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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

I have Starlink and a T-Mobile 5G home device (largish gray cylinder).

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.

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Is "no data caps" sustainable for 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.

I struggle to see how "data caps" would solve this issue. The problem isn't that the total sum of data transiting the network is somehow more than Starlink (or others) can handle--it's that the _burst usage_ is exceeding the network's capacity.

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.

My guess is that it's better understood as a social solution than as a technical one. Basically just a way to chase the torrenters and Netflix junkies off of your network. Because it hurts them a lot, and it doesn't hurt the most profitable customers at all.

It's one of those "no data caps but don't use more than 1 TB every month" kind of things.

> Is "no data caps" sustainable for Starlink?

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.

Classic ethernet.. in space!

This. I used to have an RV and looked into satellite options in case we ever wanted to go fully remote. They were pricy but justifiable when you need it for something like that.

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.

>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.

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.

I grew up in an area with forested, rolling hills. Terrestrial wireless will forever be a challenge, and even geostationary satellites are troublesome unless shaving your property bald is your bag of chips. (Which, if it were, why are you living in the northwoods instead of the great plains?) But line of sight going straight up is usually pretty decent.

Starlink is going to make a killing in areas like that.

> 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.

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.

> I don't really understand the fascination with wireless for fixed services. If you can run a wire, you should

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.

in a lot of areas of the US, you can't and telco's won't run a wire.

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.

>will be able to support just 485,000 simultaneous users at 100Mbit/s across the entire US

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.

> I don't really understand the fascination with wireless for fixed services.

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.

How is the real world latency? In the past latency has made satellite almost unusable, but those were geosynchronous sats, not ones in very low orbits like Starlink. (They're claiming 20ms, but I get 9ms on my fibre and I've seen reports that the real latency is somewhere around 50ms.)

Fast enough for me to participate in Zoom chats and no one knows my bits are flying through space.

Could you measure it for us?

Will report back.

Username reminds me of an old saying in charities etc - if you want something doing, give it to someone who has too much to do already. Very appropriate..!

30ms-50ms average, some spikes up to 100ms but rare enough that it hasn't caused me any issues.

All of the real world numbers I've seen from users have been lower than cell latency.

If real world latency is 50ms, that would put it in the same ballpark as cable internet, wouldn't it?

speedtest.net consistently shows pings in the 38-45 ms range for me with starlink, with 150 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up. I've been able to video chat and game without any issues. My previous satellite connection was nearly the same price as starlink, for only 100GB, pings of 600-800ms and only 1-5 Mbps up/down. For those of us poorly served Starlink is an absolute quantum leap.

I've personally seen as low as 30ms, but also up to 60ms. I also have a bit of packet loss, but my dish is just sitting on the ground in my wooded back yard right now. Once the weather turns back towards just being cold, I'm going to move the dish to my roof and see if that helps the packet loss. Maybe being able to see more of the sky will help get a more consistent latency too, but I'd guess more satellites are really going to be the fix there.

Budget? Here in NH, Atlantic Broadband is $100 per month after the six month offer expires, so same as Starlink.

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.

T-mobile is capped sort of, once you hit like 50 GB you are throttled to worthless speeds.

Not on home internet. I have the 4G version and used something like 1.5TB last month with no slowdowns (mostly just streaming 4K content)

Check it out here...

https://www.t-mobile.com/isp

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.

Seems pretty good, is this new? I was recently looking at cellular internet providers and missed this.

Check out r/tmobileisp for users discussing the service.

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