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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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