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Comment by matt-p | Hacker News Reader

I think they are doing OK.

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.

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> You can't get these speeds with even VDSL..

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).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL#Vplus/35b

[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervectoring

Many apartments in big cities in the US have telecom infrastructure which behaves similarly to a wet string and can only pull a few megabits down on a good day. There is no alternative for them except T-Mobile Home Internet (5G) if they are lucky.

Interesting, and what speeds can a average customer on the top tier actually get? In the UK the fastest profile used is 17a, which is then capped by our telco at 80 down 20 up line rate. The reality is that only a few percent of users actually achieve these speeds; the median speed is just over 50Mb and 30Mb or less is not uncommon.

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.

100 Gbps over fiber is now the new norm.

Not for FTTP :). In the UK we mostly have XGS PON or GPON with maybe a few hundred thousand active ethernet lines.

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?

I'm currently on profile 17a, I pay for 100 Mbit (downstream), and get like 90 Mbit actual IP protocol bandwidth (wget tops out at 10.7 MB/s). But I think the ATM signalling that's still used on the underlying VDSL physical layer is eating a significant portion of the bandwidth (due to the high frame header overhead).

Right now the modem reports a (link layer) data rate of 98338000 bit/s. Wget tops out at 10.7 MB/s.

Sounds like you have a nearly perfect line and very close to the Cabinet?

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)

Yes, I can see the cabinet from my window, so maybe less than 100 meters cable. Inside big cities that seems to be the state-of-the-art. They must have placed a lot of cabinets in recent years. I'm surprised those cabinets don't give up a noticeable amount of heat, they don't even have noticeable active cooling. That's a huge amount of DSP operations that they are running, like a hundred DSL modems crammed together. But maybe modern ASICs can run a single 17a VDSL line at a just few watts.

Oh man, I remember a podcast with a network guy in Germany and he hated 'super-vectoring' so much and ranted about it. Basically a way for the telco to get lots of money for not building any fiber.

500Mbps for $60 is already expensive and slow all over Europe, for example $30 for 1 Gbps in Spain.

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.

You’re not getting it. This is 100Mbps in the middle of a field or out in the ocean somewhere. Coupled with being unmetered for ~$100/month is a pretty good deal.

An incredible deal, would be thousands a month for much worse service with traditional satellite providers.

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.

My phone's 5G connection is 550Mbps.

Thank god for civilization!

Great! Now you can use up your 15 gigs of data in under 5 minutes.

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