.
> But just like everything it got too popular
Keep in mind that it maybe got too popular for an usable service, but it's far from being popular enough to be financially sustainable product. You're still at this point having a service paid by investors money, like cheap Uber rides in 2015.
> You're still at this point having a service paid by investors money, like cheap Uber rides in 2015.
Ouch! It's hard to tell if this is assertion based on some sort of familiarity with SpaceX's finances or just another of a seemingly endless stream of anti-Musk jabs.
Surely you can't put SpaceX and Uber into the same category when it comes to the state of their finances and where that money comes from. Surely a cursory glance at the slew of public, private and government contracts SpaceX already has, plus the ones they have lined up, not to mention the involvement in programs like Artemus, would demonstrate to most people that they are in league far and beyond the likes of Uber with their dubious Vision Fund and questionable private backers.
Or are you saying in this case that SpaceX, with all of its money and potential is basically to Starlink, what Softbank is to Uber?
If it's the former, I'd love to get a better understand of what you mean?
Not an answer to your question, but a vent-rant: 95% of anti-Musk "jabs" are reality and facts, and way over-shouted by Musk's fanatics, butt-kissers, and followers of his cult of personality. I have personally tried to set record straight with multiple instances of people in my private life (with legal documents, news clippings, timelines...) – nothing helps, they always find an excuse for him, it's like a bloody religion. And I'm sick of uncritical and butt-kissing media coverage, his fan club, and his egomaniacal loud existence.
It has always struck me that the people expressing the same sentiment that you just did put far more energy into it than the "fanatics, butt-kissers, and followers of his cult of personality"; to the point that you'd bother the "people in my private life (with legal documents, news clippings, timelines...)". It reminds me of the tech journalists who declared bitcoin dead in 2013, and how they'd get more venomous in their attacks year after year, presumably due to some kind deranged ego shielding.
> but it's far from being popular enough to be financially sustainable
That feels like it would be true but is there any publically available data to confirm it?
The hobbyist community does estimates based on reported launch pricing and satellite manufacturing costs, but I don't think there's been any company books opened to reporters.
There was that leaked email saying "Satellite V1, by itself, is financially weak" https://spaceexplored.com/2021/11/29/spacex-raptor-crisis/
Since January 2021 they've been launching V1.5
Basically like Iridium V1. It went bankrupt and only when the network was bought for dimes on the dollar did it become profitable.
Eventually it did find a sustainable business model though even for its new satellites.
Did Iridium have reusable rockets too?
Is anyone familiar with how Google Fiber Webpass works?
Is there a reason this isn't viable in remote areas?
Can it only beam internet pretty short distances?
I believe webpass is based on line of sight wireless. And they connect a whole buildings with one shared radio package.
Remote areas often don't have lots of tall buildings with many inhabitants and line of sight above the treeline. I know my semi-rural area is full of trees and hills and line of sight wireless would really only have potential for people with waterfront, and realistically, only for people with waterfront and a view towards the nearby city.
I live in rural UK and have wireless from a network on church steeples. It is quite flat here relatively.
Webpass is really only offered in largeish residential buildings as far as I'm aware (I have webpass service, though my condo building only has 90 units so it's not particularly large, and I suspect most people are with Xfinity anyway...).
I imagine the fixed cost for the microwave unit doesn't make sense otherwise.
If you're talking about microwave point to point to a cell tower that then provides 5g or LTE... Well that's how most cell towers work, I think...
Anything that runs over fiber isn’t viable for remote areas due to cost of trenching and laying out fiber.
Cook County MN is a little over 3000 square miles, half of which is water, and has a population a little over 5000 people. I own a patch of forest there. It has gigabit fiber service.
The local power company is a co-op because none of the usual power companies wanted to serve the area. About twenty years ago the co-op decided that this whole "internet" thing is probably not a fad, and they started pulling fiber everywhere through their existing utility corridors whenever they had to touch something. It was a good idea. It is _intensely_ rural, yet high speed internet access is now ubiquitous.
I guess it depends on your definition of remote. In my area theres fiber being run all over the place, and it's not like middle of Montana rural, but there was 0 internet providers here before and now there's awesome fiber.
My understanding is Webpass is millimeter wireless point-to-point.
I was wondering how far apart nodes can be.
I'm reading that they can be up to 10km apart - so it seems like something that could be an option for a lot of communities.
Except they were able to get phone lines into most of these "remote" places in the past.
Sunk cost at the same time as electric & water lines were trenched, while the road was built, paid for by the initial developers of the areas (and added to the cost of homes). For this house, that happened somewhere in the early 90s. Digging it all open again is what would cost a lot.
Yes, if there's new development somewhere, they could probably get fiber in pretty cheap, if the developers though that was worth it. That doesn't help anyone else much.
Webpass and similar services work well with line of sight. Even Starlink wants line of sight, but it's generally easier to get that up than across. What happens when a neighbor a mile away has a 3-story home or there's a hill?
With wireless spectrum, lower frequencies effectively travel farther because they don't get disrupted by objects as much. So 600-900MHz frequencies provide lots of coverage that's the backbone of our mobile phone networks, 1700-2100MHz were used to add more capacity in cities and suburbs, and now we're seeing 2.5-4GHz being used to provide new high-speed 5G services (5G+, 5G UC, or 5G UW depending on your carrier). On top of that, there's millimeter wave spectrum. There's a lot of it, but it's also 28-40GHz and going to be blocked by so much. Even if you're near a millimeter wave cell site, your walls might prevent it from working indoors. Lots of things become issues at millimeter wave so it's hard to do it without unobstructed line of sight (including trees and such) or really short distances.
Mobile phone carriers are already beaming internet far distances. They just have limited capacity in a lot of areas and people hate having their home internet connection limited. What we're seeing with 2.5-4GHz spectrum is pretty good capacity with some decent coverage, but we're still just talking a mile or two in a lot of situations. Of course, there are people hacking their T-Mobile Home Internet devices with high-gain directional antennas and really pushing that farther when they have near line of sight. I think we're likely to see this mid-band spectrum become a big factor in rural internet because it has a decent mix of distance and capacity. Millimeter wave spectrum is just hard to do without line of sight and so it often becomes limited to large buildings that an ISP can put a professionally installed antenna on the top of.
It's also that these things take time. If you're one of the big three wireless carriers, you're looking to upgrade 70,000-100,000 cell sites around the country and that doesn't happen overnight. It takes 3-6 years. To really get home internet good in many places, they might need more cell sites to supplement those. Realistically, I think it's a lot more likely that the big three wireless companies will hook up rural areas than Webpass. This is their business. Webpass (and others like Starry and NetBlazr) are somewhat limited because they don't have the spectrum to cover larger areas or even within cities where they don't have a tall building to give them line of sight. They also don't have the money or workforce to deploy as quickly as the wireless carriers (yes Google has money, but they're not going to spend $15B a year when they don't have the spectrum to create a viable rural strategy; the big three are spending that kind of money because they have the spectrum and network and potential to expand into home internet).
Wireless has a lot of promise, but the lower frequency you go the less spectrum there is available and the higher frequency you go the less distance you're going to get and the more you need line of sight. The big three wireless carriers have the lower frequency spectrum and network to start providing more and more home internet in the future. We're just at the first point where the big wireless carriers are starting to see excess network capacity (beyond what their mobile users will eat up) which is why it didn't happen much before.
The advantage of Starlink would be that it could offer a single plan worldwide though.
No more roaming charges etc.
Most people really don't care about that. They want broadband where they didn't have a reasonable option for broadband before at pretty much any price.
How do you even know?
From people in the small Arican villages to these people traveling to the big cities or even abroad, there is always an issue of being able to access the internet. (to use whatsapp for instance)
Broadband won't help here. Starlink having global coverage would be much different. (if it manages to do so without being impeded at the regulatory level)
In even slightly rural Australia and Canada Starlink has been life changing. It’s easily the fastest internet available once you are a tiny bit out of a town.
In actually remote Australia it was crazy to see locals go to the pub to use it, having never had access to anything better than dial-up.
In rural and remote places, it’s changing the world, exactly as it was designed to do. If you live in a dense urban environment, Starlink was never really designed for you.
This is expected with a new network though right? My first 4G phone was a rocket then slowly slowed down over time as more people got 4G phones.
I could see there being an opportunity for 4G+Starlink setups.
Run Starlink when you need the throughput and turn off that 100w heater when you don’t.
I’m already looking into a timer to turnoff my modem, gaming console and router at night just to turn off that ~20w load doing nothing.
http://www.tpcdb.com/list.php?page=2&type=12
There is an argument that if you have 4G/5G, you don't really need to go all the way to LEO.
Technically true, iff you have functioning telecom competition.
In Canada, 1G/2G/3G/4G/5G has captured the regulators for decades.
Would be interesting to know where the starlink demand is in USA and how much it overlaps with areas that have 4G+ coverage.
That is exactly what I am doing. The catch is that 4G data is horribly expensive in my area, download two youtube videos and you've blown a months Starlink fees.
In many-to-most cases 4G and especially 5G will simply outperform Starlink. If you have the 4G it may not even be necessary to bother with the Starlink. Unless you want redundancy of a 2nd connection or you can only get a really terrible data plan running both is not likely to make much sense. Starlink also has very onerous North-South field of view requirements that are actually often hard to meet even on completely remote sites (speaking as a Starlink customer with a handful of trees in the yard). Cellular is nowhere near as fussy about placement.
Starlink makes most sense when you have no 4G or 5G reception at all, generally speaking.
Not sure I agree about the 4G/5G comment. I got an unlimited 4g/5g hotspot through Calyx Institute that uses the TMobile network ( https://calyxinstitute.org/membership/internet ). I now also have Starlink. The Starlink service is faster and lower latency. I have noticed Starlink getting slower over the past couple months but it is still quite fast. In my experience the downside to Starlink is that several times a week it drops out completely for 10-20 seconds. I thought I was going to have issues with the trees near the location of my antenna but the app shows almost 0 obstruction in the FOV Starlink cares about. It was surprising to me how far north the antenna wants to point. I was picturing it pointing south like a dish would for a geo satellite but Starlink aren't geo. I've also been a customer of two different local wireless point-to-point ISP. One worked great when it wasn't foggy and when the trees didn't have leaves - so only about 1/4 of the year. The other had 800ms pings and also went down frequently. Starlink has been game changing.
I think not everyone understands this (we all have to learn at some point right?) so coverage like this is informative for people who didn’t know.
I remember them claiming that performance would actually go UP as they launched more satellites to fill out the network
It did. It's a question of ratio of consumers & usage vs satellites & ground stations.
I certainly didn't expect them to use an elaborate waitlist system to onboard far more customers than the network can handle.
53 MB is more bandwidth that their competition (ViaSat, HughesNet) ever offered.
Starlink can handle the customers just fine.
By definition, if the customers could get something better for less money, they would.
Plus SpaceX is launching more satellites. They are at 1/20 of the number of satellites they want to have, so the total bandwidth available will go up.
For most people unmetered 30-50 Mbps down is all they really need. Handle at least a couple streaming services or a video call. Stuff beyond that is basically luxury territory.
Yes and no. 30Mbps on a landline with zero packet loss and fixed latency is noticeably different than Starlink/5G/Wireless connections that are only mostly reliable.
It’s like how playing a game at rock solid 30 FPS is actually fine, but games with average frame rate of 30FPS that have significant random stuttering can be unplayable.
This is the opposite of my personal experience. For me, the service has been more reliably performing at higher speeds and since launching more satellites there are fewer drops in connectivity.
Good for you, but not relevant for the topic in the article. The FCC should make decisions based on data, like the data collected by Ookla (if the FCC can't collect its own), not based on anecdotes.
Of course it's relevant. The FCC doesn't make its decisions based on HN comments, so I'm not sure why the aggro response here. I'm stating my personal experience with the network, over the past year. I'm on the network now at peak time in Florida and clocking 80 Mbps.
The FCC is handing out billions of dollars to improve RURAL broadband so for those purposes it doesn't make sense to measure average speeds that include congested URBAN cells.
Good for the FCC, but it's not very useful if the data is all from congested cities, I can't find where they list their sampling.
Starlink shines when it comes to rural/remote environments, not cities where towers and fiber can reach.
Side note, look at HughesNet and Viasat in their data, LOL!
edit: instead of downvoting if someone could find the sampling method?
Nobody else thinks that the FCC decided to exclusively pull data from congested cities (I guess in order to intentionally fool theselves?), so they have no reason to look up the sampling method. You however do, so you should look it up, go through it, then give your evaluation of it.
When you make up an accusation from whole cloth, people are going to downvote it. They'll probably downvote even harder after you ask for other people to give you proof to refute the accusation that you made up from whole cloth. If you find the sampling method, and it turns out your suspicions were true, and then you write a comment explaining that, they'll give you hundreds of upvotes to offset these two or three well-deserved downvotes.
You misunderstand. I'm saying if they didn't look at only the rural cells then there's not much point in using that to determine whether to award funding for providing rural broadband...
Just because there's a lot of people in highly populated cells that drag down the speed for people in those cells has nothing to do with the speeds of the lowly populated cells.
tldr; it makes no sense to average all cells together, as the goal is to improve the areas where existing infrastructure have failed in specific regions.
(and in those areas, where hughesnet, or viasat, or old DSL were the few options, Starlink does it's best)
Cities vs rural has no impact on Starlink speeds. You fall into a "cell" which is a hexagonal region roughly the width of California. Each cell is served by a satellite that has a 20 Gbps downlink to a ground station. Everyone within that cell shares that 20 Gbps, and everyone using the ground station (4-8 cells) shares the backhaul capacity of that site.
(This is oversimplified but puts the capacity scoping in context)
How would city vs rural not have an impact on that??? If your cell happens to have a major urban area in it, you would have to share the satellite downlink with many many more people than if you were living in a cell that covers mostly ocean and a few tiny islands. (Or mostly deserts and some tiny hamlets, of course)
> If your cell happens to have a major urban area in it, you would have to share the satellite downlink with many many more people
In theory most or all of the people in a major metro area would be opting for faster, cheaper ISPs. Starlink is for people way out in the boonies that don’t have any other good options.
Providing broadband to rural america, what this whole FCC broadband push has been about, concerns those cells where there aren't many people over a large spread of land, where towers and laying down lines doesn't make sense.
So if you take a cell that has LA in it, it will be much more congested than if you took a cell in Wyoming, or Nebraska.
Are you in an area of relatively low population density?
I would guess that places like rural California and Texas have seen an increase of user density which would cause bandwidth decreases. If you're in a place with relatively slow user growth, you could be getting advantage of increased total bandwidth of the satellite constellation.
No I am mostly in Austin, Texas. Although I do travel and have used it in New Mexico, Tennessee, and Florida with 100+ Mbps.
My thought is being on a coast would have the best throughput because you’re the first/last “in-view” as the constellation passes over.
Could have lots of variability though.
> Starlink's median US upload speed dropped from 12Mbps to 7.2Mbps from Q4 2021 to Q3 2022
I wasn't able to find an answer online. Is this the expected "ok" upload speed? 7-12Mbps seem low for typical WFH usage like video conferencing and sharing your screen.
Well, considering I've been using Starlink since Jan. 2021, the upload speeds have been more than adequate for typical WFH video/audio calls.
The download speeds dramatically falling over the last year have been a major annoyance when it comes to updating games via Steam or stuff like Microsoft Flight Sim, but streaming video has been perfectly fine the whole time.
Seeing the speeds drop is a bit of a disappointment, but given the reliability of the connection versus our previous ISP, it's 100% worth it for now.
Thanks! I've been wondering if exiling myself deep in Canada and using Starlink to be fully remote was viable. Do you notice any impact from the increase latency (compared to coax cable or fiber) in meetings/voice chat/video games or would it pass the blind test?
Additional question, do you get any connection degradation in bad weather events (if you have them)? Things like snow and storms.
I don't notice any increase in latency in meetings or voice chat. I don't play any real online multiplayer games, but I did do some summoning in Elden Ring the other night and I didn't notice any lag or weirdness with the other players.
We've noticed some slower speeds and satellite obstruction during heavy snow and super heavy intense thunderstorms, but otherwise it's been fine in most of the weather events we experience out on the eastern plains of Colorado.
> 7-12Mbps seem low for typical WFH usage like video conferencing and sharing your screen
It's a little slow, but it's not bad.
It is, however, dramatically better than the <1 Mbps upload speeds (and <5 Mbps download speeds) that a lot of rural customers are getting now.
General rule of thumb for 1080p video streaming = 8 Mbps
720p is half the size, so it should be half that rate = 4 Mbps.
I have no doubt that modern image compression algorithms can bring that down a bit further without too much impact on quality.
So with a median of 7.2 Mbps, that's probably enough for 2 users to have an acceptable video conferencing experience. But if that's the median, then half of their customers have a lower upload speed than that and may only be able to get away with a single user streaming at a time.
And that’s at full motion. Your bobbing head and fixed background takes a lot less.
Same with most screenshares.
I had a 15/1 connection for a while and found no issues with Zoom calls. Maybe an issue if you’re a professional cammer though.
I mostly work on CRUD virtualized apps (effectively screenshares) all workday long and will use well under 1gb in a day.
My biggest beef with Zoom and the like is being unable to restrict resolution/camera quality of myself and others (other than setting the others into small sizes).
I’m in Canada where mobile data is expensive, and therefore very fast. The provider is happy for you to chew your handful of gb per month at full speed and then you top-up with more or get hit with overages.
720p isn't half 1080p, it's a quarter because you're halving resolution on both axes.
1080p is 1920x1080 ~= 2.1m pixels versus 1280x720 = 921,600 .
So a little less than half but definitely not a quarter. And neither dimension is actually halved.
:facepalm: I rushed to be wrong by not mentaly checking that 720 is indeed half 1080. Resolutions indeed never doubled from one step to the next.
Netflix 1080p is 5MB
Beyond some minimal throughput, low latency is a bigger factor in video conferencing and screen sharing and Starlink has low latencies from my understanding.
Thats standard cable numbers. Sadly.
It's faster than all ADSL and most Cable Modem plans, so I'm guessing it's fine?
Well that would be better than what my [canadian] wired internet provided during covid.
My favourite was when Rogers couldn’t complete calls during the day at the beginning of the pandemic. They were saturated and pushed even more people onto web-conference software.
The RDOF "Above Baseline" tier that Starlink bid on requires 100 Mbps down and 20 Mbps up so those speeds are not close to adequate.
I've been getting about 80 mb/s. Still outperforms the only available alternative in my area by 500x.
Is home internet pretty much "fast enough" for anyone else right now?
I used satellite internet for almost a full year. I was about 20 minutes drive from 3G.
Honestly, it was absolutely fine. Video conferences, online real time games, streaming videos...
Right now I'm on a copper line. Granted, it's only us villagers and country folk using it since the local big town moved to fibre. But again, the speed is fine.
I work at a rural farm and live in a big city. The farm had satellite which was okay, but they had a hard monthly data cap of 200GB, at which point they would severely throttle speeds. There was no option to pay for a higher cap. During summer time the owners (many) kids would visit and with all their video streaming we would hit the data caps about two and a half weeks in to the month. Then when the owner needed to do a video call for work, due to the throttling, he had to text everyone and ask them to stop using the network for an hour. It was a pretty fragile system. Now we have starlink and it’s a big improvement! Though the short drop outs (under 2 seconds) sometimes cause issues with video calls.
At my place in the city I get symmetric gigabit fiber for $39 a month. This is the first time I’ve ever had fiber. It’s pretty wonderful to upload a 10GB 4K video to YouTube in a few minutes, download a full movie while I make some popcorn, and pull down an OS image in seconds. I don’t “need” gigabit but I absolutely am happy to have it!
Not really, no. There are still huge swaths of the US with complete garbage and no other options (e.g. with 3mbps/<1mbps being the most an ISP will ever offer). If you have more than one or two people at home (and in rural settings, bigger families are more normal), it’s practically unusable.
Of course most people have ok internet for most use cases. But there are even places in cities where the only option isn’t great. And upload speed is often still abysmal. Comcast, which had a monopoly at my previous rental within Portland, OR city limits, offered very fast download. But upload was only 6mbps with no increase available. For content creation, like uploading videos or photos, that’s a pain in the ass.
The real problem is higher speeds allow for a wider variety of use cases, which starts locking out people from bandwidth-intensive activities. Game streaming, for example, or content creation. So in a rural area, that means some careers are harder to get into just because the internet isn’t very good.
"Fast enough" is a contentious point for many tech people.
There are very few consumer use cases that demand super fast broadband. I think basically you can say that you need about 15Mbps per person with 10Mbps overhead/margin. But 50Mbps is basically "fast enough" for the average household (browsing and streaming), it just means that game downloads or OS updates will be slower than you might like.
My experience is that 200Mbps is "more than enough for most" and above 500Mbps will barely be used in most normal applications, it just makes the internet /snappier/. Most websites and downloads don't actually support download at 1Gbps, well there's always all those ISO downloads...
If you have a house full of nerds then super speed broadband has value, but most people aren't as nerdy as that. That being said, Starlink is showing how over hyped it really was. Sure, they still need to launch more satellites, but it's a continuous obligation on SpaceX to keep replacing the infrastructure. I respect the need for those in rural areas, but suburban/urban folks (who will be affected by congestion the most) need good/affordable fibre. Even many of the rural folks (the less extremely isolated ones) could be supported by good mobile broadband infrastructure.
Starlink isn't for people who have decent copper broadband somewhere in the 10s of Mbps down that's reasonably reliable. It's for the people who can't get that and there are a lot of them.
Right, did you miss the bit where I had satellite internet and had to drive some distance to access mobile internet?
Same. They actually just upgraded service near me, for 30$ more I can quadruple my internet speeds. I talked to my roommates and even with multiple heavy internet users we really see no need to at all.
Not even close. As an example, waiting for my consoles to update games and losing half my hour of free gaming time is terrible - and I have 10G wired around my house to a 1G Comcast connection.
This article relies on Ookla speedtest results. I don't think those are representative for satellite internet, when speeds vary throughout the day based on satellite positions relative to the user.
People usually go to test their speed when they feel their connection is slow, so it's not a uniform random sample.
> I don't think those are representative for satellite internet, when speeds vary throughout the day based on satellite positions relative to the user.
Huh? It's not Hughes, Starlink is not geostationary.
Starlink satellites are in low orbit, orbiting the whole globe in about two hours. The dish switches satellites every few minutes.
https://satellitemap.space/?constellation=starlink
Yes, the satellites are moving, so the quality of service at any time varies depending on where the satellites are at that time.
They move quickly enough that your variation would be on the time scale of minutes, not over a day.
(Earlier in the beta, I had a 20 ms hiccup every few minutes, during the hand-off to next satellite. I'm guessing the IP routing wasn't in sync with the satellite switch.)
Correct, and it's when users feel those hiccups that they're going to speedtest.net - so the results are not representative.
Terrestrial broadband doesn't have hiccups as frequently, so the speedtest.net results would have a better signal to noise ratio for terrestrial ISP's vs for Starlink.
I finally was able to get fibre in my area, so I dropped Starlink. Data caps are incoming, and the cells near me are over-subscribed. Speeds have been getting worse over time.
Since this is network and internet related, just want to chime in with some experience using non-standard internet connection methods. It may help in understanding what's happening here.
Starlink as I understand it, while using 'satellites' is more like 'terrestrial tower' based internet, but with low-orbit stations in use instead of towers erected on a high hill. I make this distinction, because of other 'satellite' internet companies having been used to compare it in the past, in my opinion, erroneously.
Satellite internet like Xplornet for example, do something else where you have just a few satellites only, providing line of sight connection for EVERYONE on the facing side of the planet for that satellite.
Starlink is more like terrestrial tower because you have essentially a choice of which satellites you want to use to connect through, since there are many that could be connected to at any time. This is like terrestrial tower, because your home might be closest to a tower in a town near you, but the other tower just off the side a bit further away gets less usage and so you have less issues connection due to congestion or 'things' getting in the way. Things could be tree canopies, house roofs, etc.
So what I figure is happening here after reading the article, is that their current configuration is reaching levels of congestion that can't keep up with the demand they expected, and so they are going to start launching more satellites to keep up with the demand. They are also looking to increase the broadcasting signals strength to help ensure a higher quality connection to those who do connect to their system.
That's basically terrestrial tower internet itself in a nutshell from my experience using it in the past. Even their ping times are similar.
Now for those who get their knickers in a knot because 'thing orbiting planet in space is always a satellite'. Yes, I know. It's technically satellite internet in that right. But my point is that this isn't how we should be thinking of it.
We should instead be calling it Aerial internet, since it helps differentiate from the other satellite internet (which in my usage experience is crap and should only be used in the worst case scenarios) and terrestrial tower which is also not the greatest, but is better than stuff like Xplornet.
I've never met anyone who likes using services from folk like Xplornet, except obviously ignorant people who never have had anything better. The moment I show them the difference between their connection and mine back at the farm, or here in urban life; they immediately try to make up excuses for it instead of accepting it isn't that good.
But that's besides the point. My point is that Starlink is doing pretty good if they are only seeing that much of a drop in speeds and latency. It's still a usable connection by rural standards, which was its intent mostly to begin with. It wasn't meant to be used by urbanites who have access to much better; as I understand was what was intended by Elon in the first place.
For comparisons sake: Most rural internet only ever gets UPTO 50mbps at best, in the best locations. You can expect to get much worse in rural areas with terrestrial tower based internet. And while many including Xplornet may falsely advertise they can achieve higher speeds; latency kills their performance. It doesn't matter if you can get 300mbps, if your latency is a full second or higher of ping time. not milliseconds. Seconds. Even minutes sometimes. Depends on how bad the situation is for you.
So, with that all in mind, despite all the Elon hate going on right now; I think Starlink is doing pretty good still.
I don't have it, yet; since I don't need it. But if they keep on this path they are on right now, when I move back to the rural areas I am probably going to get Starlink as a backhaul connection, and a terrestrial tower setup as my main connection. Or perhaps vice versa. Depends on which one has the better and more stable connection in that area.
But I would never use traditional satellite internet like Xplornet. If I ever did, it would be because I have enough money that I can throw it away and not care; all just to make sure there is a redundant connection to ensure that I have a backup for my backup. Even then... I'd rather just get a second company on terrestrial to hook me up instead.
If you're interested, https://mikepuchol.com/modeling-starlink-capacity-843b2387f5...? is an super in-depth public analysis of Starlink's capabilities.
> I think Starlink is doing pretty good still.
Well, atm., yes. From the very beginning I thought that's it's a very risky idea to focus on end users, though. Ships, airplanes, mining operations, emergency services, etc. - that's where the real benefit and money is.
Ships have rates of up to $60k/mo for low bandwidth satellite internet. StarLink maritime is only $5k/mo and every maritime plan basically equates ~50 residential users in terms of turnover. Special deals with airlines, cruise ships and so forth could easily bring in as much money as tens of thousands of end-users - including much less hassle with regulators and billing.
The problem is that satellite internet (no matter if LEO or GEO) scales very poorly and creates an economic death spiral (hence the need for Starship) - more users means less available bandwidth, thus requires more satellites. More satellites require more rocket launches, which costs money and requires more users to pay for it, etc.
It remains to be seen whether the current path StarLink takes is sustainable from a business perspective. A 30k satellite constellation is certainly economically unsound using current rockets (e.g. Falcon 9), given that it took 3 years to get ~3300 into orbit and the average lifetime per Gen1 satellite is planned to be around 5 years.
This means 3300 Gen1 sats have to be replaced within the next 5 years while another 7500 or so have to be launched on top of that. With Gen2 sats being heavier, F9 can only take maybe 25 (this is a guess) instead of 50-60 sats per launch. That'd amount to about 87 F-9 launches per year just for StarLink and I don't think that's economically feasible (hence Starship). But we'll see.
I think you need to add US regulatory and political considerations when considering the liability of targeting consumers versus business. In the US, rural users are over-represented in congress and are by far the biggest beneficiaries of Starlink (vs other available options). In my area, I can only WFH because of Starlink, so you better be sure that I contact my swing state Representatives and Senators anytime I hear about something that might negatively impact Starlink service.
Although it's reasonable to ask whether Starlink is charging enough. Of course, I'd be the first to admit that it comes from a privileged position to state that I'd pay a lot to be able to live with decent Internet access somewhere that I wouldn't otherwise be able to.
Personally, I'd be willing to pay more for Starlink, but that willingness is capped by the price of unlimited 4G plans in my area.
From a business perspective, I suspect that the number of potential consumers living (at the moment) in areas with wireless ISPs and no wired ISPs is quite a bit larger than than areas with no wireless ISP. However, with time, I suspect that WFH and Starlink will encourage some people to move farther out from current infrastructure and they will be almost entirely dependent on Starlink, since HughesNet and other geostationary satellite internet providers aren't really comparable in bandwidth or latency.
Musk has publicly stated that Starlink Gen2 hard-requires Starship.
Still shocked that satellite Internet is faster than copper Internet in parts of Central London (U.K.). Definitely not able to get 105Mbps
Was that when they went from 1 user to 2?