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Comment by garaetjjte | Hacker News Reader

What's significant about this? Seems to be plain 802.11ac router.

The significance is that it's related to the much anticipated (by people with poor internet access) Starlink satellite internet service.

https://www.starlink.com/

People would be just as interested if it were just a plastic mounting bracket with the "Starlink" branding.

I have fiber to the home that is super reliable... I am still anticipating this and will be signing up to supplement my fiber

so it is not just for people with poor internet

Well... wait until you see pricing. Even if it comes in at the speculated $80/month price point, many people will find it cheaper and faster to stick with their terrestrial internet. There aren't many people willing to pay $80/month for a backup connection they'll only use once every month or two. (I'm one of them, I usually have at least one Comcast outage a month, from a few hours to a few days). I'm in a bit of a celluar dead zone, I get one bar of signal from AT&T or Verizon, and only if I walk up to the second floor)

In Alaska, specifically, gigabit internet costs ~$200/mo through Liberty Media's subsidiary GCI in the three major cities. In rural areas, GCI offers plans through local co-ops averaging $150/mo for 6mbit down, 100gb data cap over terrestrial microwave relay. Starlink will normalize this market.

Yeah, those rural customers are in the category "people with poor internet access" that I mentioned above - but I think that few people with fiber to the home are anxiously awaiting Starlink. That $200 gigabit plan is faster than I can get from Comcast (my only provider) not far from Seattle - the fastest they can provide to me is 600mbit, but with only about 15mbit upstream.

Starlink hasn't really revealed speeds, bandwidth caps, etc. Some tests claim they can provide gigabit speeds, but will have to wait and see what they can provide in real world usage.

Starlink will not cost $80 for the gigabit plan. I'd wager there won't be a gigabit plan. They need thousands of customers per 20Gbps satellite for this to even start to make sense. You cannot fit even a couple hundred 1Gbps customers on a single satellite.

You can certainly fit a couple hundred 1Gbps customers on a 20GBps satellite provided you make sure that those people don't completely saturate the entire line at the same time.

Yes, I know how the modeling works. For a 100Gbps subscriber they will need to guarantee that they can achieve 100G peak speeds when nobody is using it. That means the beam the user is in always has to be illuminated with as much power as they need for 100G. Remember, this power is shared between all the other beams on that satellite.

At 60:1 contention ratio (which used to be BT’s standard for home ADSL), you’d be able to squeeze 1,200 Gb plans per satellite.

60:1 is not realistic for a 100G plan. See my other comment.

> You cannot fit even a couple hundred 1Gbps customers on a single satellite.

ISP's totally do overcommit in the range of thousands

They do for lower tier plans. Not 100G plans.

I'm curious why though?

> I have fiber to the home that is super reliable... I am still anticipating this and will be signing up to supplement my fiber

We have fibre-to-the-home, but we'd like a bigger house and a bigger backyard. There are some really nice big houses with nice big backyards about 10-20 minutes north of us, but fibre-to-home is not available in that area. If Starlink works well, it would increase the odds we could move. So, I'd be inclined to sign up for Starlink alongside our fibre-to-the-home, just to compare the two.

I like @syshum have access to 1 gbit fiber in my current home area.

I am excited for Starlink to be able to buy a couple arces of land much further out and still be able to have "reasonable" internet that I'm able to work remotely.

You already can buy farmland and get decent ISP coverage. In fact, there is often more competition and better service in rural areas than in places dominated by the cable and telco monopolies.

I spot checked a county I’m familiar with. Population density: < 10 per square mile. Median income: 25-30K. They have fiber to the home, and offer up to 1GBit symmetric, even outside of town (where the houses are a ~mile apart).

They don’t have to trench to run the fiber underground anymore. Instead, they have a roto-rooter style boring machine that installs the fiber as it builds a tunnel. They use a metal detector to figure out where to steer it.

I live in Canada and this is not the case at all.

Plenty of the listings I look up online 40-60 mins from a city of 100k have dsl 10 mbit.

Looking at the filing, the only relation seems to be branding, i.e. they're probably looking to upsell people on wifi routers when they buy internet service (like all other providers do).

They could also be planning on selling it separately as a consumer fan product like the roofing torch flamethrowers.

Best consumer fan product would be a mini ground station for those with fibre connections.

Yes, it is pretty standard to package an access point in with the modem. No idea if they will just include the router in the internet price, or rent it monthly on top of standard charge like how some ISPs do it.

Starlink is a satellite constellation being constructed by SpaceX to provide satellite Internet access.

Presumably their router would connect to this.

I think OP is asking why is there a need for a special router. Why not just have the satellite terminal connect to a traditional WiFi router via ethernet similar to other types of modems?

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