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Comment by eddieh | Hacker News Reader

Viasat is already available and provides 12-100 Mbps service. Viasat only uses 4 satellites. HughesNet provides up to 25 Mbps service and I think has 5 satellites.

Caveat: Of course I've never used either service myself, so I can not speak to the actual download speeds vs advertised speeds.

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I live in a rural area where both of these services are available. They both come with seriously outdated data caps. Hugesnet, if I recall, charges $150/month for their fastest tier, but after 50gb, your speed is reduced to 300kbps.

I haven't experienced either service, but I regularly read that they are riddled with disconnects and spotty service.

Currently we're paying a ridiculous amount, $200/month, to Unlimitedville for what is literally just a 4G hotspot in our house, but with an actual, usable data limit (1tb/month).

I have some serious concerns about Starlink, but until we decide that internet is a utility and rural people need access too, I guess I'm happy to see at least somebody is trying to make rural internets better.

"I have some serious concerns about Starlink..."

Curious, what kind?

>Curious, what kind?

Maybe that you might be forced into an NDA for a service that never ends up delivering on promises?

Both the speeds and the latency are worse than what was originally promised. there have also been no pricing for the plans, nor have there been pricing for the equipment. This has been the biggest downsides since day one.

I saw someone in this thread mention hacking a 4g tablet plan to work as modem doing a sim swap. You could possibly do something similar by setting up 2 or 3 separate accounts so have individual data caps on each and cycle through them each month. It sounds like a hassle but could save you enough to be worth it

But of course, remember that you need cell service for that to work.

Those services' satellites are in high orbit and therefore have very high latency (think in the 800ms range), so those seemingly fast speeds rarely result in a fast experience.

I've used both services for several years, and they are perfectly fine. I think people have lost their objectivity completely here and somehow think starlink is a new technology that nobody else was capable of making.

They're both slower than advertised, have tiny data caps, and have extremely high latency. The latency is the real killer.

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