[HN Gopher] Starlink's current problem is capacity ___________________________________________________________________ Starlink's current problem is capacity Author : caution Score : 50 points Date : 2022-07-27 14:30 UTC (8 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.jeffgeerling.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.jeffgeerling.com) | virtuallynathan wrote: | Peak time speeds are definitely a bit lower than when I was one | of the only customers in the area, but it's still very good. | Almost always >50Mbps, which is faster than the DSL alternative | available. | foxyv wrote: | I think StarLink could stand to build terrestrial "Not- | Satellites" in areas that are very densely built, if they could | get it past the FCC. Something similar to 5g microcells that | users could switch to if they want better bandwidth. | | I mean, why go to the Satellite network if you are less than 10 | miles from a city center. Then you could leave the satellite | uplinks to surrounding rural areas and users looking for ultra | low latency. | krallja wrote: | That's just a WISP, which have existed since the 1990s. | jonathantf2 wrote: | Maybe they could do this in like RV parks where there'd be a | lot of Starlink users - force the individual dishes to connect | to a local network then have one big dish on property that | links to the sats. | lolc wrote: | You mean, like a cellular network? | raxxorraxor wrote: | Don't quite understand why you would like to use Starlink in a | city, especially without roaming support. Damn hipsters. What is | awesome about it is to have internet in remote location that have | no chance of ever getting a land line. | Karunamon wrote: | The Internet options available in the city can be surprisingly | awful. And not just on speed/capacity basis, but on customer | service as well. I have lived in many places where what | Starlink is offering now is better than any service available | for purchase. | phil21 wrote: | For me - backup Internet for a large-scale power outage or | other event like an ice storm that knocks down | telecommunication lines. | | I've worked from home via the Internet since the late 90's, and | having a backup has been drilled into me as a hard requirement | from hard-won experience. Living in Chicago this came in handy | just last year when a box truck took out my primary fiber | connection and most of the block for a few days, and I failed | over seamlessly to Comcast. | | When/if I get approved for Starlink, I'll cancel comcast and be | using it as my backup. Hopefully they become mobile soon as | well, so I can take it with me on adventures. | boulos wrote: | You can get the "RV" variant now at starlink.com/rv. It's a | little bit more per month but allows roaming and turning it | on and off. On the downside, it's explicitly lower priority | on the network than the fixed ones. | sschueller wrote: | I use 5G as a backup. It costs me only around 40 USD and | includes the modem which I have attached to my router. | | If you are in a city there are cheaper back solutions than | starlink. | Ekaros wrote: | I don't think I can find 5G modem for 40USD, but I think | for 40 or 45EUR I could get pre-paid internet good for a | year or two from all three operators here. | | And at least one of those will likely work. If not, I | probably don't have much power anyway. | 2snakes wrote: | Maybe Google Fi. | floydnoel wrote: | When my local fiber backbone was cut last year, many | neighborhoods including mine lost service. Guess what | happened to the 5G? I had a hotspot for backup use, and it | was useless. Turns out the towers use the same backbone! | [deleted] | PaulHoule wrote: | People hate the cable company. There are a lot of rich people | in cities who would love to burn dollar bills to spite the | cable company, they compete with people in a radius of 300 | miles or so for bandwidth. | oceanplexian wrote: | I have one and it's both a middle finger to the cable company | and supporting the development of Starship. | | Even without Starlink, you could have convinced me to donate | $100 a month . The fact that my donation comes with a pretty | amazing piece of tech is a bonus. | jlokier wrote: | I'm in a city center, and my small office network is currently | 4G through a Samsung phone because it's faster than anything I | can get on the landline. | | This is a city where some buildings have up to about 200Mbit/s | on either cable or FTTP, but these are not available at all | properties. The best landline speed I can get is "up to" | 17Mbit/s downlink, which is slower than the phone, the landline | uplink is ridiculously slow, and to top off the landline is | more than twice the price of unlimited 4G. | | I'd like the speed and latency of FTTP, and failing that a good | speed of VDSL over FTTP, but since I can't get either and I'm | on the top floor of a 4 story building, I've wondered if | Starlink would be an improvement over 4G. | adastra22 wrote: | I'm in San Jose. My choices are 25Mbps DSL or cable internet | through Xfinity. After my previous interactions with Xfinity I | will never touch them again. | | Starlink is looking pretty good by comparison. | coder543 wrote: | You should also check out recent wireless options like | T-Mobile's 5G Home Internet, which reportedly works quite | well, and it makes a lot more sense (in my opinion) from an | infrastructure standpoint than urban Starlink, unless you | just absolutely require an internet connection that can | continue working during a city-wide internet disruption. It's | also like half the price of Starlink, with no upfront cost at | all, IIRC. I've also seen people online get speeds upwards of | 700Mbps, which is higher than I've seen anyone report on | Starlink, but it is apparently highly variable from location | to location based on your local cell network infrastructure. | | I think Verizon and AT&T also offer 5G Home Internet options, | but T-Mobile's offering seems to be the best from what I've | seen online. | | (Keep in mind that all of these services provide a | specialized box that acts as a cell modem and router, and it | should offer much stronger and better connectivity to the | carrier's network than a mobile phone.) | icedistilled wrote: | In cities and suburbs it will often be the case that there is a | single cable provider who charges approximately the same as | starlink due to being a regional monopoly. At my old place the | sole choice was cox who had monopoly on internet because the | only other option was at&t dsl that offered 5mbs download for | $60+/month. I was seriously considering starlink. | | Two blocks over there was google fiber and at&t fiber but might | as well have been 100 miles away for all the good that did me. | Actually it would have been better because I wouldn't get adds | telling me about fiber only to find it wasn't available. | zepearl wrote: | For me it's incredible that it's like that in the US (I | assume you're in the US as you mention "google fiber" and | "at&t"). | | You folks have to change that, decouple who lays cables from | who can use them, or at least make companies who lay cables | let any provider access them, etc... - look at how some | european countries deal with it (at least the ones that have | the most happy users - details will probably be important) | and do the same => no risks. | | (Repeating what I wrote in the past ) I'm in Switzerland | living nearby Zurich but using a small regional Internet | Provider located 50km away (outside the region I'm living in) | and my parents are in a different region in a 800-souls | village and use a major national provider, and we both ended | up getting FTTH, with similar costs and great reliability - | cables in both cases initially layed down spontaneously by | companies not directly related to the providers, hoping that | we would start using them at some point (I waited for 1 year | being scared of complications but my parents switched | immediately as their old ADSL connection was extremely | unreliable) => this is a practical demonstration that this | system works & good for everybody (customers & providers & | whoever lays down the cables), therefore no reason not to | adopt it. | matt-p wrote: | I think they are doing OK. | | Delivering even 30-100Mbps to half a million customers all over | the world is no mean feat. Complaining that your speeds dip below | 100Mbps on a unmetred low latancy satellite connection is just | pathological. Most of the world do not have access to this speed | on fixed line networks. You can't get these speeds with even | VDSL.. Fttp and cable are the only fixed technologies beating a | satellite. Have a think about that. | | That works out at several terabits of traffic at peak times. I | think they should be able to make good improvements with more | ground stations and inter satalite links even if they never | launch another satellite. | dvdkhlng wrote: | > You can't get these speeds with even VDSL.. | | That's not quite true. At least in germany, VDSL2 with | "supervectoring" profile 35b [1] is routinely used, advertised | as 250 Mbit internet service [2]. | | Technologically it's quite a waste of hardware resources and | electric power to put these kind of data rates on old twisted | pair copper cables (instead of using fiber everywhere), but | that seems to be the status quo here right now. | | (And I'd guess that the ratio of people being in need of | satellite internet is much lower in germany than it is in the | US). | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL#Vplus/35b | | [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervectoring | orangepurple wrote: | Many apartments in big cities in the US have telecom | infrastructure which behaves similarly to a wet string and | can only pull a few megabits down on a good day. There is no | alternative for them except T-Mobile Home Internet (5G) if | they are lucky. | iAm25626 wrote: | As someone work in the telecommunications/service provider | sectors. Capacity management is both an art and science on top of | it with tight budget constraint. It always amaze me what we/ISP | can accomplish given how lean the engineering team/budget is. | Ekaros wrote: | I don't think this is any surprise... It is entirely expect that | when user number in shared area increase they have each less | capacity available. And there might not be viable solutions to | this when satellites are used. | olyjohn wrote: | I'm one of the people who doesn't seem to have any issues with it | since beta. I did spend weeks setting the thing up to get a clear | view of the sky, and topped some trees. Trees have grown back in, | and my sky view is a lot smaller now. But it's still working the | same as before. I would think these issues would be a lot more | universal. But maybe, despite being in one of the first cells | that were opened up, my cell is just not very full... | geerlingguy wrote: | It seems really hit-or-miss. Nearer cities, cells seem to have | that 'rush-hour' problem. More rural areas don't, as often. | | Some of it probably comes from whether a particular ground | station (there aren't very many still, per cell at least) is | saturated by traffic from a metro area or not. | [deleted] | algorithm314 wrote: | I think the US created Starlink for military use. It provides | world wide coverage and very small latency that helps a lot with | UAVs. UAVs that aren't in line of sight need satellite | communication. They just allow the public to use part of it, so | as to reduce the cost of the system. | hedora wrote: | I think their biggest issue is the mechanical engineering of the | dishes. They use non-standard mounts, and (despite using bog- | standard outdoor/riser-rated cat 5e cable) non-standard ethernet | connectors. | | For people replacing an existing internet connection with | starlink, the cost of swapping out the existing (perfectly good) | cable and antenna mount dwarfs the retail (and even | manufacturing) cost of the dish. | | Also, they don't document the electrical requirements for the | ethernet cable, so people end up guessing, forcing it to turn on | the on-board heater, then checking for voltage droop. | | Even oversubscribed, they're better than most rural ISP options | though. | | I agree that the starlink customer support people are extremely | overworked. In my experience, they're also completely | incompetent. | | The "impossible to update out of date firmware" issue is | ridiculous, especially since they specifically market the RV | service for use cases where you buy the dish and then pause the | service for the 11.5 months of the year when you're not using | your RV. | tguvot wrote: | >I think their biggest issue is the mechanical engineering of | the dishes. They use non-standard mounts, | | They sell for $15 or so pipe adapter. Works perfectly well with | pole that dishtv was mounted on. The none-standard mount that | they have (at least on new dishes) besides actually mounting | dish to pole also has function of holding cable in place | PinkPigeon wrote: | Do you happen to know anyone who managed to figure out what the | electrical requirements for the cable are? We tried mounting | the antenna outside and connecting the cable via an external | box to the inside (using cat 6 cable), but Starlink immediately | started complaining about a 'bad connection', which went away | when we routed the cable to the power brick unimpeded. But it | would really be much neater if we could use our own house's | ethernet wiring. But evidently Starlink doesn't like it. | jpk2f2 wrote: | see: https://gist.github.com/darconeous/8c7899c4d2f849b881d6c | 43be... | PinkPigeon wrote: | I'm on the original, round dish, not the rectangular new | one. I wonder whether this can be done on the round dish, | as that one used even more power. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-07-27 23:02 UTC)