[HN Gopher] Starlink review, four months in ___________________________________________________________________ Starlink review, four months in Author : geerlingguy Score : 363 points Date : 2021-07-22 14:05 UTC (8 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.jeffgeerling.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.jeffgeerling.com) | skellington wrote: | Some of the comments here are kind of ridiculous. They are | complaining (or just pointing out) issues that are EXPECTED at | this stage of the beta. | | Starlink has like 1700 of the planned 42,000 satellites in orbit | now. Of course there are going to be temporarily blips in service | plus the random longer dropouts during system upgrades. | | Even with the current issues, the service is revolutionary in the | remote areas that it's intended to service. Why Geerling thinks | it's appropriate to compare beta starlink to his home cable/fiber | service is beyond me. It's totally fair to review the current | state of starlink, but to then conclude that "I don't love it" | because it's not as good as his cable service is just plain dumb. | | Why did you even begin the review with the expectation that it | could be better than your land service in it's current beta form? | You're not even supposed to be on the starlink service if you | have great landline bandwidth and starlink should block you from | their service as you're stealing bandwidth from people who don't | have access to high speed internet. | | One person even said "I hope they can figure out why it drops | occasionally" as if some of the smartest people on the earth | don't know exactly why it drops out. It drops because the | satellite mesh network is only 4% complete! | paxys wrote: | If they are charging full price for it then it is reasonable to | complain. It doesn't matter whether they call it "beta" or | whatever else. | tsimionescu wrote: | > Starlink has like 1700 of the planned 42,000 satellites in | orbit now. | | I'm not sure if anyone believes that 42k number. They are | launching ~60 satellites at a time - that would mean ~700 | launches. There is no way that will be economical for the | relative handful of people (500k? 1-2M?) who could | realistically be interested in this. | | Not to mention, the lifespan of these satellites in orbit is | tiny, just a few years. They would have to be constantly | launching new satellites to keep up. | | The current state is probably more or less the best Starlink | will ever offer - as more people will join the network, coming | closer to Musk's 500k number, bandwidth will significantly | diminish, even if the number of satellites is maybe doubled. | | And if federal funds dry up, I expect the whole venture will | quickly go bankrupt, or remain alive with a handful of | satellites and a huge price spike. | nexuist wrote: | I mean, Starlink is available as a closed beta commercial | product. There's nothing wrong with comparing it in its current | form to cable service in its current form, especially if you're | going to pay $$$ for it. | | The point is for the reader to figure out if they should try | Starlink _right now_ (if eligible) or if they should wait for | some of these issues to be resolved. | | To put it another way: would you complain that reviewers were | judging Google Glass unfairly, because Google had grandiose | plans for it in the future (that ultimately never happened)? Or | would you recognize that Google made the decision to sell | Google Glass in its current form, and thus accepted that it | would be judged against its competitors? | skellington wrote: | It's totally fair to review the current state of a beta | service. It could be informative for people who are unsure if | they want to try the beta-service. | | But to compare it as an equal, in it's beta form, against a | service that it's not even built to compete against is just | plain dumb. If you already have access to high speed | internet, starlink it not intended for you. | | His final comment about "Liking, but not loving starlink" | implies that he's comparing starlink to cable internet as | equal competitors. They are not and they are not intended to | be and that's even considering the fact that starlink is in | beta. | | This guy should not even be allowed on starlink (in the long | run) because he already has access to high speed internet. | | This whole comment section is full of stupidity like: | | "isn't 100watts a lot of power?" <-- typed from gaming | computer with a 1000watt power supply "what about space | garbage, isn't space garbage bad" <-- as if LEO garbage won't | just decay back to earth "will starlink be like FSD and maybe | never get delivered" <-- as if they are related issues, they | are not "I don't like Elon" <- because reasons, but also | irrelevant "starlink bad because worky less good when | obstructed" <-- too dumb for words "i'm worried about the | starlink monopoly" <-- you should be banned from the internet | stordoff wrote: | > "isn't 100watts a lot of power?" <-- typed from gaming | computer with a 1000watt power supply | | This feels like a bit of an unfair dismissal. I'm using a | laptop that rarely goes above 30W (and is off half off the | time), so I'm not sure you can make that assumption. A | 1000W power supply also doesn't mean it's using that | continually - a GPU can consume >300W under load, but drop | to around 10W when it's idle. Further, 100W 24/7 would add | around 12-13% to my power bill (which is already above | average) - it is a noticeable amount of power. | geerlingguy wrote: | > This guy should not even be allowed on starlink (in the | long run) because he already has access to high speed | internet. | | I don't plan on owning it in the long run--I'm going to be | giving the dish to my cousin who's on a farm with slow | rural DSL once Starlink is available in her area. | | Unfortunately right now Starlink's available in suburban | St. Louis but not in most of the rural communities around | it :P | _wldu wrote: | It's my understanding that the Starlink signal is almost straight | up, so if that is true, the trees would have to be rather close | to the house. | | Does anyone know if this is true? | geerlingguy wrote: | Starlink currently wants a 100deg view of the sky (pretty | broad), and you can actually download the Starlink App on your | phone (even without service) and use the obstruction finder to | view specifically how much of the sky it needs. | | But in my case, that tree is pretty close to the back of my | house (and there are 75-100' trees pretty much everywhere on my | property). | yardstick wrote: | No mention of this in the article, but I know someone with | starlink and the router received a dhcp lease with a /10 subnet | (100.64.0.0/10). I've got no problem with the CGNAT IP given, but | found it odd the mask was a /10 and not a /31 normally seen in | single device assignments like normally with PPP. | Siecje wrote: | Does this limit what a customer can do? | blakesterz wrote: | I just wanted to say thanks, that review was super interesting. | And thanks for all your many ansible roles! I use the heck out of | several :-) | NelsonMinar wrote: | I'm typing this message from Starlink. For me it's absolutely | transformative; 10x the bandwidth I can get from any other source | and very reliable. | | Except for outages related to obstructions. That's a real problem | and the author's situation is not good. There's ways to work | around it on your property; a taller mount, a tree install, | cutting some trees. But ultimately Dishy needs a clear view to | the north and there's no getting around it. | | I have some smaller obstructions for my install and it was a | little annoying but fine. But in the past week or two it's gotten | way better: my packet loss went from 2% to 0.6%. Details here: | https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2021/07/20/starlink-improve... | MetaWhirledPeas wrote: | > But ultimately Dishy needs a clear view to the north and | there's no getting around it. | | I don't know much about radio or Starlink's signals, but is | this a situation where a strategically-placed radio reflector | would help? Assuming those are a thing. So like, a reflector | mounted on both sides of a large tree. Are the signal beams too | narrow for this to matter? | detritus wrote: | huh. perhaps I'm exhibiting my total ignorance here, but why do | they have to point North? | | I know that our Satellite TV dish when I was a kid had to point | to a specific angle southwards, to match the geostationary | position, but I'd not expect that with Starlink, unless you | were in the Falklands or Antarctica, or something? | mzkply wrote: | North is where all the satellites cluster as they reach the | peak latitude of their orbit period: | https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp- | content/uploads/2019/02/190208-s... | NelsonMinar wrote: | First to clarify; Starlink points north in the northern | hemisphere. | | Your satellite TV dish is talking to something 36,000km up in | geosynchronous orbit, around the equator. That's to the south | of you. | | Starlink are in 550km orbits moving very fast around the | planet in a fairly inclined orbit. As another commenter has | said, the apparent effect is the cluster tends to "hang out" | in the north. It's complicated, a good visualization should | help explain it. I don't have one at my fingertips. | detritus wrote: | Mm, i appreciate the basics there, but if you look at the | spread of satellites against latitude (eg | https://satellitemap.space/ ), it's pretty consistent so | without any outside reason, I'd expect the Starlink dish to | simply point up across most of the world, away from the | poles. | | coder543's answer elsewhere here seems to furnish the | remainder of my confusion. | NelsonMinar wrote: | Maybe this picture helps? | https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/wp- | content/uploads/2020/06/s... | | The radius at a northern latitude is smaller than at the | equator, so the satellites are more tightly clustered. | | I think coder543's answer is wrong, or at least has the | causality backwards. Those geosync orbits are very, very | far away from the LEO orbits of Starlink. | detritus wrote: | I'm assuming that at 550 miles up, the beneath-the- | horizon range will be quite broad, but as equally, I'd | assume further-off satellites to be slower and more | conflicted, given the density and interference presumably | increases. | | I just don't see how - sans external requirement - | pointing up isn't more efficient. | | - ed. Ok, sorry, I get it. Aim in any direction and you | have access to more satellites, even if further away. | Pointing up isn't 180o access. Reception is probably less | than 90o, I guess? My bad, I'm dumb. | NelsonMinar wrote: | It's OK, orbits are confusing. We all know in our hearts | the earth is flat. | coder543 wrote: | It's a purposeful choice to avoid interfering with radio | bandwidth allocations to existing geostationary satellites. | As I understand it, Starlink dishes aren't allowed to send | signals to a portion of the sky around the equator where the | geostationary satellites are located. | | Starlink would probably work even better if they didn't have | to deal with this restriction, but Starlink might not have | been allowed to exist if they didn't design it to work this | way. | detritus wrote: | Huh. I had no idea, but makes a lot of sense, thinking | about it. | | Thanks! | jgrodziski wrote: | I'm one of the few client here in France for a few days. I moved | from Paris to a quite isolated area (Vercors mountains) with only | ADSL (no mobile coverage), and it's night and day, I now get | between 100 Mbps and 200 mbps with 30/40 ms latency... I don't | have a lot of time with the service to give an exhaustive | feedback, but for the moment I'm able to do video conferencing | and call perfectly. And the setup experience is great! | 0x0000000 wrote: | > Starlink uses CGNAT | | This is why I'm cancelling my subscription (though I have the | privilege of multiple terrestrial providers in my area). For what | Starlink charges, they shouldn't be using CGNAT. It's not an | Internet connection if I can't get anything inbound. | only_as_i_fall wrote: | I dislike Elon Musk as much as anyone but I think it's becoming | clear that starlink could turn out to be a very good idea. | | What I haven't seen anyone do and something I'd be very | interested to see is a comparison of the relative environmental | costs of so many starlink launches in contrast to the building | and upkeep of last mile connections to the backbone. | runarberg wrote: | idk. It could turn out to be a very bad idea | (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome). And it still | hasn't proven it self to be better then traditional | infrastructure. The last mile connection problem can much | easier be solved with a 5G tower then a constellation of | satellites. | hungryforcodes wrote: | Additionally, I'm not sure how great it will be for air | quality if we have thousands and thousands of satellites | burning up in the atmosphere over the next few decades. I | certainly don't want to be breathing in vaporized satellite | ash. Your point about 5G is well made. | anchpop wrote: | It's probably not zero, but I imagine the effect on air | quality is completely miniscule compared to things like | millions of ICE cars driving around or the wildfires on the | west coast. Additionally I think they burn up in the upper | atmosphere, which makes it less likely for the particles to | end up in your breathing air (compared to cars which emit | their waste at ankle level right outside your doorstep) | only_as_i_fall wrote: | Also the rocket used to launch each satellite has ejected | more than 20x the mass of its payload as burnt rocket | fuel by the time it reaches orbit. | only_as_i_fall wrote: | Is that ash in any way different than the many thousands of | tons of meteoroids and dust that enters from space each | year? | only_as_i_fall wrote: | These satellites are low enough that they will deorbit | themselves within 5 years without periodic boosting | NDizzle wrote: | My Starlink experience has gotten a lot better recently. In the | past few months. | | I'm in rural Arkansas, near the southern edge of the rollout | still I believe. I have maintained 3 ISPs this whole time. I have | an EM160R LTE modem that will do 5x carrier aggregation and pulls | around 240-250 mbit from my local AT&T tower. I also have | T-Mobile's 4g home internet (5g works here on my phone, but they | won't give me the home internet for whatever reason) which pulls | 100-115 mbit. Starlink itself is somewhere between 180 and 240 | down, but only 15 up. On the ATT line I can get 40-60 mbit | upload, and that's one of the main reasons I keep things set up | this way. | | I'm about to try disabling the wan port for T-Mobile to see what | it's like without that ISP. I don't do any connection bonding - | straight up round robin load balancing with no stickyness, and | with the amount of servers and services that use multiple TCP | streams I can see 300+mbit downloads often. Pings range from 30 | (when using Starlink) to 90. (when using one of the LTE | connections) | | I no longer game enough to comment on it. My kids play Roblox and | PS4 online games and don't whine about it, so I think it's | sufficient. | | I don't really do Zoom meetings. MS Teams is what we use. I don't | use the camera very often, but the calls will pause and drop and | the people I work with have coined this as, "being Starlinked". | Usually a few seconds and rarely does it take an actual redial to | reconnect anymore. Just a dead period. | driverdan wrote: | If you get 250Mb from AT&T why bother with the others? | soheil wrote: | > Most well-known apps like Netflix, FaceTime, and Zoom, handled | things well without any incident. It was really the apps and | services that are obviously outsourced. | | Not sure why he threw in outsourced there, but ok. I know this | could be as simple as using the right library for your video chat | app, but at a low level how is something like this achieved? If I | establish a tcp connection with a handshake and everything and my | internet connection drops or IP is changed the tcp connection | gets terminated. Other than using udp is there a way to keep the | tcp connection going when the IP address changes without having | to establish a new connection, which takes non-trivial amount of | time? | geerlingguy wrote: | The reason I threw that in is because I've personally worked on | a few of these apps, and also some of the backing APIs the apps | consumed. | | I know first-hand that many of the ones that suffer from weird | and annoying quirks would be a thousand times better if they | had any reliable QA process (most don't), and were run by teams | that were invested in the company's success. | | Outsourced doesn't only mean 'to other countries', but in many | cases to consultancies, since for some strange reason many | media companies don't see their apps as being a core | competency, so they farm it out, and the results are always | 2nd-tier at best. | orzig wrote: | This is an exceptionally good review, and (well small in the | grand scheme of the worlds problems) a beautiful example of how a | passionate happiest can sure goodness with the world. Thank you | this is an exceptionally good review, and (while small in the | grand scheme of the worlds problems) a beautiful example of how a | passionate hobbiest can sure goodness with the world. Thank you! | dougmwne wrote: | It's sort of mentioned, but not emphasized in this review that | connection dropouts happen every few minutes for a few seconds. | That makes starlink fine for any kind of asynchronous content | like web browsing, torrenting or video streaming, but unusable | for video calls, stream hosting, voip, or online gaming. It's | implied that this is due to the trees obstructing a full view of | the sky, but I have actually heard these connection dropouts are | just about universal due to the constellation not having enough | infill. Just a warning that for most of us we are still several | hundred satellites short and some connection handoff updates away | from this being a useful internet connection. | | I have a property where Starlink would be perfect and I would pay | triple the price to be able to do zoom calls over the connection. | dataflow wrote: | > That makes starlink fine for any kind of asynchronous content | like web browsing | | This sounds terrible for web browsing. Last thing I want is to | know is to submit a form and then have my connection drop out | in the middle. Imagine being in the middle of filling out an | application or opening an account or verifying your identity or | something like that. | geerlingguy wrote: | If the connection drops for less than 5-10 seconds (this | happens even on my Cable Internet sometimes), it's no | problem. Most timeouts and TCP connections are okay with | complete dropouts for 30 or 60 seconds (sometimes longer), as | long as your local LAN doesn't drop your network connection. | dataflow wrote: | Doesn't that depend on the nature of the "drop"? When it's | just lack of signal then sure, but when I see connections | break even momentarily (on cable...), there's often some | sort of feedback (I think sometimes it's a connection | reset?) that causes the browser to just error immediately, | and then I have to reload the page... despite still being | on the same network with the same IPs and such. | lazide wrote: | That is because of the way your connection is being | dropped/what your router is doing. It's sending reset | messages back to your client telling it your connection | is dead, instead of trying to resend your packets - which | then succeed when the connection is back up. | dataflow wrote: | That's a possibility in theory; I haven't root-caused | this to know what's happening in every case (again: not | every drop is the same). Regardless, I'm just talking | about what the average end-user might see; I don't really | care where the blame goes. | boringg wrote: | As a user of Starlink for more than 4 months - the quality has | improved. While you say it is unusable for video calls, i think | that is way overstated and it completely depends on where you | are trying to connect. | | Compared to the other options which were atrocious (10 MB down | max, 3 MB Up max, weather changes everything) - the hiccup you | get maybe every 10 minutes for 10 seconds - is annoying but not | a deal breaker for VOIP calls. If you are doing client side | calls maybe a deal breaker - team calls manageable but | annoying. Also I do calls with our Australian team (and were | North America based) and they are on cable internet and they | get hiccuped in the same amount. So actually I would say that | Starlink is on par if not better than their connection. | | If you are comparing the internet to city quality cable then | yeah not comparable - but thats not what they are targeting. | They are bringing remote areas online. | dougmwne wrote: | Yeah, different call quality requirements I think. I am | mostly on client calls and I have a ready alternative to be | on fiber. If I head out to my place in the country and have | crappy call quality as a result, that does not go over so | well. | geerlingguy wrote: | To be honest, one-on-one Facetime calls and Zoom are almost | perfect now, with few bits where it would pause and come | back. Group calls were even less of a problem, because we're | all used to one or two people having connection issues, and | it's easy to work around that. | epmaybe wrote: | Obviously latency is important in synchronous use cases like | video calls, however I wonder if a delay for slower one on one | discussions would be all that jarring for users | fastaguy88 wrote: | As Geerling points out, he has substantial obstructions. I have | no obstructions, and see a few seconds of downtime per day. My | wife and I regularly have multi-hour zoom calls with no | problems. | | Obstructions are a problem, but users with no alternative are | much more motivated to locate the dish appropriately. | | Starlink is not for people who have gigabit wired connections. | For those of us who were lucky to get a hotspot to work long | enough to use our 15Gb cap, it is a godsend. | NelsonMinar wrote: | The outages have been getting better recently. They are | supposed to go away entirely once the first constellation is | fully complete. If you don't have obstructions, that is. | tylerscott wrote: | I use it for zoom daily. Yesterday was the first day in awhile | where I had difficulty completing a call. The handoffs now last | only about a second or two. Previously they'd be 15 or so | seconds but that hasn't happened for over a month. It is my | daily driver though I do have back up DSL just in case. | chollida1 wrote: | > It's sort of mentioned, but not emphasized in this review | that connection dropouts happen every few minutes for a few | seconds. That makes starlink fine for any kind of asynchronous | content like web browsing, torrenting or video streaming, but | unusable for video calls, stream hosting, voip, or online | gaming | | Yep, been our experience as well. We've got a few of us who | wanted to trade from our cottages and its just unusable if you | need a continuous signal for more than 10 minutes at a time. | | That doesn't mean its useless, just that its not usable if you | want to do voip, trading, video calls etc. | | Hopefully they'll figure out what causes drop ever few minutes | at some point. But currently given how expensive it and the | hardware are its a very disappointing product. | | I guess we're just spoiled now a days with the 1Gbps wired | internet that most city homes have access to. | foobiekr wrote: | When these dropouts occur, is the IP address stable? | pomian wrote: | Yes. We have the drops also. But they are happening less, | and for only a blink. In the worst case, we experience a | freeze frame. Most of the time can barely see the freeze. | pomian wrote: | That was the feeling a few months ago. But in the last 2 | months, we have used zoom and other applications with very | little drop outs. I have various TV stations running for hours | at a time at high resolutions, and at the most there is a | freeze frame for a split second once or twice every few hours. | Frankly, I have had more issues with all the other internet | connections we still maintain, than with Starlink. (Zoom was | always dropping out with the others.) For example we have: | (Slow) high speed DSL, (slow) high speed lte. In all those the | internet download speeds are very variable, start fast (5-12) | dropping to 0.5-1 and going up and down over time. Starlink | maintains over 20 down, going up sometimes to over 30. We are | in the countryside in Canada, so true high speed doesn't exist. | For now, Starlink is the most dependable high speed option. | (What will happen when more subscribers will join all on the | one satellite?) | jdc wrote: | It may be that anyone who is willing and able to do so has | already thought of it, but on Linux you could multiplex the | connection with LTE/3G/dialup and probably get pretty good | results. | [deleted] | shagie wrote: | > It's implied that this is due to the trees obstructing a full | view of the sky, but I have actually heard these connection | dropouts are just about universal due to the constellation not | having enough infill. | | If you go to https://satellitemap.space/# and enter in your GPS | location in the settings (45, -90 for a rural northern | Wisconsin as an example), and you can see the satellites that | that location has visibility of. | | And there are times when there's nothing in that area of the | sky. | agildehaus wrote: | https://starlink.sx/ can generate a coverage prediction chart | for you | chrisseaton wrote: | > It's implied that this is due to the trees obstructing a full | view of the sky | | Why is the antenna on the ground and not up on a tall mast? | geerlingguy wrote: | Mine is mounted near the top of my roof's ridge. The problem | is there are 8 trees (five of them more than 75') around my | one-story house. | JasonFruit wrote: | It certainly can be on a mast; I put mine on a (short) steel | tube mast, and it's been a great improvement on service that | was already a vast improvement over Hughesnet-provided | satellite. | brummm wrote: | Had a team mate on Starlink and they would drop from our zoom | call essentially every single time. | ToFab123 wrote: | How long is that ago? | JulianMorrison wrote: | I would expect that won't stay a problem for long, they're | still pouring those things up there. | fossuser wrote: | It works with video calls, I've done it often. | | Occasional blips occur, but the call isn't dropped (and this is | with some tree obstruction). | | So it's worth just getting it if that's what you want it for. | It's probably 10x better than your existing connection. | bin_bash wrote: | I hope that the problem really is due to lack of infill because | that means it'll be temporary. | gibolt wrote: | For the remote areas this is intended for, it is already a 10x | or more improvement. Great internet service is better than | perfectly reliable slow internet. | geerlingguy wrote: | Honestly when I first got the dish, and had it in an open | field, that was the case--but now the momentary dropouts | between satellites are less than 1-2 seconds. | | They had 1000 or so satellites when I first started testing, | and there are now something like 1600 or so. Most of the time, | I don't even notice when it switches satellites. | | If you were doing some more real-time work or extremely | latency-sensitive operations, then yes, you need to stick to a | different type of connection. But it's really seamless now, | compared to even a few months ago. | | Most of the software I used either showed no sign of the | dropout, or at worst would freeze a frame or show a loading | indicator for a brief moment before getting back to normal. | | Online multiplayer gaming and/or streaming are the main areas | where I'd have to not recommend Starlink for now. | taf2 wrote: | I'm thinking of using this for a backup connection if FIOS | fails... we'd switch our office over to starlink... currently | we switch to comcast and it's basicaly unsable... so wonder | if starlink would be good for ssh connections etc... | wil421 wrote: | I'd fix the Comcast problem before switching over to | something that is pretty much guaranteed to have drop offs | at this point in time. | | There are also devices that will give you a cellular LTE | backup like the U-LTE from UniFi. I've heard the plans are | a bit pricey. | | https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi- | accessories/products/... | solarengineer wrote: | When I connect to remote servers over SSH, I usually start | a screen (another alternative is tmux) session and then | perform my administrative and diagnostics actions in that | session. This way, even if I get disconnected, I can | reconnect and join that running session. There are other | benefits to a screen multiplexer - such as multiple remote | users being able to attach to the same session, a joy when | a distributed team needs to diagnose an issue or watch some | actions together. | jefftk wrote: | Combine with mosh and you can even keep editing while the | connection blips! | iotku wrote: | You may also want to look into mosh [1] as it will handle | dropouts and continue where ssh would just fail on its | own. Also has local echo for points of high latency. | | Was a real life saver on some of the terrible sat | connections of yesteryear. | | 1. https://mosh.org/ | aruggirello wrote: | How does it compare to autossh? | wffurr wrote: | autossh just re-reestablishes your ssh connection. It | doesn't tolerate packet loss very well or have local echo | like mosh. | | mosh does require UDP ports, though, which might be | problematic with some firewalls or proxies. | starfallg wrote: | Mosh is great, but if you don't need the predictive | terminal emulation, then you can try Eternal Terminal, | which is easier to get running due to not needed an UDP | port open. | taf2 wrote: | yeah i use screen for everything too... still there are | times when a connection dropping is a bit scary... | olyjohn wrote: | I work from home on Starlink. My SSH sessions work just | fine. When I first got the service, it was dropping quite a | lot, but even then SSH worked pretty well. But these days, | if there are any drops, I can't tell. The improvements in | the last few months have been massive. I am even about to | drop my land line, because WiFi calling on my cell phone | has been nearly perfect. It works better than my cell phone | does when I am in a good service area. | HWR_14 wrote: | If you live somewhere with FiOS, Starlink is going to be a | non-starter. FiOS requires high density. High density kills | Starlink connections. | | I suppose Starlink can support a small, negligible, | percentage of customers in an urban (or even suburban) | area. (Same total number as a rural area.) So, if you think | they are going to cutoff registrations as oppose to | oversubscribe when they hit that point you may want to sign | up right away. | freeopinion wrote: | I'm not sure if you are using FiOS as a synonym for FTTH. | If so, you might be interested to know I live somewhere | with FTTH that is reasonably low-density (~25-30 people | per sq km). I think Starlink will be a very serious | consideration here. | HWR_14 wrote: | When I say FiOS, I'm thinking gigabit+ FTTH/FTTD (I'm not | 100% sure of the difference). Given that you quoted | people per sq km (about 70-84 people per sq. mile), | you're probably not in the US. In the US, it's hard to | get fiber outside of areas with the high density I'm | quoting (at least in my experience). | | But yes, that density seems fine for Starlink (although | maybe it isn't in the end, who knows yet.) | freeopinion wrote: | My understanding is that StarLink is aiming for 100M un- | guaranteed in beta. So that's considerably below gigabit. | | But I also know that most households with FTTH around | here use considerably less than 50M. | | So perhaps you meant that gigabit internet kills | Starlink. FTTH has some advantages over Starlink. But | Starlink also has advantages over FTTH. If you need more | than 100M, Starlink is not in the game yet. But if you | want some leverage with the local monopoly and have | typical usage... | | Or, if you snowbird (common case here) and want the same | provider on the border of Canada and the border of | Mexico... | HWR_14 wrote: | I wasn't referring to the speed (although obviously fiber | has higher speed and reliability, and that will likely | never change). I was referring to the fact that it seems | like if you have the population density (in the US, at | least in my knowledge) to justify a local ISP rolling out | fiber to homes, you have a population density that will | oversubscribe even the completed Starlink constellation | (locally). Starlink just is never going to work in NYC or | SF or areas with significantly less density there. | Although it may work for a lucky few who manage to enroll | before the area is full and locked down. | driverdan wrote: | LTE makes a lot more sense if you have a decent signal. The | cost is lower and speeds are comparable in many areas if | you have good hardware. | IgorPartola wrote: | I have five different Wi-Fi APs on my property. The handoff | between them results in roughly 40-60ms dropout. That still | interrupts audio calls. 1-2 seconds is huge. | dougmwne wrote: | Yeah, I am on lots of video and audio calls for work. 1-2 | second drops while doing a client presentation are | absolutely not ok. | jbluepolarbear wrote: | I'm a multiplayer developer and I'm waiting to get a Starlink | to test on (I have tested a few times on my moms). I want to | makes games tolerate of the latency and instability of | Starlink. Mobile networks deal with similar issues so I think | it's possible to make games with Starlink in mind. | lordofgibbons wrote: | I believe these kinds of latency and dropped packet issues | be easily simulated on a normal PC without the need for a | Starlink connection | funkaster wrote: | exactly. Just use charles proxy (or mitmproxy) and ask it | to drop packets/throttle the connection. No need to wait | for starlink. | wtallis wrote: | Most tools for simulating latency and packet loss locally | are a pretty poor model of the kinds of behavior | encountered on real networks. In particular, latency due | to bufferbloat rather than speed of light delays is | extremely important to simulate, but not well-supported | by many tools. | jbluepolarbear wrote: | I do simulate these conditions, but there's no | replacement for real world condition testing. | tigershark wrote: | I'm not sure if it's an endeavour worth taking honestly.. | Starlink is still in beta, and once they can use starship | to launch the satellites (hopefully somewhere next year) | the launch capability will increase to 400 satellites | compared to 60 on falcon 9. At that point they will be | limited just by the satellites build throughput, so they | will reach the 11k coverage very quickly. | jbluepolarbear wrote: | I'm already getting a Starlink and I have one available | to test on at my parents house so I think it's worth it. | I'm also evaluating it as a way for me to move closer to | my family. I'm stuck in Portland because I require really | good internet as I'm a 100% remote game dev working on | multiplayer games. And the only option in Albany is | really bad and expensive Comcast service. | ajklsdhfniuwehf wrote: | > They had 1000 or so satellites when I first started | testing, and there are now something like 1600 or so. Most of | the time, I don't even notice when it switches satellites. | | Enjoy the early adopter moment. Even if they keep increasing | the numbers, they will probably move those new satellites in | a much wider net to cover more subscribers the second they | must show a profit. | Robotbeat wrote: | They are planning to increase the number of satellites by | an order of magnitude. They're launching extremely fast | with Falcon 9, and prepping Starship for launch as well, | which has 5-10 times the payload. May see Starlink launches | on Starship join Falcon9 within a year or so. | | So the opposite is true. They're likely to massively | increase the number of satellites. | | If you want to argue the per user bandwidth might be | different than for early users, that's somewhat more | plausible. But the number of satellites will increase. They | can't actually significantly change the inclination of the | satellites once launched as it takes an insane amount of | propellant, and even for solar electric thrusters, so your | concern about them moving the satellites to other orbits is | very unlikely. | zizee wrote: | > Even if they keep increasing the numbers, they will | probably move those new satellites in a much wider net | | The only way to make a wider net whilst simultaneously | adding satellites would be to raise the altitude of the | satellites, which I am fairly certain is not possible for | the existing satellites. | [deleted] | bugfix wrote: | What about an SSH connection? Do you have to reconnect when | it switches satellites? | geerlingguy wrote: | No, the connection seems to be paired up through the ground | station, so I wouldn't get disconnected via SSH. Mosh may | be a better option if you want to make it feel rock solid | though. | jbluepolarbear wrote: | My mom has been using Starlink in Albany, OR for 2 months. It | started spotty, but now works better than her other Comcast | connection. The only issue is that every day at 7ish they lose | connection for about 5 minutes. She's said it's not been a huge | issue and plans to cancel her Comcast at the end of her | contract. She works remote and Starlink has been great for | video calls and video streaming. She's getting 30-40 down and | 20-30 ms latency; Comcast is 20 down and 25 ms latency. | Reason077 wrote: | > _" It's sort of mentioned, but not emphasized in this review | that connection dropouts happen every few minutes for a few | seconds."_ | | He mentions that this is due to the Starlink dish's view of the | sky being partially obscured by trees. | | This will presumably improve as the number of Starlink | satellites grows, as it will be more likely that there will be | an unobstructed satellite in view at any moment, and less | frequent switching between satellites. | CydeWeys wrote: | And he also mentions that if this were his only Internet, he | would trim the tree branches to get a better view of the sky. | That's not what I'd do though; I'd put the satellite dish on | a radio mast. Anyone who's ever done any kind of radio work | knows that antenna height is everything, and in his specific | case it's important for a different reason: avoiding line-of- | sight obstructions. | imhoguy wrote: | Maybe mounting the dish to tree would save your trees? | https://asadotzler.com/2021/03/11/starlinks-view-of-the- | sky/ | | https://asadotzler.com/2021/03/13/starlink-tree-mount/ | robocat wrote: | I mounted a point-to-point link in a tree at either end. | | 1. Trees sway. It did matter for the PtP link in my case. | | 2. Installation and maintenance took time and it was | dangerous. | | 3. Leaves and branches grow. Obstruction and misalignment | over time were problems. | | Advantages: it did work, and it was cheap and fun to do. | I probably could not have installed a tall enough mast | (too ugly to be accepted). | ClumsyPilot wrote: | Repending on height of the mast, it could be more expensive | than the rest of your setup combined | manquer wrote: | trimming trees is a recurring activity, it might be | expensive over time depending on type of trees and access | etc | olyjohn wrote: | Yeah holy shit. The dude has obstructions and then writes a | review about it? It's like putting bad gas in your car, then | writing a review about how bad it was... Admittedly getting | rid of the obstructions was a TON of work. It took me a few | weeks of moving my dish around, and fiddling around with | different mounts and options. I even topped a tree. But once | I got rid of the obstructions, the service improved | dramatically. Now with the launches that we have had of new | satellites and other updates, I don't see hardly any drops at | all. The most common annoyance with mine right now is the | router/dish crashing. This happens maybe once every two | weeks. Not much worse than the shitty Comcast-supplied modem. | My next step is to use my own router and I think that'll take | care of a lot of it. | freedomben wrote: | I get the crashes every week or so too and I use my own | router. I think it's the firmware in the dish. | mapt wrote: | Partial obstructions are not going to be rare for | customers. While not a best-case review, this is arguably a | more authentic review. | jjeaff wrote: | Zoom handles intermittent dropouts better than anything else I | have seen and I don't quite understand the whole mechanism. | | When you lose a connection for a few seconds, maybe even 10 | seconds, the video will pause, but when your connection | reconnects, it continues where it paused. So you don't miss | anything. I believe at some point when the speaker stops | talking, like waiting for a response, it will jump cut their | video to a more live feed again. So that you don't get too far | behind. | | I'm curious if anyone here knows about how this works and if it | is common practice in live video chat? | chromakode wrote: | WebRTC adjusts playback speed to accommodate variable network | latency. Here's a paper which describes it a bit. | | https://www.isca- | speech.org/archive/PQS_2016/abstracts/19.ht... | xoa wrote: | > _but not emphasized in this review that connection dropouts | happen every few minutes for a few seconds_ | | I don't see this at all. I have constant uptime monitoring, and | connection drops are now a minute or two per week. We use it | for VoIP, there is no cellular coverage at all where I have it | deployed. | | _Edit_ : Also, I mentioned this in my fuller main comment but | this is around the 45th parallel in New England, and around | 1500' (500m) above sea level. This location is also within | approximately 50-70 miles ground level of two separate Starlink | ground station installations. The nature of Starlink is that | there is much more of a geographic component than most people | are used to in a WAN link, so it's probably important when | talking experience to specify rough area of the world one is | in. Once the network is completely built up that may not matter | much anymore, but at this point there are definite coverage | density differences, and with the current bent-pipe usage | ground stations matter too more. Anyone interested in getting | an idea of current planetary station and sat deployments might | find this site interesting: | | https://satellitemap.space/ | robscallsign wrote: | I'm in Ontario, Canada, 46.5 degrees latitude and typing this on | Starlink. | | Even with the occasional dropouts Starlink is 10-100x better than | any other option that we have here (the only options are LTE, or | other satellites, like xplornet). | | Even though we're only a few minutes drive from a municipality of | 160,000 people and on a major highway, there, is no wired | connection, and doesn't really seem likely that a wired | connection will ever happen. Since moving here 7 years ago the | pricing/data rates for the LTE data packages available have | doubled in price. Literally doubled. | | With Covid we had two adults working from home, and two kids home | schooling, on a slow LTE connection with a total bandwidth of | 100GB up/down. Even things like windows updates required planning | and rationing of the internet. | | The state of connectivity in Canada is so abysmal. At this point | I hope Starlink matures enough to add a voice service. | JulianMorrison wrote: | I recall reading that Starlink orbits below the usual level that | other satellites are at, so they shouldn't be too much of a | threat for Kessler syndrome. | qayxc wrote: | They still are. The lower orbit only means that the satellites | themselves deorbit within a few decades at most. | | Debris from a collision, however, goes every which way | including higher orbits and can still damage other spacecraft. | | The satellites in geostationary orbits will stay up there for | millions of years, but there's _much_ more room between them | and there 's orders of magnitude fewer of them. | cblconfederate wrote: | how much available bandwidth can starlink support? I thought the | primary users would be remote users, or mobile users or sailboats | but apparently people here are considering it an alternative to | cables | sudhirj wrote: | Each satellite supports 20GBPS, from what I've read. So if you | have an exclusive lock on one satellite, and that has a | direct/exclusive route to a ground station, that's probably a | theoretical max. | lmilcin wrote: | Starlink is supposed to operate 30k satellites, and it currently | has something around 1,5k (correct me if I am wrong). | | What this means is we can expect that in future obstructions will | be much less of a problem, because there will be much better | chance that at any point in time there will be a satellite on | visible part of the sky. | | Also, I think, main reason of Starlink is to have access | _anywhere_ , even in extremely remote areas. I think some | inconvenience is expected and fair. I don't expect Starlink is | going to replace a traditional broadband -- for that it will | never have the bandwidth necessary. | tsimionescu wrote: | That 30k / 42k number is mostly Musk lies. It's very unlikely | to ever happen given the size of the market, the cost of | launches, and the short lifetime of satellites in LEO. | | Basically, they would have to constantly launch significantly | more satellites than they do today to ever maintain a 30-40k | satellite network in LEO. And even Musk estimates like 500k | customers - this would basically mean 1 satellite for every | 10-20 customers, once every few years. There is no way for that | to make economic sense. | | My prediction is that they will stop somewhere around the | current number of satellites, in fact. At the very most, they | might triple the current number. | sschueller wrote: | I am curious how long Startlink will remain in beta. Looking at | FSD at Tesla it has always been in beta and will probably never | leave beta. The next question is if it is acceptable to sell a | product to customers that will never be what it was promised to | be. So in essence I sell a promise of a product but never really | deliver since you know, it's still beta. | ecpottinger wrote: | Ask Microsoft first. As far as I can tell Windows 7 was they | first 'good' OS since DOS. | spaetzleesser wrote: | That title should go to Windows 2000. I still miss it. | ceejayoz wrote: | Getting FSD out of beta requires significant technological | advances. | | Getting Starlink out of beta, to oversimplify a _bit_ , mostly | just requires more launches. | stickfigure wrote: | Even if it never advanced beyond its current state, Starlink | would still be a massive improvement over what I have now. My | internet looks like the "farm" example in the article, and I'm | only a 1:15 drive to downtown SF. I'll take it, beta or not. | GuB-42 wrote: | Starlink in beta does exactly what it is supposed to do: you | get internet, and possibly with a better connection than in the | final version, because of the limited number of users. | | With FSD beta, the car doesn't fully drives itself. | | I have absolutely no problem with the first scenario. It is not | available to everyone, but for those who do, they get what they | pay for. The second is more dubious, you don't get what you | paid for, but promise, later, you will. | ClumsyPilot wrote: | If starlink doesn't satisfy, you can stop paying them or get | a refund. | | If the autopilot kills you, the market doesnt have a | mechanism to make you whole again. | matz1 wrote: | It shouldn't matter if they called beta forever or whatever. | | As consumer you should never believe what the company promise | anyway. | | I would evaluate it myself or refer to trusted third party | reviewer based on what it can actually do right now not what it | may become. | dylan604 wrote: | Maybe beta is just part of the name that we've all just | misunderstood the meaning of? Maybe the next version will be | called BetaMax | matz1 wrote: | yes assume its just a part of name. | bussierem wrote: | In specific to Tesla: they have found that this exact business | model works astonishingly well with their customer base, so I | can't imagine they'll have any reason to stop without some kind | of backlash to their bottom line. | | RE: the problem in general, I don't have any specific answer, | but this also relates directly to the "Early Access" program | that Steam and games in general have, along with the whole "Day | 1 DLC" that may or may not be there for you. It's becoming | pretty endemic to our society and I do think it's just because | _it works incredibly well_ on us. | dylan604 wrote: | Day 1 DLC is a consequence of spinning shiny discs is it not? | They have to finalize a version to send to disc manufacturing | months in advance of actual release date just like any | typical physical goods manufacturing/distribution. There's | clearly lots of work that can and is done on the code during | that shiny disc making period. So it stands to reason that | what ever the code is on the shiny disc once released is so | antiquated it is not even worth the plastic is stamped in. | | Do digital release only games suffer from Day 1 DLC like | this? I'm not a gamer, so I have no experience with this. | wongarsu wrote: | It's a great funding strategy: sell the MVP to get the funds | to develop the full product (either directly or by showing | the product is worth dedicating resources to). It also | enables the most important element from agile development: | early and frequent feedback from all stakeholders. | | Imagine an alternative world SpaceX had launched a fleet of | rockets to bring the constellation up in a couple days while | shipping receivers to customers; only to then find out that | the satellites reflect too much light and the receivers are | too temperate sensitive. The slow beta program is just the | better development approach | piptastic wrote: | Google was one of the frontrunners, Gmail was in beta for 5 | years | jacquesm wrote: | And still doesn't support fractional word search. | eplanit wrote: | And feels like it still is. | Retric wrote: | StarLink hasn't even filled enough of their constellation for | global coverage so calling it beta is quite reasonable. Many | major features are still missing such as the ability to use | StarLink with RV's. If they still call it beta in 5 years then | sure, but for now customers should realize it's not ready to be | their only form of internet access. | | FSD isn't ready either. I don't know if it will ever be but as | much as people harp on their marking of self driving, calling | it beta is more realistic. | stingraycharles wrote: | Tesla and Starlink / SpaceX are two entirely different | businesses. FSD is a feature of a car, where Starlink is an | entire business -- it's not just an "experimental feature", | it's an entire business out of itself. | | Secondly, FSD having bugs could cause actual deaths, which is | not the case for Starlink. | | I would be surprised if Starlink would still be in beta in | 2023. | josefx wrote: | > Secondly, FSD having bugs could cause actual deaths, which | is not the case for Starlink. | | One of the issues reported with Starlink in its current state | seems to be overheating receivers. If those where buggy you | would have a few burned down houses instead of complaints | about unreliable internet in the summer due to automatic | shutdown. | stingraycharles wrote: | Don't these satellites evaporate in the atmosphere before | they reach the ground? | josefx wrote: | You need a specialized receiver / satellite dish on the | ground to connect with them. | stingraycharles wrote: | That's fair enough, but I still don't consider it as | problematic as autonomous driving; it's more the | equivalent of a microwave overheating, and it's fairly | easy to build in a fail safe for this. As a matter of | fact, as far as I understand, the receivers actually shut | down when they overheat. | | This problem is not nearly as big as solving autonomous | driving, in terms of "how to prevent deaths". | stefan_ wrote: | Why on earth would you continue this test when the app already | tells you about one third of the dishs FoV is obstructed? | | It's impossible to tell what part of this is a meaningful result | and what is just a broken setup. | panzagl wrote: | Oddly enough rural areas have a lot of trees too, so reporting | on a non-optimal setup is very valuable. | parksy wrote: | One thing that caught me as interesting about the article was the | obstruction map and what could be achieved with that kind of data | if it was gathered and correlated with millions of other users. I | am no expert but it seems that traditional observation from space | has always been limited by the resolution from up on high. Flip | the problem and have ground-based observers in densely populated | areas track shadows in a rotating grid of point sources in the | sky, and you can build a 3d map outwards instead, the only | problem being how to increase the density, consistency, and | spread of the ground-based sensor array. | kalefranz wrote: | Real-time visualization of the Starlink constellation: | | https://satellitemap.space/ | dylan604 wrote: | That's interesting to see with knowing that just a fraction of | the planned constellation is there. That's a lot of dots | already. I'm guessing that the few visible string of dots are | more recent launches that haven't quite reached their final | positions yet. That's also interesting to see how long it takes | the train to not be a train any longer, while at the same time | showing how frequently new launches have been occurring. | NelsonMinar wrote: | I believe the constellation is about 90-95% complete now. The | first shell at least. There's plans for more shells but | that's for redundancy, not coverage. | mastax wrote: | I was going to comment about how surprised I was that they | almost finished the first shell without deploying laser | links but apparently they have: | https://arstechnica.com/information- | technology/2021/01/space... | scrumbledober wrote: | I think the laser interlinks are proving more difficult | than SpaceX anticipated. I had expected them much earlier | in the deployment than now, and it seems they are | currently only planning them for polar orbits. | s1artibartfast wrote: | That is a lot redundancy. Current satellite count is around | 1,600, and FCC approved plans through phase 2 would bring | that up to ~12,000 | sebzim4500 wrote: | I think they need quite a lot of satellites in polar orbits | to get coverage at the poles, and they have barely launched | any yet. They are close to 100% coverage of the rest of the | world already though. | NelsonMinar wrote: | They're doing polar launches but compared to the number | of customers in sub-70 latitudes it's a pretty small | market. | dylan604 wrote: | Well, 9/10 is still a fraction, just not as small as I | thought it was. ;-) I must have fallen behind on launches, | not realizing they were this far along. | spywaregorilla wrote: | What are the dense lines of satellites? | nomel wrote: | At least for the short lines, they're launched in batches | from one point, so they take some time to spread out to their | final orbits. These are neat to view after a launch. | SavantIdiot wrote: | Is that really how many Starlink satellites are up there? Foo. | I had no idea. | XCSme wrote: | That is honestly a lot better than I expected. I think it is a | game-changer for remote areas. You could build a house anywhere | and still have energy (solar panels) and internet (Starlink). | BugsJustFindMe wrote: | It's been a very long time since I worked with directional | radios, but it feels very weird to learn that a tree counts as a | sky obstruction significant enough to kill the signal. It's just | a tree, not a giant steel building or a mountain. Leaves are | barely there, relatively speaking. | bbarnett wrote: | I have a backup 4G modem here, and when the leaves come out on | the trees in the summer, I see a signal drop. 4 bars to 2 bars. | | The trees (forest) is line of sight between me and the only | tower. | | I presume it's all that water in the leaves. | qchris wrote: | I think that your observation of water is probably spot-on. | When it comes which RF frequencies get absorbed, with water | the answer is pretty much "yes". Combined with what I'd | imagine is some really fun scattering math tossed in, tree | cover is a pretty good bet for reducing signal quality, | especially if it's more than one. | djrogers wrote: | Leaves are mostly water, which does a good job of absorbing | 10Ghz RF. | bityard wrote: | For RF absorption, the rule of thumb is that the higher the | frequency, the more the signal is attenuated. Once you get into | the gigahertz range, things like leaves block (actually: | absorb) a huge amount of the energy. | | This is why if you have a wifi router with both 2.4 and 5 GHz | bands, the 2.4 GHz band usually has much better range. | | Visible light is in the THz spectrum which is blocked by | anything solid that isn't clear or translucent. | DanTheManPR wrote: | Is that a function of the wavelength it's using? A quick search | suggests that starlink uses 10-12ghz, are trees opaque at those | frequencies? | ecpottinger wrote: | I had a digital TV antenna in Oshawa pointed direct at the CN | Tower in Toronto, there was only one tree in my direct line of | sight, come summer when the leaves were fully developed I lost | a number of channels because the signals was not strong enough. | The tree was not on my property so I could not cut it. | varelse wrote: | I've had Starlink for about 6 months and it is a massive | improvement on upload speed at 10-25 Mb. Download speed is a | mixed bag wildly oscillating from 5 to 100 Mb and back. It's okay | for downloading things but it's terrible for any sort of video | conferencing. There are brief dropouts on average every 6 minutes | or so and my obstruction map is better than the author's. My | neighbor up the street got slightly better service by mounting | his dishy on a 20-ft antenna pole above his house. | | Local ground service is 20 Mb download and 2 Mb upload. And | that's just barely sufficient for watching streaming video and | video conferencing. Gigabit service is but a mile and a half away | but no one is going to pay to lay the fiber into our | neighborhood. So the last mile and a half is copper from 20 years | ago. I think that's going to require political will to fix and I | don't think that political will exists right now nor will it in | the near future. We could have paid $5,000 per house to lay it | ourself but our own neighborhood couldn't come to consensus on | that. Now imagine that at a national level. | | So if they just deliver 100/100 within a year or two, this is an | epic win IMO and I will cancel ground service. And if they don't | someone else will so I'm not worried. But it took Teslas to spark | the electric vehicle industry. Now there's a lot of choice. I | wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens here. | mdasen wrote: | > So if they just deliver 100/100 within a year or two, this is | an epic win | | It's unlikely that they (Starlink or someone else) will offer | symmetrical speeds. It's not that they're looking to be mean to | you. It's that uplink is harder and people use a lot more | downlink. | | Even if they dedicated as much wireless spectrum to downlink | and uplink, uplink would likely be slower. We see this on | traditional cell networks. They dedicate as much spectrum to | uplink as downlink, but their cell tower is able to better | transmit than your equipment and so the downlink becomes | faster. Even with so many more users downloading than uploading | (and causing congestion), the downlink is usually faster. | | Newer wireless networks aren't going to dedicate equal spectrum | to downlink and uplink (using time-division instead of | frequency division to separate downlink and uplink). Again, | this isn't to be mean to you. It's just a reality that people | use a lot more downlink bandwidth than uplink. Starlink isn't | immune from that reality. | | Elon Musk has already said that they should be able to hit | 500,000 customers, but that scaling to millions of customers | will be difficult. They're going to have to cap how many people | get service in an area and/or put in network management to make | sure that some users don't use up all the bandwidth from others | nearby. | | They're also going to need to focus on downlink capacity to | serve what users need. That doesn't mean unusable uplink. As | you noted, 10-25Mbps uplink is an important improvement. But | wireless internet options (including Starlink) will need to | balance that with the downlink capacity users need. | | > We could have paid $5,000 per house to lay it ourself but our | own neighborhood couldn't come to consensus on that | | Over 10 years, that's $42/mo. Over 20 years, $21/mo. That's | non-trivial if the solution to your internet woes might just be | a couple years away. It's probably one of the big reasons why | wired companies won't want to be spending money expanding | networks in suburban/rural areas. Let's say that you invest in | a network expansion and you expect to make it back over the | next 20 years. Then 3 years into your investment, Starlink, | T-Mobile, and Verizon are all offering home internet service to | your customers. Sure, your fiber network might be "better", but | that will only attract some users. Others might get a package | deal from their wireless carrier giving them a better price. | Now you go from having 90% of households to 50% of households | and the investment that you made probably won't work out. For | most people, 100Mbps is plenty. Sure, some people love the low- | ping times of fiber and love gigabit speeds. People like us | here on HN. For most people, they want to be able to use | Netflix/YouTube/Facebook/etc. and there's going to be a lot of | competition for that market. | | > Now imagine that at a national level | | Realistically, this already exists on the national level in | that we spend billions subsidizing rural connections. Starlink | is receiving lots of government money to provide rural | internet. I think a big question is whether Starlink is looking | to grow well beyond what the government will subsidize and | whether government subsidies will flow to other companies more. | I'm sure that AT&T/T-Mobile/Verizon are all looking at what | rural internet subsidies might come their way as they launch | rural home internet. | | We do have some political will to fix the situation, but it's a | very expensive situation to fix for a lot of rural areas in a | wired way. Should people in cities subsidize suburban/rural | lifestyles? As a country, we pour money into roads, low fuel | prices (even as climate change ravages the planet), rural | telecommunications, etc. If every home in your area is on 2 | acres of land, it's going to cost more to wire up the place, | it's going to cost more to get roads everywhere, it's going to | use more fuel to get from place to place. | | We do spend a lot making rural internet happen. It's just an | expensive proposition. Heck, Starlink is very expensive at a | $550 startup cost + $100/mo. That isn't cheap competition to | wired internet - and that's after large government subsidies | that might end up being $2,000 per user. Starlink has received | $900M in federal money and Elon Musk is hoping to serve 500,000 | users so that would be $1,800 per user from the government. | That's not the $5,000 your service provider wanted to extend | fiber, but it's still a lot of money. Plus, Starlink is likely | to be getting more federal money in the future (and they might | end up serving a couple million users). | | There is political will and we've spent incredible amounts of | money over many decades and continue to spend even more. It's | just hard to serve many rural areas. If one is in an area with | 5 people per square mile, that's a lot of wire for very few | users. Wireless/satellite might make the most sense since | installing one thing could serve hundreds or thousands of | users. Even 20-50 people per square mile can be a lot of work | to wire up. | | While wireless home internet is in its infancy right now, I'd | expect it to get a lot better over the next 5 years. As you | noted, your neighbor installed a 20-foot mount to get better | reception. T-Mobile Home Internet customers are rigging up | directional antennas mounted on the outside of their homes to | get better speeds. Given that people install satellite dishes | for TV, it seems very reasonable that we'll see wireless | antennas installed to offer internet service. Again, when | something is in its infancy, there are less options and it's | less fully realized. But that will change over time. | | I think the next 5 years will be an exciting time for home | internet. I don't think that Starlink is going to be doing most | of the exciting stuff and I don't think we'll see symmetrical | connections, but I think we'll see great stuff that will bring | better connections to people who need it and will bring | competition to the marketplace to prevent monopoly providers | from taking advantage of their customers. | varelse wrote: | >Over 10 years, that's $42/mo. Over 20 years, $21/mo. That's | non-trivial if the solution to your internet woes might just | be a couple years away. | | Except... The value of each house would probably increase by | $10K-$15K or so: | | "Controlling for speed, homes in CBGs where fiber is | available have a price that is about 1.3 percent more than | similar homes without fiber." | | https://realtorparty.realtor/community-outreach/rural- | outrea... | | My new neighbors are increasingly tech TLAs as the former | generation sells their homes off for 2-3x what they paid 20+ | years ago. Median house price in my neighborhood is ~$1.1M | ATM. | fastaguy88 wrote: | I think it is difficult to overestimate how much other rural | internet providers have over-promised for their federal $$. I | know that in my area (northwestern Montana), a variety of | ISP's have received rural internet funds, and it seems like a | fair bit of money has been spent on very little additional | high-speed coverage. There are many towns from 350 - 2000 | population that are under-served, even with a lot of federal | subsidy (I'm told the local telco removed internet capacity | from our town of 400 to provide it to a nearby school system. | I know that if I pay $5K to get a telephone wire to my house, | I can have dial-tone, but not internet, not because of | distance, but because of capacity limits.) Perhaps when those | ISP's applied for their grants, they simply underestimated | the costs. | | Regardless, we do have Starlink, and it is transformative. | dillondoyle wrote: | I think nearly 100% chance we'll get at least ~1T in infra | spending on the 'hard' stuff which includes broadband. But that | cost makes me wonder is it worth it when we could instead | support efforts like Starlink? | | Or build a government run version. though while lots of good | reasons to - e.g. low rates, free access for kids etc - letting | Gov own even more of our internet is probably not great. | jld89 wrote: | > But it took Teslas to spark the electric vehicle industry. | Now there's a lot of choice. I wouldn't be surprised if | something similar happens here. | | I really hope not. There are enough satellites out there, there | are already too many, space pollution is real. Maybe we can | find a better solution to this particular problem. | ncallaway wrote: | I think these LEO constellations are actually the least | concerning part of space pollution. | | There are _many_ more LEO satellites, true, but their orbital | placement is such that the satellite 's orbit naturally | decays in a few years. Which means if a satellite becomes | uncontrollable (or is destroyed in some way), the debris will | clear in a relatively short period of time. | | I'm actually much more concerned about the much smaller | number of satellites in medium and geostationary orbits, | where the decay time is decades or centuries. | | Failed satellites or debris in these orbits will take a | _very_ long time to clear, and strikes me as a much larger | concern than the larger number of LEO sats | tialaramex wrote: | This doesn't make much sense. MEO is _huge_ and GEO is only | "relatively" small because it's narrow along two of three | dimensions we care about+, which has no influence on any | debris from a collision and thus it would most likely leave | GEO altogether. | | Would a volcanic eruption in New York be very bad? Yeah, I | guess it would, but, that's not going to happen. Whereas | California has several volcanoes that - while we've no | reason to expect them to erupt this year - certainly can't | be ruled out for our lifetimes, so, makes sense to manage | that risk not worry about New York. | | + A Starlink, or a GPS bird, has a "ball of yarn" orbit, it | doesn't really matter which part of the planet it's over at | any particular time so long as we can predict where it'll | be for the near future. But the whole point of a | Geostationary satellite is its apparent fixed location in | the sky from a point on the ground. To do that it needs to | orbit at the same rate the Earth spins, limiting the | orbital radius to a tight band - and it also needs to orbit | over the equator, the result is all GEO birds are in more | or less identical orbits, just offset in time. | ncallaway wrote: | We're looking at two different axes. You're considering | "how much of the orbit is occupied". I'm looking at "how | long does a dead or destroyed satellite continue to | occupy space". | | If we have a collision that causes a significant amount | of debris in a medium earth orbit, that debris will | continue to exist for a very long time, so a wide portion | of that orbit will be unusable or dangerous. | | > Would a volcanic eruption in New York be very bad? | Yeah, I guess it would, but, that's not going to happen. | | That's fair, but I think your analogy might fall down on | the comparative risks of damaged or destroyed satellites | in LEO/MEO compared to the comparative risks of volcanic | activity in CA/NY. | | Yes, it's true that there is a larger risk of collisions | in LEO with the number of satellites operating there. And | it's true with the larger number of satellites, there are | more risks of a satellite losing control. But that | doesn't mean GEO and MEO satellites are without risk. | Just last year there was a significant risk that a GEO | satellite had the potential to explode due to a failing | battery (https://spacenews.com/directv-fears-explosion- | risk-from-sate...). | | I'm mostly interested in hedging against worst case | scenarios, and the worst case scenario for a LEO | constellation is much less problematic than the worst | case scenarios for MEO constellations. | NikolaeVarius wrote: | What is "too many" | bsdetector wrote: | > Gigabit service is but a mile and a half away but no one is | going to pay to lay the fiber into our neighborhood. So the | last mile and a half is copper from 20 years ago. I think | that's going to require political will to fix | | I imagine once Starlink is an actual choice, the telecoms will | install wireless at the end of the fiber and offer you faster, | more reliable service than Starlink. | | They don't do it now because they get your money without having | to do anything at all. | varelse wrote: | I imagine the more immediate threat is 5G internet. But | currently the reception in this neighborhood is terrible for | T-Mobile (despite their coverage map insisting otherwise) yet | one of my neighbors claims he can get 50 Mb download with an | AT&T hotspot. I have approximately zero faith in our current | ground-based providers. They are the PG&E of broadband IMO. | | Upgrading to my first 5G phone recently made voice service | work at my house but did nothing for data. | bluedino wrote: | There are too many places that don't get 5G in the first | place. | varelse wrote: | Yet unlike ground-based service in my experience, the | situation is improving with time. It took 15 years for my | old place to go from 2.4 Mb/300 kb to bidirectional Gb | and that only happened because AT&T was feeling generous | briefly in 2019 w/r to expanding service (in that case, | 400' of fiber to my cluster of houses). They stopped | expanding shortly thereafter because so many people were | in exactly the same situation that they were swamped with | requests. | turtlebits wrote: | I get around 48-56Mb down tethered to my 5G T-mobile phone. | (in the north Seattle area) | [deleted] | varelse wrote: | Same latitude, lucky to get 2 Mb in either direction. But | down in Roseburg, Oredgon I got 135 Mb/s download sitting | in a parking lot so it's not my phone. | | Edit: I just walked through the neighborhood repeatedly | invoking speed test and I can get 50 megabits at various | points. But I can't get it anywhere on my own property. | There's no real rhyme or reason that I can see as to | where it's good and to where it's bad. | driverdan wrote: | With an external antenna aimed correctly I'm sure you'd get | a much better cell signal. That may be what your neighbor | has. | | Keep in mind T-Mobile and AT&T are entirely different | providers. AT&T coverage may be better where you live. | mdasen wrote: | Starlink isn't driving the telecoms to install wireless. The | telecoms were already planning this before Starlink. | | T-Mobile Home Internet is already available to 30M households | in the US (out of around 130M households so around 20-25% of | US households). T-Mobile is looking to have 7-8M subscribers | within the next 5 years which would make them the 4th largest | ISP (behind Xfinity, Spectrum, and AT&T). Verizon is looking | to cover 50M households by the end of 2024 which is years | away, but shows that 5G home internet is coming. | | Wired home internet companies aren't avoiding installing a | wireless link at the end of their fiber out of spite. It's a | combination of who has wireless spectrum and the | technology/capacity available. If you're talking about | Xfinity or Spectrum, they don't have the wireless spectrum to | offer that. If you're talking about Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile, | they're working on it, but it takes time for the technology | and spectrum to be there to provide the capacity people | expect for a home internet connection. The recently concluded | C-Band auction means that wireless carriers are going to have | more spectrum available to provide more capacity (and they | spent nearly $100B getting it). 5G NR provides more speed and | capacity. | | If it was just out of spite, Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile would have | been offering wireless home internet for years in areas where | they had no wired network. They weren't getting the money in | places where they didn't own the local telco (which for | T-Mobile is everywhere and for Verizon/AT&T is most places). | Even when they owned the local telco, most people would be | buying cable internet. | | The problem is that home internet isn't easy. A wireless | customer probably uses 10GB of data on average. Streaming HD | Netflix is 2-3GB per hour. Home internet usage is usually an | order of magnitude higher (and can be even higher than that). | Basically, you need to increase your network capacity by at | least 10x if you're going to be signing up home internet | customers. With new technologies and spectrum, that's what | wireless carriers are doing over the next 1-5 years. | | I think that terrestrial wireless will be big in the future, | but it's not because of Starlink putting pressure on | telecoms. It's because their networks are going to be seeing | massive capacity upgrades over the next few years that will | enable it. Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile would have loved to offer | wireless home internet years ago, but the technology and | capacity simply wasn't there. I mean, they did offer home | internet years ago, but it often cost hundreds of dollars a | month and was only available in really rural areas (not just | places that might hate 20Mbps service). But new tech and | capacity gains are allowing them to offer new service. | T-Mobile is first out of the gate because it got new spectrum | earlier, but Verizon and AT&T will be following in the coming | years. | varelse wrote: | I personally don't hate 20 Mb service and I don't think it | is the problem except for streaming video. | | The problem is the metastasis of ridiculous dynamic content | that is driving up bandwidth requirements and latency and | delivering a reduced quality Internet experience in return, | not because dynamic content is intrinsically bad, but | because of how it's being utilized. | | But in both situations I've lived through recently, the | fiber has been just out of reach along main roads for some | time now. And I know a bunch of people in similar | situations on side streets where AT&T and XFinity declined | to extend service after building the infrastructure along | main roads to do exactly that. | | Anecdote: during 2019's power shut offs because of high | winds, my house lost power for 3 days, but my neighbor 25' | from me did not lose power. Seems like a similar situation | in some ways. Both of our houses were on hills served by | separate power lines less than a quarter mile from a main | road. The only qualitative difference I can think of is | that the last 200 ft to my house is below ground. | jjeaff wrote: | I don't believe that TMobile home internet is available to | 30 million households. The only numbers i can find say 30 | million people. Some announcements from T-Mobile say 20 | million households. | | But it appears to only be available to people in mid sized | cities. In other words, people that already have somewhat | acceptable internet service options. | AuryGlenz wrote: | I'm in a rural area (the nearest town's population is | about 1,000) and I know someone that has T-mobile's home | internet, fwiw. | BenjiWiebe wrote: | T-Mobile's home internet is cellular. 4G/5G. And I've | heard it's pretty good from a friend that runs a WISP. | ncallaway wrote: | > And if they don't someone else will so I'm not worried... I | wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens here. | | I'm a little worried about it. Other than Amazon's Project | Kuiper, I don't really see who else can compete. | | Unlike EVs there's not an existing industry that's doing | _mostly_ the same thing, that just needs to start offering a | new line. Running a LEO megaconstellation is extremely | different than putting up a handful of massive geostationary | satellites. I just don't see the existing satellite internet | players being able to compete. | | Frankly, it's a _massive_ investment of resources to get | started (which is true for auto manufacturers as well), but | doing it economically requires launch costs that only SpaceX is | currently able to provide. | | Nobody else wants to build a competitor to Starlink by paying | SpaceX. Which is why I think Amazon's Kuiper is the best shot | to compete--but it requires Blue Origin's New Glenn to come | online to really get the economics working. I know Amazon has | tapped ULA as a launch provider in the interim, so they'll be | able to start getting satellites up and running soon, but the | economics seem...painful if they're going to use expendable | rockets for the bulk of the constellation. | | It's definitely possible that we see a flourishing of | offerings, but I could also see a world where in 5 years time | there's really only still Starlink. | itsoktocry wrote: | > _Nobody else wants to build a competitor to Starlink by | paying SpaceX_ | | I'm not sure what you mean here. Outside of, say, military | usage, every single telecom company is a competitor to | Starlink. Internet is internet. | | This commercial product is turning out to be what the | "naysayers" thought it would be; brilliant if you're in a | place with terrible internet, but noncompetitive in any kind | of urban environment. | | Again, imho, the huge thing here is the ability to get a | quick internet set up anywhere in the world that can't easily | be taken down (...military). | ncallaway wrote: | > I'm not sure what you mean here. Outside of, say, | military usage, every single telecom company is a | competitor to Starlink. Internet is internet. | | That's certainly true, but there are real physical | limitations that make it hard to compete with Starlink | without a LEO constellation. | | Sure, you could do ground based infrastructure build outs, | but the population density means it's not profitable or you | have to charge really high rates to make up the fixed | costs. Other satellite providers can compete in the rural | areas, but Geo and LEO are have important differences. The | first is latency (internet is internet but 60ms internet is | not the same as 600ms internet). | | When I made the statement I did, I was mostly referring to | satellite internet providers, because land based providers | have largely abandoned or drastically underserved this | market segment. | | I don't see a GEO constellation being able to provide a | similar internet offering to Starlink ever, due to light | delay. I don't think ground based solutions will pop up to | start competing for these low density market, because | they've already been written off as unprofitable even | _before_ there was serious competition for the market. | | > This commercial product is turning out to be what the | "naysayers" thought it would be; brilliant if you're in a | place with terrible internet, but noncompetitive in any | kind of urban environment. | | Well that's probably because the naysayers were predicting | the exact same thing as the supporters. Spaced has | described Starlink consistently as being designed to | service rural and suburban areas that are underserved by | existing providers. The goals never were to compete with | providers in super high density urban markets. | | I've been a huge supporter of Starlink since the first | announcement, and it's shaping up pretty much how I | imagined which also lines up with your description. | spywaregorilla wrote: | If you want to build a competitor to Starlink that does the | same thing and is ideal for terrible internet areas, you | need to put up satellites, and SpaceX is the only company | that you can pay to do so economically. | skissane wrote: | > I'm not sure what you mean here. Outside of, say, | military usage, every single telecom company is a | competitor to Starlink. Internet is internet. | | With regard to satellite Internet mega-constellations, it | is true thus far. The two other major constellations | (OneWeb and Kuiper) have avoided SpaceX as a launch | provider, choosing competitors instead - OneWeb has gone | with Arianespace Soyuz and Virgin; Kuiper has chosen ULA | (and is assumably going to choose Blue Origin too once they | are ready). SpaceX has said they are happy to launch | competitor constellations, but it makes sense that its | competitors aren't happy to fund their competition. It is | very unlikely that Arianespace or ULA can actually beat | SpaceX on price, so avoiding funding your competition is | the only logical explanation for OneWeb and Kuiper's | decisions. | | SpaceX is launching other satellite telecommunications | systems, that obviously also compete with Starlink to some | extent, but less head-on. For example, they are contracted | to launch one of the ViaSat-3 satellites. ViaSat-3 is a | satellite Internet constellation, so in that sense does | compete, but it only has 3 satellites in geostationary | orbit, so it isn't really going after the same direct | market as Starlink. (ViaSat appears to be getting scared of | Starlink, as evidenced by their anti-Starlink applications | to FCC and threats of a lawsuit; given that, I wonder how | much longer they'll be willing to buy launch services from | SpaceX.) | ncallaway wrote: | Is OneWeb still in the game? I saw that they had been | financial issues and were sold to the UK and I kind of | assumed that they had ended their constellation goals. | | It'd be great if they were still working on it, though | dnadler wrote: | A bit of a tangent, but is there any information about how | many constellations are physically possible? Obviously | there's a lot of space in LEO, but it's still limited. Given | that each provider would need their own very dense | constellation of satellites in different orbits, things would | eventually start getting crowded. | | I don't think we'll get there any time soon (or ever), but | kind of an interesting thought experiment. | ncallaway wrote: | I haven't done the math and I'm certainly not an expert, | but my lay understanding is that the number of | constellations is much more limited by spectrum frequency | availability, rather than the space constraints in LEO. | | That is, if we had an very large number of companies | wanting to create satellite internet constellations, we | would run out of useful EM spectrum before we would run out | of LEO orbits. | | I'm not positive about that, though! | rcxdude wrote: | The limit is far more how tight you can beamform the | signals and how much usable spectrum there is: this is the | fundamental thing limiting the density and hence number of | users starlink can have. | lazide wrote: | You're underestimating the amount of space in space (sorry, | couldn't resist). Volume increases exponentially as | diameter increases. | | I don't think anyone would worry about 1800 or even 180000 | things spread over the entire surface of the earth. We have | billions of cars, and they mostly avoid running into each | other. Even 100 miles up? Far, far more space - and a lot | less 'stuff' to worry about too. | | They could pack a million satellites up there and basic | traffic management would be more than enough to avoid | collisions. | rini17 wrote: | We will see. | | But it's definitely don't comparable to cars. Say you | want safety margin of mere 1 second, that means reserving | 8 kilometers free corridor in front of every satellite. | At all times. That isn't a small volume. | relativ575 wrote: | Why one second and 8km? Satellites are not manually | maneuvered. | | Airplanes are only required to keep 1,000 to 2,000 feet | vertical separation. They travel at much slower speed | than satellites (550 mph vs. 17,200 mph), but they are | also much bigger. They tend to travel in narrow | corridors, as opposed to being spread out like | satellites. | | NASA and SpaceX have started working together to address | the collision issues with their fleet: | | https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-spacex-sign- | joint-sp... | itzprime wrote: | But it is not the same thing, due to the speed that | satelites travel. | BenjiWiebe wrote: | Satellites aren't going to swerve, though. | varelse wrote: | HughesNet and ViaSat have both been around for a while but | their rates and their service are terrible. But unlike | Starlink, their service is reliably and predictably crappy so | there's that I guess. There's nothing stopping them from | improving their own services. | ncallaway wrote: | > There's nothing stopping them from improving their own | services. | | Well, they can't improve the latency of their service due | to light delay. If they want to compete on that front, they | need to move to a LEO constellation. | | Neither HughesNet nor ViaSat has started working on LEO | constellations (publicly anyway), and these things take | years. If they want to get into LEO constellations, they've | ceded a 5 year head start to SpaceX. | | I'm not optimistic that either of them will be able to | remain competitive with Starlink over the next decade. | agency wrote: | > There's nothing stopping them from improving their own | services. | | Except the laws of physics I guess. Geosynchronous orbit is | about 36,000 km out so best case scenario if you were going | straight up to a satellite in such an orbit and back down | even at the speed of light in a vacuum that's a lower bound | of a quarter of a second of latency. So unless these legacy | satellite internet companies launch LEO constellations of | their own, which there's no indication they're capable of | doing, it seems pretty hopeless for them. | IPTN wrote: | I don't know when the project started, but ViaSat has | been working toward constellation service of their own | for at least 6 years: https://www.viasat.com/space- | innovation/satellite-fleet/vias... | ncallaway wrote: | ViaSat-3 is a geostationary constellation of 3 | satellites, which I don't really consider to be a | competitor to Starlink due to its physical inability to | ever reduce the latency lower than 500ms | fy20 wrote: | > So the last mile and a half is copper from 20 years ago | | In the UK, BTs 'fibre' rollout is almost exclusively FTTC and | then copper phone lines after that. My parents have a phone | line from 35 years ago, and the cabinet is maybe half a mile | away, but they can get 50 Mbit down (I can't remember upload, | maybe around 15 Mbit). The provider rolled this out a lot | quicker than ADSL (we never got ADSL2), so I assume it's | technically not that complicated. | robocat wrote: | Using copper is weird. | | The New Zealand government invested ~ PS750 million into | fibre to the premises infrastructure, in partnership with | other companies. About 80% of NZ homes have access, with say | half of those actually using it, but percentage is growing. | Usable plans are about PS40 per month. In my city you can't | sign up to a cable connection, even if the house is already | wired up for it. I belive you even have trouble signing up | for copper, because the infrastructure companies just don't | want to support it. The main competitor left is mobile, | although I would love to see StarLink be available here. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-Fast_Broadband | tialaramex wrote: | About 15% of that Openreach rollout is Fibre to the Premises. | Overall about a quarter of UK homes can get FTTP/FTTH either | from Openreach or another provider. A lot more in Northern | Ireland, somewhat less in Scotland. | | However actual _usage_ is quite different. If your Internet | seems fine, why would you buy a more expensive service that | claims to be "faster"? In my city Toob are trying to | aggressively acquire customers for FTTP with a price they're | presumably losing money on, but I don't expect that to last. | | The technology for a setup like your parents is either VDSL | or G.fast. Near to their old (perhaps slightly battered) | green BT cabinet is a newer one, the newer one has fibre to | it, and a DSLAM, the DSLAM ties to the old cabinet with | copper, and so only that "maybe half a mile away" distance is | covered by the DSL technology, from there it's fibre. | bluepanda928752 wrote: | Technology is pretty solid (no comparison to FSD), order of | magnitude better than previous iterations of satellite internet. | The solution is still getting our collective heads out of our | asses and running fiber everywhere though | verytrivial wrote: | 100W 24x7? That's quite a lot, right? | | This adds some color perhaps to the argument that this is for | underserviced regions -- they don't mean third-world or | impoverished even though it sounds like that, at least when I | heard people defending Starlink. | oscardssmith wrote: | It totally can make sense in third world improved regions, just | not in homes (and/or possibly not on all the time). You could | pretty easily run a small business off of 100 mb down, 50 up, | and in that setting, you can probably power it with a small | solar panel and just turn it off at night. | humanistbot wrote: | A "small" solar panel? A 100W solar panel is 2 x 3 ft (.60m x | .90m). You'd need multiple panels even if you run it only | during the day, because fixed solar doesn't just go from 0% | to 100% once the sun rises. | cyberge99 wrote: | Solar technology, including the footprint is advancing | rapidly. I believe there are panels that can do much higher | wattage around that size. Your point stands though. "Small" | is a relative term. | qayxc wrote: | > Solar technology, including the footprint is advancing | rapidly. | | Is it, though? The price drops have been significant, | yes, but the efficiency of COTS panels hasn't seen any | dramatic improvements in the past 20 years. Silicon | panels have a theoretical limit of 29% efficiency and | current models are close to 20%. There's not much room | for improvement left there. | skellington wrote: | You would need 1 standard 400 watt solar panel ($250) | plus batteries and inverter ($???) to power starlink 24 | hours a day in this mythical zero power area that you all | seem to be worried about. | ecpottinger wrote: | That is what batteries are for. and you don't need many to | do the job. | turtlebits wrote: | Yes, 2.4kw in a day is a lot. I was hoping to switch to it from | tethered cell service for my off-grid cabin. (I need 24/7 for | security cameras), but it looks like I won't be able to without | a substantial solar and battery addition. | ecpottinger wrote: | A single 400 watt solar panel and batteries could power this | 24/7, no problem. | ClumsyPilot wrote: | Only if you live in the Sahara. Panels are rated for power | they produce at 1,000W/m2 irradiance, in UK average is 100W, | that panel will produce 40W on average. | turtlebits wrote: | That seems absurdly low. My 250w panels get within 90% of | rated output and I'm in Seattle. | coder543 wrote: | I think they're averaging throughout the year, using the | number of "Mean Annual Sunshine Hours" * "Percent | Possible Sunshine", which would account for average cloud | cover and such. | | I'm sure that for a few hours during the summer, the | solar irradiance in London is probably 90% of what it is | at the equator. That doesn't help most of the year. | bick_nyers wrote: | Gotta remember the double whammy here. Starlink is mostly | rolled out at higher latitudes where solar power is less | effective. Still, solar is cheaper than utility power most of | the time. Might need 1.5 of those panels. Maybe I'm crazy, | but I wouldn't consider off-grid unless I had like a 5KWh | array at a minimum. Probably with wood burning stove as | primary heating source if I really couldn't expand that solar | for electric heating due to cost. | | With heat inverter pump tech. taking over fridges, water | heaters, AC, etc. and making them so much more efficient, it | can give a lot of headroom on energy requirements. | Syonyk wrote: | No. It can't. | | My office has 5kW of panel hung, 10kWh of battery, and my | Starlink terminal is on the house system (grid tied) because | an extra 2.4kWh/day isn't workable with my system in the | winter, short of a _LOT_ of generator time - I 'm severely | power limited during inversions, and the Starlink dish more | than doubles my office's "idle power draw" (it's the property | network hub, one of our internet connections, inverter idle, | sleeping computers, etc). | | Yesterday, the 15.9kWh system on the house produced 78kWh for | a "sun factor" of about 4.9, so a 400W panel would produce | about 2 kWh. Whoops. That's not 2.4. | | In the dead of winter, the same system can produce 2.5 kWh - | yes, 2.5 kWh on a 15.9kW nameplate system. A 400W panel won't | even power on the charge controller in those conditions. | | To reliably power a 100W load, 24/7, in most areas, requires | probably 1500-2000W of panel and 20+kWh of battery - or | someone willing to light a generator, which is the far | cheaper option. But "a 400W panel and batteries" (implied as | a trivial thing to set up) definitely won't. It won't even | run it 24/7 in peak sun most of the year. | | ... and that's before it tries to melt the snow off. From the | blog post: | | > _During the heavy snowfall, Dishy quickly spiked up to | 125W, peaking at 175W towards the end of the snowstorm._ | | Solar panels don't produce much covered in snow, either. | skellington wrote: | You are probably technically correct, but most people don't | need 24hr internet access, so that one 400 watt panel would | provide high speed internet for let's say 12 hours a day | and that's plenty for this odd scenario of living in a | place with no power but still needing high speed internet. | Syonyk wrote: | The claim was 24/7 powering with "a 400W panel and some | batteries" - which is simply false. | | I deal with the realities of off-grid power in my office | on a daily basis, and a vast majority of what's written | about solar and batteries by people who don't have | experience with them is simply wrong. I try to correct it | where I can. | | With a 400W panel and a few kWh of batteries, you could | reasonably accomplish 14-16 hours of access during peak | sun in the summer, 8-12 hours in spring and fall, and 0-3 | hours in winter, except for 5-6 hours on sunny winter | days. | | Although I've heard that the newer Dishys use somewhat | less power (50-70W), which does improve things. | turtlebits wrote: | Doubtful. Most of the US does not get 6 hours of full/peak | sun (2400w/6 = 400w) | stordoff wrote: | It would cost me about PS11/month to run. For context, I | currently pay ~PS80/month for electricity (UK average is | ~PS60[1]). Not prohibitive, but it's a pretty sizeable | increase. When you consider I can get 4G connectivity[2] for | PS22/month, with significantly less power consumption,, it | doesn't seem that attractive unless you have no other options. | | [1] Table 2.2.1 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data- | sets/annual-d... | | [2] Claiming typical down speeds of 50Mbps-100Mbps | SamBam wrote: | Anyone know if Starlink is happy turning off and on again | throughout the day? | | I know we are all used to 24 hour internet, but if I were | energy-conscious or off-grid, I might want to turn it on for | 3-4 half-hour sessions during the day. | geerlingguy wrote: | I tested it a few times (putting in stow mode, turning off | while I was rebuilding network rack, etc.), and it always | picked back up within 2-4 minutes. | | I know a few people who have Starlink on an outlet timer or | WiFi switched outlet, and only have it run during the day. It | seems to be okay with that. | [deleted] | spookthesunset wrote: | Is this power requirement just because the hardware hasn't had | a chance for years of iteration or is it a "hard" requirement | that no amount of product iteration can fix? | | In other words is it 100W all the time because of physics or is | it just "sub optimal" hardware that in theory can be mitigated | through smarter protocols and fancier hardware? | qayxc wrote: | For the foreseeable future it's mostly physics. | | The "all the time"-part is of course something that can be | worked on even without changing the hardware. A simple switch | on the outlet to turn it off during the night or if everybody | is at work/school and thus doesn't need it would reduce power | consumption a lot already. | | "Fancier hardware" could also mean a timer for the outlet | switch or a "smart home"-solution. This could mitigate | connection time by turning the router back on before you | arrive at home/wake-up. | | There's a lot of potential for not having to use 100W all the | time without hardware changes. | aWidebrant wrote: | Presuming that a large part of those 100 W go to the power | amps for uplink transmissions, it seems that it should be | possible to make at least that part scale with how much | outgoing data the terminal is actually sending. But that may | require new hardware, and it may conflict with the ambition | of reducing cost per unit. | flyingfences wrote: | 100W is a couple of light bulbs. It's not nothing, but it's not | all that much. It'd be challenging off-grid, but not a concern | anywhere with electrical infrastructure. | humanistbot wrote: | 100W is a lot. It is a couple of very old incandescent bulbs | or ten 60W equivalent LED bulbs. | ls612 wrote: | It is a lot but it's also outside so it won't heat up your | house and in most places it only adds up to about $10 a | month or less on your power bill | katbyte wrote: | perspective i guess - i used to use 2 100watt bulbs to | light a single room. | tialaramex wrote: | A more durable reference comparison: 100W is similar to a | human. An adult human, not exercising heavily, but not | asleep, maybe reading a book, or talking to a friend, | something in that ballpark. | | Also, if you aren't off-grid, you're apparently not so far | from civilisation that _previous_ utility suppliers couldn 't | be bothered to provide service to you. Maybe if this | generation's utility suppliers got their act together you | wouldn't need Starlink anyway. | martincmartin wrote: | At 25c per kWhr, that's 60 cents a day, ~ $18/mo. | geerlingguy wrote: | To be clear, electrical rates are much different in different | parts of the country. At my house in the suburbs outside St. | Louis, MO, the cost is about $9/month. Not nothing, but not | too significant compared to the total cost of the service. | NDizzle wrote: | 8c per kWh here where I'm using it here in rural Arkansas. | phire wrote: | If it's your only (or best) option for decent internet, that | cost probably won't consern you at all. | | People who are off grid might grumble at having to provision | more solar, battery and inverter capacity. | | But for people who have other Internet options, $18/month | might influence their decision. | SamBam wrote: | That's actually non-trivial. That makes the monthly cost | nearly 20% higher. | minhazm wrote: | 25c per kWh is pretty high, I think that's high even for CA. | Most states are in the 12-13 cents per kWh range [1]. | | 1. https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by- | state/ | skellington wrote: | Electriciy in CA is ridiculously expensive. $0.27/kWh | average rate is common in CA. Going up to $0.40+ if you get | into the higher tiers. | | But even with insane generation rates, most of the electric | bill is the power company service fee, not the generation | fee. | | For example, out of a $200/mo bill, maybe $50 is electric | generation, the rest is the service fee. PG&E is insanely | badly run. | SavantIdiot wrote: | Many places are tiered, so if you go above a certain kW/h | the rate doubles or triples. Cali and parts of NY state are | like that (never lived anywhere else tho). | geerlingguy wrote: | It's a little less than a modern efficient fridge (2-3 | kWh/day). I used to have 100W light bulbs in the house, so it's | not a crazy amount of power, but it's most significant to | anyone planning on using Starlink 'off-grid', since it's a lot | more than just a little 4G or 5G hotspot, or a standard DSL or | Cable modem and router. | morsch wrote: | A modern efficient fridge uses way less than 1 kWh/day. The | one I bought in 2018 uses 0.44 kWh/day. 2-3 kWh/day is awful. | | Three random examples: | | https://www.appliancesdirect.co.uk/p/kge36awca/bosch- | kge36aw... | | https://www.appliancesdirect.co.uk/p/ffu3dx1/hotpoint- | ffu3dx... | | https://www.appliancesdirect.co.uk/p/htf-540dp7/haier- | htf540... | geerlingguy wrote: | I should be more specific: an efficient 'USA-megahome- | sized' fridge. Our typical fridge is often 25-35 cubic feet | (850 litre)... that's about double the size of the small | fridges used in many parts of the world. | clvx wrote: | I'm in a rural area in Montana and luckily I have access to a 5G | tower. My impression is if you are close to one, it's better and | cheaper than going with Starlink even if you have to pay extra | money to set up an external MIMO antenna to improve your signal. | | I think Starlink is useful in many areas and industries, but 5G | home internet is reliable for many cases at least in the US. | Starlink will do great in the South hemisphere where providers | struggle even in metropolitan areas. I see that as a huge win for | many as long as the prices go down as the current prices could be | a barrier for not so wealthy countries. | adkadskhj wrote: | I don't know much about Starlink, but isn't one point of | Starlink that eventually it _could_ even beat wired connections | for distance latency? Ie it 's a shorter and more direct trip | to use Starlink to get from US West to US East, for example. | | Though this is quite a ways out i imagine. | | Best of all this idea works in current tech, and can get even | better with future tech when Starlink starts going Satellite | <-> Satellite, avoiding unnecessary land hops. | | I'm interested in Starlink for all use cases, once they get | more satellites up. | spookthesunset wrote: | My understanding is that in addition to distance latency | there is some non-trival amount of latency due to the use of | TDMA. Unlike CDMA where everybody piles on the same spectrum | at the same time, TDMA gives a timeslot to every station and | you gotta wait your turn before TX/RX (this is a gross | oversimplification of course). | | While it doesn't add _that_ much latency it is more than | CDMA. | syncsynchalt wrote: | Not just TDMA - lasers in vacuum travel at the speed of | light, but signals in optical fiber and coax copper are | both 2/3 of that. This means that if (and that's still an | if, not yet a when) starlink does laser between satellites | it can beat terrestrial speeds. | | I could see the end result being that we still do bent-pipe | signaling over land and only laser interlinks for crossing | oceans and for customers that pay for low ping to financial | markets. | gdubs wrote: | 5G speeds are decent but the main issue for me is caps. I'm | waiting on StarLink -- early signup to beta, never got in, | purchased day it was available, no sign of order being | fulfilled - and what I'm counting on is being able to upload | large files, etc, without a cap. | SavantIdiot wrote: | Starlink will most definitely add caps, IMHO. If you have | tens of millions of subscribers trying to download terabytes | of video per month... yeah, that's gonna be a problem. | clvx wrote: | Currently I have no caps on T-Mobile. I understand Starlink | plans to have caps at some point. | rootusrootus wrote: | I'm waiting for my turn (I had a beta offer last year but | declined to proceed at the time, now I get to wait like everyone | else). Hoping that real soon it gets opened up for mobile use. I | have a campsite about 50 miles away that I'd spend a _lot_ more | time at if I could work from there. Trees would be a little bit | of an issue, but not a deal killer for me. | rdca wrote: | Amazing how starlink reviewers never bother to mention if it is | possible to run a publicly available web server - at least over | IPv6. | soheil wrote: | > Starlink uses CGNAT | | Just curious what is the security implications of using carrier | grade NAT? If I start DDoS'ing a bunch of websites and get | blocked, does that mean effectively I also block all my neighbors | sharing the same IP4? This seems like a lot of power over their | internet usage. | bityard wrote: | Yes, it has all of the pitfalls of other kinds of NAT. | | However, in 2021, blocking all traffic from entire subnets or | NATted IPs is an extremely blunt defense and doesn't even work | for certain kinds of attacks like UDP floods. "Websites" do not | typically do their own traffic filtering or attack mitigation | for this reason and many others. They leave that up to their | upstream provider. And any provider worth their salt is paying | big bucks for a system that can recognize and mitigate attacks | based on traffic patterns and deep packet inspection while | letting most of the "good" traffic through. | | Source: I work for a company that makes these products. | soheil wrote: | You're basically saying it's magic and trust me because I | work on this stuff. That's fair, but how can you tell if I | send you 1MM curl commands to download | _large_ugly_cow{i}.bmp_ from your server or if it 's my | neighbor doing that if we both share the same IP address? | spookthesunset wrote: | > your server or if it's my neighbor doing that if we both | share the same IP address? | | It depends on how sloppy you are running your attack. Most | of the time the attacker will be sloppy and hit the system | using the same useragent with the same cookies. Or maybe | they'll go the other way and every single request will have | some random BS for a useragent and random cookies. Plus | they will only hit that exact single URL and won't bother | loading the rest of the page. | | So if you look at your logs, you'll see a million requests | for "large_ugly_cow.bmp" coming from the same IP with a | useragent that doesn't bother loading anything else. | | In short, to a human such an attack usually stands out like | a sore thumb. Writing the filter rules to block them... | that is a different beast. With the right tools and a smart | tech, it is totally possible though. | soheil wrote: | But how do you do that with CG-NAT? | spookthesunset wrote: | Good question! The fact you've got a thousand users on | the same IP doesn't really change much honestly. Like I | said, when you see this kind of attack happening it | usually stands out in your monitoring. The trick is | writing the filter rules to target it. | | Using IP addresses as filter / block criteria isn't very | effective so most don't do it. Any attacker even a slight | clue is hopping all over IP blocks to route around IP | blocks so effective filtering rules use things other than | IP addresses. | | In short, the fact that your "signal" (attacker) is using | the exact same IP address as the "noise" (everybody else | using the IP address) shouldn't be a problem. | BenjiWiebe wrote: | Commonly on CGNAT your connection will be assigned a | range of source ports. The web server can see that all | your connections have a source port number between 10,000 | and 20,000, for instance, so they block new connections | in that range. This would not directly target you (unless | there's only 6 customers per NATted IP) but it does | reduce the blast radius. | throwaway2048 wrote: | Google itself regularly blocks CGNAT IPs with annoying | captchas or outright blocks on usage of google.com entirely. | | If Google does it, so do lots of other companies. | xoa wrote: | I've had Starlink deployed for a client since mid-January or so | up around the 45th parallel (near the US/Canadian border). | Installed it in a brisk -20 windchill too, good times. That was | kind of a best place replacement scenario even early beta, as | their previous solution was a 10/2 connection that cost | >$200/month, so Starlink didn't have to be stellar to beat the | competition there. I was able to place it with zero obstructions. | This was never used with the native router which just stayed | unopened in the box, it was right into a OPNsense gateway. We | left the old landline connection up for a few months with | Starlink as primary and the old one as a failover. For the first | month and a half or so, there were regular dropouts every day, | though only for a minute or two. That noticeably dropped over the | course of March, and we dumped the previous service by mid-April. | Overall experience has been excellent for wireless, as good as a | high quality WISP despite the much greater technical challenges. | And it's continued to improve: as well as latency and uptime, | bandwidth u/d has increased from around 100-130/10-30 to nearly | always 220-250/30-45. At no extra price. Tell me the last time | you got that from an ISP ;). | | Overall experience is similar to this review, a few observations | following along the review: | | >Hard cable | | This is annoying, but my perspective is coming from someone who | does a lot of network termination and has thousands of dollars in | fluke testing gear, rolls of cat8 cable and certified jacks and | so on which is obviously absolutely not the norm. I needed it to | go farther, but I ended up just plugging the 802.3bt injector it | comes with into fiber optic anyway which thus also gave me | guaranteed isolation from the rest of the network without having | to worry about grounding. I suspect once it's in full service and | they start to branch out they'll do a "Business Class" version or | something aimed at more advanced deployments. | | >Your own router | | This does work fine. In order to get statistics though you'll | need to static route 192.168.100.1. It's not needed for it to | operate, but probably still a good idea. Lots of instructions | around on the net for that. When I first set it up, IPv6 was | still wonky whether you had your own router or not. Easily worked | around with a permanent WireGuard tunnel for a VLAN to a cheap | VPS with a static IP. Anything that needs a static IP can just | get put there. | | >Power consumption | | Real, but as the article said in the context of rural internet | pricing it's frankly fairly meaningless. Effectively means it's | $105-115/month which is still so much frigging better than most | options available at the speed that it's plenty competitive. If | we had fiber we'd use it, but we don't. | | >Latency | | Where that will REALLY get interesting is once intersat optical | links go live constellation-wide (can't remember the timeline on | that, v0.9 for polar went up last year, I think they're now on | new ones going forward). Most latency tests are local hops only, | which is relevant of course and Starlink will always be at a | disadvantage for. But once you start cross continents or oceans, | Starlink definitely has the potential to easily beat many | people's fiber connections (particularly rural ones its aimed | at). CDNs are a lot, but not everything. It'll be cool to see how | that affects the market. | | > _it 's potential to increase the risk of the Kessler syndrome_ | | This is a meme, not reality. I wish it would stop coming up. | Starlink sats are in quite Low Earth Orbit (LEO), and the | majority of the constellation yet to be launched will be V-band | ones in V(ery)LEO. At those altitudes, natural orbital decay will | eliminate debris or sats even if they fail, and if they don't | they deorbit themselves. SpaceX has thought this through, part of | the delay on optics was specifically figuring out how to make | sure they'd all burn up. | | Other planned megaconstellations higher up do indeed represent | more concern, but Starlink does not. SpaceX is leveraging its | overwhelming and soon to grow more-so advantage in launch | capability and economics in a host of self-reinforcing ways, and | this is one of them. They get to lean on higher numbers and | faster replacement to get more performance _and_ stop Kessler | risk. | | >Astronomy | | They've been working on shading them to reduce apparent | magnitude, but that only fully works when sats are fully deployed | and the trains going up are there. Even reduced magnitude will | still affect some instruments and observations. I'm afraid though | astronomy is just going to have to deal with that for a decade, | looking forward to major development of cheap space based | industry allowing lunar/space telescopes like never before | eventually supplanting ground-based entirely. Cold comfort to a | few who really will be messed up at a point in their careers that | will be awkward for that, but this is frankly more important. | | >Other | | This will be MIND BLOWING FOR MARINE/AEROSPACE. If you think your | rural connection is bad go look at merchant marine pricing. | Aircraft too obviously, but one area I think many people haven't | thought about yet is the potential for other satellites | themselves. SpaceX is really setting themselves up as a major | space infrastructure company. | spywaregorilla wrote: | Can these satellites provide service to higher orbit | satellites? I don't know anything about this tech but I would | assume switching from a concave blanket over the orb to a | convex lens shooting out into space is very different. | xoa wrote: | These ones cannot. But with intersat optical links, it'd be | perfectly feasible to have some percentage of sats as part of | the constellation in the future that talked up rather than | down, using either radio or optical links themselves (no | atmosphere to worry about obviously). No need to have any | single satellite do it all. If commercial satellites could | simply plug into Starlink in a standard fashion and then it's | normal internet from there, no groundstations or any other | infra to worry about, that itself would be a big deal in | terms of further removing obstacles to wider spread | commercialization of space. It's something I haven't seen | considered much but I think is another really exciting | example of how many things SpaceX is shifting in concert and | finding self-reinforcing effects for. Scary thing to be up | against though for competitors. | geerlingguy wrote: | >> _it 's potential to increase the risk of the Kessler | syndrome_ | | > This is a meme, not reality. I wish it would stop coming up. | | I do too, but since that's probably the first or second most | prevalent thing that people mention in response to _anything_ | not completely negative on Starlink, I figured I 'd give it a | mention. | qayxc wrote: | > This is a meme, not reality. I wish it would stop coming up. | | Kessler syndrome has begun decades ago. The question is not | whether it happens, but whether mega-constellations have the | potential to make it significantly worse. | | So it's not a meme at all, but a question whether it's a | relevant concern in the context of Starlink. At a failure rate | of ~3% [0] this would be relevant, but as the failure rate has | dropped significantly since and the company aims for 1%, it | probably isn't. | | [0] https://phys.org/news/2020-10-starlink-satellites.html | xoa wrote: | > _but a question whether it 's a relevant concern in the | context of Starlink_ | | I kind of thought it was pretty obvious that my statement was | specifically in the context of Starlink, given that I | explicitly acknowledged that higher up megaconstellations are | a much bigger concern. But it's not at all to a significant | degree for Starlink due to orbital decay by atmospheric drag. | Have to get above 550-600km or so for unpowered lifetimes to | really start to stretch out. You might find this Gabbard | diagram animation very interesting as a visualization: | | https://old.reddit.com/r/space/comments/ld4vlq/gabbard_diagr. | .. | | It shows all the altitudes against period of all tracked | space debris since 1959. Watch what happens around the | 550-600km mark in terms of decay acceleration. Starlink, | particularly the VLEO ones that are planned to form the | majority of the constellation when completed, is essentially | passive failsafe. Planned deorbit is still much better than a | 1-5 year lifetime of course, but neither will it ever just | block us off or render an orbit unusable because they're just | plain too low. Anything below those marks (like ISS) requires | regular active reboosts to maintain their orbits. When ISS | wants to get rid of trash, they can literally just let it go | in a big brick. | | Kessler absolutely is worth worrying about very much at | altitude. But a lot of the coverage and stuff getting shared | around about it are 100% backwards. They focus purely on raw | numbers of sats. But the absolute best way to avoid Kessler | is to go low for as many things as possible, which by | definition requires more, cheaper sats that get replaced much | more regularly. Massive VLEO constellations are a good thing | for space debris not a bad one, because they require both | active boosting and even aerodynamics to stay up, and even a | worst case direct collision of two sats at ~300km say would | result in complete elimination of all debris within at most a | month. Starship will make lower altitudes and more safety | systems economically feasible. | mellosouls wrote: | _I 'm afraid though astronomy is just going to have to deal | with that for a decade...this is frankly more important_ | | At least you are honest in your dismissal. | | A counter point of view is that an unelected private | individual/organisation visibly polluting the night sky of the | whole world represents extraordinary arrogance. | relativ575 wrote: | > A counter point of view is that an unelected private | individual/organisation visibly polluting the night sky of | the whole world represents extraordinary arrogance. | | That's an emotionally charged argument. I could say that | denying affordable Internet access to a vast population just | for the sake of astronomy is equally arrogant. But that'd be | wrong, and so is your statement. Everything is a trade off | and we need to live with both. | | SpaceX just didn't launch Starlink satellites. They got | approval from the US regulation agencies, which in turn | operate in accordance with the Outer Space Treaty that most | countries are signatories. | xoa wrote: | > _A counter point of view is that an unelected private | individual /organisation visibly polluting the night sky of | the whole world represents extraordinary arrogance._ | | Who elected astronomers? Who decides what's "pollution" vs | "beautiful"? It's just as arguably "extraordinary arrogance" | to argue that a handful of rarified specialists should get a | permanent veto on Earth's orbitals, particularly when it's | about valuable planetary infrastructure for potentially | hundreds of millions _and_ we can see a clear path towards | giving astronomers vastly superior capabilities to anything | that will ever be possible on Earth. | | Note that I 100% support mitigation efforts like are being | undertaken. Magnitude reduction efforts, even if they add | some cost, are entirely reasonable and appear to help solve | much of the problem. But I do think it's important to | acknowledge that no, mitigation isn't going to solve the | entire problem for Earth-based astronomy, it is a compromise, | and that the incredible capabilities of vastly better space | telescope options will not be realized, even in the best | case, within the remaining careers of some astronomers. That | stinks. But Starlink will still be life changing for orders | of magnitudes more and they deserve a say too. | | And you say "unelected" but all these companies are regulated | by a variety of organizations that _are_ elected which is | close enough. If a majority didn 't want this, it could be | banned. And if it did come down to a direct democratic | referendum vote on Starlink vs a subsection of Earth-based | astronomy, frankly I don't think the result is particularly | hard to guess so I'm not sure that's a particularly | productive angle to pursue. | spookthesunset wrote: | > CDNs are a lot, but not everything | | So how much hardware would be required to put the CDN on the | satellite? Like, if the CDN was for popular video sites like | youtube or netflix? | sudhirj wrote: | Try an google image search for Netflix Open Connect | appliance. Basically a 2U / 4U rack mountable server. Need to | put a few of those in orbit. | cmrdporcupine wrote: | My email Feb 24: "Starlink now available to order" So I put an | order in right away. It's now July 22nd, and I haven't heard | anything, despite the original email saying "mid-2021" for order | shipment. So I go to check: _" Starlink is currently at capacity | in your area through 2021, your order might not be fulfilled | until late 2022."_ Despite having taken my money for deposit they | never sent an email at any point to let me know this. I think | that's a rather dubious customer service practice. | HWR_14 wrote: | Elon Musk, famous for Tesla, is willing to take your money and | not deliver a product for several years. I am shocked. | markandrewj wrote: | I am not sure if this is a helpful comment, or possible, you | might want to try attaching the dish to the top of tallest tree | if you can though. I have had to do this with satellite dishes in | the past while working in remote locations. When I say remote, I | am talking surrounded by mountains, deep inside the boreal | forests of British Columbia. | bahmboo wrote: | 100 watt power draw makes off grid solar much more challenging. | linsomniac wrote: | @geerlingguy: Consider checking out some global latency | comparisons between StarLink and cable. I believe their long-term | plan is to have the satellites route traffic between themselves | using space lasers rather than hit a ground station and traverse | undersea cables and the like. | | Not sure if they have that fully implemented yet, but might be | interesting looking at the path and latency traffic to .au or | Asia or Africa takes on Starlink vs cable. A couple factors may | come into play: "as the crow flies" and light speed in vacuum vs | glass. | | I know Evi Nemeth (RIP) talking on the CAIDA project showed some | nice graphs of the "speed of light cone" re: latencies vs. | geography. See about halfway down on this: | https://web.archive.org/web/20160103034640/http://www.isoc.o... | tsimionescu wrote: | The lasers are more a nice idea than a plan. It's entirely | possible they are not doable with realistic technology, given | the speeds and other constraints of space, even in LEO. They | are certainly not going to be there in the near future, anyway. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-07-22 23:01 UTC)