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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

IMO, I'm unsure starlink can stick the landing. I think they'll end up facing challenging oversubscription issues, which is why they're slowing the roll out. 5G could easily expand to fill in the service gaps and deliver better, more reliable service. I think the key differentiator that everyone assumed was going to be included ASAP was a global mesh network, with the ground based repeater setup it's not that novel of a solution.

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Is there a long range and a short range version of 5G ? I was under the impression it was higher freq and less ranger, meant for dense cities.

I live about 10 minutes from a small city and still don't get 3G signal, hardly enough to hold a phone conversation. Is 5G really competing for rural users like me?

5G can be deployed on the same spectrum as LTE, including the low frequency bands that support long range. For those deployments you do get faster speeds compared to LTE but not significantly (I've read it's about 25% faster for the same spectrum). All 3 major cellular providers in the US have 5G deployed on their low-band spectrum (T-Mobile on band 71 (600 MHz) and AT&T and Verizon on band 5 (800 MHz)).

> "(I've read it's about 25% faster for the same spectrum)"

I get 200-400 Mbps on 5G, on a UK network with 40 Mhz of TDD 3.6 Ghz 5G spectrum. On 4G LTE I rarely see more than 50 Mbps or so (Typically 20+20 Mhz FDD LTE at 2.1 or 2.6 Ghz).

nice, thanks for the info

Perhaps a dumb question but what does oversubscription entail here?

Too many people, not enough bandwidth.

Latency, timeouts, general slowness. There are a lot of layers that starlink needs to optimize/scale, they're effectively trying to operate as a global cell provider.

Starlink announces that they will make service available at a certain quality for $X/month, but more people want that than they can sell it to. Basic economic theory says they should raise the price to find equilibrium, but consumers hate that kind of thing, tying (in some cases) the company's hands.

I don't really think that Starlink's hands are tied with respect to price increases, though. I doubt over-subscription is all that possible, unless they overestimated their own capacity when signing existing contracts.

Also, they can sell a set of one dish plus some wifi/wimax repeaters for the whole village or something. Could be really nice solution for both sides

Insufficient density or spectrum to serve all users in an area

oversubscription is a necessity in the economics of last-mile consumer grade ISP services no matter what the tech: ptmp wireless last mile, docsis3 cablemodem on coax, gpon/10Gpon fiber last mile, dsl, active ethernet fiber last mile, geostationary consumer grade ku and ka-band vsat, starlink, etc.

if you look at the traffic usage charts from 50 houses on residential last mile gigabit connections the average customer really doesn't move that much data. you'll get the occasional outlier such as a person who is really enthusiastic about torrenting 75GB 2160p movies but when averaged out over a group of dozens or more customers it's generally a non issue.

the danger is in oversubscribing your network to the point at an unreasonable ratio that the ordinary end user starts to see bad packet loss, jitter, latency, slow speeds, etc.

they have already addressed throughput in v2 satellites. the only route to failure is if starship cant reach orbit and return.

think outside the big city box.

5G is only good for high population density.

Don't assume that the US is representative here. Currently living in Germany, and in most neighbourhoods (even here in Berlin) fibre to the home is unavailable and the best connections available are DSL. Starlink would be an enormous upgrade, and there's a huge untapped market. And that's in the middle of the developed world. Presumably lots of other markets are in a similar position, and there are many increasingly populous places where weather, remoteness, elevation and other issues make other connections unavailable for the foreseeable future. Starlink should have no problem greatly increasing their customer base.

I don't doubt that starlink can find customers, I don't think they'll be able to keep them long enough to make a profit.

Starlink doesn’t work for anything else than very sparsely populated areas. Population density in most of Europe is beyond of what they can support.

Starlink works fine in densely populated areas, they just have a fixed number of users per square mile they can serve regardless of the density.

There also tends to be more competition in densely populated areas (but perhaps more people looking for backup internet)

> "fibre to the home is unavailable and the best connections available are DSL. Starlink would be an enormous upgrade"

5G is also an enormous upgrade from DSL, and better suited for dense urban areas. Here in the UK it's at least 4X faster than Starlink and 1/4 the cost. I haven't had any fixed-line internet connection at all in the past 2 years since cheap 5G became available.

Starlink is great for rural areas, which often have poor DSL and neither fibre nor good mobile coverage.

Fiber should be the solution there, then 5G, not Starlink.

"And that's in the middle of the developed world."

In this case 'developed' means 'having legacy infrastructure'.

There are small ISPs doing roof to roof singlemode fiber in very densely populated parts of Dhaka, Bangladesh that probably beat this guy's German copper dsl speeds by 50x.

The fact that much of Western Europe and the USA have severely outdated legacy networks is not reflective of the state of the Internet in urban areas. Here in the much poorer Bucharest, a good chuck of apartments already have fiber to the home, and those that don't still have fiber to the apartment building, and those that don't still have broadband. DSL speeds have not been a thing for essentially anyone in the whole city for >15 years. The situation is slightly but not that much worse for most other cities and towns.

This could easily and cheaply be done in any city in the developed world, and in most rural areas as well. That it isn't happening is one of the failures of the free market and government.

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