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Comment by 7e | Hacker News Reader

Can you compare with T-Mobile’s 5G home Internet plan? Similar numbers advertised, $60 a month, no caps.

"no caps" - but watch what happens if you move 200 or 300GB downstream on a LTE based last mile residential connection in a month. you'll either get shut off, throttled to a few Mbps, or billed extra. Look at the fine print in the terms of service. If you have a household with multiple people that watch netflix, download movies, or even want to download a single xbox one or PS4/PS5 game (they can be 120-180GB now), watch out.

Um how do you expect Starlink to treat you once it’s GA?

A whole lot better than the quotas and caps enforced on consumer grade geostationary satellite stuff right now (hughesnet, viasat) that is available in the same price tier of $85-130/month. And also better than 90% of WISPs.

Relative to the helpful details on LTE you posted, though? (Obviously Starlink is incomparably better than the status quo satellite options...)

Why do you expect better than LTE?

And would you say more about WISP behavior? I know WISPs are all over the place, but in my small experience, a technically competent WISP will not look at your usage unless there’s contention impacting other customers.

Like, Starlink has said they won’t service urban areas, to prevent degradation due to contention. So I expect them to use the usual TOS and technical controls... to prevent contention. I don’t see what makes them special here. If they had some special sauce to provide more cumulative bandwidth to subscribers than LTE and WISPs, I’d expect them to open up to urban areas stuck with Comcast, and profit massively.

Typical WISP last mile: Something like a ubiquiti rocket 5ac gen2 on an RF elements 60 degree horn antenna, in a 40 MHz TDD channel somewhere in the 5.x GHz band, aggregate capacity of the entire AP might be around 240 Mbps. Shared between 20 to 30 customers. I'm regularly seeing 250-330 Mbps down on Starlink right now with beta equipment, and very, very few WISPs except those who are doing 60 GHz based PtMP micro-POP setups can match that. It's a real challenge for a WISP to have a few dozen houses all trying to download the latest 180GB Call of Duty update connected to one AP.

I'm not nearly as optimistic about WISPs in the long run, compared to my views 8-10 years ago. Really difficult to reach locations will go to starlink or similar (as a replacement for consumer grade geostationary), other places where the customers per square km density is sufficient will eventually get overbuilt with GPON last mile that provides vastly more throughput and capacity.

The most clueful and forward thinking WISPs I know are all making every effort possible, within whatever capital resources are available to them, to develop in house capacity for doing rural aerial FTTH. Buying bucket trucks, getting training, learning how to splice fiber, design GPON architecture, working with state PUCs for pole access, etc.

WISP and Musk are ruled by the same Shannon, so I'm skeptical that there will be a significant advantage over the long term, but satellite has a big advantage it terms of coverage -- the difference between "can you see that tiny hilltop in the distance over the trees?" and "can you see the sky?"

Same Shannon limit, but very different bands and channel sizes as well. Most WISPs are limited by the unlicensed frequency bands that exist in FCC part 15, and things like 3.5 and 3.65 GHz. One of the things that can go wrong with that is many WISPs in the same area fighting over the same bands from 5100-5900 MHz.

By comparison LTE fixed last mile services in some places (where expensive spectrum is owned by entities like tmobile) have some of the prime tree-penetrating frequencies in the 600 and 700 MHz bands, and 2.5 GHz band. One of the reasons why clearwire was acquired by sprint was for their 2500 band.

Replying to your reply, I don’t buy it. Your experience now on Starlink is analogous to being the first WISP subscriber on a newly deployed AP. Time will tell anyway. (And I will still be a grateful Starlink customer at my off-grid cabin, even with the throttling and caps. Starlink is a game changer!)

My perspective is informed by having been in locations previously dependent on geostationary based satellite services, as a comparison.

For people who have budgeted, procured and installed 'serious' two way geostationary stuff in the past (one example of which would be a 2.4m two port linear compact cassegrain antenna, NJR PLL LNB, a 40W BUC, a Comtech CDM760 modem and a 1U sized Cisco router), for 1:1 SCPC dedicated transponder capacity based services, starlink is atonishingly fast.

I could pull out a check book and spend $45,000 on buying terminal hardware and $30,000 a month in transponder space and not be able to achieve the speeds that starlink can do right now. Even if starlink was only 20 Mbps down and 4 Mbps up, go price what 20x4 service will cost by traditional geostationary right now (hint: start looking at $1200 per Mbps per month and multiply by N number of Mbps).

It is indeed a good theory that I'm seeing unreasonably higher than normal speeds right now and better latency, jitter and packet loss because I'm in a similar situation to being the first customer on a new WISP PtMP AP sector. But I also have a great deal more confidence that spacex's continued paces of launches and satellite deployment will keep up with providing at least a 100 Mbps down x 15 Mbps up service. I do not think that they will let it degrade into a contended-service-hell where customers see a very poor end user experience.

My perspective on starlink is also informed by knowing the price right now for Inmarsat and Iridium based offshore and aviation data services (sub 2 Mbps) and the $ per megabyte costs. There's already starlink aviation terminals in beta, and terminals for maritime and offshore use. It'll be a game changer there. The market for a globe-covering LEO high throughput satellite network is much larger than just the US48 state consumer residential internet/small business last mile internet market.

If your cabin is off-grid, why do you want to be online? Doesn't that sort of defeat the point?

Sometimes there's not an option to be on the grid.

Not the person you replied to, but off-grid doesn't mean no power. I have an off-grid cabin with enough solar capacity to run my laptop, as well as quite a few other things. I'm looking forward to getting Starlink there myself. It's a fantastic, quiet place to work with no opportunity for interruptions.

photovoltaic power systems are a lot less costly than they used to be - if you're fully off grid and won't be connecting to it, having absolute fidelity to electrical code might not be a high priority. If you have some technical ability and can follow documentation and instructions, big 360W panels are like $0.45/watt now, and the setup process for a charge controller and battery bank isn't excessively difficult.

T-mobile doesn’t apply a traditional throttle but instead they deprioritize you on the towers. So as long as you're on a tower that doesn't typically get congested (typical in residential areas since people use their home Wi-Fi instead) you're fine.

Correct.

Typical is to quietly throttle you into oblivion.

Above average users are not and never welcome.

I can't compare but I think one of the selling points is going to be the satellite coverage for Starlink versus T-Mobile's cell towers.

I do like T-Mobile's offering as an alternative to these crappy cable companies.

Thinking about it, they may complement each other.

t-mobile will probably have cell towers/coverage where people live vs starlink which grants coverage where people do not live.

I can't because the nearest city to me with 5G is several hours away. The 4G at my house is super spotty. I've used it for Webex calls when my home internet went down and it will mostly handle that, but I would never want to rely on it for my primary connection.

Have you tried T-Mobile? I don't know what they have configured, but they certainly own a lot of midband 2.5mhz spectrum in east idaho. They have 140mhz in Idaho Falls and Twin Falls, and 180mhz in Pocatello, and at least 60mhz everywhere else in east idaho. It looks like they have a decent amount of sites too. I'd have to dig a bit more but if you don't have access to 5g on T-Mobile today, it's not gonna be more than a couple months away.

Fascinating! I go to Idaho Falls fairly often. My phone is Verizon but my wife's in T-Mobile (MVNO). I don't think her phone is 5G capable though.

I have the Tmobile service. I use at least 500 Gb/mo without problems. Others on the reddit forum use over a Tb without problems. The terms of service say Tmobile will deprioritize us when there is congestion, but I haven't experienced it. Also, it appears that Tmobile is limiting the number of subscribers in a given area to prevent degraded service. Overall, I like it (full disclosure: I have a dual Wan setup with xfinity being the other provider)

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