Surveys: More Americans Want Starlink Than 5G Home Internet
pcmag.com
pcmag.com
IMO coop-owned fiber is the best answer in the US. Low ping, truly no caps, and generally costs less than the incumbent monopoly. With everyone having done so much tele* over the past year, now is the time to push for it in your community.
Agree wholeheartedly with the typical stance of large telcos in the US.
My current options:
Dial-up (the 'high speed' option offered by big telco [F** you AT&T]): No cap, $50/mo
Satellite: 15gb/mo cap, $80/mo
Cell: "No cap", but throttled to 1x at 2gb/mo/line. $138/mo for 2 lines.
Thank Satan/God/Buddha/Whoever, the local ISP secured a rural internet grant to run fiber past our house this year.
T-Mobile: $50/month. No data caps. ~40-50mb/s down, ~5-10mb/s up. Intermittent connectivity drops (30-60 seconds at a time) and stalls. Line of sight to the tower. Device indicates I'm on LTE as 5G hasn't been enabled yet (either on the device or tower).
Starlink: $100/month. No data caps. ~100mb/s down and up. No intermittency or stalls. Kids love watching Dishy acquire satellites.
If your budget affords it, I would recommend Starlink.
In my city, we had a wimax provider set up shop a while back (10 years now, I guess?). At first the promised, and delivered on, high speed and no data caps. Then more people started signing up, and clogging up the network, and they ended up imposing throttling and caps to try and deal with it.
Maybe not. This was the first hit for "starlink downlink bandwidth"
https://www.lightreading.com/4g3gwifi/starlinks-network-face...:
> Starlink, the satellite Internet provider from Elon Musk's SpaceX, will be able to support just 485,000 simultaneous users at 100Mbit/s across the entire US, according to one firm's new estimates. And that kind of performance won't even be available until the end of 2026, when Starlink floods Earth's skies with up to 12,000 satellites.
I don't really understand the fascination with wireless for fixed services. If you can run a wire, you should, because wireless is basically just using the air as a single shared wire, and the longer the range the more people have to share that one wire.
Where I am, my Spectrum service is fantastic for a reasonable price and I can’t imagine justifying paying for Starlink at my house. If anything the only upgrade I ever expect to make is when AT&T fiber finally makes it to me.
Even then, I’m pretty happy with the TV package and my TiVo units so switching to a non-cable provider is questionable if I don’t really need it.
Sometimes the economics don't play out for being able to run a wire. Often times things like water towers will have fiber conduit run to them as the city will want to have monitoring equipment and their own RF services operating on them. So it becomes cheap for a WISP to also put their own equipment on one of the taller structures in town. Split it out to several different sectors and you can carry dozens of customers at decent speeds for far less than the cost of digging the fiber to connect a single customer, meaning the payoff time of the equipment install is in months to a single year instead of a decade.
I generally agree, but here in Kansas we have long sight lines. On our farm we use fixed wireless to the grain elevator three miles away. The alternative would be running 1.5 miles of wire for three potential customers.
For years we had Hughes satellite service. Compared to fixed wireless it had higher latency (the speed of light is too slow to geosync), usage caps (none now), and was twice the cost.
Starlink is going to make a killing in areas like that.
Yeah, I totally agree. There are definitely cases where the economics of running a wire doesn't make sense, though what you describe seems a lot more desirable than Starlink. Generally, I'd think you'd you want to get a wire as close as possible, and minimize the wireless distance. So wires are better than 5G/Wifi, and 5G/Wifi is better than Starlink.
The local DSL can barely reach 5 Mbps -- direct quote from the guy who installs them around here. The local cable television doesn't support cable internet. I'm currently on a point-to-point wifi link to a small local ISP, and while the wifi works perfectly, the ISP's uplink is often congested. I'm quite eager for Starlink to reach my latitude, just to shake up the competition.
I mean sure, but presumably more considering they aren't going to be super correlated?
Based on a quick search, it appears that average bandwidth used by cable subscribers (who only use internet and not TV) is probably a little over 1 Mbps (and that's higher than the median) so it seems like your figures imply the ability to handle around 30-40 million customers.
my sister lives an hour outside of phoenix. her dsl was down for days and Verizon told her that not enough people in her area had complained for them to do anything about it.
The policy of data caps certainly reduces all data usage, but it's a nuclear bomb to solve an anthill: they should just do a decent job of QoSing their traffic. Say "peak hours" speed is, I dunno, 15mb/s or something, and then offpeak is full speed. People can do their game/os/whatever updates off peak then, and as long as everyone isn't streaming netflix and downloading iOS updates while you're on a zoom call, you should be fine.
You do have to amortize the $500 dish, but even that is only $40 more a month for the just the first year and $10, if spread over four years.
No price increase, no contract, no hardware fees, no data cap, $50 per month. With no commitment I am think of giving it a shot.
Not Satan. The federal government who setup the grants. The state government who licensed the experts who did the work. The local governments who issued the permits and made sure they didn't cut into anything. And the IRS who collected the taxes that paid for the grants. All hail our functioning socialist system.
My guess it will be around capacity, though if the LEO ISP market has multiple players all covering the same areas, there is a chance we don't fall into the market segmentation we have now since there will be multiple options.
Contrast with Starlink which will help rural consumers get better internet and introduce real competition into the marketplace, and the advantage is clear.
So yeah, seems like an urban tech to me. In rural areas, it would degrade into a Rube Goldberg version of fiber.
I’m in a rural/urban transition area and we have a solid 5G signal that gives me 200mbps on my phone.
So 4G speeds then .. (assuming the phone used is a modern device)
They send me an email stating that I have exceeded the 1.2TB monthly cap on my Unlimited plan, but that I can upgrade to a Truly Unlimited plan for another $25/mo.
I go to their website and apparently the upgrade is $30/mo if I want to use my own equipment but $25/mo if I use theirs. That makes no sense, but whatever. I sign up.
A few days later their integrated modem/wireless router shows up. I forget about it.
A week or so after that, late morning on a weekday, my internet goes down. I was in the middle of a work Zoom and my kids were on Zoom for school. Terrible timing. Turns out, Comcast turned off my internet until I connected the new equipment and signed up for the "new" service.
I was pretty livid. Researched Starlink. Hmm, 100-150Mb/s. Let me see what I'm getting from Comcast.....run a speed test.....389Mb/s. Oh well, guess I'm staying.
Improved coverage? Yes I’ve heard that a lot.
It seems like 5G is being pushed for other reasons. Corporate growth, ability to sell more surveillance data, etc.
Every IPv4 address created has been assigned. There have been at least two rounds of clawbacks. The current mode of operation is to buy blocks from Ethiopia, since they're IPv6-first. There's really no need for a new internet connection to be assigned an IPv4 address.
It'd be great if ipv6 were adopted, but it isn't. Only having an ipv6 address effectively cuts you off from 99% of the internet. All that's left is big corporate websites.
EDIT in reply to EDIT: Gee, if only there were some wide-scale home internet use adoption giving everyone an IPv6 address in order to ensure it's supported.
Either way v6 is definitely as much the internet as v4 and NAT64 is not really worse (though different) than NAT44 when it comes to accessing that half of things.