Also a little sad; I'd hoped that 100/20 RDOF standard would mean Starlink would have someone keeping them honest. They seem to be in a race to the congestion bottom right now.
SpaceX has used Starlink as a driver for investment rounds and is regularly raising money.
Considering the expenses of Starlink and Starship, both big money sinks, it's entirely possible for Stalink to get scrapped at some point if investment money dries up.
Probably unlikely, since they could stop launching and keep the service running until the sats decay, but still possible.
OTOH $900M is a lot of money to give to a company. And there's no guarantee that if they survive they won't just keep overselling capacity.
> SpaceX has used Starlink as a driver for investment rounds and is regularly raising money.
Takes like these make no sense. They assume some kind of lack of intelligence among people at SpaceX. As if they don't know how economics work. Rather than assuming stupidity, maybe you should rethink your premise?
The math doesn’t work out for starlink and people have noted this for years at this point.
Believing that FSD is a fraud in the first place is where you go wrong here. Frauds generally require something to not work at all or not exist. FSD works and exists, just not on the timelines promised but continued to be refined.
Musk himself has repeatedly said that Starlink is a risky bet, and that satellite network operators usually go bankrupt.
Taking risks does not imply lack of intelligence.
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306
We have a 1080p TV. We had a connection that was effectively 6mbit dedicated down, and it never pixelated or buffered. Our “75mbit” comcast line regularly dropped to minimum resolution or started buffering. Speedtests said the connection was providing 25-100 mbit down, since ISPs often prioritize households that are currently running speed tests. This was before netflix launched fast.com to defeat such gaming.
For starlink, everything is fine, except that a few times an hour it jumps to the next satellite and the connection drops for about a second.
I don’t think it resets tcp streams or anything, but it definitely makes Zoom and “live” TV streaming apps cranky.
> I don’t think it resets tcp streams or anything, but it definitely makes Zoom and “live” TV streaming apps cranky.
It hops to next satellite more often than that. The satellites take about 90 minutes to go around the globe.
Most of the handovers to next satellite are seamless (maybe 10ms delay in traffic), but especially when they're working on the beta phase software the more routing-oriented parts of the system seem glitchy. Earlier in 2022 I'd lose Internet for a few tens of seconds every now and then -- but that seems to have been a bug in the routing stack that they since fixed.
There's a few Grafana based Starlink monitoring projects I've been looking at. Historical data would be nice to have.
Now, OK, maybe that's not going to be acceptable to regulators. And... that's sort of a shame given the fact that satellite services are available literally everywhere. How many people not served by existing rural broadband RDOF recipients would love to have a subsidized Starlink antenna?
I really don't see how this is helping anyone except a handful of cable companies actually doing deployments. The vast bulk of the rural subscriber base that fund is intended to assist aren't going to get anything out of it.
So, in the case of Starlink, they absolutely CAN provision customers like that, and that's EXACTLY how it works right now - invites happen per "cell," and each "cell" has a capacity quota.
Recently, they've been overprovisioning "cells" for some reason or another, and the service has slowed down, so it objectively didn't meet the thresholds and they'll need to bid again. This also seems reasonable.
I say this all as a happy Starlink customer - negative externalities to space junk and obnoxious fanbase aside, it's way better than my previous fixed point to point WISP experience was, and worlds better than ADSL stretched to the bitter end of distance capability over lines from the 1970s was.
But there are no good alternatives. ADSL was 1Mbps down with a tailwind and it was the last house on the road that could get it. Cell service is very sketchy, especially if not on Verizon. HughesNet limitations are well-known. So it's pretty much a game-changer in terms of Internet access.
Here in Colorado my service is actually pretty good - I get 20-30mbit during crowded times, and 150-200mbit during off hours. Outages were problematic a few months ago but have improved and now usually coincide only with severe thunderstorms.
Overall, it's a literal order of magnitude better than end-of-line ADSL and roughly a 2x gain over my old WISP (at 2x the cost). For someone who used to have access to a WISP, it's evolutionary. For locations with no previous access at all, it's revolutionary.
On the flip side, the hardware is almost offensively silly and ridiculous (proprietary connectors and cables, router with 0 Ethernet ports but a diagram of Mars instead, etc.). IPv6 support disappeared sometime last year, and everything is behind a CGNAT. And link quality sometimes seems to depend on the dish repositioning algorithm picking the correct inclination, which seems to be a crapshoot depending on when it was last rebooted rather than an ongoing correction process.
I agree not having Ethernet out of the box sucks. I suspect some one chose environmental seals over Ethernet given the water proofing on the cables. Though they seem only half way committed to the path given the warnings and disclaimers about the Wi-Fi access point not being rated for waterproofing.
I had a cable sliced and I put standard rj45 jacks and a coupler in as a repair and it works fine. Pretty sure you could put standard ethernet in there straight to dishy if you really wanted to. At least if you can feed it enough power.
There's really no good excuse for the router setup - SpaceX could still supply a standalone power injector with Ethernet on one side and the proprietary connector on the other side.
https://www.revk.uk/2017/12/its-official-adsl-works-over-wet...
If only they’d replace the ancient phone lines around here with wet string! Until then, I’ll continue to get my internet via multi-mile air gaps.
You might want to tell SpaceX that, because that’s what they’ve been doing.
The satellites near a particular area (at any particular point in time) have a capacity as do the local ground station(s).