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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

They're satellites, they move. You can't "provision" customers like that. You provide a constellation that gives some level of coverage at some level of reliability as a function of latitude, and that's what you get.

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.

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Starlink right now is a bent pipe between the dishy and a ground station. Depending on how many customers they have in a specific ground station's cell, they need different backhaul capacity for that cell.

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.

My experience with the Starlink at my brother's house in Maine is that it's "OK" relative to wired broadband. Speeds are reasonable and, while I've had a couple multi-hour outages in the limited time I've spent up there, it's pretty usable. I could work up there if I wanted to.

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.

That's been my experience too.

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'm pretty sure dishy is way out of spec for poe power use. Using proprietary connectors is probably forgivable with that. Poe+++

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 a few ways to go about that. Someone made a post on Reddit with details for two different POE injectors that can be used.

I just cut the Ethernet cable and put RJ45 on it, I wasn't about to drill another hole in the wall of my house to accommodate the connector. It works fine, even though I'm sure it's out of spec.

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.

ADSL is magic. It can run over wet string:

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.

I doubt the backhaul capacity is the problem (since that's basically a solved problem), but instead the satellite-to-ground links become saturated.

They literally do provision customers per cell. The satellites move in predictable orbits meaning each cell has a specific capacity.

> You can't "provision" customers like that.

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).

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