What do Starlink’s latest Ookla results mean for its RDOF winnings?

They're beaming almost 100mbps from the space to surface of the earth, to us, mere consumers, and they're the worst because they're slower than some wired solutions?

I'm seriously worried about the pollution they create for astronomers, but that's seriously absurd.

Do I need to repeat? They're beaming this from space, to your home.

Check out the section "Technology-Neutral Service Tiers" https://www.fcc.gov/auction/904/factsheet SpaceX bid for "above baseline". They still seem to be doing much better than other auction winners though.

Ya, I was thinking the same thing.

This article seems like it's written by a PR/lobbying firm for BigTelCo / Satellite providers.

Setting aside the high cost of growing the constellation, I'm not sure they can just add more satellites even in theory. As I understand it Starlink has performance tradeoffs wrt to density of ground stations. Others on HN would probably know more though.

Starlink took govt funds and is obligated to deliver 100/20 at a minimum.

I own 2 starlinks at different locations and I can tell you 1 of those locations is consistently MUCH under that.

That being said, I am pleased with starlink at one location as it absolutely blows away the next best available option.

Honestly, I'm surprised that managed 90Mbps. Beaming internet from satellites iis not really a great idea because you are essentially doubling the wireless bandwidth required for a given level of service. Wireless cell service has the big advantage of only needing to use bandwidth for the link from the tower to the client while satellites require a link to the client and a link back to the ground station. There's also the fact that putting a bunch of compute into a satellite is going to be way more expensive due to weight, power and cooling in space not to mention increased cosmic ray interference.

>What's the median for wireless internet delivery?

Who cares? If they signed up for

>100/20 Mbps speed obligations attached to its Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) projects

they have to deliver. The article has a valid point.

I'm on T-Mobile's home internet. With just the modem chilling in my room, i can get about 200/20. I've bought an external antenna that I'm going to be hooking up to the modem and mounting on top of my house soon. Testing it in my front yard I was able to get 350/25. Latency/Jitter was also significantly better with that antenna.

I'm not super rural, but we have literally no other internet options, are on septic/well water, and are about 10 minutes from the nearest store by car.

Anyone who has lived with rural internet will be blown away by 90MB. This is an incredibly high bar.

Ookla's speed test shows the entire network, not RDOF subscribers alone. It should be easy enough for Starlink to give RDOF subscribers the slated speeds. So yeah I think the article is click bait. Especially since Ookla showed improvement year on year for Starlink.

Heck, my upload with a fixed broadband provider in the US was 10Mbps! Starlink's cited performance would match that.

SpaceX chose to target the 100/20 benchmark, and bid on that, and because of that, their success is measured against that.

The part that is a bit hit-piecey is this quote from Viasat:

“even if SpaceX were to deploy a full, 4,408-satellite Starlink system, that system would fall short in satisfying SpaceX’s RDOF commitments.”

The full Starlink satellite system doesn't have 4,408 sats. That's just the Gen 1 constellation. They have committed to completing the Gen 2 constellation, with an additional 7,518 sats, which each provide many times more bandwidth than the Gen 1 sats, by 2027, well in time for the RDOF.

Are Falcon 9 launches more expensive than Proton?

I built my own WISP which I have run for 20+ years, to get myself connectivity. Now I'm seriously considering dismantling it because Starlink is almost as fast and way cheaper and less maintenance.

I'll piggy back off this comment.

It's pure gold for people in rural Australia as well. Our country is extremely vast with most of us concentrated on the cost in major cities. Our fixed internet speeds are not that great at all in major cities, let alone in the country.

Starlink provides fantastic speeds that no other solution can currently provide in the country. It's also not bureaucratically tied with another company that needs to provide the infrastructure. Which means you don't need to go through the hassle of an ISP, then the ISP liasing with the company that actually owns the infrastructure.

There isn't an "official data source" for RDOF evaluation. ISPs are required to carry out measurements in the markets where they've accepted funds. Measurements are carried out on a sampled subset of their customers, and a large set of frequent measurements has to be produced from each customer. Measurements have to be conducted to servers in specific locations (you can't just test to a server two miles down the road inside the ISP's network). The requirements are pretty rigorous and not straightforward to meet (e.g. if a customer switches their router off for a day, then that can disqualify their measurements entirely - you need a sample every hour, every day for at least a week in the quarter). They need to submit these measurements to USAC at the end of the quarter, to demonstrate that at least X% of measurements met the target of Y (it varies by metric).

Generally speaking, crowdsourced measurements (whereby you have loads of users but each running very few tests) aren't well suited to these requirements.

I'm oversimplifying things here, but more details on the requirements can be found at https://www.usac.org/high-cost/annual-requirements/performan...

Source: I work in this space

No, in b2b setting, checking internet speed happens on regular bases in order to monitor network performance or to confirm compliance with the SLA. Have you ever wondered how they do their money when the browser test is free?

Most of Africa and central Asia cannot afford a terminal. Australian outback is too sparsely populated to matter, economically.

You seem to imagine Starlink will be motivated to behave better than other telecomm companies. I have no clue why you imagine this. I expect the more power they amass, the more they will use. On their own behalf, not yours.

Nowhere does the article claim that the Starlink service is poor, or that other services come close.

The RDOF auction had specific criteria, and as noted in the article, participants could bid at four tiers: 25/3, 50/5, 100/20 and 1000/500 Mbps. Simply put, Starlink bid at 100/20, and they have an obligation to meet that in order to qualify for the fund.

There's plenty of evidence that they can do just that, albeit with some open questions about how things will go as they continue to roll out the network and take on more subscribers.

I don't understand the anger throughout the rest of this comment. Geos that qualify for RDOF funding are just a subset of Starlink's market, and arguably any Internet provider bidding for those funds should be held to the standard set when bidding for those funds.

It's fine (and justified, IMO) to be angry about how crappy telcos have been for years, and their misuse of funding is certainly upsetting, but are you suggesting that Starlink should somehow be absolved of their responsibilities because of past transgressions by legacy telcos?

> Why can't we have nice things? This.

What is the nice thing here that we cannot have? Why?

> Think about what Starlink means to Africa, central asia, interior australia, remote south africa.

I think the value of Starlink is tremendous hard to estimate, especially in these traditionally underserved regions. But how does the RDOF funding conversation have anything to do with that?

2028 is in 6 years, which is a 40% closer than 10 years. But other than that I agree

Totally agree this is a hit piece; pretty much everyone who has taken federal money to deliver rural broadband has done far worse than Starlink. That being said...

> V2 satellites and p2p laser will be inlay before 2028, along with far more terrestrial POPs, which will all improve service.

Is this something that there is more evidence for than just "Musk says so" since he is notorious for promising results on unrealistic timelines.

Numbers matter.

The more subscribers they add, the less bandwidth is available for each. Adding more birds does not increase overall bandwidth, it just decreases the number of subscribers using each bird. But only a tiny fraction of birds are in range of any subscribers, at any time, so all the subscribers are piled onto those few, and most of them on even fewer.

To be a viable business, able to pay for and launch new birds at the rate they age out and burn up, they need to grow the number of subscribers way, way faster than they can add birds, until bandwidth available per subscriber gets very low.

Money available to pay for buying and launching birds is only a fraction of income, because they also need to pay for trunk bandwidth, add hub stations, and subsidize terminals, which cost way more than the entry price. Trunk bandwidth cost increases with subscriber count.

Most potential subscribers who could afford the service have better terrestrial service already. So it is far from clear, even if they could supply the bandwidth for as many subscribers as they will need, that they can get that many. They could get more by cutting prices, but then take in too little to keep their constellation filled out.

Government subsidies could paper over the difference, but most subscribers will be in countries other than the few writing checks.

I tried to do a few months ago some back of the envelope math about Starlink.

They are aiming for 12 000 satellites. A given satellite at the altitude Starlink uses should be visible at any average time from about 3% of the surface of the Earth. That would on average be 360 satellites visible from a given spot if they were all spread out uniformly throughout the sky. But the orbits are such that they don't go far north or south. There will be more visible in the areas they can serve and few to none visible outside those areas. I don't know how big the concentration into the service area is, so I'm just going to guess and say 1 000 visible to a given customer at a given time.

Their next generation satellites are specced at having 80 Gbps bandwidth to the ground, which is enough for 800 simultaneous downloads at the full advertised speed.

But most users do not go all out downloading all the time. I've read that most Comcast users only reach about 1/4 of Comcast's monthly data cap, which corresponds to an average use of 1 Mbps, which is 1/100th of the advertised Starlink speed.

Assuming Starlink users also use an average over time of just 1% of their advertised maximum, we get one satellite could support 80 000 users. Taking into account 1 000 satellites visible at any one time from any one average user location, and the area covered by those satellites, I got that Starlink could handle on average 11 users per square mile or 4.4 users per square kilometer.

Note that this doesn't mean that there can't be spots with higher user density. Just that the average density over the service area would need to not exceed that. Islands of density in a sea of very sparsely populated land would be OK.

My calculations assumes that any user could use any visible satellite. I think they are more constrained than that which probably means my allowable density estimates are a little high.

A ground station isn't a client terminal. Ground stations are what provide the upstream link to the internet.

Client terminals are more like cell modems.

The "Rural Digital Opportunity Fund" (RDOF) was created specifically to provide internet access to low density areas.

Other satellite providers didn't tell the federal government they can handle 100mbps in exchange for a huge pot of government money...

This is the issue in a nutshell: Starlink agreed to meet a specific threshold in exchange for government funds, and these tests suggest that Starlink will have difficulty accomplishing this if they can't manage to do it when their network isn't saturated.

It's going to be a moving target. Just guessing I would say I average 90/10 in Ohio as of late. Last summer it was 180/30 or so.

The thing is they have <3,000 operational satellites from a planned constellation of >30,000, so it's currently oversold but capacity is a moving target.

> valuable orbital space which is a scarce resource.

It really isn't. There are lots of plans and each plan is way, way, way bigger then the surface of the earth. You could literally a single constellation of millions sats and still have lots of space left over.

The actively monitored and controlled sats are not really the problem in orbit and Starlink are low enough that even if they fail, they will burn very fast.

> It's a service tailored to suit the needs of yacht owners, cabin owners and the RV enthusiasts. Quite simply: tech-bros, cryptomillionaires etc.

Nonsense. Its service tailed to literally everybody who doesn't live in a dense environment. In fact, its a of huge benefit to fringe communities such as some native americans. And I am sure all people in the Ukraine who use it are not 'tech-bros'.

You can take 1 Starlink antenna and connect a whole village to the internet with decent speed.

Its a huge advantage for farming, mining and lots industrial activity in low density areas. I am sure the workers in those place would like to watch Netflix and Skype their families. Same goes for people who work on all kinds of ships.

> for a service they'll never use or need.

All those poor dumb people who don't understand that they don't need the internet. They should just by happy not having video chats with their families.

I guess we'll find out because RDOF is giving billions to rural fiber ISPs. Personally I'm skeptical.

>Starlink is a huge waste of money.

"By the end of 2014, America will have been charged about $400 billion by the local phone incumbents, Verizon, AT&T and CenturyLink, for a fiber optic future that never showed up."

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...

Any fiber carrier serving that hub locale.

Depends on location. They have arrangements with Google to share networking from their datacenters, so presumably those form a large portion of the backbone in the US.

This.