Hacker News Reader

Comment by gerikson | Hacker News Reader

Isn't starlink a service aimed at areas that can't easily get the sort of internet service that's cheap to provide to metro areas (i.e. rural areas)?

View on HN

You still need fiber to the towers for good connectivity. The amount of infrastructure needed to install even for 4g in remote areas is very expensive compared to these now that spacex can get the satellites up for very cheap as secondary payload with the most of the expense is borne by the primary payloads.

Wouldn’t it be cheaper and more cost effective to cover those areas by 4G mobile phone network?

Have you seen what they do to install just a few blocks of 5G antennas? Ripping up pavement, trenching fiber and power. And that is just in a high density city.

4G does not require as dense a cell network as 5G.

My in laws live In the middle of nowhere. Their option for many years was 3G and eventually 4G. Having to visit them, 4G was just unbearable. Eventually ATT said they could just barely get 1.5Mbps down service.

That was superior to the 4G service they got. Just because it is 4G doesn’t mean it is services well and not overloaded even in rural areas.

Starlink will be the first real viable high speed connection they will have ever been able to get

My dad's house in Maine is at the very end of a DSL connection. He get up to about 1Mbps down with a tailwind--which is barely usable even for non-video. I couldn't really work from the house. (And there's essentially no cell service at all.) And the neighbors further down the road basically have nothing at all other than conventional satellite.)

Have you tried using 4G as your only connection? Even carriers that provide “unlimited” transfer typically throttle your connection after a certain amount of usage.

I use 4G as my primary Internet connection in Oslo, Norway. The apartment block where I live has a 100 years old copper line and DSL gives like 10 MBit/s with 100ms ping.

For about 90 USD/month one can get 60 MBit/s connection l both ways with ping bellow 20s. The connection is only throttled after 2 TB of data. But then you need a router and an antenna.

Or one can pay like 15 USD/month extra to upgrade the mobile subscription with 10 MBit/s connection and the throttling limit of 1TB. The ping is about 30.

I am in Europe on unlimited data plan for 35euro, it gets throttled down to 8Mbps after 600GB.

I think Starlink would give a realistic option to deploy those 4G base stations in rural areas—they need connectivity as well.

Starlink would also give a realistic option to deploy a communal ISP somewhere isolated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com