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Comment by gdubs | Hacker News Reader

Eagerly awaiting an invite here in NW Oregon, seemingly just on the border of the beta zone. Last night I white-knuckled through a big presentation, hoping my over-the-cap LTE wouldn’t get throttled. It mostly worked out. Our traditional sat is expensive, capped, and the latency isn’t usable for video conferencing. For our family, the trade offs are worth it. But for rural areas, this is really exciting. Can’t come soon enough.

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I'm right in the middle of the beta zone, in Washington state, and I've not yet received an invite.

I was surprised to get an invite with an address smack in the middle of Seattle. I've been tempted to bring it up as as failover for Centurylink, but it's still a bit pricey for novelty (about all it provides compared with the alternatives at this address).

If Starlink customer service knows what they're doing, they won't let you sign up with a metro address. Starlink has limited bandwidth per satellite footprint. It either won't work at all in a city, or be very, very slow.

> Starlink has limited bandwidth per satellite footprint.

That's not actually the problem. The satellite footprint is >1000km across, and they can just launch more satellites to serve more customers. They would happily launch enough sats to serve every customer in the world if that was the only problem.

The issue is rather bandwidth density on the ground. Starlink achieves it's high system capacity by SDMA. That is, every antenna, both on the ground and on the satellites, is very highly directional, and they can have a single satellite talking to many customers on the ground at the same time on the same frequency, so long as the angles between each customer are large enough. The ground antennas are, for cost and physical size reasons, less capable of distinguishing between different directions than the satellite antennas, and can only do so if the angle between the transmission origins is ~>10°. This means that any location on the ground (iirc with a spot size of ~10km or so) can only handle a few dozen simultaneous beams, no matter how many satellites you have up there.

Almost everyone who would benefit from Starlink in a rural area shares the sky with a major metropolitan area containing millions of people.

Can you expand on that? "shares the sky"?

Sure. When you look up in a rural region you see stars. When you look up in an urban region within, say, the same geographic hemisphere, you're very likely to see the same stars.

I must not be under the same sky then. It’s too bright here to see any stars in order to confirm your theory.

Links for that? It sounds logical but I never heard about it before now.

>Elon: "We'll have some small number of customers in Los Angeles but we can't do a lot of customers in Los Angeles because the bandwidth per cell is simply not high enough" also "I wanna be clear, it's not like Starlink is a huge threat to telcos. I want to be super clear. It is not. 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 radio stations, cell towers."

https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/wiki/index#wiki_-_will_sta...

That links to two timestamps in a 47 minute livestream by Elon Musk. There's no canonical answer on starlink.com.... because that site has basically no info on it.

Last time telcos were taken on we got Google Fiber. I'm skeptical if the long-term play is to stick with servicing just rural customers. Also telcos get paid quite an insane amount of money to service rural areas poorly. I'm not so sure they'll see it as "not a threat".

It's also important to position the company in this light to prevent telecos being able to lobby hard against Starlink.

If Starlink had come out saying they wanted to provide access to everyone the telecos would have came in and said Starlink has to also allow reselling of access like how they're forced to (at least in Canada).

It is a lot easier to show up and just tell everyone, "Remember how rural areas aren't profitable for you? No worries, we'll take this trouble from you."

Thanks!

The invites only last a few days, so if you got it a few days ago the link may not be valid anymore.

I check my e-mail for it pretty regularly, and I searched my history for it, no go.

From what I've read, they had a lot more people sign up for beta testing than they needed, so some people just didn't get the invite.

It's barely "beta" with plenty of downtime. I'm sure it's better than what you currently have.

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