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Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

The service is awesome.

In Placerville California our service went from Calnet 10mbps down at 28ms latency to Starlink 160mbps down at 24ms latency.

This is a really big deal and will disrupt a lot of these shitty ISPs that have done nothing for years.

Also, still tracking for my 2021 predictions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25601473

Edit: Price is only $99/month with one up front cost for the hardware ($500).

Upload is currently only 15mbps, but should improve.

Elon says we should see 300mbps soon and less than 20ms ping (iirc).

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Many of these ISPs are shitty because they service the hardest to reach places. Comcast and Verizon have gobbled up billions in government aid to bring service to rural areas and end up delivering only to fringe areas which they can reach easily. The small companies end up struggling to get the government cash and end up underfunded providing service to the absolute-most difficult to reach consumers. It's a real crappy deal.

Arguably satellite service erases all of this and is a hard reset on rural telecommunications. Unfortunately, it's not a industry small businesses can participate in.

I guess as a customer I don’t really care why they suck, I just know that they do. I also don’t care about small business if they provide bad service.

From a policy standpoint as a citizen - I think it’s terrible the telecom monopolies took public money and did nothing, but I think they’ll start feeling competitive pressure from Starlink too, hopefully this will force them to adapt or die (I don’t really care which).

In SF with Google webpass fiber, Comcast is not competitive.

> I guess as a customer I don’t really care why they suck, I just know that they do. I also don’t care about small business if they provide bad service.

I guess it depends on what you mean by bad service. If by "Bad service" you mean don't return calls when your service is down, then I agree. If you are referring to bandwidth or latency, you are likely getting the best they can afford to give you for the price. It's the price you pay for living in the sticks. (I suffered with crap small ISP "high speed" internet for years so I sympathize).

I'm not suggesting anyone should stick with an inferior product to bolster small business. Their run at being internet providers is coming to an end.

> you are likely getting the best they can afford to give you for the price

Running fiber isn't really any more expensive than running copper, and they managed to afford to run the copper.

So much this. The ground playing field has been controlled by comcast and Verizon. And now space will be spacex. This will be just as bad, if not worse for the people

> shitty ISPs that have done nothing for years

Oh no they did do a lot. They lobbied for hundreds of billions of dollars from congress to upgrade infrastructure, then gave themselves bonuses and bought back company stock.

> Elon says we should see 300mbps soon and less than 20ms ping (iirc).

Mini rant: Can we stop calling that guy by his first name as if you were his acquaintance?

Mini rant: Sincerely, who cares?

Musk just has a weird mouth feel (has the same strange feeling like saying "Moist", to me), Elon just flows of the tongue better, (both literally and metaphorically in the "thought voice" sense), and also is rather unique (unlike Jack, Tim, Mark or Jeff, Elon is a far less common name)

if it gets the point across, why quibble over such minor details?

Also, on a seperate point, Elon has rather created that familiarity by his constant Twitter updates, we FAR more about Elon, both personally and professionally, on a MUCH more regular basis, than like the next thousand billionaires combined. It's not strange that people DO genuinely believe they are acquainted with him in some way.

Perhaps refer to SpaceX rather than Elon?

Why do you care so much? Did you complain about the same thing with Steve Jobs, that we should be saying "Apple said" instead of "Jobs said"? Or Bill Gates? Mark Cerny? Or.. Well, in many situations where the CEO or other management of a company says something, where it's absolutely normal to mention who said it?

I just call him Musk Daddy.

Does that work better for you?

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