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Comment by VivaCascadia | Hacker News Reader

It looks like starting out they're going to prioritize rural Washington State. From the FAQ which is buried for some reason at https://www.starlink.com/main.16ae0a3588c339b10118.js.

q:Who can participate in Starlink Beta?

a:Starlink Beta will begin in the Northern United States and lower Canada, with those living in rural and/or remote communities in the Washington state area. Access to the Starlink Beta program will be driven by the user's location as well as the number of users in nearby areas. All beta testers must have a clear view of the northern sky to participate.

View on HN

There's 4 starlink earth stations in Washington state. The starlink r&d team and office is also based in Redmond.

1. Redmond office site

2. North bend, colocated with CenturyLink long haul fiber hut

3. Brewster, commercial teleport facility, as a tenant, larger site is run by USEI. This is also a TT&C (tracking, telemetry and control) site for starlink space segment network operations.

4. Prosser, also colocated with CenturyLink fiber huts.

It is also worth noting that one of the first major internet traffic exchange points which the starlink AS has joined is the SIX (Seattle internet exchange). It's my theory that their IP network and other common ISP-like infrastructure is the most fully developed in Seattle.

If you take a look at their peeringdb page it will give you an idea of where they're publicly announcing availability for peeing and PNIs. Presently only Seattle.

https://www.peeringdb.com/net/18747

Hey, did you go to umich?

Nope

> prioritize rural

It's worth pointing out that this will probably be something only people in rural areas will be interested in. "High speed" is in reference to the utter garbage available to these people. The throughput won't be close to what you can get from copper/fiber in an urban/suburban setting.

If you want to stick it to Comcast+co, this is unlikely to help you cut your cable [internet]. We'll still need to vote and apply pressure to end this oligopoly.

Nope.

“As confirmed by the company, Starlink will be able to provide speeds of up to a gigabit per second with latencies ranging from 25 milliseconds to 35 milliseconds. Elon Musk has previously stated that it has been designed to run real-time, competitive video games.”

It will be plenty good to replace anything else available out there for home internet.

I do think that's highly optimistic. It'll be worlds better than Geostationary consumer VSAT or a crappy wisp, but not as low latency or with as much throughput as a wireline docsis3.1 network or GPON FTTH.

The most optimal market is not somewhere like a northern suburb of Seattle with a well-developed Comcast network that also has CenturyLink GPON 1Gbps available, but more rural and fringe areas.

To be fair, my 300mbps connection is rarely ever actually 300mbps, even at times like 3am. I don't have access to a gigabit connection where I live, in a well-developed suburb.

Honestly from a cable operator (Comcast/shaw/charter/whatever type company) I'd rather have only 100Mbps and more than three nines uptime over a one year period, than gigabit and something more flaky. Quality of network engineeeing and how much battery backup and generator protection is put into last mile and middle mile docsis3/3.1 networks varies widely.

A benefit I have found since switching to wireless (5G) broadband is that uptime is significantly better than it was with my old cable connection. The fibre/cable internet would randomly go down for an hour or so, probably once a month on average - and that's just the times I was home and noticed.

But the mobile network almost never goes down. If something happens to a given cell tower/base station, the connection will seamlessly switch over to another. Performance might degrade a bit but you probably won't notice. There is built in resiliency/redundancy with less single points of failure. I imagine a network like Starlink will be the same.

So true for cable internet. My parents just upgraded from 300 to 600 and it did nothing from what I can tell as they are still getting like 25 mbps. It is freaking ridiculous how bad it is for what they are advertising.

One thing people need to consider also is their router.

If they plug a 1gig network into an old 802.11g wireless router or an old 100/10 network card with cat4 cables, you are not getting what you pay for at all.

Rock on over to my parents house. They were paying for 40 and had it plugged into a wireless usb dongle that could maybe manage 2.5 on a good day. That came from the ISP. Bought them a better one and they were getting near the rate they were paying for.

A good WISP will even beat it. The one we are on has latency (measured to 1.1.1.1) of 17-20ms. We are quite rural.

It can match other options for speed, but what about speed/price?

As has been pointed out on every Starlink thread, problem isn't latency or speed, it's contention. Each satellite only has 20gbit/sec per beam of capacity. It's likely even in small cities that will not be enough (it's only 1-3k users streaming Netflix for example). There is no way you can connect a city of even 100k people with 20gig/sec of capacity these days, never mind major metro areas many times that size.

Elon Musk has admitted this himself, and the problem gets worse over time (bandwidth requirements grow every year, but satellites capacity is fixed), so the 20gbps they have now will seem even more limited in 3-5 years when the satellites are becoming EoL.

This is not to say that Starlink is fundamentally flawed, it has great potential for rural access.

I have friends on the Indiana Ohio border that are only offered ISP from a monopoly, ISP offers one plan $45 mo 60/40mbps. They have the first fiber optic Network ever laid in the country from adelphia cable but Time Warner Cable bought it and turned it off 20 years ago.

I just gave Starlink my address as per the email request they sent out today.

I'm currently on an 5Mb down 1Mb up LTE connection with a total data limit of 250Gb/Month for the low price of 100 bucks a month. I do have very low latency < 20ms, but last month my friends kid was over and managed to burn through 95 gigs playing and updating some game called PubG that ended up putting me over my limit and I got to pay an extra 50 bucks for the next tier of usage.

If I get the opportunity to try out Starlink I will be more than happy to do so as it's very frustrating being forced to use an ISP monopoly provider, especially when there is fiber available to properties less than 5 miles away from mine.

You should really check out Visible. Unlimited 4G data, even on the hotspot.

$25 per month if you join a party, which takes about 5 minutes after searching for "Visible Party".

I’ve been playing a bit of pubg recently, it’s included with the Google Stadia streaming gaming service. Fun game!

Stadia can easily burn through tens of GB per hour in bandwidth, and needs low latency, so it’s a good test of my 5G mobile connection. Good thing I have unlimited data!

The median speed is close to 60/5 so despite them getting screwed on fiber that's not even bad for the US. And the price isn't extortionate, even!

> ISP offers one plan $45 mo 60/40mbps.

I pay $75/month for 30/30. So that sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

I have family on 6mbps down for somewhere around $70, so that's a pretty decent price for rural internet :p

thats brave!

make sure you have some decent AQM (qos) like cake or fq_codel. isp-gear probably has not. IQRouter was one of the first but there are others https://www.stoplagging.com/

Both myself and another remote coworker, this is our situation, although it is closer to $60.

6Mbps/768kbps DSL

60/40mbps isn't bad unless you want to share it with a lot of people (e.g. larger families). Sure, downloads won't be as fast as you'd like them to be but it's enough for 4k streaming so I don't think many people would notice the difference between this and a 200mbit line.

I recently did a substantial speed drop and barely noticed.

When I dropped cable TV and phone 4 months ago, I also dropped my internet speed from the 600 I had, figuring I’d start low and then raise it to what I need.

Options were 25, 100, 200, 300, 600, 1000, or 2000, for 50, 55, 70, 80, 90, 100, or 300 $/month.

I went with 100...and am still there 4 months later. The only times I notice it’s slower than my old 600 is OS and sometimes large app updates. (And for mobile devices, the difference is even less because my WiFi was a lot closer to 100 than 600).

It hasn’t affected working from home at all (I’ve been WFH for a couple years now so have plenty of prior experience with that at 600). I do occasionally need large downloads from work, but I’ve never gotten more than 20 Mbps out of our servers hosted at AWS.

I was worried a bit about upload. Nominally it was 15 for the 600 plan and is 5 for the 100 plan. Comcast over-performs in my area, so actual is about 19 for 600 and 7 for 100. (Download for those two is actually about 620-640 and 124). But the only large uploads I do aren’t very large. They are just large enough that on the old plan I would overlap them with other work rather than wait...so now I just get more other work done during the upload and still don’t really notice the wait. I get the same total work accomplished in the same time as before, just sequenced slightly different.

I thought I might be going to 300 if it turned out that streaming TV ran me into Comcast’s data cap and I needed to go unlimited. That would have been an extra $50/month, so 100 unlimited would be $105/month. But they also had an option where you could get unlimited for much less but only if you rented their modem. Total was $25/month, but it was only available on 300 or faster plans. A 300 plan with the modem/unlimited bundle would be $105/month, same as the 100 plan with my own modem and added unlimited. Still wouldn’t need 300, but if it is the same price as 100 why not?

But it turns out that even in my bingiest COVID lockdown month I only hit about 300 GB. Also, Comcast has since raised the cap from 1000 GB to 1229 GB, and dropped unlimited to $30/month, so I now anticipate staying at 100 indefinitely.

I agree, I have the option of 1000/1000 for £50/month or 150/150 for £25/month. Both unlimited. Despite pushing the connection very hard I ended up downgrading to 150. It's hard to get more than 200mbit on WiFi consistently, and unless you download onto an SSD with ethernet, downloads are constrained by hard drive speeds (especially over USB).

Can adding more satellites solve that problem?

Sort of, but not really. A major metro probably has a terabit+ of peak demand these days. It's not going to be viable to have 50+ sats over all metro areas at once (that would probably suggest a spacing of a few km, requiring literally millions of satellites deployed globally).

The math just doesn't add up. It's a similar problem to why 4G/5G isn't a viable replacement for home internet service (yet) in many areas, apart from its much worse as it's easier to add new 5G base stations to densely cover cities than add new satellites.

> "It's not going to be viable to have 50+ sats over all metro areas at once" ... "requiring literally millions of satellites"

That doesn't sound right. A satellite doesn't have to be directly overhead to be reachable. The coverage map below suggests that each satellite can cover a region 800-1000km in diameter, so with a fully deployed constellation of 12,000 to 42,000 satellites, there should easily be 50+ sats visible from any metro area. Perhaps even more than that.

https://satellitemap.space/indexA.html

I'm surprised each sat has such a large radius (especially when the constellation is fully deployed). This is actually a bigger problem than I thought if that map is correct.

This means satellites are going to cover a very large area. There might be 50 sats to cover the area from Boston down to Washington DC. That's 1tbit/sec of bandwidth to cover 100m potential customers.

Considering beta service afiak is using 600-1200 sats I imagine sat penetration will be significantly less. Considering cell towers between 4G and 5G can offer 20gbps _per tower_ these days I can't see 20gbps working across an entire state. Especially when it has been hyped as better than terrestrial internet. Even with a small number of users it will degrade rapidly at peak times when you get 1-3k users watching netflix.

It's also why Wifi, as amazing as new generations are, can't be the universal solution. Even well built installations in offices will quickly clog up during busy times. Wifi is important for devices where cables don't work, the same as satellite via internet or 5G only makes sense where fibre doesn't work.

> Each satellite only has 20gbit/sec per beam of capacity

Can this be upgraded in future versions of the sats? Is it a major undertaking requiring new ground station hardware, or something relatively easy that will increase with each "new" version of the sats?

I imagine they will scale up the sats to have more beams, better tech, etc. They have a super heavy lift rocket coming online in the years between now and the current batch of sats being retired. What they will be replaced with will likely look nothing like today's model.

In 3-5 years each location may be covered by 10+ satellites, but that still won't be enough.

I think I saw a photo of a 5 Tbps Netflix POP recently.

To a certain extent they can increase total bandwidth by launching more satellites, although it's unlikely to ever make sense for urban areas where you could roll out fixed infrastructure much more cheaply. With satellite constellations, you can't just add satellites only where they're needed.

>> Each satellite only has 20gbit/sec per beam of capacity.

How many beams per sat? What's the minimum angle/distance between them?

That isn't how the math works out for an ISP. You can serve on the order of 50k customers on a 20gbit/sec uplink.

Not when you’re promising them each gigabit speeds, though. Which many ISPs do now days.

On average, end users use about the same amount of bandwidth regardless of what speed plan they are on. Then planning is based on average and peak bandwidth

Usually not a promise, usually “best effort”.

> ”Each satellite only has 20gbit/sec per beam of capacity. It's likely even in small cities that will not be enough”

But you're not going to have just one satellite per city. Consider that Starlink already has approval for 12,000 satellites. And has applied for 30,000 more! At 20 Gbps each, that’s a lot of bandwidth.

When fully built out, any given point on the ground should have coverage from dozens (hundreds?) of satellites at any given time, spreading the load in regions of heavy demand.

But they have to move. Having 100 satellites serving NYC means you'd need a similarly fine mesh over the ocean.

I think they'll just make it more expensive than internet in cities. That way it's still the best option for rural areas without attracting too many customers in cities.

Exactly. And in a dense city like NYC, many customers wouldn't have a clear line of sight to the sky anyway. You could install communal antennas/receivers on building roofs, but at that point you might as well just pay for fibre or terrestrial mobile broadband.

There may be niche customers in cities (data redundancy/resiliency etc), but in general, the biggest advantage will be for rural/remote customers who currently pay above the odds for substandard service.

Plenty good, yes. But if you already have decent service, you’re not likely to be an early adopter of this. I live in a decently sized Midwestern city with fiber available. I’m not going to switch over to Starlink. However, my father, who lives in a rural area, has had to work with a) satellite or b) LTE internet. He is going to switch over to this in a heartbeat.

At least initially, this is going to primarily be a rural and/or mobile warrior type of service.

And I don’t believe those latency figures at all until I see them working in the wild. It will be significantly better than geosynchronous satellite service, but the question is by how much.

‘Up to’ is a load-bearing phrase, there, I assume.

...and if you look at the second half of wherever you are quoting that from, you'll see that the person you're replying to is correct. Starlink is meant for rural customers, and according to Elon Musk himself it will not be "plenty good to replace anything else available out there for home internet" for urbanites.

> Despite that, the SpaceX CEO argued that Starlink won't be a major threat to telcos because the satellite service won't be good enough for high-population areas and will mostly be used by rural customers without access to fast broadband.

> The amount of bandwidth available will be enough to support typical Internet usage, at least in rural areas, Musk said.

> So will Starlink be a good option for anyone in the United States? Not necessarily. Musk said there will be plenty of bandwidth in areas with low population densities and that there will be some customers in big cities. But he cautioned against expecting that everyone in a big city would be able to use Starlink.

1: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-...

So what does this mean for people like me who are rural, but right next to a major city? Right now, I am 5 minutes from the city but have to rely on a slow 10mbps-ish (down, don't ask about up) 900mhz point to point wireless connection. If I end up with Starlink as an option am I going to be fighting with urban users for bandwidth?

In many ways those of us in this scenario get the worst of both world because infrastructure spending / subsidies for rural Internet improvement gets used in real remote places, while most people don't realize that if you drive one street over from the suburbs, out into the farmland, you're unlikely to even be able to get low quality DSL. It's simply not available to me. When the sprawl finally brings the bulldozers in to build McMansions around me, I guess that's when the fiber lines will come in...

If I end up with Starlink as an option am I going to be fighting with urban users for bandwidth?

No, because there won't be any urban users on Starlink. It doesn't make any sense for them (ignoring a small number of vocal fanboys).

Starlink will likely be more expensive than city fibre. That should solve the issue naturally. The only people using it in cities could be companies for backup connections or people taking their router when travelling.

I don't care, I want to give a middle finger to CableCo

At least in the SF Bay Area, rural areas have better internet than the suburbs (not counting places covered with small ISP fiber to the premises).

Example rural ISPs. East bay:

https://www.unwiredltd.com/residential-internet.html

(3 up, $50/mo, 6 up, $89/mo, 9mbps up, $129/mo, no caps)

South bay:

https://www.surfnetusa.com/services/

(Lots of plans: 5 up, $40/mo, or 18mbps up, $103/month, no caps)

I’m paying comcast $80 for 6 up, 1TB cap. It’s nominally 75mbps down, but performance is sometimes too slow for netflix 1080p (3-6 mbps down) during prime time. They won’t sell me a cheaper plan.

Tbh, none of those numbers look good from where I'm sitting. I pay €45/month for 80Mb down/20Mb up fibre. Granted I'm in a city (in Portugal). My parents in rural France pay €39/month for 20Mb down / 8Mb up. None of us have data caps

US broadband pricing is atrocious ... and people here don't even know it.

I get a symmetric gigabit fiber connection for $80 a month (€70). If I didn't need the bandwidth I can get 200/20 for $45/month. I'm on the US east coast.

I think it highly depends on what's available in your area.

That's more like it. Actually, I've just checked and my ISP here in Portugal (MEO) is now offering 1Gbit down / 200Mbit up, no caps, 1 month minimum contract length for €45.99 (... seems I need to move package!).

Jesus that's horrible.

We live in a somewhat rural area in Mexico (big city is 45 mins away) and we have uncapped 200Mb down / 50Mb up fiber for less than $50 per month.

Can I ask you something a bit off-topic? In Spanish (well, specifically in what you've heard in Mexico) do people use the word Jesus like you just did (i.e. Jesus esto es horrible)? Or is there a similar word/phrase that you would say takes that place?

I'm from Spain and there it's only used when someone sneezes.

The word "Jesús" is rarely used nowadays to express a strong emotion like astonishment or disgust. It's something my grandparents would have said. My father is in his 60s and sometimes says it but only jokingly.

It's more common in Mexico but it's also disappearing. When someone sneezes the usual response is "salud".

Note that these are wireless ISP’s. They put a directional antenna on your roof, and aim it at an omnidirectional antenna on a hill. This is similar to starlink, but with lower latency (to the tower/satellite).

I agree that the speeds are awful on an absolute scale, but they’re competing with entrenched monopolies that own legal right of ways that will never be developed. This lets them prevent competitors from running fiber.

Starlink is attacking the same ridiculous regulatory problem. Why build an entire reusable launch infrastructure and custom satellites when laying fiber is dirt cheap? Heck, Facebook says they have a robot that will piggy-back 2km of fiber over existing power lines in a day!

In California, deploying the robots would mean getting PG&E to cooperate, but I could see it helping out in other states.

I thought you mentioned that some of those numbers where in the suburbs?

Sorry, Comcast is the wired ISP (cable modem) in the suburbs. The others are wireless.

In some areas, you'd need 10km of fiber to reach 50 households. Considering frequent repairs and maintenance, even with robots that's not cost efficient at what consumers are willing to pay.

Rural WA outside Seattle 50mi you can get gig fiber for $60/mo http://www.ifiber.tv/internet/mason-county there are allot of other similar municipalities (eastern WA/parts of TN) with similar deals. Just don’t let the telcos become a monopoly and this is what you get.

Musk himself has said that Starlink is primarily meant for rural customers, and most urbanites should not expect to use it. He even specifically addressed that Starlink will not "stick it" to Comcast+co, and may actually "help" them.

> "I want to be clear, it's not like Starlink is some huge threat to telcos. I want to be super clear it is not," Musk said. "In fact, it will be helpful to telcos because Starlink will serve the hardest-to-serve customers that telcos otherwise have trouble doing with landlines or even with... cell towers."

> Starlink will likely serve the "3 or 4 percent hardest-to-reach customers for telcos" and "people who simply have no connectivity right now, or the connectivity is really bad," Musk said. "So I think it will be actually helpful and take a significant load off the traditional telcos."

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-...

Musk originally said this would compete with fiber and other terrestrial carriers. That's where the myth about it being lower latency than fiber started out.

I think the only claim is that it's gigabit speeds [as fast as fiber], however I can't find a specific tweet other than one talking about 1tbps capacity (they've launched more satellites since then):

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1128834111878193155?s=20

> That's where the myth about it being lower latency than fiyver started out.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1132903914586529793?s=20

I'm not sure if you're refuting what I said, but there is absolutely no way you will get 20ms end-to-end latency from this. Satellite propagation delay, yes, but for your ping to get to Google and back will be over 50ms.

Why isn't space the biggest part of latency? can't they put a satellite link directly in google?

They have no cross-links, so up and down to space is going to happen multiple times in many cases. Second, they will not have data centers or ixps right where Google's ingress is, so it has to traverse fiber for quite a while. Someone gave some real numbers on the last SpaceX thread, but I believe that part alone will be 20-30ms added.

So how long until Google puts a datacenter in space?

Seeing as heat dissipation is a hard problem in space, probably never.

They do have cross-links though?

They do not have cross-links. They were in the original public announcements, but none of the current satellites have them, nor have they announced when they would be launching some that do. It's likely years away.

> Early satellites are launched without laser links, in October 2019 SpaceX expected satellites with these links to be ready by the end of 2020.

from wikipedia

That's a claim musk made, but they already have over 500 launched without them. They should have 1000 by year-end, so it's unlikely they'll be able to use them for a couple of years.

Would satellite on-board caching be possible? Could you cache, for instance, the most frequently requested cat photos currently on reddit? You would be able to bypass half of the round trip

Possible, yes, practical, no. In general, you want the least complexity as possible in the payload, since you can't fix it as easily as you can with ground bugs. Also, memory that's space-hardened is going to be significantly more expensive and failure-prone, so you need a lot of redundancy.

AFAIK Verizon is doing something similar with edge compute in their 5G towers/data centers. If Starlink gets big enough, I'd expect them to do the same. However, I think it's much more likely for Starlink to put the edge compute/cache at the Starlink ground stations, rather than in the satellites themselves. I think the tech/cost still isn't good enough to have significant compute on a satellite.

https://www.fiercewireless.com/5g/verizon-partners-aws-to-br...

I played CS 1.6 at 120-200 ping... people will manage.

I agree. Latency is much less of an issue than most people think. It's mostly about bandwidth.

It should be lower latency for transaltantic and other long haul traffic, as the speed of light in glass is roughly half that of the vacuum of space. So the extra distance to space is offset by the faster speed of light.

They don't have the laser interconnects working yet, so long haul traffic won't go over Starlink for some time.

Simulations have shown that it can still be faster than fiber even without laser interconnects.

That simulation only takes into account the satellite delay. Fiber delay will be another 20-30ms.

That is very roughly... it is about 2/3 c and can be calculated by the refractive index of quartz glass vs air (e.g. SiO2 has refractive index between 1.55 bad and 1.4 good for the speed) e.g. 1/1.55 ~ 0.645 and 1/1.4 ~ 0.714. According to "Main Parameters" section of [0] it seems to be 1/1.44 for the silica used in actual fibers.

A good approximation would be 200 km/ 1 ms instead of 300 km/ 1 ms for speed of light in a vacuum/ microwave links.

[0] https://www.rp-photonics.com/fibers.html

I can’t imagine the project would pay off if it was only intended for rural customers.

All kinds of mobile users are definitely in play too. Trucks, cars, yachts, tankers - all need a connection, and in the middle of the ocean or in the Siberian plains you don't have many options.

My friend is right now swimming under sail somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and she'd definitely benefit greatly from an affordable high speed internet connection.

Keep in mind that the three best selling cars in America are pickup trucks, and pickup trucks aren't cheap [0].

[0] https://www.edmunds.com/most-popular-cars/

At some point there'll be a Starlink connection in every Tesla, and Tesla will pay Starlink for that.

How many tractors did Silicon Valley buy again?

Roughly speaking, I think 1 million customers worldwide (rural or otherwise) should get them into profitable territory.

1m*$80 per month=$80m per month ~= $1b per year

If the project costs the estimated $10b, the capital cost and operations cost should be covered, or close to it, at ~ 1 million subscribers.

This looks like a milk run to me, but I guess we’ll have to see how subscriptions go.

You assume people worldwide pay $80 for internet

$80 is what I think subscribers might pay (on average) for Starlink - it's a guess.

When you look at what subscribers pay worldwide for internet, it varies, but in the U.S., I currently pay $50/month for 3mbps/0.768mbps DSL (Yuck!) in the countryside. When I'm traveling, ATT is charging around $100/month for unlimited LTE at 8mbps/8mbps. If Starlink can give me 10mbps/10mbps or better at $80/month, I'll take interest. Even more so if Starlink can replace an Iridium go when out at sea.

I'm not sure how Starlink will price services around the world. It'll be interesting to see how they work out the terms/pricing globally. If they are competitive though, I think there are enough customers in the U.S. to make it a profitable project.

My dad pays something like $80 a month for his 1.5mbps DSL line from CenturyLink. It's such a scam, but he can't get anything else. $80 a month for something decent would be a no-brainer. I even signed him up for the beta, since he's in a rural area. I'm just hoping he is rural enough though, because he is only about 6 miles from the city. 6 miles though should be close enough to get decent wired internet...

Imagine what Starlink can do for telcos in Africa. Just put a cell tower up anywhere and use Starlink as upstream.

Why not just a straight voip phone using starlink as network? Why do 4/5G to starlink at all?

Apparently the receiver is roughly the size of a pizza box, so only really useful for static use-cases or attached to something like a truck.

I'm pretty sure that says more about your lack of imagination than the economics of Starlink. There are already multiple geosynchronous satellite internet providers that provide incredibly shitty (and expensive) internet service that you would only pay for if it's literally your only option. If Starlink can provide service at less than $100/month, it's going to put all of those companies out of business in a matter of just a few years.

From what I can find each Starlink can support about 650 users. I'm not sure how far apart each satellite is and if that means the 651 person is out of luck.

Rural areas with sparse populations would make sense rather than dense urban areas with greater populations. Even if like GPS there are several satellite overhead even a dozen may be too few for large cities.

The perfect customer is one person who lives in a rural area that doesn't have trees and it doesn't snow.

isn't the plan to have ~10k satellites eventually? i'd imagine the pace of launches would pick up as they have more success

Some napkin math:

Total covered area: 400 000 000 km2/ 40 000 satellites / 650 users = about 15km2 per user

i.e. starlink users should be on average 4km or 2,5mi apart

I actually think they should cap Starlink at 10Mbps just so that it IS only competing for Rural. I will likely get Starlink because Frontier is ending support for future development in the rural area I'm building a house. The house will be ready by the end of this year, so I'm hoping I can go with them instead of an ATT connection.

Given that it is going to pretty be my only option, it would suck if a bunch of city people suck up all the invites.

Or make it more expensive? I'm sure their 1gbps plan won't be cheap. Probably expensive enough that no one in a city would consider taking it. In rural areas however it's the only alternative.

Starlink's business is probably more successful anyway if they focus on fewer customers but charge those more. Less congestion and lower bandwidth requirements for their ground stations.

That seems fair, but still, it seems like you should still be required to be in a rural area to get those bandwidths. I can also imagine a scenario where dads in the city decide to buy this so that they can take the internet with them during weekend RV trips. So even if they are paying double what they pay Comcast, it's worth it for the internet everywhere factor. So perhaps, the satellites can give them that high bandwidth in remote regions, but only when the device is truly remote. When it returns to the city, perhaps the bandwidth should not compete with cable.

In live in the Bay Area and can’t wait for this. I want to be able to have internet in all the dead spots in California, if which there are a LOT.

We have lots of National Forest / BLM land and it usually has almost no reception.

My understanding is that it won’t be particularly portable - the base stations are fairy large.

Last I saw, it requires an antenna that’s about the size of a television satellite dish. Maybe portable enough to stick on an RV or campervan, but almost certainly not something you can take with you while hiking or backwoods camping.

Sounds like it could easily sit in the bed of a pickup truck, or on the roof of just about any large cargo vehicle (like perhaps a Sprinter).

If they aren’t too expensive I hope to have one on a rural property as well as on the RV/truck I drive to get there.

I go to the wilderness to get away from mobile phone reception.

I've got bad news for you:

https://www.iridium.com/solutions/land/

As a rural customer only 5 miles out of town, I have a DSL bonded pair. No cable service. 20mbit/sec down, 1.5 mbit/sec up. Starlink doesn't have a high threshold to meet for it to be a major improvement to our service. My situation is not unusual in rural settings.

Cellular is also spotty, so its not a good option either. Very hilly terrain with low population density. All of my cellular service at home is over wifi via the DSL connection.

Comcast has no interest in running cable/fiber the 2.5 miles needed to get to us. No ROI.

Rural Washington is a great test market, there are entire counties with only a single viable provider (Kittitas). Or counties in which there are NO viable broadband providers (Okanagan)

There's 3 small independent WISPs in kittitas county in addition to Charter cable in Ellensburg, and whatever Consolidated (the ILEC phone company) is doing. Definitely some more rural parts of kittitas the only thing you can get is a consumer-grade vsat terminal, but those are really quite small amounts of population.

For okanogan, Google NCI datacom, they're a wisp that covers much of the county. But not out to the fringes. Okanogan county itself and the PUD have fiber along the highway all the way from Brewster to the Canadian border, with POPs in the towns along the way. Several WISPs make use of it.

If you were using either of those counties as an example because you actually know people who are finding it difficult to get last-mile broadband, let me know and perhaps I can help put them in touch with the right people.

If we were going to use a very rural Washington State location as an example of where starlink might do well, somewhere such as people who live on acreages outside of Republic might be a better example. Or somewhere like Stehekin.

If I had to guess, the reason why Washington state is a good test market for them, is a combination of relatively low cost and easy to provision lit transport services they can buy from each earth station back to Seattle, reasonable driving times and hassle for people to come and go from the Redmond facility to the test sites for physical install and modification of equipment, and a fairly good sized base of consumers in very rural locations presently dependent on hughesnet/wildblue type cheap consumer VSAT.

Are WISPs really a viable broadband option? The pricing vs data caps that you get are pretty ridiculous, especially for rural customers

And yes I do know people who have had problems in these counties. I also had an absolutely miserable experience using Charter due to their poor infrastructure in the valley. Internet on nights, weekends, holidays, etc. was unusable due to their high utilization of low bandwidth lines

They absolutely are if implemented with the right technology and some degree of network engineeeing acumen. One wisp I know in kittitas is selling 50Mbps down x 15Mbps up with no data caps or quotas.

There are also a lot of crappy WISPs out there, so this is by no means definitive. Same as there's lots of crappy frontier copper wireline 5Mbps ADSL2+ still out there on degraded copper lines from 40 years ago.

Lol, ah Frontier. I have friends in the valley who used to work for them, great horror stories. What is the name of this kittitas WISP? I have long since moved out of the valley, but can pass this on to my family who still deal with horrendous providers.

http://kiwireless.com/

Yup, we've got one out here in that's well run and has been increasing capacity with Covid-19.

FCC official broadband number is 25Mbs per household. I, personally, think a good number is whatever is enough to sustain productivity, entertainment, and education - so about 5 down/2 up a person (obviously, more is better).

In a household with 5 people, that is 25/10, which does fit into the FCC's definition.

WISPs are popping up left and right that can do 1000/1000 per access point, which can be shared with all customers within about a 500ft radius. That's definitely doable with the above definiton of broadband. Basically, it's one wifi-based access point that has a uplink, and each household has an externally mounted wifi antenna that then redistributes to a conventional home router.

On the other hand, I personally have a WISP in a dense urban area. I pay $45~/mo for guaranteed 100/100 - usually, my sustained speeds are closer to 200/200, or 300/300. It's an antenna on our building that is the backhaul for about 50 households.

WISPs are viable in rural areas - they bring broadband to those who can't get it.

WISPs are viable in urban areas - regions where installing new copper or fiber would be prohibitively expensive, they allow upstarts to challenge the duopoly.

Just about the only awkward middle ground where the economics get a little tough is in spread suburban areas.

I’d argue 2 up isn’t sufficient for work from home. 6 up is hit or miss for video conferencing. It’s also super painful for uploading builds, etc.

I worked from home for years on a 2mps symmetric link from a wireless ISP in Tanzania, video conferencing worked well enough (Google Hangouts or whatever it was called 5 years ago).

For the heavy uploads I usually resorted to doing the upload from a VPS instead though, when possible (build the artifacts from that VPS, so that both the build and upload are much faster).

>2 up isn’t sufficient for work from home

maybe! I video conferenced on 1.5up for a week and I did have to turn down send quality, but other than that, it was fine.

I think the bigger issue is that if you can only get 1.5 in 2020, then that means that the physical layer between you and the internet is tenuous. Like, DSL far away from the DSLAM and thus packet loss and line noise.

WISP options in my area (SF Bay Area) are extremely weak. I've opted for AT&T LTE instead.

$99 for 15/3 mbps, or $139 if you want broadband: https://ethericnetworks.com/residential-service-plans/

$50 for 2.5/2.5 mbps, or $679 if you want broadband: https://ridgewireless.net/ridge-wireless-plans/

More data from main.js parsed out: https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/hr4904/starlink_b...

> lower Canada

That's exciting. Internet could be a real game changer for the 1800's

Can anyone explain why the northern sky?

Are the satelites all in the same orbit? And if so shouldn't it be an orbit around the equator?

Intuitively for me it should require a view of the southern sky. But I know very little about satelite orbits to be confident.

I can explain it, but the most intuitive explanation comes from simply looking at the sats.

https://satellitemap.space/indexA.html

(Try to ignore the closely bunched satellites; those haven't spread out yet.)

They're all in an inclined orbit, with the orbital planes regularly staggered about Earth's axis. So, the simple way to consider this is that the distance between these orbits is greater at the equator than it is near the poles.

An extreme to illustrate the point; if they were all polar orbits, all the orbits would intersect at the poles, providing coverage from all of the planes, whereas each location at the equator might be served by one or two orbital planes.

Rural Washington is a smart move; it’s mainly desert. Clouds aren’t great for satellite signals.

They emailed me saying to add my address. Seattle

FWIW I got the same email in Michigan.

I drove by the ground station here in Michigan recently and it’s coming along but it’s definitely not looking close. In a month they basically installed conduit, electrical, and a fence. I don’t currently see any radio gear.

I don't suppose it would be too much to ask if you took some photos of that, and can share them?

https://postimg.cc/gallery/k6PhnPs

Near Manistique, MI. (45.9086063, -86.4838231)

Thanks, as with the other sites, that is a pre-existing, fairly typical intercity fiber regen hut it is colocated with.

I got this email and I'm in the bay area, though admittedly up in the SC mountains. Not sure it means anything.

Listing all FAQs for reference:

q:What is Starlink Beta? a:Starlink Beta is an opportunity to be an early user of the SpaceX's satellite internet system.The purpose of Starlink Beta is to gather feedback that will help us make decisions on how best to implement the system for Starlink's official launch. By design, the beta experience will be imperfect. Our goal is to incorporate feedback from a variety of users to ensure we build the best satellite broadband internet system possible.

q:Who can participate in Starlink Beta? a:Starlink Beta will begin in the Northern United States and lower Canada, with those living in rural and/or remote communities in the Washington state area. Access to the Starlink Beta program will be driven by the user's location as well as the number of users in nearby areas. All beta testers must have a clear view of the northern sky to participate.

q:Why do I need a clear view of the northern sky to be a beta tester? a:The Starlink system is currently made up of nearly 600 satellites orbiting the Earth that can provide internet service in a very specific range between 44 and 52 degrees north latitude. Your Starlink dish requires a clear view of the Northern sky in order to communicate with the Starlink satellites. Without the clear view, the Starlink dish cannot make a good connection and your service will be extremely poor.

q:Can I document and share my Starlink Beta experience? a:No, unfortunately you cannot document or share your Starlink Beta experience publicly. Beta testers will be required to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement as a condition of their participation.

q:How will my service quality be during Starlink Beta? a:During Starlink Beta, service will be intermittent as teams work to optimize the network. When connected, your service quality will be high, but your connection will not be consistent. This means it may support streaming video with some buffering, but likely is not suitable for gaming or work purposes.

q:What is expected of me as a participant in Starlink Beta? a:Beta testers will provide feedback in the form of periodic short surveys over an 8 week period to help our teams improve every aspect of the service.

q:Is there a cost to participating Starlink Beta? a:There is no cost to be a beta tester, aside from a $1 charge to help test the billing system.

q:What will I receive as a Beta Tester? a:Your Starlink Kit will arrive via FedEx pre-assembled with a Starlink dish, router, power supply and mount depending on your dwelling type. Your Starlink Kit will require a signature for delivery, but you will be able to manage your delivery date and time through FedEx.

q:How does Starlink internet work? a:Starlink will deliver high-speed broadband internet across the globe with a large, low-Earth constellation of relatively small but advanced satellites. Satellite internet works by sending information through the vacuum of space, where it travels nearly 50% faster than in fiber-optic cable.

q:Most satellite internet services today come from single geostationary satellites that orbit the planet at about 35,000km, covering a fixed region of the Earth. Starlink, on the other hand, is a constellation of multiple satellites that orbit the planet much lower at about 550km, and cover the entire globe. a:Because the satellites are in a low orbit, the round-trip data time between the user and the satellite – also known as latency is much lower than with satellites in geostationary orbit. This enables Starlink to deliver services like online gaming that are usually not possible on other satellite broadband systems

q:If I sign up to be a Beta Tester and I change my mind, can I cancel? a:Yes, you can cancel at any time

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