Hacker News Reader

Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

> Almost seems designed to get people's hopes up only to squash them again. What people have been asking for is an RV/camping/sailing Starlink they can use moving, and that product has yet to materialize.

What an odd comment. Seems like a narrow way to blame the marketing. And, a narrow way to cherry pick what doesn't fit your description of what Starlink should be and shouldn't be. In truth, Starlink is an absolute game changer for the entire world. Mobile or not. I think you need to think about rural people that have to deal with shitty DSL. 20-40 ms (You can go on YT and find people benchmarking it - average I've seen is around 40-50 ms [1]) ping is amazing and 350 mbps is exceptional compared to the status quo.

Also others complaining about delays is strange. It's a fricking satellite constellation in the sky. Give them some time and slack.

[1] https://youtu.be/nB5d8zqnvug?t=370

View on HN

It's never gonna work for camping anyways, unless you like to camp in an open field. Trees are the weak spot for Starlink, and even on my 2 acre plot, I could almost not find any clearings free of obstructions. I have a few 40+ foot trees and even though I was over 150 feet away from them, my signal was still getting obstructed.

Can you not install it on a rooftop? Guaranteed clear view of the sky.

Not who you're responding to, however a rooftop definitely doesn't guarantee clear views of the sky. I have solar pool heating on my roof, it works great, however Starlink requires 100 degrees field of view. That's a lot! There's definitely no such location on my 1.25 acre property. Even if you chopped down every single tree in my yard (not legal) there still wouldn't be 100 degree field of view due to trees in the neighbours yard.

EDIT: To clarify as to why the roof doesn't work, the trees are at least 4 times the height of my roof.

Not if there are 100 foot trees around you.

This really isn't true in my experience. I live in a forest, on the side of a mountain. I have dishy at ground level on the edge on my small parking area and it works just fine.

The actual competition: https://www.hughesnet.com/get-started

Starlink blows competitor offerings out of the water. Starlink has higher speeds, lower latency, and no data cap.

because they have no users yet. once the satellites are filled you're back to the status quo.

That's not true. The biggest problem with other satellite internet is ping, which has nothing to do with # of users (it's just that geostationary is really far away). Starlink satellites are 100x closer (so 10000x stronger signal), and there are well over 100x as many starlink satellites, so Starlink has roughly 1 million times the capacity as the other satellite internet providers.

no, it's not. streaming media is the vast majority of internet traffic, and it doesn't care at all about your latency.

your capacity math is so far off it's just crazy. if they had a million times the capacity of current satellites they would have around 250 petabits per second.

Signal strength and channel bandwidth are only partially related.

You could blast out a 100Hz-BW CW signal at 1MW, but you will not be able to send much on it, even if you can receive it from the Moon.

There are other limits too, like channel concurrency, which you can see in action in places like busy stations or stadia where your phone can't connect and your Bluetooth headphones become unreliable. I don't know how many simultaneous connections a single Starlink transceiver can handle, though.

it looks like their previous satellites (v1.0) were 18Gbps. I haven't found anything for v1.5 which is currently deployed, or v2.0 which theoretically are starting to launch this year.

Yes, but that is presumably not a maximum of 18 billion users at 1 bps, nor a maximum of 1 user at 18Gbps.

based on the plans they are selling, it almost certainly can do both 40 users at 500mbps and 200 users at 100mbps. This is a total guess, but I'd imagine it can probably do 2000 users at 10mpbs, since 10:1 over-subscription is pretty common for ISPs.

Seems weak in comparison. How much do they charge?

i think most people would pay around $100/mo

> No Hard Data Limits†† > > If you exceed your plan data, we won't cut you off or charge you more. Stay connected at reduced speeds, typically 1-3 Mbps.

Are they, though? (Seriously, I once looked at them, and promptly concluded that unless I wanted to give up streaming video and pulling docker images, there was no point since I'd blow through the data cap in a week or two.)

note 500ms ping. That's pretty much unusable for calls, games, or just loading pages.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com