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Comment by NikolaeVarius | Hacker News Reader

Deepest darkest corner of New Zealand, as long as it has an internet connection. Starlink can't come fast enough.

I can't imagine wanting to use satellite internet as my daily driver. A quick search says that the physical limit for latency is around 500ms? That's unplayable for most video games, and would make things like SSH'ing to a server pretty annoying.

But I imagine you'd probably go there to get away from things, and just rely on internet when absolutely needed.

Starlink will be a LEO (low earth orbit) satellite network. Satellites travel at much lower altitudes resulting in much lower latencies (I think easily below 50ms was what I read before).

Ah wow, I didn't realize that Starlink is a service specifically planning to address latency! Thanks.

And, in practice, the latency will actually be better than fibre. So instead of a 240msec ping to the US from NZ, it'd be closer to the theoretical minimum of 25msec, but by how much, who knows? I could see a realistic 50-80msec perhaps.

Which is still pretty mind-blowing.

FWIW I've been using conventional (geo-stationary) satellite for the past 7 weeks. SSH is surprisingly not horrible, though it could obviously be snappier. RTT for servers that are physically ~250 km away is ~600ms. (Obviously you really shouldn't be ssh'ing into your servers anyway - that's what configuration management tools are for.)

No one wants to use satellite as their daily driver, but almost by definition some of the best places on the planet are necessarily a long way from a) people, and b) modern infrastructure. Everything is a tradeoff.

Most video games are perfectly playable -- but I suspect you meant most multiplayer video games, and yes, that latency's not going to work for you.

Why not Far North instead - the county of never ending summer?

I'm too excited for Starlink capabilities for offshore sailing and working (though sailing is involved enough that working on the side didn't work well for me before).

I like to do winter hiking/tramping/camping too

The place you're looking for then is Haast.

However, if you're earning a good salary, I would suggest Lake Hawea if you want to still be part of society. (and you should still be covered by the nations gig fibre network there)

fiber in NZ is essentially government sponsored to get into the vast majority of NZ, including all the tiny places .

Not quite all of them - I'm out in Rakaia Gorge, no fibre for me :)

But I have a 5gz wireless connection from Netspeed that works just fine for video conferencing and collaboration. It's more expensive than fibre and it comes with data limits, but it lets me work from where I want to live, so I consider the extra cost to be worth it.

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