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Comment by nekoashide | Hacker News Reader

People were tossing traditional internet satellites from roofs, chopping off the old dried up copper from the side of the house and pushing the wisp tower down.

Starlink made remote living and work truly possible. No more turning off video, pixilating and worrying about data plans. And low enough latency to make up with skill in games.

But just like everything it got too popular, cellular carriers are trying to service that market though and t-mobile might be a last mile internet provider with decent speeds and unlimited data. But, fiber is also getting buried all over rural areas to help with this as well.

Between fiber/cellular and Starlink people are going to get interesting data plans for sure though. Wisp are regional and the market will shrink because the service is just inadequate and poorly maintained. The smart wisp that got federal high speed internet subsidies will survive building out fiber even in some pretty rural areas.

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As someone desperately looking for connectivity options in a more rural area (though not that rural, I'm only like 20 minutes from one of the largest cities in the state) I won't hold my breath. My whole neighborhood is on the waitlist for Starlink still.

I've called every provider that could possibly service our area and nobody has any interest. T-Mobile is supposedly offering 5G home internet for people in this kind of situation but they are not available in this neighborhood either.

No idea what to do other than wait for Starlink availability. There is a WISP, but it is truly terrible and very expensive.

Starlink is game-changing for even somewhat rural. My brother's place is just outside of a small, but by the scale of Maine significant city, and Starlink turns it from a previously barely 1 Mbps download to somewhere he can actually work from.

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.

I'm always curious about details on situations like this. Really nerdy stuff like: what's the average housing lot size; what's the average driveway length; what kind of "largest city in the state" (since 20 minutes won't get you from LA to another part of LA and in most places I've seen 20 minutes won't get you far from a city at all which makes it sound like you're in a state where a top-5 city has 100,000 people and becomes rural fast). One of the problems a lot of the US faces is that the cost of infrastructure is shared by so few people: rural roads that have few homes on them, electric lines that have to travel farther to reach customers, sewer systems that require more feet per customer, etc. In a lot of rural places in Europe, people often live clustered in a town center, but rural America tends to spread out a lot more with a lot of distance to cover to connect people. It doesn't really matter how far you are from a city as much as how easy it is to connect lots of households in your area.

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.

> No idea what to do other than wait for Starlink availability.

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.)

> But just like everything it got too popular

Keep in mind that it maybe got too popular for an usable service, but it's far from being popular enough to be financially sustainable product. You're still at this point having a service paid by investors money, like cheap Uber rides in 2015.

> but it's far from being popular enough to be financially sustainable

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

The hobbyist community does estimates based on reported launch pricing and satellite manufacturing costs, but I don't think there's been any company books opened to reporters.

There was that leaked email saying "Satellite V1, by itself, is financially weak" https://spaceexplored.com/2021/11/29/spacex-raptor-crisis/

Since January 2021 they've been launching V1.5

Basically like Iridium V1. It went bankrupt and only when the network was bought for dimes on the dollar did it become profitable.

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

Did Iridium have reusable rockets too?

> You're still at this point having a service paid by investors money, like cheap Uber rides in 2015.

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?

Not an answer to your question, but a vent-rant: 95% of anti-Musk "jabs" are reality and facts, and way over-shouted by Musk's fanatics, butt-kissers, and followers of his cult of personality. I have personally tried to set record straight with multiple instances of people in my private life (with legal documents, news clippings, timelines...) – nothing helps, they always find an excuse for him, it's like a bloody religion. And I'm sick of uncritical and butt-kissing media coverage, his fan club, and his egomaniacal loud existence.

It has always struck me that the people expressing the same sentiment that you just did put far more energy into it than the "fanatics, butt-kissers, and followers of his cult of personality"; to the point that you'd bother the "people in my private life (with legal documents, news clippings, timelines...)". It reminds me of the tech journalists who declared bitcoin dead in 2013, and how they'd get more venomous in their attacks year after year, presumably due to some kind deranged ego shielding.

Is anyone familiar with how Google Fiber Webpass works?

Is there a reason this isn't viable in remote areas?

Can it only beam internet pretty short distances?

Anything that runs over fiber isn’t viable for remote areas due to cost of trenching and laying out fiber.

My understanding is Webpass is millimeter wireless point-to-point.

I was wondering how far apart nodes can be.

I'm reading that they can be up to 10km apart - so it seems like something that could be an option for a lot of communities.

Cook County MN is a little over 3000 square miles, half of which is water, and has a population a little over 5000 people. I own a patch of forest there. It has gigabit fiber service.

The local power company is a co-op because none of the usual power companies wanted to serve the area. About twenty years ago the co-op decided that this whole "internet" thing is probably not a fad, and they started pulling fiber everywhere through their existing utility corridors whenever they had to touch something. It was a good idea. It is _intensely_ rural, yet high speed internet access is now ubiquitous.

Except they were able to get phone lines into most of these "remote" places in the past.

Sunk cost at the same time as electric & water lines were trenched, while the road was built, paid for by the initial developers of the areas (and added to the cost of homes). For this house, that happened somewhere in the early 90s. Digging it all open again is what would cost a lot.

Yes, if there's new development somewhere, they could probably get fiber in pretty cheap, if the developers though that was worth it. That doesn't help anyone else much.

I guess it depends on your definition of remote. In my area theres fiber being run all over the place, and it's not like middle of Montana rural, but there was 0 internet providers here before and now there's awesome fiber.

Webpass is really only offered in largeish residential buildings as far as I'm aware (I have webpass service, though my condo building only has 90 units so it's not particularly large, and I suspect most people are with Xfinity anyway...).

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...

Webpass and similar services work well with line of sight. Even Starlink wants line of sight, but it's generally easier to get that up than across. What happens when a neighbor a mile away has a 3-story home or there's a hill?

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.

I believe webpass is based on line of sight wireless. And they connect a whole buildings with one shared radio package.

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.

I live in rural UK and have wireless from a network on church steeples. It is quite flat here relatively.

The advantage of Starlink would be that it could offer a single plan worldwide though.

No more roaming charges etc.

Most people really don't care about that. They want broadband where they didn't have a reasonable option for broadband before at pretty much any price.

How do you even know?

From people in the small Arican villages to these people traveling to the big cities or even abroad, there is always an issue of being able to access the internet. (to use whatsapp for instance)

Broadband won't help here. Starlink having global coverage would be much different. (if it manages to do so without being impeded at the regulatory level)

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