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Comment by caymanjim | Hacker News Reader

I've been using "Starlink for RV" for a couple months now. It's nice in that the alternative is often nothing at all, but it's not nearly as reliable as I'd like. I'm constantly battling trees, because it wants to look really low on the horizon. Even when I have full line of sight to all of the sky, it cuts out with some frequency (multiple times per hour) for anywhere from a couple seconds to half a minute. And the speed is heavily throttled on the RV plan (or on the "portable" plan for those who primarily have a fixed address).

Starlink is fantastic in some ways, but I think they've massively oversold it, and I'm not sure they'll ever catch up as they're recruiting people faster than they're adding satellites. I've now used it all around the country, and it seems particularly bad on the US east coast.

I worry that this push to sell to more-lucrative customers at sea is just going to make the service even worse for nobodies like me.

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On a positive note, seas are not really known for their trees

I can confirm this

It is indeed a pitty. Imagine how much carbon could be captured if these pesky seas had their fair share of trees.

It's quite hard to imagine, because those trees could mess up other carbon sequestration cycles already present in oceans. E.g. phytoplankton uses CO2 but need sunlight to do so.

Or maybe we should replace all the trees by Oceans, because they're a much more efficient carbon sink !

Well good news then! This seems to be the current strategy.

The ocean captures a lot of CO2…

Also, they aren't known for having high densities of people, unlike the east coast of the US.

Except on cruise ships ... 2000-3000 per boat, though, yeah, nothing like Manhattan

Sure, but consider the density of population covered by a single satellite in space. You could have dozens of boats serviced by a single satellite and have much, much lower density than any city.

Since it's the middle of the ocean, you're competing with nobody else (besides, maybe, large ships that also pay for Starlink)

IIRC adding ships and planes to the mix likely won’t make a big difference to the home/land user as they are geographically far apart.

The bottleneck is the bandwidth/users a single satellite can serve at any given time, as a single satellite serves users below where it is at that point in the sky. So when satellites start orbiting over the ocean or remote/uninhabited locations, they are sitting idle.

>IIRC adding ships and planes to the mix likely won’t make a big difference to the home/land user as they are geographically far apart.

I would think that latitude distance is irrelevant and longitude distance is everything.

A ship going across the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans would have the satelites all to themselves. A ship sailing ports in the Caribbean would be in a very congested region.

Airplanes fly at a very high elevation which should allow them to access satellites covering less dense cells.

What's the backhaul for those ships though? I thought point to point transmission wasn't available yet and therefore you needed to be relatively close to the backhaul point.

The nice thing about these cruise ships are that they aren't using one satellite dish per user, which massively reduces transmission overhead.

> I would think that latitude distance is irrelevant and longitude distance is everything.

Why would you think that? There's nothing special about north south directions versus east west directions.

> A ship sailing ports in the Caribbean would be in a very congested region.

Congested by what exactly? Most of the countries in the Caribbean don't have Starlink.

I stayed at a rural Airbnb that had it in place of a wired connection. It was pretty good for download (100mbps fairly consistently) but the latency jitter and upload speeds made it almost unusable for video calls and it did cut out for a minute or so once or twice over the course of a few days.

It's definitely a nice option but it's hard to rely on. I certainly wouldn't want to work remotely using it as my main connection for any length of time.

My requirements may be different but my experience is that it's usable for remote work but, yes, you need to be tolerant of it cutting out for a bit every now and then (but, hey, that happens with Comcast 50 miles outside of a major city) and maybe drop off video for a call especially if you have reasonable cellular backup.

It really is pretty much Starlink or nothing in many rural locations in the US.

I used Starlink for fully remote work for a couple years in a rural area (US West). I had occasional 5-15 second drops until the satellite-picking algorithm was updated (from the closest satellite to the satellite with the best signal). Ever since, it has been nearly flawless for my remote job purposes; however, speedtesting indicates a mild slowdown over time.

I was an early-ish adopter, so I have the first gen hardware. I think that may make some difference.

Like many things that are overcrowded, the experience is vastly different when you leave the lower 48. Remember this is a global service. 95.75% of the world's population do not live in the US.

I used Starlink in rural Australia where the alternative was non-fuctional 3G tethering and it was very fast without a single dropout in many days. Friends in off-grid cabins in Western Canada have the same experience.

> Remember this is a global service

International service. Maybe they are aiming to be a global one, but not there yet. Starlink is not available anywhere in Africa nor Asia, two of the most populous continents in the world, together accounting for more than 50% of the total population.

And also exactly in those places internet is most needed

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1124283/internet-penetra...

I assume that the number of people willing to pay $50-100 per month there is not that high, though

If the minimum price you can pay for Starlink is $50 and they think of themselves as a "global service", then do I have news for them...

$50 a month shared by a whole village. Not so bad.

There have been anecdotal reports of some people taking their RV dishes to places like the Philippines and having it work.

Same in a random rural location in Germany. Works perfectly with <3s downtime in a week.

My experience with the fixed version was not like this, it worked very well, and this is in a location with huge trees in all directions(redwoods).

> Even when I have full line of sight to all of the sky, it cuts out with some frequency (multiple times per hour) for anywhere from a couple seconds to half a minute.

This would be incorrect. If it has proper line of sight this does not occur. You're experiencing some other problem that most people do not experience.

> Starlink is fantastic in some ways, but I think they've massively oversold it, and I'm not sure they'll ever catch up as they're recruiting people faster than they're adding satellites.

This isn't a problem over the ocean as there's no one out there. It will be extremely high speeds in such places.

> I worry that this push to sell to more-lucrative customers at sea is just going to make the service even worse for nobodies like me.

It can't make service worse on land because the systems are disjoint. Speeds in one cell do not affect speeds in another cell.

The sea customers shouldn't directly impact land use, esp. in the current bent pipe mode. May have impact once laser interconnects re fully functional, but most likely not.

The biggest obstacle for future growth is launch capacity, which hopefully Starship will address. If Starship doesn't fly in time, Starlink is toast

Overselling seems to be a feature of a lot of Musk's ventures. Another example is the level of autonomy in the Tesla.

OP's experience is highly atypical.

They're charging substantially more for their boat service, and with the added bonus that boats are utilizing satellites in areas where they'd otherwise be running idle.

That’s unfortunate to hear. I was considering buying this for travel and I’ve been looking for objective feedback. I’m seeing very mixed results.

Worth waiting for their laser links to come online and see if they improve things. May be coming by the end of the year.

I'm planning on moving onto a liveaboard boat next year and was really excited about Starlink until the price was revealed to be way out of reach for yachtsmen who aren't in the super-rich bracket. People assume boat owners have lots of money but the very fact of owning a boat means they often don't!

I've been tempted to try RV Starlink as an alternative but I don't think having my livelihood reliant on 'Elon Musk might think I'm taking the piss and cut off my internet' is a great idea. Realistically 4G and 5G coverage is good enough where I'm intending to go that it's not a huge issue.

> until the price was revealed to be way out of reach for yachtsmen who aren't in the super-rich bracket

To save others the googling: $5000/mo for Starlink Maritime, equipment cost $10000.

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