It's interesting that they are rolling in the warranty cost with the monthly subscription. First time I've seen that.
It will be great for aircraft owners looking to have a full featured internet experience in flight.
Though the downside is that it will likely have priority when roaming into any cell, thus degrading service for ordinary ground based customers in busy areas.
Highest demand for normal starlink is in cities.
Not gonna be flying over NYC w this.
Kind of a good fit I would think in terms of utilization.
?? cities have fiber, who wants starlink in a city?
If the building signs up with the ISP, any customer from that building can sign up directly at ISP, and they can setup the connection within the same day.
Price wise, they are on par with other ISPs, but the Sri Lankan government heavily regulates the prices.
Only 1 in 3000 people need to desire starlink for cities to have more demand.
Strange situations happen. Not having good service in your neighborhood, hating the one provider available, wanting a backup, liking the idea of internet from space, lower latency over seas and thousands of other reasons I'm not crazy enough to think of.
To do that you probably need to get the whole building (or the building manager) to go along with this.
So if you have 1/3000 of people wanting this in the city, those same people also need to be in a matching situation to have the possibility to use Starlink, which can significantly reduce the ratio.
It's still possible, but the initiative will need to come from Starlink, possibly involving plans for complete buildings.
edit: I was of course thinking city centers, but in the nearby regions the demand might be significantly higher, access to roof is easy, population density is OK, and fiber internet still not well available.
I think there are misunderstandings in the concept of a "city", that what kind of density it refers to, and how much space - on top of area - is allocated for a resident in such a city. To me, a city is straight up Bladerunner, luxury apartments having such privileges as shared library rooms or balcony railings with sightlines workable for some GEO satellite dishes. To GP a city might be towards houses with single-car garages. That kind of definition mismatch happens both ways, by the way, in forms of city dwellers mistakenly offending other city as rural areas and complicating discussions.
If people want it, at least some of them will find a way with their landlord, if they don‘t already own the entire building (especially in the US, single-family homes are not at all uncommon close to the center of major cities).
Interesting. In which country do you live in? Because in France, I'd say that 90% of the people owning a TV sat dish are immigrants looking for the channels of their country of origin (the type of things you usually don't get with cable network), and the other 10% are people in very remote areas.
There's much fiber there, but also many streets where no fiber is available. AFAICT that kind of spottiness is the most common case and few cities have uniformly good coverage. I do hope 3Mbps is rare though.
Is this where the weird dichotomy between the US being on the one side very liberal for businesses yet on the other very restrictive? (the restrictive being protectionist practices from the established companies in this case)
* there isn’t any sort of provider like Openreach where all the ISPs share some portion of the network (in Openreach’s case, the last-mile network) so every ISP has to build every last inch to the home themselves
* generally speaking, ISPs have to get permits from localities, which are often cash-strapped and thus looking to scrape as much money as they can from an unsympathetic sector
Yeah, erm, mate ... don't get me started on Openscreech.
TL;DR: They are not the panacea, ESPECIALLY when it comes to fibre. Openreach might sound good on paper, but boy does it really not work out well in practice.
There could be though if US regulators wanted too.
In my country (New Zealand) for example the government did a deal during the switch from copper to fiber that regulated the network owners. A network owner would get exclusive rights to install their cables in a particular city and in return they would be prohibited from retail sales and would have to provide wholesale access to their network to ISPs at regulated prices.
Now something like 90% of the country has access to at least gigabit fiber (up to 8 gigabit available in some areas) and a choice of a dozen or so ISPs.
There are other 2 or 3 year newer apartment buildings 10 meters away in 3 directions which have fiber to the premises rather then awkwardly run lengths of the cheapest aluminium cable that they could find.
I was considering using starlink but found prepaid MVNO 5G cheaper (though it is unreliable)
Maybe 1960s/1970s era GPON does that
Yup.
Sounds like you've stumbled across one of OpenWretch's many failings.
Sounds like your building is one of the many unfortunate older buildings throughout the country that is connected via EO lines. EO = "Exchange Only", i.e. copper goes direct back to the exchange, not via a street cab.
Buildings served via EO lines are very much "back of the back of the back of the queue" at OR when it comes to FTTP upgrade.
OR seemingly deem it "too difficult" to pull fibre back down the same EO ducts to the exchange. Others might say "can't be arsed" or "easier to sweat the copper assets" or "waiting for another government handout" .... I couldn't possibly say.
The expected additional sales, because some/many of the customers will buy a 16/1Mbps DSL connection if the provider doesn't offer them 500/500 fiber, and the price won't be that much lower.
For normal consumer pricing laying down new lines will likely never turn a profit in the U.S. in any established neighbourhood, especially in municipalities that like to extract every dollar out of unsympathetic companies as another comment mentioned.
I‘ve seen stable latencies under 20ms on some networks, but also absurd spikes of multiple seconds on others. (The same goes for cable/DOCSIS, by the way…)
So at home I'm on 50 Mbps VDSL. My company's office has fiber but it has a Starlink for fallback.
How is Starlink in terms of latency?
But on one provider, with congestion, that would go up to 15 seconds (yes, 15.000 ms) basically every evening during the pandemic…
It all depends on how well a network is managed. This is true for ever access technology; fiber just has a lot more headroom to mask bad network management, congestion etc.
If Starling does indeed provide even a lower bandwidth connection at just 20ms, that is a nett win. Cool!
I don't know if a fiber to home would achieve lower latencies than 20 ms.... Someone mentioned DOCSIS - don't know much about it. Is that not needed for a fiber connection?
Who in their right mind would pay for Starlink over fiber? The same cost, but a lot better connection lol.
Because even if there's very few people who don't have good service (for example some kind of technical issue where fiber can't be routed to a specific building) you quickly reach the capacity for the service. Plus the odd person who wants it for a backup.
Also, I routinely get 100+ Mbps on Starlink, which is better than a lot of connections available across the country.
you also have the effect of cities sometimes being tied to a single sub-par ISP… many are willing to pay for any alternative
This is literally the opposite of true.
But both of you combined make a good point: this is the best way to fully utilize bandwidth of the sats, which are not going to be serving terrestrial customers when flying over the oceans, which is a significant portion of the time.
Between boats, planes, and rural terrestrial customers the usage of any individual Starlink sat can be efficiently spread out.