Starlink's current problem is capacity
jeffgeerling.com
jeffgeerling.com
Delivering even 30-100Mbps to half a million customers all over the world is no mean feat. Complaining that your speeds dip below 100Mbps on a unmetred low latancy satellite connection is just pathological. Most of the world do not have access to this speed on fixed line networks. You can't get these speeds with even VDSL.. Fttp and cable are the only fixed technologies beating a satellite. Have a think about that.
That works out at several terabits of traffic at peak times. I think they should be able to make good improvements with more ground stations and inter satalite links even if they never launch another satellite.
That's not quite true. At least in germany, VDSL2 with "supervectoring" profile 35b [1] is routinely used, advertised as 250 Mbit internet service [2].
Technologically it's quite a waste of hardware resources and electric power to put these kind of data rates on old twisted pair copper cables (instead of using fiber everywhere), but that seems to be the status quo here right now.
(And I'd guess that the ratio of people being in need of satellite internet is much lower in germany than it is in the US).
We do have Gfast in some urban areas but its only useful if the cabinet is less than 200M or so away. We are actually making good progress on 1-10Gb FTTP coverage now though.
Just thought it was a interesting if not suprising note that Internet from space which travels hundreds of miles through free air to the ground station where it hits fibre is faster than we can achieve over a few hundred metres of twisted copper pair with a consumer level budget.
You can always order a 1Gb service, sometimes a 2.5Gb or 3Gb service rarely a 10Gb service at consumer prices if you have FTTP here. What about in your area?
In the UK lines can typically be 500M while worst case may be 1KM or more from the Cabinet. We do have alot of aluminium or cca based lines as well due to copper conservation in world war 2.
All in your perfect 17a vdsl line is still slower than Jeff is complaining about over starlink (100mb)
Thank god for civilization!
Starlinks <200Mbps for $124 is very expensive. You can get 100 Gbps for $5500, that is $5,5 for 100 Mbps.
As an internet provider since 1987 myself, I think all of the above is slow and expensive, I am not kidding, $1 for 100 Mbps is fair and still allows us ample profit margins.
Typical 1G FTTP in uk is around £35 but you won't be able to get that in a RV half way up a mountain.
For people replacing an existing internet connection with starlink, the cost of swapping out the existing (perfectly good) cable and antenna mount dwarfs the retail (and even manufacturing) cost of the dish.
Also, they don't document the electrical requirements for the ethernet cable, so people end up guessing, forcing it to turn on the on-board heater, then checking for voltage droop.
Even oversubscribed, they're better than most rural ISP options though.
I agree that the starlink customer support people are extremely overworked. In my experience, they're also completely incompetent.
The "impossible to update out of date firmware" issue is ridiculous, especially since they specifically market the RV service for use cases where you buy the dish and then pause the service for the 11.5 months of the year when you're not using your RV.
They sell for $15 or so pipe adapter. Works perfectly well with pole that dishtv was mounted on. The none-standard mount that they have (at least on new dishes) besides actually mounting dish to pole also has function of holding cable in place
Even without Starlink, you could have convinced me to donate $100 a month . The fact that my donation comes with a pretty amazing piece of tech is a bonus.
AT&T terminates fiber 1/10 mi from my house, built out under the $0.5B federal broadband subsidy many years back. But FCC did not require them to light it, so AT&T never bothered.
Who is worse, Comcast or AT&T? Each is worse than the other.
I've worked from home via the Internet since the late 90's, and having a backup has been drilled into me as a hard requirement from hard-won experience. Living in Chicago this came in handy just last year when a box truck took out my primary fiber connection and most of the block for a few days, and I failed over seamlessly to Comcast.
When/if I get approved for Starlink, I'll cancel comcast and be using it as my backup. Hopefully they become mobile soon as well, so I can take it with me on adventures.
If you are in a city there are cheaper back solutions than starlink.
And at least one of those will likely work. If not, I probably don't have much power anyway.
On another topic, I have had Starlink since early 2021. A lot of the people I see complaining are not the target audience. We live 3 hrs from the nearest airport, and it’s night and day difference for everyone outside our “town” who were either using a local WISP or Hughesnet. There are more of those people out there than you think ;)
IMO Starlink is not going to replace hardwired connection options or local 5G, but that’s okay. At least in the USA, there is a lot lot land not covered by cell service. I carry an Iridium messenger in the car just in case I break down in one of these areas (it has happened to me, and is not fun trying to get a tow truck).
For something that spans a week or so like my fiber outage? Worth every penny. As an employee it's my duty to have reliable "transportation" to work - in this case that means Internet access.
I did use a 4G LTE hotspot when I lived in less dense suburbs - it worked quite well. In the city core though, I've found that when there is a widescale outage mobile data slows to a crawl and is unusable for work purposes.
It's expensive, but when I was contracting being unable to take a sev0 on-call escalation would have cost far more in opportunity cost than paying for the backup line for a year.
Although it's more than a backup, I use it daily when I go sit in a park to work, or work from a cafe or whatever.
Two blocks over there was google fiber and at&t fiber but might as well have been 100 miles away for all the good that did me. Actually it would have been better because I wouldn't get adds telling me about fiber only to find it wasn't available.
You folks have to change that, decouple who lays cables from who can use them, or at least make companies who lay cables let any provider access them, etc... - look at how some european countries deal with it (at least the ones that have the most happy users - details will probably be important) and do the same => no risks.
(Repeating what I wrote in the past ) I'm in Switzerland living nearby Zurich but using a small regional Internet Provider located 50km away (outside the region I'm living in) and my parents are in a different region in a 800-souls village and use a major national provider, and we both ended up getting FTTH, with similar costs and great reliability - cables in both cases initially layed down spontaneously by companies not directly related to the providers, hoping that we would start using them at some point (I waited for 1 year being scared of complications but my parents switched immediately as their old ADSL connection was extremely unreliable) => this is a practical demonstration that this system works & good for everybody (customers & providers & whoever lays down the cables), therefore no reason not to adopt it.
They don't even need to bribe inspectors; the agency itself just rolls over on its own.
Starlink is looking pretty good by comparison.
I think Verizon and AT&T also offer 5G Home Internet options, but T-Mobile's offering seems to be the best from what I've seen online.
(Keep in mind that all of these services provide a specialized box that acts as a cell modem and router, and it should offer much stronger and better connectivity to the carrier's network than a mobile phone.)
This is a city where some buildings have up to about 200Mbit/s on either cable or FTTP, but these are not available at all properties. The best landline speed I can get is "up to" 17Mbit/s downlink, which is slower than the phone, the landline uplink is ridiculously slow, and to top off the landline is more than twice the price of unlimited 4G.
I'd like the speed and latency of FTTP, and failing that a good speed of VDSL over FTTP, but since I can't get either and I'm on the top floor of a 4 story building, I've wondered if Starlink would be an improvement over 4G.
Some of it probably comes from whether a particular ground station (there aren't very many still, per cell at least) is saturated by traffic from a metro area or not.
I mean, why go to the Satellite network if you are less than 10 miles from a city center. Then you could leave the satellite uplinks to surrounding rural areas and users looking for ultra low latency.
Probably not more than a half-dozen extra hops, usually. And, better than no service at all.
But with, what, 4k birds up, and speed below 50Mbps? More birds won't help data rate much if licensed RF bandwidth is saturating.
It would not be surprising if Starlink charged them 100x as much for each ms of latency boost. They would be paying not so much for the ms ahead of fiber as for their lower-paying competitors to get less ahead of fiber.
In fintech, they say "a microsecond is an aeon, a millisecond an eternity". You can do millions of computations in a ms.
Sure they will have many government including military, emergency services, coast guard, NASA and so on.
Starlink has many use-cases for the military they certainty didn't create it with that application as the primary goal. The primary goal is making money to fund SpaceX.