Starlink speeds in US dropped from 105Mbps to 53Mbps in the past year

They had HughesNet before, barely ever got more than 1 Mbps. Latency was ~1000ms on average. They paid for the 100 Mbps service for awhile but HughesNet oversubscribes their satellites to a disgusting degree and they rarely saw more than that 1 Mbps.

Even when the bandwidth was ~10 Mb, the latency levels caused basically all of the streaming services to not function.

When they first got it, it was ~100 Mbps on average. Now it's around 50 Mbps. Latency is still holding around 40ms. Still at least an order of magnitude better on all fronts compared to their competition. I was able to play some competitive shooters with decent success ... although CoD had a tendency to occasionally boot me when satellite switches happened. Seems to trip the anticheat, but I can't really blame Starlink for that.

This has been my experience too which I've assumed they are capping speeds. Often I work late so am up in the am's so would have little competition for bandwidth and if I do a speed test it's lower (~60Mb down) than when I first got it and would regularly be 100Mb+ sometimes over 200.

Also recently we've been getting more network dropouts.

All that said, it's been a game changer for me as I was living with 3.5Mb down before starlink and a significant overall improvement.

How does this solve the geolocation issue? The parent poster mentioned IP based geolocation, which isn't affected by the starlink terminal providing some sort of local debug api to get the current lon/lat.

I live 45 miles outside of a major Northeast city, have just one broadband option which is mostly OK but would still seriously consider Starlink as a backup. I barely get cellphone reception at my house without WiFi assist because I'm in the shadow of a hill.

As you note, one of the problems that Starlink is facing is that everyone who wants Starlink generally lives in the same areas. Are there a few hundred households that want Starlink within a 7 mile radius of you (150 square miles)? Then there's likely to be capacity constraints, at least until Starlink can launch a lot more satellites.

All three wireless carriers are offering home internet in situations like yours, but with slightly varying offers. T-Mobile has an unlimited offering in areas where it has excess network capacity. T-Mobile also has a "Lite" offering that is available everywhere T-Mobile has coverage, but it has a data cap and costs $150 for the 300GB plan (https://www.t-mobile.com/support/home-internet/t-mobile-home...). AT&T has a home internet offering for $60 with a 350GB cap (https://www.att.com/internet/fixed-wireless/); overages are $10 per 50GB up to a maximum of $200/mo. I don't know if that's $200 total or $200 in overages + $60. At $200, it's certainly expensive, but Starlink isn't cheap. The average home internet user uses around 300GB of data (data from both T-Mobile and Comcast), but that's probably not people on Hacker News. Still, 1TB would be $170 which isn't that much more if you're desperate and doesn't have as high a startup cost (Starlink's being around $700 while AT&T's is up to $150). Verizon also offers home internet service at cheap costs (either LTE https://www.verizon.com/home/lte-home-internet/ or 5G https://www.verizon.com/5g/home depending on where you are), but availability is limited like T-Mobile's unlimited service.

Have you looked into Starlink's RV service? It's more expensive at $135/mo and you're deprioritized behind standard Starlink customers, but that might be a good option. I hate saying this, but once you're in for $110/mo, what's another $25? Well, $300 per year. But if you're desperate, it might be what you need.

Things will likely get better over the coming years. T-Mobile will be covering half of rural households over the next few months with mid-band 5G and they're also embarking on a huge rural coverage expansion with 10,000 new towers coming to improve coverage. Verizon and AT&T are behind on mid-band coverage, but it's coming. Starlink will be launching more satellites which will give them more capacity.

If you don't mind paying an extra $25/mo, Starlink RV might be the best solution. However, people have reported being annoyed that they haven't been able to switch to regular Starlink (and save $25/mo) when capacity becomes available. Definitely check Verizon and AT&T's offering and see if there's something right for you there (and available). It feels like a long-shot, but I'd rather mention them than not even if there's just a 1% chance it'll help. Over the next few years, we're likely to see AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile gain a lot of capacity in rural areas as they bring online a lot of spectrum and Starlink will launch more satellites. Right now, since you say you're "desperately looking", maybe grab Starlink RV or even AT&T's service.

Read the contract carefully to make sure it's allowed, start a coop & buy the commercial variant for a group of farms, with point-to-point wifi for local distribution? That should get you to jump the line.

(Though your problem may also be lack of a ground station close enough to you, but that's more rare.)

That feels like it would be true but is there any publically available data to confirm it?

Eventually it did find a sustainable business model though even for its new satellites.

Ouch! It's hard to tell if this is assertion based on some sort of familiarity with SpaceX's finances or just another of a seemingly endless stream of anti-Musk jabs.

Surely you can't put SpaceX and Uber into the same category when it comes to the state of their finances and where that money comes from. Surely a cursory glance at the slew of public, private and government contracts SpaceX already has, plus the ones they have lined up, not to mention the involvement in programs like Artemus, would demonstrate to most people that they are in league far and beyond the likes of Uber with their dubious Vision Fund and questionable private backers.

Or are you saying in this case that SpaceX, with all of its money and potential is basically to Starlink, what Softbank is to Uber?

If it's the former, I'd love to get a better understand of what you mean?

I imagine the fixed cost for the microwave unit doesn't make sense otherwise.

If you're talking about microwave point to point to a cell tower that then provides 5g or LTE... Well that's how most cell towers work, I think...

With wireless spectrum, lower frequencies effectively travel farther because they don't get disrupted by objects as much. So 600-900MHz frequencies provide lots of coverage that's the backbone of our mobile phone networks, 1700-2100MHz were used to add more capacity in cities and suburbs, and now we're seeing 2.5-4GHz being used to provide new high-speed 5G services (5G+, 5G UC, or 5G UW depending on your carrier). On top of that, there's millimeter wave spectrum. There's a lot of it, but it's also 28-40GHz and going to be blocked by so much. Even if you're near a millimeter wave cell site, your walls might prevent it from working indoors. Lots of things become issues at millimeter wave so it's hard to do it without unobstructed line of sight (including trees and such) or really short distances.

Mobile phone carriers are already beaming internet far distances. They just have limited capacity in a lot of areas and people hate having their home internet connection limited. What we're seeing with 2.5-4GHz spectrum is pretty good capacity with some decent coverage, but we're still just talking a mile or two in a lot of situations. Of course, there are people hacking their T-Mobile Home Internet devices with high-gain directional antennas and really pushing that farther when they have near line of sight. I think we're likely to see this mid-band spectrum become a big factor in rural internet because it has a decent mix of distance and capacity. Millimeter wave spectrum is just hard to do without line of sight and so it often becomes limited to large buildings that an ISP can put a professionally installed antenna on the top of.

It's also that these things take time. If you're one of the big three wireless carriers, you're looking to upgrade 70,000-100,000 cell sites around the country and that doesn't happen overnight. It takes 3-6 years. To really get home internet good in many places, they might need more cell sites to supplement those. Realistically, I think it's a lot more likely that the big three wireless companies will hook up rural areas than Webpass. This is their business. Webpass (and others like Starry and NetBlazr) are somewhat limited because they don't have the spectrum to cover larger areas or even within cities where they don't have a tall building to give them line of sight. They also don't have the money or workforce to deploy as quickly as the wireless carriers (yes Google has money, but they're not going to spend $15B a year when they don't have the spectrum to create a viable rural strategy; the big three are spending that kind of money because they have the spectrum and network and potential to expand into home internet).

Wireless has a lot of promise, but the lower frequency you go the less spectrum there is available and the higher frequency you go the less distance you're going to get and the more you need line of sight. The big three wireless carriers have the lower frequency spectrum and network to start providing more and more home internet in the future. We're just at the first point where the big wireless carriers are starting to see excess network capacity (beyond what their mobile users will eat up) which is why it didn't happen much before.

Remote areas often don't have lots of tall buildings with many inhabitants and line of sight above the treeline. I know my semi-rural area is full of trees and hills and line of sight wireless would really only have potential for people with waterfront, and realistically, only for people with waterfront and a view towards the nearby city.

Starlink makes most sense when you have no 4G or 5G reception at all, generally speaking.

Starlink can handle the customers just fine.

By definition, if the customers could get something better for less money, they would.

Plus SpaceX is launching more satellites. They are at 1/20 of the number of satellites they want to have, so the total bandwidth available will go up.

Starlink shines when it comes to rural/remote environments, not cities where towers and fiber can reach.

Side note, look at HughesNet and Viasat in their data, LOL!

edit: instead of downvoting if someone could find the sampling method?

Could have lots of variability though.

Additional question, do you get any connection degradation in bad weather events (if you have them)? Things like snow and storms.

Same with most screenshares.

I had a 15/1 connection for a while and found no issues with Zoom calls. Maybe an issue if you’re a professional cammer though.

I mostly work on CRUD virtualized apps (effectively screenshares) all workday long and will use well under 1gb in a day.

My biggest beef with Zoom and the like is being unable to restrict resolution/camera quality of myself and others (other than setting the others into small sizes).

I’m in Canada where mobile data is expensive, and therefore very fast. The provider is happy for you to chew your handful of gb per month at full speed and then you top-up with more or get hit with overages.