Starlink. It’s the internet, from space!

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hestermofet

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  • #41
    This thread is a perfect demonstration of why wiring up rural areas for Internet is not economically feasible, and WISPs aren't really a solution either. You have a tiny number of rural people who are "I'm definitely going to sign up", with a small number who drop out. If it's a WISP, you hope for some urban people to subsidize the cost so you can provide higher speeds to your rural users. This is because WISPs can go crazy long distances, so you hope to capture some users on the rural/urban boundary who may have some urban Internet options, but they're not very good.

    But everyone in an urban area is like "I'd definitely sign up. But only if I can pay for just 3 days a year". You can't run a profitable subscription-based service with users only expecting to use your service 3 days out of 365.

    I just don't see how Starlink is going to really get off the ground unless they have something very compelling for urban users. Rural users don't represent enough of an economy to make a service like this profitable, but many urban users are spoiled for choice. I pay $50/mo for 1000/750Mbps. I don't see why I should waste money on Starlink, even though I love the tech, I love space, and it would be a really cool thing to play with. But I can't justify such an expensive toy.
     
    Paladin

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  • #43
    Yeah, I see Starlink as almost exclusively based on the idea that there are a lot of people who just cannot get anything better than a dribble of cell service where they live and would happily pay $100 a month for anything over 10-20 Megabit per second. For people in urban and suburban areas, there are already tons of feasible options and if there are not it is probably because they have allowed their local government to get into bed with Comcast and regulate out metro/local fiber providers etc. Once one community rolls out a municipal fiber service or gets Google Fiber or something similar, the neighbors want it too and it will happen sooner or later. But if you live 10+ miles from the nearest neighbor, you simply don't have the customer density to be a viable market for anything other than satellite or maybe cellular. And the cellular is heavily subsidized by all the other users in neighboring cities that want to be able to drive past your house and not be out of coverage for 50-100 miles of road.

    I don't see Starlink as an attractive backup for home internet if you already have good service from a common fiber/coax provider. Cellular would be better really. We should be pushing wireless companies to make that easier and more common. A cellular hotspot for emergency use as a small monthly price (assuming it is unused 95% of the time) would be reasonable. They just have to account for rate limiting when they all come on at once during power outages, emergencies, etc.
     
    Hap

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  • #44
    Paladin said:
    Yeah, I see Starlink as almost exclusively based on the idea that there are a lot of people who just cannot get anything better than a dribble of cell service where they live and would happily pay $100 a month for anything over 10-20 Megabit per second. For people in urban and suburban areas, there are already tons of feasible options and if there are not it is probably because they have allowed their local government to get into bed with Comcast and regulate out metro/local fiber providers etc. Once one community rolls out a municipal fiber service or gets Google Fiber or something similar, the neighbors want it too and it will happen sooner or later. But if you live 10+ miles from the nearest neighbor, you simply don't have the customer density to be a viable market for anything other than satellite or maybe cellular. And the cellular is heavily subsidized by all the other users in neighboring cities that want to be able to drive past your house and not be out of coverage for 50-100 miles of road.

    I don't see Starlink as an attractive backup for home internet if you already have good service from a common fiber/coax provider. Cellular would be better really. We should be pushing wireless companies to make that easier and more common. A cellular hotspot for emergency use as a small monthly price (assuming it is unused 95% of the time) would be reasonable. They just have to account for rate limiting when they all come on at once during power outages, emergencies, etc.
    Click to expand...

    I am getting it as a backup for a multitude of reasons:

    - There is one and only one road into where I live
    - Tornados are prevalent in this area and poles frequently go down
    - NO cell service at the house

    So, if a tornado comes through anywhere on that road up from me and takes a pole out. No phone, no internet, no cell. I do have a HAM radio license, but that's not really a substitute for a real internet connection.

    I do believe that I am a niche case where Starlink is a decent backup option.
     
    stevenkan

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  • #46
    Kethinov said:
    I'm in this boat as well. I am interested in Starlink as a backup internet connection. I would be in shut_up_and_take_my_money.jpg territory if we could confirm it is easy to shut off and turn back on on demand. I'd be more than happy to pay for a full month of service anytime I need it if my primary connection goes down. My hope is I can have it shut off 10 to 11 months of the year and then if a bad storm comes, all I have to do is get on their website on my phone, push a button, and bam my Starlink connection is active and they've charged me $100. No brainer.
    Click to expand...

    But how will you get on their website if your internet is down? :D

    Semi-seriously, it would be great to have it available as a fail-over service, e.g. pay $10 a month to have it provisioned but not allocated, and then have it automagically allocate and bill if your primary goes down.
     
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    hestermofet

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  • #48
    sryan2k1 said:
    Rural users don't represent enough of an economy to make a service like this profitable
    Click to expand...


    Yes they do, think globally.
    Click to expand...
    Over half the world's population lives in cities, and the less than half of the population that lives in rural areas face an incredible income disparity. For example, a typical highly rural but rapidly industrializing country like China (perfect target for Starlink), people living in rural areas earn 57% less than their urban counterparts.

    So no, not really.
     
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    hestermofet

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  • #49
    Paladin said:
    Yeah, I see Starlink as almost exclusively based on the idea that there are a lot of people who just cannot get anything better than a dribble of cell service where they live and would happily pay $100 a month for anything over 10-20 Megabit per second.
    Click to expand...
    There aren't very many people in this situation. I mean, who could afford $100/mo just for slightly faster Internet. In the US political climate, they have extraordinary influence on the national discourse, so their issues get blown way out of proportion, but in the rest of the world, public policy is not really aimed at satisfying the very few people who live in the countryside, and barely contribute to the economy anyway.

    People who are really rural are getting by with 2G on their Nokia Asha phone.

    Starlink, while really awesome, seems like a billionaire's vanity project more than anything truly revolutionary. The costs are just going to be way too high for people who truly need it, so Elon Musk is probably going to just end up subsidizing the Internet service of a bunch of Middle Americans.
     
    Hap

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  • #50
    Paladin said:
    That sounds pretty rural to me so yeah, that is what I would figure Starlink makes sense for. You have a good 'normal' internet service but no cell coverage? That's weird because usually they go together pretty closely. The internet service enables the cellular providers to put up towers near by.
    Click to expand...


    AT&T Fiber, no other ISPs available (not even WISPs), AT&T zero coverage. You can make a phone call on Verizon if you climb up on the roof (I guess I could get a booster), but the signal just isn't strong enough for data. Up until 4 years ago, it was a T1. So fairly rural.
     
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  • #52
    Over half the world's population lives in cities, and the less than half of the population that lives in rural areas face an incredible income disparity. For example, a typical highly rural but rapidly industrializing country like China (perfect target for Starlink), people living in rural areas earn 57% less than their urban counterparts.
    Click to expand...
    What % of the global population do you think need to become customers before the service becomes viable?
     
    malor

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  • #53
    Remember that they can sell service pretty much anywhere, including in big cities. They just can't exceed a certain density, so the percentage in big cities will be much lower than in more rural areas. Wired ISPs won't feel especially threatened by Starlink because they know they can't lose very many customers, so they're probably not going to move much on price.

    I strongly suspect that they'll get good overall uptake in the US, which should alone be enough to be somewhat profitable. And then once they have the inter-sat lasers working, they can keep re-using the same shell to sell Internet anywhere the local government allows them to. In effect, they can sell the same satellites over and over and over again. The incremental cost for adding a new country is a vanishingly small fraction of the expense of building the network in the first place. The profit margin on additional countries will be enormous.

    ISPs in general tend to struggle in the early years. Witness EPB, which built the best fiber network in the country, and then freaking nobody bought it. It took them saturation-level advertising, at least on local billboards, for like six or seven years before they reached break-even. But then as word got out about how good the service was, more and more people switched. Their break-even point was something like 18% coverage. They scraped along at just a few percent for years, and then it started to grow steadily, and then quickly. I'm pretty sure they were north of 60% when I last saw figures, and their Internet division is fabulously profitable.

    I think Starlink is probably going to be similar; once people know it's good and reliable (assuming that it is), customer growth will accelerate. And once they really launch in a worldwide sense, I think they're likely to be generating very large profits.

    It's the miracle of mass production, in a sense. Even ground ISPs can scale from horrible money losers to hugely profitable without adding much equipment. Starlink can scale explosively at very little cost. Their biggest expense will probably be the dishes.
     
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    hestermofet

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  • #54
    malor said:
    Remember that they can sell service pretty much anywhere, including in big cities. They just can't exceed a certain density, so the percentage in big cities will be much lower than in more rural areas. Wired ISPs won't feel especially threatened by Starlink because they know they can't lose very many customers, so they're probably not going to move much on price.
    Click to expand...
    I don't know why any one in a big city would pay for Starlink when wired services are so much cheaper, not weather dependent, etc. We have a lot of people in this thread in cities or in the rural/urban boundary saying "I'd be interested, but only as a backup I pay for 3 days a year". So the appeal for urban people seems to be the subscription model, not the fact that it's Internet anywhere, regardless of geographic restrictions. Can you not provide a traditional wireline service on the same subscription model, where it's pay as you go instead of prepaid? That to me would mean virtually anyone in a city interested in Starlink would no longer even consider it, at least according to a straw poll of the preferences expressed in this thread.

    KD5MDK said:
    Over half the world's population lives in cities, and the less than half of the population that lives in rural areas face an incredible income disparity. For example, a typical highly rural but rapidly industrializing country like China (perfect target for Starlink), people living in rural areas earn 57% less than their urban counterparts.
    Click to expand...
    What % of the global population do you think need to become customers before the service becomes viable?
    Click to expand...

    I don't think that's the right question to ask. I think the right question to ask is "who is this service for?", and from that, you can figure out how many people would potentially be interested in the service, and if that would lead to a break-even on operating/capital costs. It's not like all of the global population is at the same income level, so if your answer to "who is going to buy Starlink if its biggest advantages are for rural populations" is "think globally" as sryan suggests, that's ignoring the fact that most of the global rural population can't afford wired Internet of any kind, let alone a $100/mo Internet service. That's more than the monthly income of many global populations living in rural areas.

    To me, Starlink seems to mostly be appealing to wealthy (relatively) people living in rural areas, and the Venn diagram of those two populations don't overlap much outside of English-speaking North America, and Northern Europe. By wealthy, I mean enjoying a G8 standard of living, not extravagance with multiple luxury cars and a McMansion or anything like that.
     
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  • #55
    when wired services are so much cheaper, etc.
    Click to expand...


    I pay $70 a month for Comcast, $100 a month for space internet isn't out of the same price bucket.


    not weather dependent,
    Click to expand...

    The fuck it isn't. We lost power over the summer for 3 days, the cable network only has about 8 hours of battery runtime in it, after a few hours we had no internet at all (we live in a city in a slight depression and get almost zero LTE data when the power goes out.


    I want starlink so I can make phone calls and get literally any data at my house during utility outages. I'd be fine with 5Mbps
     
    malor

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  • #56
    hestermofet said:
    malor said:
    Remember that they can sell service pretty much anywhere, including in big cities. They just can't exceed a certain density, so the percentage in big cities will be much lower than in more rural areas. Wired ISPs won't feel especially threatened by Starlink because they know they can't lose very many customers, so they're probably not going to move much on price.
    Click to expand...
    I don't know why any one in a big city would pay for Starlink when wired services are so much cheaper, not weather dependent, etc. We have a lot of people in this thread in cities or in the rural/urban boundary saying "I'd be interested, but only as a backup I pay for 3 days a year". So the appeal for urban people seems to be the subscription model, not the fact that it's Internet anywhere, regardless of geographic restrictions. Can you not provide a traditional wireline service on the same subscription model, where it's pay as you go instead of prepaid? That to me would mean virtually anyone in a city interested in Starlink would no longer even consider it, at least according to a straw poll of the preferences expressed in this thread.

    KD5MDK said:
    Over half the world's population lives in cities, and the less than half of the population that lives in rural areas face an incredible income disparity. For example, a typical highly rural but rapidly industrializing country like China (perfect target for Starlink), people living in rural areas earn 57% less than their urban counterparts.
    Click to expand...
    What % of the global population do you think need to become customers before the service becomes viable?
    Click to expand...

    I don't think that's the right question to ask. I think the right question to ask is "who is this service for?", and from that, you can figure out how many people would potentially be interested in the service, and if that would lead to a break-even on operating/capital costs. It's not like all of the global population is at the same income level, so if your answer to "who is going to buy Starlink if its biggest advantages are for rural populations" is "think globally" as sryan suggests, that's ignoring the fact that most of the global rural population can't afford wired Internet of any kind, let alone a $100/mo Internet service. That's more than the monthly income of many global populations living in rural areas.

    To me, Starlink seems to mostly be appealing to wealthy (relatively) people living in rural areas, and the Venn diagram of those two populations don't overlap much outside of English-speaking North America, and Northern Europe. By wealthy, I mean enjoying a G8 standard of living, not extravagance with multiple luxury cars and a McMansion or anything like that.
    Click to expand...

    Starlink would be cheaper than, and superior to, the Cox cable service my mother gets. But Starlink's problem with overheating is a non-starter where she lives, which is extremely hot. If they work that out, she'd be better off switching. Cox is very expensive.

    I think you're overestimating the appeal of wired service. In nearly all areas of the US, bandwidth is very limited and the monopoly rents are enormous.

    And keep in mind that Starlink doesn't need to charge the same prices in other countries that it does in the US. Remember, the marginal cost of adding a country is nearly zero, so any customer at any price is probably money good. The main expense is the dish.
     
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  • #57
    I don't know why any one in a big city would pay for Starlink when wired services are so much cheaper, not weather dependent, etc. We have a lot of people in this thread in cities or in the rural/urban boundary saying "I'd be interested, but only as a backup I pay for 3 days a year".
    Click to expand...
    Ok, so how many people don't live in cities? In the US, it's 80.7%. So we're stuck with mere 59.5 million people as potential customers. If they live in households of 4, and only 10% of them chose Starlink, that's about 1.5M customers.
    https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys ... facts.html

    Or we can look at Hughes & ViaSat and how many customers they have. Satellite internet is terrible so I think it's pretty safe to say anyone using it now is a potential Starlink customer because they wouldn't choose it for any other reason.
    EchoStar (Hughes) had 1.125M customers in North America and 375k in Latin America. ViaSat has not quite 600k. There's also some number of people using cellular internet as their source, with varying speeds and reliability.

    That seems like a start of a market to me.
     
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    hobbler

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  • #58
    One thing Starlink has been useful for here in rural Canada, is prompting local service providers and governments to finally upgrade their infrastructure and service offerings in areas where it always made sense to do so, but where it was much more profitable to provide terrible service on the old and degrading infrastructure whilst raising prices regularly. (112 CAD per month for 15/.75 megabit dsl, 150 CAD for 10/1 megabit line of sight WISP that would go down regularly due to weather, another LTE based provider that would lure you into a multi year contract with a 30 day cancellation clause by giving you great service for those first 30 days, then throttling you aggressively thereafter)

    Crews have now been trenching fibre here for the last few months, I never thought I’d live to see the day. That said, Starlink has been great for the year or so that I’ve been a subscriber, with very minor issues like the occasional reboot, and knocking the large icicles off the edge of the dish every once in a while. No weather related issues at all so far.

    I have some doubts as to the long term financial viability of Starlink, but as long as the service remains up for the next 6 months or so till the fibre is lit here, I’ll continue to be very satisfied.
     
    cmannes

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  • #60
    So, there is a guy who strapped the dish on his truck, and has been driving all over seeing if it would work.

    Originally, he was going into the starlink site, and updating his address everytime he changed locations. Which worked. But lately, he hasn't had to do that anymore either.

    https://www.tuckstruck.net/truck-and-ki ... erlanders/

    While I'm not moving around, I did originally have a dish. But for various reasons, I had to cancel service. Recently I've been thinking of moving the dish out to a cabin I summer in. So I first tried the address change thing. Worked fine, no warnings/issues. But then I inquired on how to restore service, and they immediately switched me back on.

    I actually turned around and had them cancel again.

    But it seems currently, you can turn it on whenever you want, turn it off whenever you want, and take in anywhere you want. YMMV of course, especially if too many people start taking advantage of it.
     
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  • #62
    SunnyD said:
    Does anyone know what current order to delivery times are if you're in a coverage area? I think I may need to use starlink as this DSL connection at my new home isn't even stable, let alone fast.
    Click to expand...
    At least in NA, EU and most of Australia (rest of the world is slated for coverage once the intersat mesh goes online Q1 next year, assuming the local government allows it) it's no longer so much a question of if you're in a coverage area but if your cell is full. If it's not you should be able to get service very fast from what I've heard, they are starting to hit a mismatch in demand vs cell density so there are plenty of terminals now but that doesn't mean they can go wherever people want them. If your cell is full you are out of luck for probably at least a year, they need v2 sats to shrink those/boost bandwidth per cell. You can also pay extra for an RV license, which can bypass the line and be used mobile but is only "best effort" service, great in an empty zone, might be low end DSL level in a filled cell and busy time of day.

    If you haven't already also look around and see if there are any decent WISPs in your area, those can offer very solid service if you're fortunate enough to have a good one within 30 miles or so. More of a thing in mountainous areas. Fixed home LTE/5G service can also be surprisingly decent from T-Mobile where offered. Does not have data caps. And for the US might as well at least check what the local ISP coops look like in your area if any, or muni efforts or the like. Even if nothing exists just now, a LOT of federal money is now starting to percolate through the system and depending on local factors there might be some fiber rollouts in surprising areas.
     
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  • #63
    xoa said:
    SunnyD said:
    Does anyone know what current order to delivery times are if you're in a coverage area? I think I may need to use starlink as this DSL connection at my new home isn't even stable, let alone fast.
    Click to expand...
    At least in NA, EU and most of Australia (rest of the world is slated for coverage once the intersat mesh goes online Q1 next year, assuming the local government allows it) it's no longer so much a question of if you're in a coverage area but if your cell is full. If it's not you should be able to get service very fast from what I've heard, they are starting to hit a mismatch in demand vs cell density so there are plenty of terminals now but that doesn't mean they can go wherever people want them. If your cell is full you are out of luck for probably at least a year, they need v2 sats to shrink those/boost bandwidth per cell. You can also pay extra for an RV license, which can bypass the line and be used mobile but is only "best effort" service, great in an empty zone, might be low end DSL level in a filled cell and busy time of day.

    If you haven't already also look around and see if there are any decent WISPs in your area, those can offer very solid service if you're fortunate enough to have a good one within 30 miles or so. More of a thing in mountainous areas. Fixed home LTE/5G service can also be surprisingly decent from T-Mobile where offered. Does not have data caps. And for the US might as well at least check what the local ISP coops look like in your area if any, or muni efforts or the like. Even if nothing exists just now, a LOT of federal money is now starting to percolate through the system and depending on local factors there might be some fiber rollouts in surprising areas.
    Click to expand...

    According to what I've been tracking, our cell went active next month. So what you're saying is there's a good chance if I order now I'd have it fairly quickly?

    Also, quite literally I have zero other options. I'm very rural, in the mountains and I'm roaming on Canadian cell towers with no US provider towers in range. It's either crappy DSL or satellite for me unless Consolidated magically decides to run fiber here. So I'm trying to decide on how badly I want broadband internet.
     
    Frennzy

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  • #64
    hestermofet said:
    This thread is a perfect demonstration of why wiring up rural areas for Internet is not economically feasible, and WISPs aren't really a solution either. You have a tiny number of rural people who are "I'm definitely going to sign up", with a small number who drop out. If it's a WISP, you hope for some urban people to subsidize the cost so you can provide higher speeds to your rural users. This is because WISPs can go crazy long distances, so you hope to capture some users on the rural/urban boundary who may have some urban Internet options, but they're not very good.

    But everyone in an urban area is like "I'd definitely sign up. But only if I can pay for just 3 days a year". You can't run a profitable subscription-based service with users only expecting to use your service 3 days out of 365.

    I just don't see how Starlink is going to really get off the ground unless they have something very compelling for urban users. Rural users don't represent enough of an economy to make a service like this profitable, but many urban users are spoiled for choice. I pay $50/mo for 1000/750Mbps. I don't see why I should waste money on Starlink, even though I love the tech, I love space, and it would be a really cool thing to play with. But I can't justify such an expensive toy.
    Click to expand...

    They said very similar things about cable TV back in the 70s/early 80s.

    I grew up in the most remote county in the continental US. (Hinsdale, CO)

    At the time our choices were terrestrial (OTA) signals...but that was unreliable because some shithead, we never found out who, would rebroadcast Broncos games via HAM which generally fubar'd the signal to TVs. Or, you could get one of those two meter satellite dishes, and pay through the nose every month. Once cable signal was laid into the county the uptake was damned near 100% for year round residents. Those big dishes were somewhere around $2000 back then...and service was something like $200 per month. Cable came in, with a whopping 11 channels, at less than $20/mo.

    Cane shaking aside, what you are currently paying for broadband is pretty much as low as service will ever get for those speeds. I pay $135/mo for 1G/40M, and I'm smack in the middle of the greater Denver/Boulder metro area.

    I'm still in touch with many old friends who live where I grew up, and every single one of them are on the Starlink train. It's really the only game in town, even with a much more modern cable system in place. There simply isn't enough bandwidth available "over the wire" to the main (only) town to give everyone decent bandwidth.

    Oddly, Hinsdale also has the third-highest per-capita income in the state...but look at the number of households

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_C ... ita_income
     
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  • #65
    SunnyD said:
    xoa said:
    SunnyD said:
    Does anyone know what current order to delivery times are if you're in a coverage area? I think I may need to use starlink as this DSL connection at my new home isn't even stable, let alone fast.
    Click to expand...
    At least in NA, EU and most of Australia (rest of the world is slated for coverage once the intersat mesh goes online Q1 next year, assuming the local government allows it) it's no longer so much a question of if you're in a coverage area but if your cell is full. If it's not you should be able to get service very fast from what I've heard, they are starting to hit a mismatch in demand vs cell density so there are plenty of terminals now but that doesn't mean they can go wherever people want them. If your cell is full you are out of luck for probably at least a year, they need v2 sats to shrink those/boost bandwidth per cell. You can also pay extra for an RV license, which can bypass the line and be used mobile but is only "best effort" service, great in an empty zone, might be low end DSL level in a filled cell and busy time of day.

    If you haven't already also look around and see if there are any decent WISPs in your area, those can offer very solid service if you're fortunate enough to have a good one within 30 miles or so. More of a thing in mountainous areas. Fixed home LTE/5G service can also be surprisingly decent from T-Mobile where offered. Does not have data caps. And for the US might as well at least check what the local ISP coops look like in your area if any, or muni efforts or the like. Even if nothing exists just now, a LOT of federal money is now starting to percolate through the system and depending on local factors there might be some fiber rollouts in surprising areas.
    Click to expand...

    According to what I've been tracking, our cell went active next month. So what you're saying is there's a good chance if I order now I'd have it fairly quickly?
    Click to expand...
    From what I can tell yes, unless of course there is already a line in front of you and the cell will be filled before it's your turn. My main metric here is people paying for the mobile/RV plan have recently been receiving terminals fast, which has suggested to most people that terminal mass production isn't the limiting factor right now, it's where demand is vs where empty cells are.

    Also, quite literally I have zero other options. I'm very rural, in the mountains and I'm roaming on Canadian cell towers with no US provider towers in range. It's either crappy DSL or satellite for me unless Consolidated magically decides to run fiber here. So I'm trying to decide on how badly I want broadband internet.
    Click to expand...
    Yep I hear that, that is identical to the situation I first deployed Starlink for a client at early last year during the beta. Except no Canadian cell towers either, just zero cellular coverage of any kind at all. 10 Mbps connection cost ~$300/mo, I hope you're at least doing better than that on price :scared:.

    Approaching a year and half now, everyone is very, very happy with Starlink, including using it for VoIP. If you can swing it I'd absolutely give it a shot in those circumstances. I'm a bit disappointed in the terminal v2 (though I don't have to use it either and it probably doesn't matter to you) and I hope they do eventually introduce a few more price tiers, but in the scheme of things those are minor quibbles. The commitment is refreshingly low as well. I'm about to have to pull the trigger on Comcast somewhere else since the local ISP seems to have come to a halt, and $220+/mo for gigabit and 2 years is the minimum period sigh. At least by that time mass v2 constellation should be filling out and I'm looking forward to seeing what they can do with that.
     
    Frennzy

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  • #67
    One really neat thing about Starlink. Once the Sat-Sat mesh is up, it will trounce terrestrial latency over the horizon. (butt-dyno guess being anything beyond 60ms land based can be beaten by S2S).

    That'll be a game changer for certain applications. HFT/HST would be my first guess. I'd even wager those types of firms would simply buy all the bandwidth available at first.
     
    stevenkan

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  • #68
    Frennzy said:
    One really neat thing about Starlink. Once the Sat-Sat mesh is up, it will trounce terrestrial latency over the horizon. (butt-dyno guess being anything beyond 60ms land based can be beaten by S2S).

    That'll be a game changer for certain applications. HFT/HST would be my first guess. I'd even wager those types of firms would simply buy all the bandwidth available at first.
    Click to expand...

    If the DoD hasn't already bought it . . . .
     
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    gusgizmo

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  • #70
    I was recently testing Hawaii -> Los Angeles and got the distinct feeling that my traffic was at times going satellite to satellite based on latency vs satellite position in starlink.sx

    Enterprise fiber is in the 50ms range. Cable 70ms.

    Starlink was in 90-120ms range dropping down to 70ms as v1.5 satellites came overhead. There is a train of them running between Hawaii and LA so it's at least in theory possible. There are a limited set of geographic pairs where this is testable so I intend to dig in further. I'd really like to try to go direct to someone with a dishy in LA or inland along that great circle path. To eliminate variability in peering latency.

    They still have some ways to go with optimizing bufferbloat before this product becomes an MPLS killer.
     
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    antiwraith

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  • #73
    My Starlink RV gear is in the hands of Fedex, hope to have it this weekend.

    I'm currently living in very rural KY on a 80 year old farm in an 80 year remodeled farmhouse my wife's grandparents built back in the day. I've been waiting for Starlink to arrive since Feb 2021 and a week ago figured out I can get the RV dish with deprioritized traffic now or the residential dish sometime in the future (currently still says "mid-2022").

    So I've been using a cell booster to get 1 or 2 bars of 5Ge in the house, which is just barely enough for a zoom call. 4 or 5 megabits down and barely 1 up. And I only get that if my wife is away from home at work. Once you get a second person using the limited cellular data, you can immediately tell. Things that were "fast" before get slow and things that were slow before just stop working.

    No cable company or fiber. DSL, isn't an option either, but if it were it would be a joke. The landline is so crappy and full of static it's not really worth using.

    So I am 100% the target market for Starlink. Bring it. If anyone in the thread would be interested I can post what it's like after I get it up and running.

    Does anyone know how big a "cell" is on the starlink map? I'm curious how many starlink users are in my cell, but I don't imagine I have a way of ever finding that out.
     
    SunnyD

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  • #74
    antiwraith said:
    My Starlink RV gear is in the hands of Fedex, hope to have it this weekend.

    I'm currently living in very rural KY on a 80 year old farm in an 80 year remodeled farmhouse my wife's grandparents built back in the day. I've been waiting for Starlink to arrive since Feb 2021 and a week ago figured out I can get the RV dish with deprioritized traffic now or the residential dish sometime in the future (currently still says "mid-2022").

    So I've been using a cell booster to get 1 or 2 bars of 5Ge in the house, which is just barely enough for a zoom call. 4 or 5 megabits down and barely 1 up. And I only get that if my wife is away from home at work. Once you get a second person using the limited cellular data, you can immediately tell. Things that were "fast" before get slow and things that were slow before just stop working.

    No cable company or fiber. DSL, isn't an option either, but if it were it would be a joke. The landline is so crappy and full of static it's not really worth using.

    So I am 100% the target market for Starlink. Bring it. If anyone in the thread would be interested I can post what it's like after I get it up and running.

    Does anyone know how big a "cell" is on the starlink map? I'm curious how many starlink users are in my cell, but I don't imagine I have a way of ever finding that out.
    Click to expand...

    I feel you. I literally just hooked up Dishy about 2 hours ago and am enjoying a solid 50Mbps++ on steam updates. I'm getting anywhere between 20-120Mbps during these primetime hours with less than optimal positioning of the dish (I'm expecting outages due to the current location). But my DSL line is equally as crappy with outages, so it's going to get cancelled.

    Setup was nothing more than "plug it in, wait for a few minutes, then let it do its thing". Log in, setup wifi SSID and done. Even comcrap doesn't hold a candle to this setup process. It's insane.

    The cells on the map look to be roughly a 10 mile radius from what I can tell based on locations I know. I think officially they're about 7.5 miles radius. And it looks like a very large swath around me just lit up recently too. I'm no longer right on the edge of service.

    Good luck, definitely interested to see what the RV service looks like in terms of performance!
     
    SunnyD

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  • #75
    pDde4dv.jpg


    It's not ideal, but until I get a pole set in the ground to mount it on I'm actually surprised that I'm getting almost no obstructions even though it's definitely blocked by the house on the south side.

    Only real gripe is that there are no ethernet ports on the router. That's an extra $25, and from what I understand they're backordered until second tuesday of next week.
     
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    antiwraith

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  • #76
    SunnyD said:
    pDde4dv.jpg


    It's not ideal, but until I get a pole set in the ground to mount it on I'm actually surprised that I'm getting almost no obstructions even though it's definitely blocked by the house on the south side.

    Only real gripe is that there are no ethernet ports on the router. That's an extra $25, and from what I understand they're backordered until second tuesday of next week.
    Click to expand...


    I ordered a pole mount and Ethernet adaptor for my dish when I placed the order. Both items showed up in less than a week.

    But the dish itself is delayed, looks like Fedex may have lost it….. :mad:
     
    Hap

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  • #77
    I have the ethernet adapter, waiting on my longer replacement cable. Starlink is a fall back system for me and going to set it up as a failover ISP on the router.

    I'm also paying for the "portable" addition. I have a couple of recurring events that happen out where there are no buildings or cell service. This year we will have internet. :)
     
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  • #79
    Agree. In my case, AT&T Fiber has only gone down once since I've had it. That was due to a tree down across lines (and across the only road out). With tornadoes being a frequently occurring phenomenon, my wife and I find it both a reasonable expense. We do take the dish inside the storm shelter during major storms though. What good does a back up do if the dish is in the next county over?

    Right now we're just testing it once a month, but when my replacement cable arrives, I'm going to install a permanent pole, run the longer cable inside to my wiring closet, and into my router. During major storms/warnings. We'll pull down the dish off the pole, grab the starlink router and put it in the storm shelter.
     
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