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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

I have a colleague in Canada who uses Starlink. He disconnects at least once per video call, and his latency spikes upwards of 4 seconds regularly.

Perhaps this is the best use for it - locations which could never get wired (or stationary wireless) internet.

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I live in Canada, and live a 5 minute drive from a municipality of 160,000 people. I got Starlink a month ago and even with a few disconnects and occasional lag Starlink is a quantum leap improvement of internet connection. Going from 0.5-3 Mbps down with a 100GB bandwidth cap to a 80-250 Mbps link with unlimited bandwidth is literally life changing.

I work from home as a developer and no longer have to drive into town to install windows updates and compilers.

That’s why it’s called “the better than nothing beta” - it’s not production ready until they have extra birds in the sky.

Funny, this is the first time I've ever heard anything say that it's expected to have highly degraded performance by default.

EDIT: Key words: Highly Degraded Performance. This isn't the occasional disconnect or lag spike. It's frequent disconnects and lag spikes.

It is the first paragraph, of the first FAQ answer on their website:

> There will also be brief periods of no connectivity at all.

Most articles or videos about the Beta has mentioned just that as a limitation (along with being geo-locked, both due to lack of coverage right now).

Don't know your exact latitude, but fwiw I've installed Starlink for a client in the US close to the Canadian border and have it set to auto speed test regularly. After a few weeks highest latency recorded has been 51ms (lowest 26ms), and no noticeable dropouts (no events on failover to the 5/1 DSL old line). Downloads 85-140, uploads 20-35. Installed it on a mast 20' up or so, fully clear view. Performance has been fully adequate for general real time video usage.

This is definitely still beta, and with only a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of sats planned in the end, only beta intersat optical links for polar orbits, performance is more variable then would be hoped by general release. Latitude matters a lot in terms of density for LEO sats too. Polar orbits only just barely got going, if your colleague is far enough north to need that the lower density and version 0.9 sat links could explain some of that oddly high latency. Nevertheless the promise is there as a matter of physics, and they also very clearly advertised that this is still early stage stuff. They even had a groan inducing but highly memorable pun for it, "beta than nothing" (badum tish). It still beats the wired internet available at my client's location however. I'll probably transition the DSL from failover to static VLAN usage soon.

Single biggest beta issue right now is their IPv6 support still sucks, which means heavy CGNAT all the time. Not a huge deal to solve via reverse tunnels but still feels retrograde for something otherwise so cutting edge.

My parents live in Canada and can't get wired Internet. They previously had satellite from another provider (can't remember which) and it sounds like it was much better quality than this although latency was definitely a problem. They've since switched to some type of cellular modem (not sure what exactly) but of course not everyone has that option. (A few years back, the phone company ran fiber right across the street from them for a cell tower a few miles away, but nothing they could use as consumers.)

Parent commenter and now you - what's story of wired Internet in Canada? Some law or Canada is in general extremely inaccessible? I mean I've heard it's colder and nicer America but is it that bad?

America is sparsely populated - and Canada is even worse. Miles and miles and miles outside the cities where there’s just not much of anything.

I saw this coming :) It's not that bad. My parents just happen to live in farming territory a way outside a town of around 3,000. There's maybe three houses on their street and no one else really nearby so there's not a lot of financial incentive to run wires out there for providers. Like most places, the majority of the population lives in more densely populated areas and don't deal with these kind of issues.

Canada has a landmass larger than the US with a population smaller than California. Where it is developed everything is much like the US (actually better, telecom rules make it so that cable providers are required to allow alternate ISPs access). But outside of populated areas the availability of services drops off very quickly. I live about a mile from a Costco and I don’t have access to public sewer or garbage collection.

Thank you. That clears it.

By the way as an Indian I have always been attracted to your country, but it's just the cold that stops me from even attempting. (And I don't mean the "immigration" attraction, I had my chance in NL and after a backpacking trip I realized it was not my cup of tea). Same with Europe. Australia seems too far and in the middle of nowhere disconnected from every other place. I imagine it will be too lonely there.

Coming back to Canada I also think we outsiders know very little about the place compared to say your neighbours and a place like the UK. I am heavily into watching cinema. Would you please recommend some filmmakers that show Canada in a way that people get to see how and what the life is there?

Here's what bugs me (I'm in "rural" america, but not quite as rural enough). All of these houses have power. They also, in most cases, had phone service. But somehow, companies can't manage to get fiber (or even copper) to these places?

Something smells foul.

In my old house in WI,a few min from Madison, it was 40,000ft of copper between my house and the central office. They had repeaters that were fine for voice traffic, but DSL is usually 15,000' or less.

It's definitely a motivation problem and not a technology problem.

But I will note that normal copper wires are not good for this. You can't get usable speeds past 2-3 miles on telephone wires.

The guy who installs DSL around here says the lines are bad enough that it'll reach about 3 Mbps, maybe.

This house is wired to cable television, but that doesn't carry any internet.

Has a root cause been identified? Is it a growing pain like coverage gaps / satellite scaling issues or a fundamental issue?

Not yet, no. A sister comment indicates that it's expected (news to me and my colleague) until more satellites are in place.

Does the colleague have full open sky, or some obstructions?

Not positive, but I believe that current base stations point at one satellite at a time, and will lose connection for a brief moment while they transition from one satellite to another. In the future, ground stations will be able to lock on multiple satellites at a time, in order to bond channels for higher bandwidth, and also to do handoffs so there's no drop in connectivity.

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