I took down my Starlink dish (but haven't cancelled)
jeffgeerling.com
jeffgeerling.com
But if your other choice is HughesNet or its competitors, that throttles you after 15 GB (2 days of non-streaming usage for me), or 50 GB, the Starlink "shortcomings" are irrelevant. With Starlink, if you can get it, and if you can site it without blockages, you have "real" internet. Reasonable speeds and no caps/throttling.
The massive over-subscription (presumably by people who have no functional alternative) suggests it serves a need.
Just not a need for people who have a non-DSL wired alternative, like Jeff Geerling.
With the prior DSL, I couldn't have worked from the house in a meaningful way. (My AT&T wireless is also very marginal.) Now I mostly could.
Just looking at a satellite map of Spain, I see La Langa. It seems like it has very few people, but they all live in a small town center. Looking at Uclés, it's the same: tiny place, but everyone is living in the town center.
Let's look at Potomac, MD in the US. The roads are sprawling with giant houses all far apart. That's a lot more distance to run fiber to get it to each house. Potomac is a rich suburb of DC and has fine internet (it's still dense enough for that), but the US keeps sprawling. Look at a satellite view of Pike Township, PA. There's a lot of houses with huge distances in between and no discernible town center.
> If you manage to use electric or telephone posts deploying fiber and getting a carrier is doable
I think this can also be an issue in the US since place might not have easy/cheap access to those utility poles. Title II carriers in the US get cheap, regulated access to utility poles. That's traditionally been your phone company. I believe the FCC tried reclassifying broadband as Title II under the Obama administration, but it might have been reversed under the Trump administration. If you're someone that already has access to the utility poles, you don't want more people getting cheap access to them.
Even if you have access to the utility poles, you can face difficulty. As noted, you aren't wiring up a town center, you can be wiring up places with a huge amount of distance between people. Even if that isn't a problem, property owners might want new cables buried. Even when power lines are above ground, sometimes they're underground from the street to the house. Many houses might be set back from the street by 50 meters so it can be a larger distance. You can have a 300m road with 3 houses on it each with a 50m set back from the street.
That's not to say it isn't possible (and some towns have created coop ISPs), but costs add up. Uclés has 140 people in it, but everyone seems to live within a 250m radius of the city center. That seems pretty easy to wire up. Pike Township, PA has 1,700 people that are incredibly spread out. That seems a lot harder to wire up. It's not impossible, but it seems harder.
The Home Internet service is 100% deprioritized compared to postpaid cell phone data, so they really are selling "excess" capacity.
T-Mobile has been managing how many people they sign up in an area. Sometimes T-Mobile's home internet is available in your area, but then they get a certain number of signups and it becomes unavailable in your area until they're able to increase capacity or customers cancel. It's possible that it was available in their area and others signed up for it.
AT&T is only offering service in very limited areas and it seems like they're mostly trying to replace their DSL connections that they don't want to upgrade to fiber.
Verizon's service is currently pretty small scale, but they're looking to grow it. Again, it will be limited areas because no one wants to overwhelm the network.
Even if you have good phone service, there's a big difference between someone using 10GB on mobile and someone using 500GB as a home user. Signing up 10 home users could be like adding 500 new phone users in a small area. That can be a lot of traffic and they don't want to start seeing their mobile users cancel service because home users are clogging up the network. So they want to roll it out a bit slowly, especially as they increase capacity over the next few years with midband 5G.
Also check cellmapper to check for near by antennas and bands. More info in r/tmobileisp
In Europe, cities often drop off into farmland very abruptly. You have built-up areas and then very abruptly farmland. In the US, you can have suburbs where there's 1 house on an acre (4,000 square meters) going for a long time. Even 1 house every 2-4 acres (8,000-12,000 square meters) isn't unusual.
If you look at a satellite map between cities in the Netherlands, you can see that there isn't any sprawling houses between Rotterdam and Utrecht. Places like Oudewater exists, but it's dense. It might not be as dense as larger cities, but people don't have enormous plots of land. You can easily walk to neighbors and shops. In the US, a lot of people live in areas where it can be 5 miles to get to shops.
In the US, people often have the issue that the wired internet doesn't go up their street which might be a couple miles with only a handful of houses. In the US, they might face costs getting it from the street to their house because their house is set back a hundred meters from the road. This isn't super typical, but it's typical enough that it effects a lot of people.
I think part of the issue is that there is no real demarcation between the urban area and outside it in the US. I can look at a satellite view of a city in Europe and clearly discern city vs farmland. In the US, a lot of rich people left the city for suburbs where they could set land use policies that kept lower income people (and often minorities they didn't want around) out of their town (and out of their schools and out of their tax base). They still wanted to be able to commute into the city, but often passed laws mandating minimum lot sizes, minimum setbacks from the street for houses, and emphasized local control to prevent housing they deemed undesirable from being made. These places have fine wired internet.
But they kinda slowly melt into progressively more rural places rather than having a clear demarcation. The US's emphasis on cars and a certain cultural idealism around rural life means that there are people that want to live semi-rural while not really having a rural lifestyle or job. They just drive farther and cheap fuel and subsidies make that possible.
The lack of coherent land use policies means that the area where people consider themselves as part of an urban area can keep expanding. Maybe a developer wants to build new housing. The city and suburbs don't want more housing and so the developer picks a piece of land just past the last suburb. It's another 15 minutes from the city by car, but with skyrocketing housing prices, there are probably going to be some people who think it's a reasonable trade-off. What's the difference between an hour commute and an hour and 15 minute commute? Why shouldn't I trade 10 hours of my life every month for a larger house?
A lot of European countries have greenbelts around their cities where you aren't allowed to do a lot of development. It prevents things like the US suburbs which initially were thought of as 5-10 miles outside the city and now often go all the way to the next city creating a giant area that people commute from.
But these suburbs aren't the problem. The thing is that the suburbs then meld into really rural areas - but those really rural areas aren't that far from the suburbs that rich people live in and commute to the city from and those suburbs have big-box stores like Walmart and Target and they have high speed internet. If you live in a rural area that's 5 miles from such a suburb, you think "I'm not in the middle of nowhere! I'm just 5 miles from this place that has a Walmart and high speed internet and a supermarket!" If you're 5 miles outside a city in Europe, you're in farmland - but very often the houses all seem to be on one main road even through that farmland rather than up winding roads that lead nowhere (other than a few people's houses).
In the US, because there's this gradual drop-off in density, there can be this "why not just a little more" mentality. "Why not just a little farther out to get a tiny bit more land? It's working for the suburb next door that's just a tiny bit denser."
And a lot of Americans want to live in a rural area with acres of land, but in a commuting way. US policy often supports this choice - fuel prices, road subsidies, same-price delivery by the postal service, and billions spent trying to give them modern communications choices. That last one is key for this. The US is offering billions for rural internet and Starlink is going after that money.
Starlink is partly happening because the US government put a large amount of money available to anyone creating rural broadband options. The US Postal Service makes sure that rural areas can still get their deliveries.
I think "how far outside the urban area" is a hard question to answer because it's hard to answer where the urban area is in the US. The issue is that there's a lot of people that live in pretty rural areas in the US. Amazon and other deliveries are available. LTE and often even 5G is available, though often not with enough bandwidth at the moment to supply home internet (though companies are looking to change that). A lot of places with low density have fine wired internet. But when there isn't a clear demarcation of urban vs rural, there's still going to be a place where certain things stop, but people are going to wonder about the cut-off: I'm just outside the place that has broadband and it's only 15% less dense here.
I think that's the big thing. You might be 50 or 100 miles outside the city, but the gradual reduction in density while still being surrounded by non-farmers can make you feel like you're still a part of non-rural life while your neighbors and shops get farther and farther apart. Good wired home internet usually extends well away from cities in terms of miles (though often with annoying monopolies), but people really spread themselves out in the US.
Actually I've only seen an Amazon delivery vehicle one or two times...
Back when preorders started, it wasn't obvious how slow Starlink would be to expand, and it also wasn't obvious transfers wouldn't be a supported feature for many months.
Even so, my cousin also signed up in hopes to get Starlink, and 11 months later her date was moved from 'late 2021' to 'late 2022'.
And yes, I've tried many address hacks to see if I could get my dish moved there, none have worked.
They shouldn't have dropped the 'beta' moniker last year if the service is truly so far from its final state (IMO).
SpaceX has a government subsidy to provide high speed internet right across the street from my parents house. But they have no satellite coverage in that area according to their own map. I don't really understand the business plan of SpaceX with respect to starlink.
This will change dramatically once sat-to-sat laser comms are fully online as it will put more base stations “in range”.
So coverage at your house is dependent on you and a Starlink ground station being in the ground track of some Starlink satellites. Because of their low altitude it's entirely possible for your house being in the ground track of satellites but the nearest Starlink ground station being outside.
At some point in the future Starlink satellites will have laser communications between each other. Then only one in that group needs to be able to see a Starlink ground station and the others can route customer signals to it.
There is nowhere in the lower 48 where starlink has no satellite coverage, I believe there are still areas where they have not built out ground stations though, and since most of the satellites don't have laser links to talk to other satellites (due to issues with their original lasers not fully burning up on re-entry - now fixed) they need to have a ground station under the same satellite as the customer.
They also have limited bandwidth to any one satellite, so they need to limit the density of their customers. Satellites move up and down lattitudes, but at any one time the density of satellites is higher at higher latitudes, so they should be able to serve more customers there.
For an ISP that uses satellites, ground stations are equivalent to satellite coverage. It doesn't matter how many satellites they have, if there isn't a ground station to connect to you don't have coverage.
Inter-satellite links also don't do anything useful if you don't have enough ground stations. Even if you had a ground station with infinite bandwidth there is no way a single satellite can have the entire network linked through it. It's a really neat thing to have a single voice channel connect through a constellation from somewhere like the southern Indian ocean, but you can't really run 100+ mbps pipes like that.
This is completely different than something like a military communications satellite where both ends of the connection are communicating through the same satellite. The 48 states could be totally in the dark (no power, no comms) and a military communications satellite still functions fine.
The nuance between ground station coverage and satellite coverage is extremely important for understanding spacex's business plan, which is relevant to your comment since you were saying "I don't really understand the business plan of SpaceX with respect tostarlink", with the implication that it doesn't make any sense. The difference between ground station coverage vs satellite coverage is the difference between "we're still building out the infrastructure, but we have the hard bits in place" and "this business model never scales because we need to launch way more satellites just to have basic coverage over the continent". It shouldn't be surprising that they're not done scaling the ground infrastructure, but that's not an impediment to their long term business model, because it's not the expensive bit.
> Even if you had a ground station with infinite bandwidth there is no way a single satellite can have the entire network linked through it.
This is a straw man, no one ever suggested that the entire network would be linked from a single satellite.
Rather the primary purpose of inter-satellite links is that you can expand coverage to areas away from ground stations. You route the traffic to a nearby groundstation (or better, a groundstation close to it's destination) with bandwidth available.
> but you can't really run 100+ mbps pipes like that.
Yes you can, I don't have numbers for starlink's inter-satellite links, but in general that technology is at the ~10gbps / laser link range, each satellite has 4. Light travels through space faster than in fiber, so if routed intelligently this actually lowers ping too.
> This is completely different than something like a military communications satellite where both ends of the connection are communicating through the same satellite.
Ironically, this actually describes how the current system works (as long as you treat the endpoint as a groundstation, and not an IP address somewhere on the internet).
The future system is more robust, even if there is no "other end" to talk to locally, spacex will (with inter-satellite links) be able to route you to an "other end" anywhere around the globe.
Tell us you know nothing about military satcom without telling us you know nothing about military satcom.
Let's see, this system predates even my birth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_Satellite_Communications...
It's still in use as recently as 2009, by pirates however. Newer systems include some form of conditional access to prevent anyone with the gear from using them.
It's a bit like saying "a bicycle is different from an automobile, because automobile frames are made from wood", and then pointing to a Morgan to prove the point.
There is a very, very high probability that if they allowed people to move starlink transceivers/dishes around that a number of areas would end up with higher concentrations than wanted, and starlink would have a lot of angry customers.
Notably, this is only about twice the cost of a high speed "business" internet connection from the cable companies in a high density area. Regular Starlink is priced at about twice a high speed "consumer" internet connection, so the premium seems reasonable for the available-in-austure-areas part.
I do hope they end up coming out with a version for RVers that has the lower throughput but allows arbitrary roaming.. but I do understand putting roaming on a premium plan first, since it plays such havoc with per-cell capacity planning.
IP would be absolutely trivial to spoof so that's not a proof of anything really.
AFAIK even regular cell sites have GPS for timing purposes.
There are also 911 implications.
https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.nena.org/resource/collection/1F053...
If you move it, and call 911 - how does the carrier determine the address where the call originated?
The technology would have worked just fine, they just couldn't fill in their E911 entry with anything that would work.
There is so little tolerance that people are finding the dish only works say, in their driveway because the dish's required location is based off mapping data that puts a certain address at certain coordinates, regardless of where the house is (which might be set back considerably from the road.)
Starlink never originally advertised the ability to transfer service or even sell your hardware. It was very clear from the beginning you had to use it for the address you provided, and their communication was very clear to that effect.
You are definitely correct that logically you should be able to sell your kit, transfer service, or just move with it (Elon has said you’ll eventually be able to use it on an RV). But you took that logical end result and set your own expectations based on assumptions that were not aligned with reality.
You are not in the target market, of course you’re going to be frustrated.
Mobile antennas will also require separate FCC approval.
"Requires separate approvals" does not always mean that approval is hard to get. It might require a version of the dish that doesn't do something v1 or v1 and v2 current do however.
Starlink itself cares about positioning to avoid overcrowding and also any satellite tasking/scheduling/whatever.
If you can't sell it, is it really yours?
Just because they do not have the coverage of other satellite systems does not mean it is still a beta.
FYI: I unsubscribed because of this video (previous to it showing up on HN). It's obviously disingenuous clickbait. Look at the title alone. And it even goes into a pointless discussion about Elon Musk that has nothing to do with Starlink itself. Lots of good technical YouTubers avoid this crap. I was surprised you felt the need to engage in it. I'm not mad, just disappointed :-)
I was genuinely informed by the experience.
This seems like a gripe very particular to you and not generally relevant.
I have synchronous gigabit wireless internet from Sail Internet. It has pretty much all the same issues you mentioned about Starlink except the last one, but I'm not making a video to complain about it.
Engineering involves trade-offs, and it's just a reality.
We bought a property in a very rural area in mid 2020. One of the hard requirements was verified high speed Internet access.
Our home has good performing Comcast. But I also pay $100/month and have a Dishy on my roof. Fortunately our home is very tall and we're able to get about 95% visibility, since our home is in the middle of a forest.
Why am I paying an extra $100/month? Because our Comcast has outages. It's not surprising since we're at the end of miles and miles of above ground cable that has hundreds of trees pushing up against the wires and poles.
I'm a pretty well off 'tech person' so an additional $100/month to cover a few hours of use makes sense.
(Wireless coverage is terrible around here, so that was never a backup possibility.)
I'm pretty convinced that Starlink is not only going to revolutionize many people's lives, but it's also going to be a cash cow for SpaceX, in large part funding their Mars ambitions.
Internet scores higher than running water for me on prioritization, but I still couldn't bear to waste the resources to have a sat uplink for the 1-2 days a year comcast goes down. Taking a slot from somebody that actually needs it feels off to me too. It would only likely be worth it if your particular area has abnormally bad comcast uptime.
That said, we just purchased a beautiful rural property with a wonderful house, and will rent it out until starlink or fiber( local company is 1-2 years out) hits it. So maybe I'm just sore that people are taking starlink slots when they absolutely don't need it and its 2 years out =P
The comcast outages are far above anything that's 'normal'. And honestly if it was just me, as a decades long 'devops' person, losing network connectivity briefly every few days and for tens of minutes or longer multiple times a month would not be too bad. But my wife does zoom/video professionally all day every day with paying clients, so when comcast goes to crap it's very important for her to be able to reconnect over starlink ASAP.
Have you looked at something like Firewalla and multi-wan setup? https://help.firewalla.com/hc/en-us/articles/360051575473-Fi...
My wife reports that she's able to switch WIFI from Comcast to Starlink in a matter of seconds, which doesn't actually break the video chat session. Not ideal, but not terrible.
When discussing it with some of the sysadmins that I work with, they had a "hmm... interesting" thought with it - the configuration for it compared to the dual wan router setups that they have for their home labs is (from their standpoint) much easier.
The issue isn't so much a "can you do it" but rather a "how much time do you want to invest in designing your own setup?"
I was working in the ISP space, and we did some rough back of the envelope calculations which showed that Starlink could only ever service a very low population density, based on the radio spectrum fundamentals.
Now people are realizing the obvious- it's an incremental improvement over other satellite internet options. It's great for people in very rural places, but if you are in or near a town of any size, you likely have a better option available.
The joke here is that the lucky few percent of people who can get fiber here have two choices, but the rest of us are stuck in the 1990s. And this is a dense area, far more dense than 100 miles W of here in the little towns of population 1k that can also get fiber from their local telco co-op.
Anything that's coming from Musk has a huge hype, for better or worse.
"the SpaceX CEO argued that Starlink won't be a major threat to telcos because the satellite service won't be good enough for high-population areas and will mostly be used by rural customers without access to fast broadband."
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-...
Source - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink
It's typical Musk - announcing something that sounds super cool and impossible, because it's impossible. Ad later quietly scale it down to something still pretty cool, but nothing like it was presented initially. And ride the hype as much as you can in the process.
Some of this might be coming from real-world experience with the network and an update on previous incorrect assumptions. Part of it might be simply making bombastic claims.
Right now, Starlink hit around 100,000 customers with 1,700 satellites. With the full 12,000 satellites we'd then expect 700,000 customers. That might change given that the satellites aren't geostationary and they haven't launched in many countries, but to hit a million customers in the US, they'd need to increase the number of customers per satellite significantly. Maybe there are improvements they can make that we don't know about, but it seems like Starlink's advantages are in making cheap rockets and cheap satellites - which is very cool, but they likely don't have radio advantages.
Starlink is also thinking about an additional 20,000 satellites so it's possible that they'll just keep increasing the number of satellites. Still, if they're seeing linear gains, that's still a relatively small number of users even with 32,000 satellites (and even the 12,000 is 4-5 years away).
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210510/08050146767/elon-...
Notably these are all of the Starlink customers I know despite living in a region with vast rural areas... I've heard from a couple people I know out in the country that they are stuck on the waitlist. I think Starlink may have prioritized urban areas first for whatever reason (just higher customer count presumably).
I needed to run mostly on LTE tethered connectivity for a couple of months, and 30 GB a month of data was more than enough for my daily development process, and background youtube music mixes (at lower bitrates).
Unless you're rebuilding containers/redownloading dependecies daily, 15 GB of data should be pretty reasonable.
Say I'm considering moving to a rural location. One of my barriers to moving is the quality of my internet access. Along comes this fancy new Starlink service and I might be tempted to think "problem solved". But reviews like this allow me to anticipate problems with the service and reconsider moving altogether.
If Starlink is the least bad of your bad options, then this review probably just isn't for you.
This sounds exceptionally high. What do you do that uses so much?
> The download size of a 140-minute 4K video, for example, would be approximately (14 GB x 2) + (.233 GB x 20) = 33 GB or .233 GB x 140 = 33 GB.
The worst offenders are social networks like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, especially if you have video auto play enabled. Because almost everyone has an ultra-high-DPI screen these days, they expect high video and image quality, and that's a lot of data.
Next up are media sites: auto-playing videos again, followed by "normal" advertising and actual content. Just for popular papers and media: A single (!) page load of the front page of Germany's respected newspaper Süddeutsche clocks in at 7.7 MB, Spiegel has 6.6 MB, tabloid BILD has 10 MB. US NYT is 9 MB, Fox News is 6MB, CNBC 8.7 MB. Even relatively plain Stackoverflow's front page clocks in at 2 MB.
And then, there are all the updaters (looking at you, Windows Update), the other phone-home telemetry and analytics stuff, even more ads side-loaded by modern "smart TVs"...
Where the fuck have we gone wrong? Is there any chance to get "the old" Internet back without putting everyone in advertising in jail for a decade?
And then there is Zoom.
I think that it is difficult to estimate one's internet usage if you can go somewhere else when you need do to something big. If 15 Gb is your only allocation, for home and work, it doesn't last long.
We've just moved to a place where our only other option was a £400 a month leased line delivering synchronous 100Mbps. For less than a quarter of that, Starlink gives us roughly 120-150Mbps down, around 7Mbps up, and pings around the 30 ms mark. Upload is slow but workable for now.
It's easy to complain for clout when you don't actually need the service. But if you don't have another affordable option, Starlink is remarkable. I keep having to remind myself that I'm running a business from my rural home via space.
And, sure, there are elements that aren't perfect (the cable on our dish isn't replaceable unless you want to manually splice wires, but reports on the Starlink subreddit say that Starlink will send you a new dish if the cable gets damaged). The power draw is around the same as a fairly typical lightbulb from 20 years ago, so I can totally live with that.
I know it's frustrating for people who can't get Starlink, especially if they know someone who wants transfer their dish to them, but that's the price of avoiding oversubscription.
If you can take the Starlink dish off your roof and still post your videos complaining about Starlink then you were never the target customer anyway.
Starlink's key markets are fairly spread out rural areas, not infrastructure expensive exurbs and suburbs.
Since you mentioned pounds, I just want to address the power consumption part.
At averaged 100W power usage, the system will use 2.4kWh of electricity every day. In UK the energy prices are absolutely exploding - with the government estimating that the "average" consumer will be paying 28p/kWh of electricity from April. At that price, you are talking £20 a month in JUST ELECTRICITY to keep the system running. That's more than some basic broadband offers in this country on a per month basis.
Yes I know that's not an option for you. But damn, £20 worth of electricity a month just to keep my internet router running? That's crazy.
To put it in context, my PC isn't on 24 hrs a day but it's almost certainly drawing at least 250W for the 9 or 10 hours it is on. It's just a cost of working from home.
You should throw a meter on it and actually check. My recent-ish Ryzen 2600 desktop, 1070 GPU, and 27" monitor use <100W when not doing something like intense gaming. Even then, under intense gaming its often between 300-500W of usage. YMMV, obviously.
And just to drive the point home: this is not the last price increase we will see. It will rise another 50% in October and probably won't fall much until 2024.
The proprietary connector is annoying but the antenna needs 100+ watts. Power over Ethernet doesn't support that, so the antenna connector can't use standard Ethernet. If the router additionally had a standard Ethernet port then it wouldn't be weatherproof, which was clearly a design goal. They should really have done some kind of weatherproof housing for an Ethernet connector. I expect they will on the next version.
Kessler syndrome is not going to happen because unlike their competitors SpaceX intentionally put all their satellites in very low orbit where the atmosphere naturally cleans up any debris within a couple of years. That's something uniquely enabled by SpaceX's low launch costs because it limits the useful life of the satellites, requiring frequent replacement. But it's worth it.
I haven't researched Starlink much before, but if the target satellite count is 10k (some say 30k?) and replacements are needed every 24 months, this suggests that to keep Starlink running they need to deploy an average of ~415 satellites every month, forever. Some quick searching suggests a cost of $250k/satellite[0], for a total monthly bill of over $100M. I must be misunderstanding, because that seems pretty pricey, and it excludes launch costs, which they say are ~$30M. Maybe everything will be cheaper by the time the constellation reaches 10k satellites.
[0]: https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-starlink-satellite-launch-s...
But many people aren’t dealing with that, meaning that when you have better options, something like Starlink no longer looks all that necessary.
But users who are in a position where real internet is a real luxury due to location, Starlink still has value, even if it’s obviously not perfect. Especially when compared to satellite internet options that are comically slow even compared to cable modem connections that were common more than a decade ago.
Good critique, Jeff.
Now, a proprietary, weather hardened, friction fit, outdoor connector that repurposes USB-C? that's user hostile new.
Propriety connectors: it's not a laptop which i need to connect to many things. I set it up and leave it.
Lack of ethernet: sure, that's a legitimate problem for me... $20 fix.
Wifi 6: as author said, Starlink isn't fast enough to utilize Wifi 6. If author wants Wifi 6 connected devices within the home, that's not Starlink's issue.
I’ve learned nothing new except that there is a custom cable that is somewhat expensive to replace.
I have it currently set to "failover only" on my Ubiquiti device, as it's snowing sideways and there is a tremendous (read: 30%) amount of packet loss at the moment.
I don't yet know how to do automatic failover due to packet loss on a UBNT device, but that's what I'm looking up this afternoon.
Anyways - I have 3 ISPs, with two of them being LTE. One is the unlimited ATT iPad plan, since I have a router that currently identifies as an iPad (so modern) with the other being TMobile home internet.
Up until this snow storm, I had both of the LTE connections in failover only mode, using Starlink exclusively since about November, when there was an update that stopped the "disconnect all active sessions every ~45 minutes when I lose physical sight of the satellite I was connected to" problem. I guess that was when sat to sat communication came online in my longitude.
I will also note that my IP has been static on Starlink for about 2 weeks now, which is the longest it's ever been. It's still CGNAT, so multiplayer game hosting is mostly out, unless the game handles it. Most don't.
Overall it's a decent thing, but I would recommend at least one backup ISP for those rural or thinking of going rural. LTE Hacks group on Facebook can help you tremendously if you are considering buying a place outside the range of normal wired connections.
It's kind of funny that snow took it down 1 day after I started looking at the premium option, which I'm considering if I can get my workplace to pay $300 per month, with me covering the other $200. Kind of dulls the excitement for that...
Right now I'm paying $99 for Starlink, $23/mo ATT, $50/mo TMO. Hardware costs were $450 for the router and LTE modem (EM160g) and roughly the same for (what I know know to be the gen 1) Starlink.
I had no idea they rolled out a gen 2 Starlink that's even more restricted than the first one. Ah well.
When I was in NORCAL and wired, I was on business internet that was $190/mo, so that's about what I'm accustomed to.
I have no idea what it would cost to wire my house. I'm miles from any infrastructure.
It’s either CGNAT or ponying up $60 per IPv4 address.
That's a staggering amount of money & it isn't locked up in assets like real estate.
This scarcity creates perverse incentives, I'm surprised that the governments aren't doing their job in first forcing new hardware to be IPv6-compatible, then later forbidding new hardware to be IPv4-compatible, like they did for digital TV tuners and low consumption light bulbs... maybe because the lobbying is pushing in the opposite direction in this case for the aforementioned reason ?
Only 28% of Alexa top 1000 sites support IPv6.
Very, very few, if any, consumers of commercial ISPs have only IPv6 access.
Woof.
The cable is kind of a bummer, but at least it's super high quality. I wasn't too happy about having to use a giant step bit to drill holes, as I wasn't about to cut the ethernet jack off the end of it when I ran the cable in the attic.
The new router does have a bypass mode, so you can get around using it at all (though it still needs to be plugged in as it's the PoE source through the proprietary cable). The reset method is a bit weird, since it doesn't seem there's a button. I think you have to plug and unplug it three times within a certain time period.
That can’t increase the BOM that much, right?
Standard PoE+ is 30w, and even the newest PoH maxes out at 90w. The new hardware draws more than that, so Starlink made up their own PoEish standard with proprietary cable/connectors. The $20 dongle is probably a custom PoE adapter. The good thing about this setup is you only need a single cable run up to your roof.
Adding an RJ45 jack directly to dishy might actually complicate the construction. For one thing, it's a weatherproofing issue. But now you have two ethernet ports and need a switch, which needs software management. It's not just a few pennies on the BOM.
The jack is pennies, and the rest of the chips to support the extra Ethernet interface are still readily available. Version 1 of the router had a LAN port (labeled AUX).
It wasn't an additional jack on dishy. It was an additional jack on the router.
See here for an example of the router: https://www.androidcentral.com/sites/androidcentral.com/file... One of those ports connects to the Starlink (through another box which provides the POE), and the other is labeled `aux` and is available for LAN.
My understanding for the newer routers is there is now only the single port. The router itself doesn't appear to be weatherproof'ed in any way, and already needs to be installed indoors, so I think it'd just be the cost of the RJ45 jack (and whatever internal differences for the router).
It just...seems like it cannot be much of a cost savings.
- They integrated the power supply into the router. Cuts the cost.
- An ethernet port and a physical switch with all its required component costs money. If SpaceX determines that only one digit percent (very likely) of its customers use the Ethernet port on the router (or don't use the router, both of which is detectable from SpaceX PoV), then the ethernet port becomes a good target to remove.
- Same story with the cable from the dish. It's most likely that the cable, plugs and connectors for that cable costs less overall. Also note that there is not PoE standard that allows 180 watts, so they essentially had a non-compliant port that could potentially cause issues in some scenarios. For instance, the ethernet inductor module on the PSU board for the first version is rated for lower current than the dish needs at its maximum power usage so the components are essentially running on the edge of their spec, probably why some PSUs were failing (see reddit). In addition, by making the cable non-standard ethernet, they've eliminated a potentially large number of support requests of people adding extensions to the already at-the-limit cable and wondering why it doesn't work.
As for why you can't transfer your account: you have a service that's in high demand and low supply. It'd be irresponsible of SpaceX to allow one person to sign up for 10 services, then sell the equipment at higher price to a 3rd party and transfer the service, while those who really need the service have to wait longer.
It's good to sit down and think why certain product decisions are made, instead of assume "user hostility" right off the bat.
Part of me wonders if it will suffer the same fate as Iridium - terrestrial service came in and took the market away. Especially if the rollout continues to be so slow.
I think there will always be some sort of market for it if they can get ships/planes onboarded.
I understand that the limit is because Starlink is oversubscribed in the cousin's area, I'm just wondering where the limitation is enforced.
That's exactly what he tried a few months back. It didn't work (no connection was possible IIRC). The service was basically geo-fenced back then and still might be.
The constellation is proposed to be approximately 10,000 satellites.
I wondered how this compares to the number of US commercial flights per year. The FAA claims it handles 45,000 flights per day [1]. If we assume each aircraft has 5 flights per day and spends half it's time on the ground, then we might guess there are approximately 4,500 aircraft flying above the USA at any given instant.
The USA is only a portion of the globe, let's say it's 1/50 of the global surface area, and let's assume starlink satellites are distributed evenly across the sky. From this we can guess, there will be approximately 200 starlink satellites above the CONUS at any instant.
So the starlink constellation will be about 5% of the problem that commercial air traffic is.
That is an interesting comparison though! And it'd be cool to compare with more nuanced assumptions - maybe even factor in how contrails affect things in addition to the 1:1 satellite:plane maths.
Each one is also visible from a larger patch of ground because it's 300 miles farther away than a plane.
I'm currently paying ~$40 (converted from EUR) per month for a 100Mb/s fiber connection.
I'm paying $34 / month in a small city in the middle of nowhere for 200mbps in the US.
Then $99/month for Starlink (for now, at least).
Meanwhile a few blocks away a friend has 500 Mbps symmetric access for $50/month.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/TP-Link-300Mbps-dual-polarized-direct...
[2] https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/df4123cf-5f0e-40f2-bf71-f...
I guess that's a benefit to a small relatively wealthy country?
My question would be, what do you have to even _use_ that much bandwidth? I have 1Gb/50Mb asymmetric and my Ubiquiti router can't really saturate the down stream. Sure, I could invest in a more powerful router, but in normal daily use we never even get close to max bandwidth.
The reason the city has such a good fiber connectivity is because of a vote a few years ago that pushed this. It cost a lot of money but was worth every bit IMO.
I hope something like this gets pushed for the whole country. I see it as core infrastructure like electricity and unlike cable or copper it is way more future proof.
Damn... hope your wages make up for this man.
Select max speed and then go zoom in somewhere rural and see "1Mbps to 25Mbps" and then switch over to min price or provider counts...
There aren't a lot of options in rural areas and running wire to the spot is expensive.
But the real embarrassment is the satellites. They should been covered in an antireflective coating, the kind you can get for $20 at any hardware store. But the engineers didn't bother, even though they knew about Iridium flares:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_flare
Why would they make such a simple, obvious mistake? Let's look at some options:
A) They didn't know (casts doubt on the competence of the engineers and the adequacy of their engineering process)
B) They couldn't solve it (I just did, this is a red herring)
C) They didn't care (casts doubt on their relationship with science, environmentalists and members of the public who don't want to see satellites when they look at the stars)
D) They wanted people to see the satellites in the sky as free advertising (ding ding)
Corporate greed runs the show now. And other countries will copy this bad behavior because once again, a US corporation didn't lead by setting a good example.
If we want to see real change in the world, we need to start by NOT supporting bad actors. Don't buy Starlink. Tell your friends why.
I grew up in a region with exceptionally low light pollution, staring at the stars and Milky Way in awe, and feel great sorrow for people who don't get to see them. The idea that there will always be a satellite glaring somewhere in the sky now, diminishing that sense of natural wonder, is one of the great tragedies of the modern world IMHO.
But I'm not going to sit here and tell people what to buy. Starlink has great tech, and I do want everyone in the world to have affordable internet access. It's up to each of us to do our own research and vote with our dollars for products that are sustainable, equitable, etc. I think we all want to do better and fix our mistakes, rather than live in the shame of any dishonorable behavior we may have had in the past.
I have some sympathy for the astronomy crowd, but I wonder if its inevitable. And is world wide broadband more/less important to society than having to correct for light streaks?
The router debacle is just ridiculous though. All of the networking tech being used is so ubiquitous, why not include a damn ethernet port. I just received my ethernet adapter 2 months later and... it doesn't work. Tried multiple configurations including straight into a PC - nothing. to top it off my support ticket was closed without any response... so my $300 mesh wifi will just sit on the shelf while half the house gets poor connectivity.
Overall its exciting to have decent internet and not live in a city. The future of it is exciting too -especially the space laser links. Imagine a situation where you can hop directly to a ground station on or very nearby a data center. A lot of people saying Starlink is great if you don't have access to something better, but Starlink may end up being the "fastest" internet available.
I'd pay extra for business class service, but it doesn't even help, it's the same speed just with some more guarantees and a stable IP.
Also the DOCSIS network in my area is such low quality it isn't reliable anyways.
$95/month for 400/20. I don't need all of that download bandwidth, but I could use a bit more upload bandwidth.
The savings come in the form of real state, the "last mile" widens a lot, many of the elements of the network are passive so you save up energy too, and you can cram up much more people/€ spent.
1) Cable providers in major markets (urban ones) are offering gbps service and often slightly faster (1.2gbps) now, at rates that I would say aren't great but are not terrible, in my case about $100 a month. Unfortunately that gigabit is downstream only. So high DOCSIS speeds are happening, just not as universally as you'd hope.
2) One of our biggest cable giants, Comcast, has a legacy channel planning problem related to the older Motorola STBs guide and on-demand delivery that prevents them reallocating additional channels to DOCSIS 3.1 upstream for the time being (those channels are in use by the Motorola STBs which don't support anything else). This results in a hard 35mbps upstream limit for most Comcast customers. Unfortunately the route to fixing this is to replace all of the older STBs, which Comcast is slowly doing but this requires getting customers to turn in their old one and pick up a new one... you can imagine how hard it is to get everyone to do this, even offering incentives.
3) DOCSIS 3.1 can achieve gbps+ speeds over an admirably long range but not for a very high customer count. So cable providers are transitioning their HFC network over time to a "node+0" architecture that resembles DSL with serving area DSLAMs... basically they are eliminating distribution amplifiers from the cable network and replacing them with compact field nodes (CMTS and head end) using fiber uplink. This essentially becomes a "fiber to the curb" architecture with cable last mile (more like last thousand feet in urban areas). It needs to be done mainly to reduce the number of customers on each CMTS to reduce contention, and sort of as a requirement for full performance of the DOCSIS 3.1 high speed upstream channels, but as you can imagine this large-scale change to outdoor plant is expensive and time-consuming, although it seems largely complete in a lot of cities.
4) As you get customers on very fast service plans backhaul at the node becomes a problem. This is mostly being addressed through installing new fiber backhaul routes for the new nodes, but in more suburban areas can be a big limitation.
5) All the TV on the cable takes up a lot of bandwidth and makes channel planning more difficult even with the abstraction in STBs. This is why major cable providers are starting to shift towards an IP-only "over the top" architecture where they deliver IPTV over DOCSIS instead of "real" cable television. This will help but once again requires all new STBs.
Did he ever think they might be weather proof? Looks like some rubber seals on those connectors. You know, since the dish is outdoors and has to deal with rain, sleet, or snow. I certainly wouldn't put a standard RJ45 on it.
I'd like to have Starlink at my condo, do they care if I split costs with a few neighbors? Do they have group plans? It seems like having higher usage from a single terminal would be better for them vs having multiple terminals.
*To be fair this was also like, 10 years ago now, and Iraq sucked anyway - but I'm pretty sure bandwidth needs for general internet usage haven't gotten any lighter since then so I suspect the performance is just as atrocious as I remember.
Anyone looking to buy a useless Starlink terminal?
When I lived in a bus I traveled to almost 30 states and spent most of my time in rural areas like national forests. Finding a good signal was a lot easier than you might expect. Get the right hardware with an external antenna and high speed coverage is good in most of the country.
Finding a good plan can be tough. If you can get a good T-Mobile signal they have unlimited plans for a reasonable price. AT&T has data plans that are $1/GB. There are grey market resellers that offer unlimited SIMs at an inflated price.
"Many countries, including the US, have a lot of inequality when it comes to Internet access and affordability."
There were recent reports that cats just liked to sleep on the dish in very cold weather as they are self heating.
https://www.mcmaster.com/networking-equipment/micro-m12-scre...
1. Used more power than all my other appliances/devices combined. 2. I dropped signal every few minutes. Didn't impact streaming/downloads but did make calls basically untenable. Given my work, this made StarLink a step back despite the dramatic increase in speeds.
I'm paying $10/mo for 1GB.
Hence Starlink in South East Asia is priced so high up that it's basically useless for 99.9% of population.
They already have (pricey) fast internet.
Starlink isn’t for them. It’s for idiots like me who live far enough out of town that nobody wants to run cable or fiber to me.
I’ve literally offered to pay for “whatever it takes” to AT&T and Comcast on several occasions only to be told it’s just never going to happen.
I don’t like Elon Musk, what he stands for, how he manages companies, staff or social media. But I’ll throw fists with anyone who wants to talk poorly of Starlink.
My only option for internet was 5mbit/768k. Now I can play FPS and stream 4k video to multiple screens simultaneously.
Until we as a nation (USA) start investing in telecomm infrastructure Starlink is going to be as good as it gets for me.
I used to have 10 seconds of blockage every 5 minutes.
Now I get some blockage every... 5 hours?
I also have a 5G modem appliance that I used to use for stuff like Zoom. It actually is LESS reliable than the Starlink now.
Do I do massive bandwidth downloads or serve websites? No. I am the typical consumer usage.
Is the expense worth giving the finger to the cable company? Oh yes.
If I got around to getting rooftop solar and storage or a backup generator, then I'd be protected from a grid failure. That appeals to me, but then again going off-grid is an obsession of the typical aging male techie in America. I think it's the new "going republican when you were liberal young": instead you go pseudo-libertarian.
Does anyone actually think this about Elon? Think what you will about the guy’s persona, but it seems undeniable that he is doing big things in the world (and outside of it).
He's not a 'nice guy' in my book.
Are they as prevalent as the people who think his feet can't touch the ground because they are too holy? I don't know, but I do know they exist.
Maybe 7+ years ago you could try to make that claim and not be a laughing stock, but it's very odd at this point.
https://www.drive.com.au/news/tesla-australia-admits-it-sale...
commensurate: corresponding in size or degree; in proportion.
consummate: showing a high degree of skill and flair; complete or perfect.
Amazon has a almost militant drive to optimize customer experience, will take anything back, will do just about anything to please their customers. They state so.
Tesla, Space X in the form if starlink, solar city all seem to have pretty piss poor customer service and experience. They get away with things you'd never tolerate from your local grocery store, car dealership or ISP. But we hold them up on a pedestal and say it's a necessary evil, part of the process. Why do they need to hold onto millions of dollars in pre-order fees from average people when they have so much investment from the rich that they could use for that purpose. It's because he isn't selling products anymore. He doesn't make his money when the product ships, he makes it when he announces a new vaporware product, collects pre-orders and stock benefits from the hype and press, and then never delivers on the actual product. Its no matter to him, by that time he has already made his money and cashed out.
The only difference between Theranos and Elon's ventures is that his ventures hot the bottom 25% of the goals and timeline so its not a total lie. At the same time, it's also not totally honest.
There are Teslas driving on the roads. Starlink is serving customers. SpaceX is delivering payloads.
Like him or loathe him, Musk has delivered multiple times.
I agree, he has delivered on about the bottom 25% of his promises.
that Elizabeth Holmes is in jail for fraud and Elon Musk signs and delivers on deals with NASA.