Starlink's network faces significant limitations, analysts find | Hacker News Reader

Starlink's network faces significant limitations, analysts find

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16 pointsteleforce20 comments

What sort of incompetent writing is this?

Which broadband operator has capacity to serve all their clients at full advertised bandwidth at the same time?

Given the articles I have seen recently I am starting to suspect there is organized campaign to discredit Starlink.

...we should probably change how they're marketing the service then, it's a little unreasonable to expect consumers to understand ISP tech. If you say you offer 100mb/s or whatever, I am going to expect 100mb/s, why should it be my problem the ISP is serving so many customers that they can't maintain the service at the level it was sold to me.

If you purchase consumer service and expect your 95th percentile usage level to be 100mbps, you’re going to discover the difference between consumer and business grades of service and be eternally disappointed.

If they say 100mbps, they should be able to peak a connection to that level when necessary. If you’re a residential user, ‘when necessary’ is about 1% of the month or less.

Yes, you, a capable HN community member, may have something running in your home datacenter that can continuously saturate 100mbps 24/7/365, but don’t hold your breath expecting that level of service from residential plans.

Residential users need stable bandwidth (for remote working) in 10mbit increments (4K video * number of concurrent streaming devices). If you have a family of 10, then you’ll be potentially needing continuous 100mbps service when everyone is streaming at once, and you’ll probably discover at that point that most cheap consumer routers aren’t going to do a very good job with that (especially on the wireless side). For anyone with less than 10 people in their home, it scales down rapidly to a fraction of 100mbps peak, with a much lower 95th percentile than a business would have.

In an ideal world bandwidth would be infinite and peak/constant capacity tradeoffs irrelevant. We definitely do not live in that world yet. Measuring this rural residential product against the standard of a business/commercial 95th percentile 100mbps 24/7/365 SLA guarantee is inappropriate. It should be compared to the products it’s competing with, not to the highest expectations possible.

No, I’m wrong about one point. Comparing it to an ideal world standard is fine, but it’s not the only option. Apologies.

But that situation is no different than cable internet. You have a shared access medium that has a bandwidth limit. They constantly oversell the bandwidth because normal consumer behavior is bursty enough that they can mostly get away with it and have few issues.

Wow, these analysts are either deceiving through their teeth or completely unaware of how internet utilities operate. No internet service calculates their total expected bandwidth needs by multiplying the number of customers by each customer's total bandwidth allotment, and in fact total bandwidth usage is mostly not a function of the peak speed of a user. Whether your link is 100Mbit or 1Gbit, your HD Netflix content will still use the same amount of bandwidth.

For reference, continually filling a 100Mbit connection implies using 33 TB/month of downloads, which is definitely not what SpaceX customers should be doing over a satellite link.

You are right. Especially in space-sourced internet, the provider radically OVERSELLs customers far beyond the actual capacity.

HughesNet is the obvious example proving that. When I had it we'd get no better than dial up modem speeds because they would NEVER SAY NO to new accounts.

The article speculates in '3x oversubscription', so they have heard of the concept. Some casual googling suggests that values closer to 100x is realistic though.

So they're at least an order of magnitude off.

The upper limit on decent consumer internet is in the 5-10x ratio for oversubscription. 100x is going to be pretty awful, akin to how Xplornet runs there wireless networks (hint: you don't want to be like Xplornet). On my own FTTH network we see somewhere around 3-4 Mbps per subscriber at the 95th percentile currently. 2 years ago it was closer to 2-3 Mbps. COVID made quite a difference when it hit as peak usage ramped up around 10am each day rather than the 5-6pm pre-COVID.

The other downside of how Starlink is building their network is that upload capacity is seriously latency limited for bursts. GPON also uses a shared medium for uplink, and you can "feel" the upload latency at 20km since your node has to tell the other end how much data you need to send before you'll get a grant that lets you send your burst. With all the overhead of modern web pages, the 500 km RTT will feel quite a bit worse than a GPON network at 20 km, and GPON already feels worse than a straight 1 Gbps full duplex ethernet connection. Otoh, Starlink will probably work wonderfully for streaming since it's all bulk data that doesn't care about latency.

I one hundred percent concur with you. Look at how many DIA 1Gbps symmetric customers you can fit in one 10GbE transport circuit around a city, before the daily sine wave traffic chart starts peaking at 7Gbps. Hint: it's a hell of a lot more than ten.

People writing this stuff have clearly never actually typed enable into a router or run engineering operations at any ASN.

Starlink won’t scale, but beta testers are probably having the time of their life right now.

It's pretty genius marketing when the biggest hurdle will not even present itself during the "beta"

When it works well: It's a beta, imagine how well it will work when it's finished!

When It works poorly: There are still some kinks to iron out but what do you expect? It's a beta.

This is why some PC games are in perpetual “early access”. All the cover of being incomplete, but still take your money.

I think some developers do right by their customers, but many also use it to cover excuses and try to get people to buy in to the idea that they’ll be the next Warframe.

I’ve been fairly skeptical about Starlink since watching Common Sense Skeptic’s video, which I recommend: https://youtu.be/2vuMzGhc1cg

That video is mostly wrong (and I made a Starlink Reality Check video so I'm hardly a fanboy).

Can you elaborate on what is wrong with it?

I watched it a while ago and I'm not motivated to re-watch it, but I remember the idea that Starlink needs to launch tens of thousands of satellites upfront. They don't. They can wait until they have demonstrated customer demand, then incrementally launch just enough satellites to service that demand. This dramatically reduces the financial risk of the system.

The video doesn't make that assumption. It has relatively straightforward calculations about the size of the market, the existing competitors, the number of satellites needed to support a customer base of whatever size given SpaceX's own numbers. And the economics don't make much if any sense. The only objection I had is that low latency internet is more useful than just to gamers. E.g. voip and video calls, even ordinary browsing are unbearable with high latency connections.

On rewatching it I'm certainly not as impressed. Maybe I was just enjoying watching some anti-hype for once. Currently reading https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/02/starlink-is-a-... which seems more optimistic but http://tmfassociates.com/blog/2019/12/12/reality-and-hype-in... less so

but http://tmfassociates.com/blog/2019/12/12/reality-and-hype-in... less so

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