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Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

I am hearing that lots of people are now getting under 50/15 out of it, and nobody I know with starlink has gotten better than 100 down. That is not really broadband. Those people may be in regions that are oversubscribed, but that is also partly a problem related to the price being too low. Of course, if they raise the price, then it might not be considered cheap enough for these subsidies either.

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I’ve had it in central Ohio since February 2021. I would say i average ~120M down, ~20M up. There’ve been a few outages, but I’ve never seen a prolonged period of less than 80M down.

The fastest thing I can get otherwise is a 10M down, 768K up DSL link. I had been working remote on that since 2008.

> nobody I know with starlink has gotten better than 100 down. That is not really broadband

AFAIK the minimum speed for "broadband" is 25 down.

I am a highly online person living in a large city with many choices of ISP at many different speeds, and I still only have a 110mbps connection. It seems strange to me to suggest that speed is universally inadequate, though I can understand why large households may need higher bandwidth.

>>and nobody I know with starlink has gotten better than 100 down

I have starlink and mostly see between 150-300 down and uploads in the 8-15MB range, all for $99/month - verizon was charging me $156/month for 3MB down and 0.768MBP up.

Nice to meet you - now you know at least one person 'with starlink has gotten better than 100 down'

I mostly know people with it in the SF bay area, which is reportedly very oversubscribed. Unfortunately, that may be the experience everyone gets once the network saturates at this price point.

Of course that's really broadband and it's fine for what most households use the Internet for. Maybe once you get into multiple 4K streams you start to run into limits. But once you get past some fairly modest point, it doesn't change the Internet experience for most people.

I get more than that on the RV plan in an oversubscribed area (jumped the queue).

I’d be lucky to get 5/1.5 from frontier, and their DSL service in the area goes down every few weeks.

This seems like a case of lobbyist-induced double standards.

You think Starlink doesn’t have lobbysists?

If they failed their qualifying metrics and did win the subsidies anyway, wouldn’t mirror universe hedora be here complaining about that double standard?

To me at least, this seems less obviously suspect than that would have.

Of course they do. I’m just wondering when the last two decades of RBOF funding (which had no apparent effect) is going to be returned to the federal government.

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