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Comment by clvx | Hacker News Reader

I’m in a rural area in Montana and luckily I have access to a 5G tower. My impression is if you are close to one, it’s better and cheaper than going with Starlink even if you have to pay extra money to set up an external MIMO antenna to improve your signal.

I think Starlink is useful in many areas and industries, but 5G home internet is reliable for many cases at least in the US. Starlink will do great in the South hemisphere where providers struggle even in metropolitan areas. I see that as a huge win for many as long as the prices go down as the current prices could be a barrier for not so wealthy countries.

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I don't know much about Starlink, but isn't one point of Starlink that eventually it could even beat wired connections for distance latency? Ie it's a shorter and more direct trip to use Starlink to get from US West to US East, for example.

Though this is quite a ways out i imagine.

Best of all this idea works in current tech, and can get even better with future tech when Starlink starts going Satellite <-> Satellite, avoiding unnecessary land hops.

I'm interested in Starlink for all use cases, once they get more satellites up.

My understanding is that in addition to distance latency there is some non-trival amount of latency due to the use of TDMA. Unlike CDMA where everybody piles on the same spectrum at the same time, TDMA gives a timeslot to every station and you gotta wait your turn before TX/RX (this is a gross oversimplification of course).

While it doesn't add that much latency it is more than CDMA.

Not just TDMA - lasers in vacuum travel at the speed of light, but signals in optical fiber and coax copper are both 2/3 of that. This means that if (and that's still an if, not yet a when) starlink does laser between satellites it can beat terrestrial speeds.

I could see the end result being that we still do bent-pipe signaling over land and only laser interlinks for crossing oceans and for customers that pay for low ping to financial markets.

Having the lowest latency is only useful to commodity traders. There's no way Starlink can ever compete with terrestrial service on QoS in general (due to Shannon theorem). Their USP is universal availability.

5G speeds are decent but the main issue for me is caps. I’m waiting on StarLink — early signup to beta, never got in, purchased day it was available, no sign of order being fulfilled - and what I’m counting on is being able to upload large files, etc, without a cap.

Currently I have no caps on T-Mobile. I understand Starlink plans to have caps at some point.

Starlink will most definitely add caps, IMHO. If you have tens of millions of subscribers trying to download terabytes of video per month... yeah, that's gonna be a problem.

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