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Comment by dustractor | Hacker News Reader

Between 2010-2016, I lived in a rural area where we had one option: Satellite internet from HughesNet. Prior to that, the only option was dialup, and since it was such a remote area, the telephone had grandfathered a few numbers from out of the service area as free-to-call, to allow for residents to use the nearest isp without extra toll charges.

So we went from paying 9.95/month for average 56k service, to 80/month for a service that was worse than that.

To add insult to injury, a local broadband provider kept sticking their signs at our driveway next to our mailbox, and we would call to try and get service, but we were apparently 200 feet past the limit of their service area. People who lived at the mouth of our driveway had service, our neighbors had service, but we were too far out they said.

I repeat: as late as 2016 I WOULD HAVE KILLED TO BE ABLE TO JUST USE FREAKING DIALUP!

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In rual Virginia I had a very similar experience during the exact time frame as you. Verizon and Comcast would say we could be connected over the phone, send equipment (which I'd pay for), then turn around and say it was too remote. Neighborhood down the street had their service though. The ISP we ended up with was a couple with an antenna on top of a local mountain. Our service was capped at 2GB per day and blowing through it (which was very easy) meant being throttled to the point of nothing working anymore. It was several long years of frustration.

I have been using another person's starlink beta terminal since November of last year, and have had my own since late January. It's at a latitude sufficient that packet loss and service unavailability is averaging about 0.25% (1/4th of 1 percent) over multi day periods.

It's a real 150-300 down, 16-25 Mbps up. In many cases it actually beats the DOCSIS3 cable operator's network at the same location for jitter, packet loss, downtime.

The unfortunate economics of building 4000-6000 kg sized geostationary telecom satellites with 15 year finite lifespans, and launching them into a proper orbit ($200 million would not be a bad figure for a cost to put one satellite in place) mean that the oversubscription/contention ratios on consumer grade VSAT are extreme.

Dedicated 1:1 geostationary satellite still has the 492-495ms but is remarkably not bad, but you're looking at a figure of anywhere from $1300 to $3000 per Mbps, per direction, per month for your own dedicated chunk of transponder kHz for SCPC. You're also looking at a minimum of $7000-9000 for terminal equipment. That's the unfortunate reality right now.

I feel sorry for both viasat/hughesnet consumer grade customers, who are suffering, and also the companies, who are on a path dependent lock in towards obsolescence. Even more so if various starlink competitors like Kuiper, Telesat's LEO network and OneWeb (not exactly a competitor since it won't be serving the end user, but same general concept) actually launch services.

> It's at a latitude sufficient that packet loss and service unavailability is averaging about 0.25% (1/4th of 1 percent) over multi day periods.

Do you have any more specific data you could share there? For example, how much of that percentage is caused by downtime and how much is caused by random lost packets outside of downtime? Or how long does it go unavailable?

That's total unavailability time for a basic series of 20 icmp pings sent to a target in Seattle very close to the cgnat gateway exit point. On a 60s Cron job. Very close to a default smokeping installation. My 0.25% would be even less if I could remove one problematic tree in a 1/12th quadrant of the cpe's obstruction measurement system.

Not within the past 3-4 weeks, but there have been previous times of 30 to 120 minute downtime at 0200 in the morning local time while the starlink people do terminal firmware updates and other changes in the network.

No neighbor that let you piggyback on their connection? (That of course doesn't change the fundamental shittyness of the overall lack of available access)

Yes that was my first thought. Offer to pay half the bill and pick up a giant yagi antenna for twenty bucks. Only downside is it's technically illegal to combine that much power and that much gain but I've known people who did it for a decade with no FCC call.

Depending on how far we’re talking you could also just run network cable…

For a link, you mainly need signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).

With high gain antennas you simultaneously increase mutual reception and decrease reception of other signals, giving a triple boost to your signal-to-noise ratio if you can use it on both sides (sender: +1 txpower; receiver: +1 signal reception, +1 interference rejection), so that is what you should aim for.

Transmit power does comparatively little (sender only: +1 txpower, -? amplifier noise), while blanketing the area with useless power (both in-band and out-of-band²) that can get you detected and affect other devices. Especially if you driver you transmitter near the limit (or use a shitty amplifier, broadband antenna) further increasing out-of-band transmissions, which is the part that is likely to get you a visit from regulators.

¹ gain ~ directionality; symmetric in both reception and transmission

² out-of-band - frequencies other than intended ones

This is how many of the local wireless networks here in Czech Republic started - someone who could have connectivity got together with others, put up an omni-directional antenna on the roof and had others connect to it, then split the cost of the connection. This often made it possible to share much more expensive connections than any one of the participants would otherwise would be able to afford.

This often started with off the shelf wireless APs (like the venerable D-Link DWL-900AP+ with often home made antennas connected. If the network had more knowledgeable Unix people, they might have used an old PC running Linux or BSD with hostapd and an PCI wireless card. The most advanced ones even had home-built optical links (Seriously, 10 Mbit/s full duplex on 2001 by light was super cool! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RONJA) though our network was not that hardcore. :P We did lay some cable via agricultural pipe and build a makeshift com tower next to a Vineyard. :)

Over time the networks got high larger via bridging and wired or even fiber segments and a lot of the hardware was often replaced by high performance Microtik and Ubiquity devices.

Also the networks often merged into bigger ones, covering whole cities and their surrounding villages, with APs on top of grain silos and water towers.

Some of the networks are still independent and quite big, some were bought by big "traditional" telecom companies and some still operate as user coops to this day.

Oh man, I empathize. I'm writing this from the literal end of the internet: our cable (Comcast) comes off the last pole with coax on it.

We spent today taking a look at properties, and the internet situation goes downhill fast from where we presently rent from DSL to "unknown". HughesNet is an option, but it's an iffy option for latency reasons, and Starlink is crazy pricey. Cellular is a total non-starter: there is none.

Our realtor lives on a road with a bunch of people willing to pony up to get decent internet, but they can't get the ISP to actually run media down the road because it's too few houses, never mind that there's money on the table.

So if you're a web developer, please know that there are real folks in the USA who have legitimately lousy internet options in 2021. In our case, it's self inflicted, but I'm going to make some sweeping assumptions based on the houses we drove by and say it isn't a matter of choice for everybody.

I feel bad for y’all rural folk. I paired with some people who were living out there, and Internet was always a problem for them.

Starlink is a life saver for this situation.

Family in Placerville CA went from unusable <1mbps viasat to 50-190mbps overnight.

I hope it puts all the geostationary satellite companies into bankruptcy.

They're not competing for bandwidth with anyone else yet. Wait til the service is open to everyone.

In rural areas, contention should stay low enough that the speeds will continue to be at least decent. And of course the latency is much lower than geosynchronous satellites, independent of bandwidth.

They're limiting the number of CPEs per cell to a maximum number of sites, and volume of traffic, such that the service won't degrade to a viasat/hughesnet like terrible consumer experience. I can't say how I know, but some very experienced and talented network engineers are designing the network topology and oversubscription/contention ratio based out of their Redmond, WA offices.

OneWeb is launching new sats I think in leo

Probably a breach of contract but maybe you could have convinced your neighbors to share their connection

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