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Comment by sontek | Hacker News Reader

As someone who lives in the mountains of Puerto Rico and has to rely on "unlimited" cell phone coverage that data caps me and satellite internet that also has data caps.... I can't wait until starlink is up and running and we may have an option for high speed, low latency, internet for us who hate cities and love nature :)

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We lived for a year in some mountains in Mexico in an off-the-grid cabin. We became accustomed to everything (energy starvation, driving 30 mins to the nearest village, 2 hours to the nearest city, etc) except the lack of connectivity.

I bought one of those huge Wifi antenna to connect to an open Wifi of a rural school a couple of kilometers away. It was empty after 2pm so we had 4Mbps just for ourselves all afternoon and night (if we had a sunny day and our batteries were full). That lasted about 8 months until someone built a barn or something and installed some electricity poles. We weren't able to connect anymore.

After that we drove almost daily to the village and spent a couple of hours in a café with a flaky 2Mbps connection but it became unpractical. We went back to civilization 2 months later or so.

If Starlink would have been available back then maybe we'd still be living in the mountains!

> huge Wifi antenna to connect to an open Wifi of a rural school a couple of kilometers away

That's impressive, but how did this work from the school's side? Wouldn't they need a huge wifi antenna too?

They had regular wifi access points, nothing fancy.

The huge antenna [1] was connected to an Alfa R36 hotspot which was fairly powerful. I guess that's why it worked.

[1] https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81Zwin2Z-ML...

"huge" antennas usually have high gain, which increases your signal-to-noise ratio - both Rx and Tx.

So one can "hear" signals further away and "speak" softer than would.be normally necessary.

Where do you buy a WiFi antenna like that? Would you have any example links to what they're like?

We used this antenna with an Alfa R36 hotspot.

https://www.amazon.com/TP-Link-Directional-Parabolic-Connect...

Wow. Thanks!

Have you looked into WISPs? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Internet_service_prov... You can even setup your own.

This was 7 years ago and I'm pretty sure even today nobody offers WISP in that area.

One of our neighbors who lived a couple of kms from us had a point-to-point Motorola antenna connecting with the closest village. We considered doing that but there was a mountain between us and the village which complicated things. Also connectivity in the area was so bad the only ISP available hadn't been signing new contracts for years. The region was difficult to access and wasn't particularly rich, it didn't make sense for ISPs to invest in upgrading 15 years old ADSL.

Yeah, if it really does deliver ~25ms latency and up to 1GBPS, work from anywhere becomes much more literal. Currently a lot of remote work and things like multiplayer games are limited to areas with reliable broadband.

But if you can get that anywhere... it'll be amazing and have a profound effect.

It will work from anywhere after about 90 more launches and thousands of ground relays being installed, and the antenna is the size of a watermelon.

So "anywhere" would be limited to vanlife on up, in a place that doesn't have trees, in the markets initially served, which will likely be rural US.

But starlink v2? I'll be on a cute Panamanian island :)

Do you know if being able to use it on a boat in the ocean will be part of v1 or v2?

I sail a bit, and I've always wanted to sail the world, but giving up a decent internet connection has always been the main deal-breaker.

v2 most likely. The currently launched satellites do not have cross-satellite links so the satellites can only provide service while they are within range of a ground station. The cross satellite links were originally planned for v1 but are behind schedule and nobody outside SpaceX knows what the current schedule is.

> in a place that doesn't have trees

What problems do trees cause for starlink?

I don't know anything specific a out starlink, but I have hundreds of days of experience trying to hit iridium sattelites while hiking in the wild. You need direct line-of-sight to sky.

Cites are done - Scott Adams

If it becomes available i buy or restore an 18 century cannon-ship, over the day i sail and play captain sparrow, and in the night i play StarTreckCrew-VR in my captain quarter's ;-)

https://www.timesofisrael.com/life-size-replica-of-18th-cent...

YES, exactly that!!

The flag need's a change, the rest is just perfect!!!

Especially useful for web pages that have 6MB rocket takeoff GIFs ;)

Absolutely. Many places in rural Canada don't have great, if any, options for high speed internet and sometimes even reliable cellular. That's great if you want to escape the connected world, but for those of us who would like to at least spend more time away from the city and who don't have the ability to just leave our jobs... it could be a game changer.

Sadly, you don't even need to go very far out of some major metro areas in the United States to find ZERO options besides either, as you say, 'unlimited' cellular data with intermittent service, or capped satellite with latency too great for anything like video conferencing. When I say zero, I mean not even DSL is available. Even options like "Fixed WiFi" don't reach a lot of properties due to hills and forest cover, and even if they did they'd also be capped similar to satellite.

Have you looked into Calyx? Might be a good solution for you if you can get Sprint 4G coverage in your area and it’s actually unlimited.

https://calyxinstitute.org/membership/internet

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