Hacker News Reader

Comment by ardy42 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

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

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 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.

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.

>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.

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.

Classic ethernet.. in space!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com