Starlink internet is going from rural savior to unreliable luxury
xda-developers.com
xda-developers.com
I say this as an Australian who watched one government plan a national rollout of fibre while another came in justifying most people don't need a connection better than 25/5 (based on usage data at the time) and went ahead and gutted the project.
We're now trying to undo the previous government's mess up of the original roll out post COVID world when everyone discovered remote work is a good idea for many.
Starlink's issue feels like history repeating itself with any service that becomes popular and goes too quickly into high demand
If you want Internet, you can pay for it.
If you want Electricity, you can pay for it.
So, yes, absolutely - many people without connected power need the internet.
Oh, that's interesting! I always thought this to be an outlier scenario. What is "here"? Can you estimate the size of population to this applies?
Presumably because at some point, it was cheaper to buy 30 years of diesel than to run a power cable, and yet cell coverage wasn't widespread enough to replace a wired telephone.
Of course, we can debate whether providing telephone service is us beneficent city dwellers generously subsidising our backwards rural cousins for the good of their children; or us being taken for fools and subsidising the rich's gigantic holiday homes and rental properties.
I know Australia does keep population statistics, and surely if it is indeed not uncommon for people to do remote work from areas without connection to grid power, somebody must have done a survey, otherwise you’d just be guessing.
As for remote work, I have to question the decisions of someone that moves to an area without connection to the electricity grid and expects to do remote work from there. IMHO they are putting them self into an extreme scenario which shouldn’t be accommodated for, neither by government nor private enterprise.
You may bring up rural communities that have been neglected for decades as a counterpoint here. To that, I go to ancestor post and state, that those communities deserve traditional infrastructure, paid for from our common funds, not to be forced into a magic solution from a startup looking to make money from them.
> I have to question the decisions of someone that moves to an area without connection to the electricity grid and expects to do remote work from there.
That's just silly, closed-minded, and ignorant. You must just have very limited experience of the world. I can off the top of my head list hundreds of scenarios where remote work might become the only option for someone already living in the bush. And many other reasons (which I know first hand from people living here) why people may be entirely unable to move from here. These are real facts on the ground, and not subject to your lack of imagination and propensity towards narrow-minded curtain-twitching judgements about whole classes of people you know zip about.
> 4g has very patchy coverage in rural Australia
This goes back to the claim in the original post. Starlink is an excuse not to rollout proper infrastructure.
> schooling and healthcare
Really? Are there honestly scenarios in the real world where people don’t have power but need to do school and healthcare via the internet. I find that hard to believe. Honestly if there exist rural communities where this is a concern than they deserve infrastructure, which goes back to the original post which claims:
> All these talks about Starlink -> Remember it's a bandaid solution to your governments poor planning and infrastructure rollout of a core utility / service.
> I can off the top of my head list hundreds of scenarios where remote work might become the only option for someone already living in the bush.
Do you mind listing some of them? It might be because of my lack of imagination, but I have a hard time seeing someone living in the bush, unable to relocate, suddenly finding a job that requires the need for high speed and low latency connection.
No insult, just a description of what you've posted (idiotically) here
> Starlink is an excuse not to rollout proper infrastructure.
That's ridiculous. Australia's infrastructure plans were laid out long before Starlink was conceived. They were then undermined by a right-wing gov. Invidividuals are then left by government inaction to do what they must. That involves (unfortunately) use of all kinds of less-than-ideal individualistic solutions like Starlink. It's not good for society, but, like private health care, it can be necessitated.
> Really? Are there honestly scenarios in the real world where people don’t have power but need to do school and healthcare via the internet. I find that hard to believe.
I don't care what you find hard to believe because of your limited experience of life. The solution to limited experience is either to gain more, or to refrain from judgement outside of your realms of competence.
> Remember it's a bandaid solution to your governments poor planning and infrastructure rollout of a core utility / service.
Agree. Like healthcare, it should be there. But again as with healthcare, when it's not, those with the means just have to go where they must. Whether that be health care mercenaries, or Starlink.
> Do you mind listing some of them?
I won't list them. The fact that you, clearly knowing literally nothing about this part of the world, still feel like doubling-down on your ignorance (a factual description, not an insult), makes you not worth enlightening.
Anyway, you're uninteresting and incurious. I shall block you.
Well yes, but a needed bandaid. That's what happens when governments vacate their role - individuals are left to manage on their own (and the devil take the hindmost).
Australian here like you. Generally appalled by the NBN debacle. Starlink's beyond my means, but if I had a remote job I'd find it a godsend where I live (rural Northern Rivers). Our "NBN" is SkyMuster, which is from all accounts not up to much (even if you can get the NBN to connect it).
And SkyMuster is supposed to be a last resort, but is pushed anywhere local topography offers a mild inconvenience for fixed wireless. I'm 4km from a village, and 30km from Lismore - hardly the back of beyond.
And the NBNCo is just an old-style Telco: bloated with plushly-remunerated suits, utterly indifferent to users, and grossly inefficient. Before I knew how bad it was I tried to get signed up with SkyMuster. It never happened. I had multiple appointments made by NBN with different contractors, none of whom knew anything about the other appointments. It never actually happened and I ended up cancelling the whole thing and making my own arrangements.
Like the other poster I agree it's a band-aid. I agree it's not the world's best connection (there is considerable latency sometimes). I agree I shouldn't have to be paying Elon Musk 140 bucks a months to get a decent connection but ... I am, because that's all I can get here.
We're just outside Perth, less than a k from a new(ish) suburb development and our only NBN option is "Fixed Wireless", which guarantees 25Mbit at least once in a given 24 hour period. WTF! There was one non-NBN wireless option which according to all reviews actually managed to be worse, and 5G here is bad, plus Telstra won't (yet?) sell us a 5G 'home' connection. AFAICT my options are starlink or paying $22k to get a fibre put in.
So far it works well for us here, regularly exceeding 200Mbps, fingers crossed our cell isn't going to become oversubscribed anytime soon. I also hope that they spin up a Perth exit node, because AFAICT our traffic pops out in Sydney at the moment, adding to the latency.
But really I hope the government gets its act together and sorts out the NBN for more people. Tony Abbott has a lot to answer for.
(I understand from what I've read that the problems with starlink in the US are a lot less of an issue here, because the populations are an order of magnitude different...)
It’s been a bit of an eye-opener moving back here! I left at the end of the Gillard government, when the future of the Australian internet connection was bright, and came back wondering what had gone wrong!
It seems wasteful, I know, but it's nice to have competition at least.
I have choice of half a dozen suppliers this way but only one set of hardware in the house.
That's what you get when you let your corrupt politicians sell your national infrastructure and customer base to private monopolists who will rentseek you instead of competing and investing in infrastructure.
I remember walking into an A1 shop browsing for internet offers for my new apartment and the lady working there straight up told me "you don't need more than 80 mbit" without even asking what I do with it or what I need it for, as if 80mbit is the national standard all citizens should get, like in communism.
Gigabit here is a rare and expensive luxury while in most of EU is a freely available commodity.
With the shift to cloud computing, at least in the awkward hybrid phase, that won't suffice for a business of that size, but it really isn't obvious what a single person would _need_ a gigabit connection for. Perhaps you can elaborate.
The download part is great because now it's faster to buy a game on steam for instance and download it than getting in the car, driving to the closest store to purchase a physical copy and bring it home.
Regarding the upload, I built a small utility that stores the videos from the cameras I have at home to the cloud in a rolling window (I didn't want to pay the service from the cameras provider). So at any time I am uploading something like 7 1080p streams (it's more bursty as I chunk the streams every 10 minutes and upload the resulting files). So, while 1Gb is still an overkill, once you have the bandwidth you find uses for it.
On the one hand, I have two competing cable providers (RCN/Astound and Comcast/Xfinity). Being able to swap between services as offers change has been huge (hey, competition is a thing!) Currently I’ve got 1400/40 (measured) on Xfinity.
But fiber? Totally absent. AT&T seems to serve other areas nearby but not mine. Why? No clue. But I’d sure love having a symmetric connection.
Incidentally, there are multiple fiber cables strung on the poles in the alley behind my house. Presumably they are the infrastructure for our two cables cos.
It's cheaper than Ziggo' coax though (300 mb).
To be honest, I still have to research that.
I too am in Australia
Proportion of urban population 92.57%
https://www.statista.com/statistics/276724/urbanization-in-t...
People forget. The numbers tell a really great story.
You could have a gigantic nation which is completely centralized into one city, giving you a super low population density on paper.
It's not the case in any of your example, so not really an issue here. Nonetheless...
Only trying to provide context for the economics of density in places like Singapore and the a Netherlands, not necessarily prove the opposite use case. I just wanted to highlight a contrasting factor that is very important for fiber and other high speed service viability. There are many others!
These criticisms are totally valid.
The base 300/300 service is price capped at 38 euros/month as well. I'm paying a few bucks more for higher speed.
We have a pretty different scale in a lot of ways: Australia is huge and basically empty, density wise.
It's a bit annoying to find, everything is hidden behind area code filters.
> (semi-)rural
Pick one.
How many hundered km are you from the nearest settlement of >10,000 people?
People in England, Netherlands, etc don't really get what remote means.
It's not available everywhere, but it covers a lot of smaller cities, so I'm happy that at least that's one thing that is done correctly here.
I have no idea how Poland is pulling off such low costs but props for doing so. Other nations should take note.
Partially. The thing is, the US is so unbelievably huge that it is economically infeasible to serve extremely rural areas with high-speed wired (i.e. fiber, DSL) or wireless (microwave, 4G/5G phone) internet, even with massive government subsidies - and that applies for other large-area countries such as Germany or Australia as well.
Starlink completely changes the equations there as (for the user) no investment is required other than getting a terminal, and for anything mobile (sea ships, RVs, emergency services) it blows the competition from geostationary satellites completely away.
Power lines aren't an inherent fire risk. Unmaintained power lines, however, are.
Primarily, you need to maintain clearance from bushes and trees.
The exception to the "usually only" is, once again, our beloved "german redneck" government in Bavaria who insisted that the new North-South line Südlink got buried on Bavarian soil to quash local NIMBY resistance [2] - at the price of taking ages longer to build and costing ~8x the amount of pole-run lines.
[1] see page 64, https://www.amprion.net/Dokumente/Dialog/Downloads/Studien/E...
[2] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/bayern/energiewende-warum-erdkab...
and due to the way the laws are written, we had to pay to have an engineer prescribe what work needed to be done to each pole - up to and including replacing it - then submit plans to the utilities, and then pay the utilities to pay 'their' engineer to do the same study - and then when it was agreed that a pole needed to be replaced, we had to pay the full cost of replacing it, and then when the work was done, the utility still owned the pole and rented it back to us for a yearly fee - repeat several hundred times.
Several million dollars for about 500 households.
Orders of magnitude. I actually once worked in construction, specifically in trench digging for German Telekom.
Putting up poles is easy, drill a hole in the ground for the pole, put the pole in, string a fiber on it, done. Even cheaper if you already have poles, all you need there is a truck with a lift. Downside is, unless you own the poles, you have to rent them from the local utility and some of these charge extortion rates for third parties. And there are always drunkards or people with shoddy cars taking down entire series of poles, not to mention adverse weather events and vandals taking pot shots. Phone and electricity lines are easy to fix, you can probably train apes to do that, but splicing fiber still involves specialists.
Trench digging is a whole different beast: you need to pull permits, dig the trench, hope you don't hit something else that's buried, deal with bad soil (sometimes straight out rock) or shit like WW2 bombs, lay down your cable, bury the cable in a first layer of fine sand, place a warning band, bury and fill up that with the coarse soil you removed, restore asphalt/plaster where needed... it takes weeks and multiple dedicated crews - usually you have one crew that deals with cutting up and removing asphalt, one that deals with placing and removing anti-traffic barriers, one with doing the actual dig and backfill, one that runs the cable, and one that restores surface.
There is a third way however, it's virtually "underground poles" - earth displacement hammers. These "rockets" can shoot up to 70m through the soil in one go. Nice shit but needs the right soil to operate and it will cut through anything already buried, including solid water and wastewater mains.
Does any of this calculus change when you're talking about really rural areas, like in the desert of Australia? My guess is that would mean higher cost of sending someone out to fix a pole (point against poles), but also lower likelihood of running into existing infrastructure (point in favor of digging).
For power at least, running it buried is no good idea at all because capacitive losses are larger, so at least as long as an area has a grid connection it makes sense to "dual use" the already existing poles.
Based on popular memes I can imagine, especially in Australia, that it might not be a good idea to bury lines in the open desert because you will get animals burrowing and chewing through the cables.
Putting Germany in the same category as Australia or the US seems a bit weird when the former two have truly continental dimensions whereas Germany is a bit smaller than California, although there's an interesting twist: Going by population-weighted density, Australia definitively comes out ahead and even the US is somewhat denser than Germany in that regard.
Though on the other hand the United Kingdom is much denser population-weighted-wise than all three of them, and yet from what I've gathered it's no perfect shining example of highspeed broadband rollout either…
I believe there will still be a rural segment relying on cellular for a while yet, but it's a shrinking minority.
Economics aren't actually that different for villages (very rural single dwellings are though of course). Most villages of say 1k ppl already have fibre going to them (for VDSL cabinets), so they can buy the backhaul from Openreach.
Then it's a case of adding the actual fibre which they can use existing telegraph poles for.
There isn't really a huge difference in economics between urban suburbs and villages.
London is actually not as cheap as you'd think, because a lot of properties are apartments and that requires expensive wayleave agreements to be negotiated with the freeholder. This has significantly increased the cost, as many freeholders don't care and don't respond or want a lot of money for the permission, meaning you have to dig up the street regardless and miss a lot of properties and hope they can be added later.
Plus the cost and complexity of closing roads/streets is much higher in London than other areas.
In the past few years though there has been an explosion in FTTH build. 75% properties can get gigabit service now which is increasing by around about 1% every month.
The priority a decade ago really was on getting the entire country up to 'usable' internet speeds, rather than having a lot of FTTH in some areas and then very slow DSL in many other areas. Only 0.35% of UK properties are below 2mbit/sec down now (unusable), which doesn't include 4G/5G coverage, so in reality it's likely only 1 in 1000 households have utterly terrible connectivity.
So while the UK doesn't rank top of the list of median download speeds it is far less likely you are going to have bad connectivity, which IMO is a greater priority than raw download speeds.
Very few people actually need more than say 100mbit/sec day to day. It's actually hard to get gigabit around the house; most powerline adaptors and wifi solutions top out around 300mbit/sec in my experience, so unless you have ethernet in your house (very rare), the limiting factor is now on in home connectivity, not the external ISP.
It's not that it's economically infeasible. It's that it's just not as profitable for the ISPs as running a smaller, closer network in a populated area. So they won't do it. Why would they care about covering a huge area that doesn't make as much money? All they care about is money over all else.
Lots of core utilities aren't rolled out everywhere. You might need a different water source or use a septic tank rather than roll out central services everywhere, because it's so expensive per capita. Internet from a satellite seems a valid equivalent to that.
[0]: https://nltimes.nl/2023/01/27/dutch-meteorologists-say-musks...
You don't even need to be in the middle of a wilderness area. My brother has a house 10 minutes outside of a smallish Maine city. And his only Starlink options were a 1Mbps down DSL and a very data-capped cellular hotspot.
But a good wired connection is almost always going to be better.
I replaced our Skymesh (geo-stationary) satellite (the only barely viable alternative) two years ago with Starlink. Skymesh gave me ~600ms RTT to Sydney servers, and maybe 25Mbps down (at 3am, clear sky, etc). Data cap was around 120GB / month, IIRC. Pricing was probably 75% of what I'm paying for Starlink now.
We can kinda sorta get 3G, but effectively only for voice & SMS - our nearest tower is ~ 10km away, and my yagi / repeater requires power to establish a very feeble back to that. 3G is being retired almost definitely in 2024, at which point I believe the national carriers' plan is to have no plan - as the replacement technology requires a much higher density of tower placements than rural areas will ever substantiate. The joy of a fully privatised communications industry.
It's kind of amusing to me that you blame our private telecom industry. I'm relatively sure Australia has some of the best mobile connectivity on the planet, with generally extremely high speeds, high data caps and usually, relatively good coverage. It is absolutely not a given that government service would be better.
My handset (Pixel 4A original) will need replacing if they go 5G only - I guess they will go 4 & 5 combined, but see above.
I don't know if my Telstra-installed (~ 2 years ago) repeater will work with 5G, or I'll need to buy a replacement.
I don't know if I have any recourse or remedy in the event that I lose all connectivity after the 3G retirement.
Signal propagation is weird. When the tech installed my repeater and yagi, most of the time was spent finding the optimum direction - he ended up pointing it at a hill probably 10 degrees off the measured direction for the tower (line of sight is impossible for us).
So, yes, you're right ... but still.
Anyway, Australia has some of the best mobile service coverage in populated areas - that's why they talk about percentage of humans that have coverage, not land area. And I totally understand why.
Reviewing https://www.telstra.com.au/coverage-networks/our-coverage - where I am, unboosted 3G, and to a lesser degree, 4G zones are asserted to be within several km of me - but the nearest 5G blob is ~60km. There's no 'coverage coming soon' zones within 300km of me.
And yes, I blame privatisation. Prior to that, if you wanted a landline service, connection fee was flat, no matter where you were. If that had continued on, presumably the same policy would apply today for other services.
Contesting for last-mile means it's now hideously expensive to the consumer - similarly for power connection - compared to a few decades ago.
...what about Starlink's performance over the last 2 years?
My use case is web, remote desktop, video conf, phone (carrier->wifi voice is a transparent feature for me), streaming audio, syncthing.
Only a couple of those things are sensitive to the few seconds per hour that my dish seems to lose connection, and I suspect part of that is poor placement of my dish.
To your question, and TFA's point, though - I've not noticed any change in the frequency or duration of those ephemeral outages, nor any feeling of overall performance degradation.
I might have occasionally noticed evening drops in throughput, but little of my use case is impacted - I put that down to other customers in my cell ramping up their video streaming services that time of day.
The (mean) ~40ms latency has not changed over those two years (as expected).
I follow a few rural internet groups, at first most members thought Starlink would be all they'd ever need, now they are very unhappy.
1. No broadband from any of Rogers, Bell, Cogeco, etc. for multiple decades, and no real local offerings; despite being only a few km from a major centre
2. Nothing seems to be happening, so some local companies start offering point-to-point wireless services which fill a hole. They start putting up antenaes and stringing fibre all around. Fees are high but not awful. Bandwidth is low, but so much better than what one could get before. Also Starlink gets announced and deployed for some people.
3. Suddenly Bell shows up and starts running Fibe up and down the rural roads. What wasn't "economically viable" for them before suddenly super viable. Local wireless companies -- who took big risks to get a product to people -- lose hundreds of customers overnight.
I now have 3gbps fibre optic direct to my house when I had a 15mbps wireless connection a few months ago. But I'm sure some local small ISPs are going to be out of business by the end of the year.
I hate the way Canada is run.
Regional Bell says your DSL is $60-120/month.
Your local ISP buys a circuit to a DSL aggregator (Covad, Northpoint, Rhythms, etc) and starts offering DSL for $50/month (their cost was $25-30/month).
After increase in customers, regional Bell says "we're offering $29.95/month for 6 months to new customers". ISPs nationwide start losing thousands of customers.
One by one, DSL aggregators start to go out of business which means ISP have no DSL connectivity and can't sell DSL anymore.
DSL is dead from anyone but regional Bell.
That 2019 decision was reversed in 2021.
[0] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-crtc-chair-...
"Fake" a local internet company in order to provoke Telcos into rolling out fibre.
It seems to work well enough for fake "grassroots" movements.
You would need something like a political party to hire them.
Law has been modified recently https://www.canada.ca/en/radio-television-telecommunications...
Or, in the case of the US, it's what you get when you have private for-profit corporations doing all the planning and rollout.
This is good news and not bad. It's a strong sign that the model fundamentally works and they will be able to fund continuous improvements to meet strong demand.
Also, yes it may get cheaper, but that’s not a given, if it doesn’t, what happens then?
OneWeb seems about ready to start offering service. Remains to be seen if the offering can compete with starlink but good chance it will apply downward pressure to prices.
Then in the medium distant future there is Amazon's constellation that will have to compete with starlink v3 or v4 or whatever they're up to by then.
https://spacenews.com/spacex-goes-all-in-on-starship-configu...
Also, if you think a $500 one-time fee is bad, try asking Comcast how much they'll charge for pulling 20 miles of fiber to your farm.
Made me laugh out loud! :)
Closest wired internet to my place is 6mi South. Also have a big hill between me and the only fixed LOS internet tower in the area. Currently, Starlink is my only real option, and it has worked fine for me so far!
In my experience, an ISP with no real competition is always going to be pricy. The only way to get reasonable rates is to have some competition....
When they subdivided my neighborhood it was supposed to have fiber. All my neighbors had it, but not me. There’s supposed to be a major connection every other house, and mine should have it, but it doesn’t.
The person at Century Link that came out to my place and found the problem pulled the original plans for the subdivision, figured out who screwed up, contacted that company, and got fiber to my place. They had to go 500 feet, under a street and two driveways. Now I have fiber.
Thanks dude at Century Link.
p.s. Comcast (Xfinity) came out and looked too. They noped the hell out right away.
And potentially screwup the upper atmosphere by polluting it with vaporised aluminium as the satellites re-enter
And definitely pollute the night sky too
If I had a dollar for every time Elon Musk said something that didn't pan out or wasn't true, I would be richer than Elon Musk.
If you think $500 setup cost + the ~$90 monthly fee is bad, I got news for you.
The same people using Starlink out in the middle of nowhere now were paying way more than that before switching. Like ~$250/m for subpar speeds and had very small data limit caps + data usage overage costs with crap ISPs.
Not a fan of Musk, but the calculus becomes pretty simple at that point for someone who wants a home internet connection.
~$120 in California
Starlink does not really compete with Comcast in areas Comcast already serves(at least when it comes to speed/price/reliability), it just doesn't make sense to use Starlink when Comcast is available other than maybe as a secondary backup connection. Starlink is significantly faster and cheaper however than other providers like Viasat which serve areas without economical terrestrial based internet options.
Comcast installation costs would be roughly $250,000 to my property and is the only hardline broadband provider in my area.
What I was responding to was the assertion that starlink is ‘too expensive’ at $120/mo, when the normal offering from everyone else is about the same price.
As you note, depending on the area, one will provide better actual service or not. But the pricing isn’t the deciding factor IMO, just service quality.
That’s insane!
Do they give you an option to draw your own lines? Any chance you can apply for some subsidy?
I really don’t know why in 2023 fiber internet is not treated the same as water or electricity..
I got a similar quote from PG&E to run power to a remote lot once, with the caveat that ‘maybe’ they could do it.
Just because highways keep getting bigger doesn't mean it's the best mode of transport.
I'm not sure starlink has a future in this kind of environment outside of niche applications.
Their business model is difficult in my opinion, they both need a lot of customers from rich countries to recoup the costs but in the same time, the vast majority of those rich countries are well equipped already (or about to) since having a decent internet coverage is critical for their economies.
I don't believe it is viable model they are running.
In fact, if this isn't happening at scale already, I would expect that some WISP companies will start using starlink congestion areas to figure out where they should be putting masts.
small town and fast internet? it's my dream come true
The honeymoon phase of starlink is over. in the best case scenario with starship they can add capacity much cheaper. but even the business case for that is going to be hard to close given the amount of money they're already burning.
Starlink's problem is going to be that most profitable areas are better served by terrestrial LTE/5G, leaving only truly remote areas that are low density enough. But not many people live there...
Spectral bandwidth doesn't matter so much with beamforming with reasonably narrow beams. At least not until you get to a lot of satellites overhead at once. Dishy probably obtains a beam ~3 degrees wide; there's a lot of 3x3 degree sectors in the sky.
Similarly, the ground "cells" are 300 sq km; there's a lot of these in view of the satellite.
> Starlink's problem is going to be that most profitable areas are better served by terrestrial LTE/5G
Yup, for the most part I agree. Still, there is a pretty large rural population.
Sure, how much data you can exchange per satellite is roughly proportional to the bandwidth.
Increasing bandwidth or increasing satellites increases data rate.
> it's why SpaceX pays so much on legal fees for fcc filings
Note that a whole lot of the paper that goes to the FCC relates to the FCC's statutory authority over space debris and constellation licensing.
Well, sure. It has a multiplicative effect with number of satellites on throughput. Not to mention the proxy warfare they've endured from other constellation vendors through the FCC.
The big point which I responded to was there was a claim that adding more satellites doesn't add throughput ("Do cheap launches help")-- that one could be purely spectrum limited and not benefit from additional satellites. Directional antennas make this not true for any reasonable number of satellites.
If you use a diameter for a circle area, you need to divide by 4, to get like ~7. I was just going to do 3*3 = 9.
> It looks like Starlink has 7 GHz total downlink bandwidth from satellite to customers. A cell may be ~300 sq km, but no way you can pipe all that bandwidth in adjacent cells due to interference
Both the downlink and the uplink are directional. Yes, there's some power lost in side lobes, but..
So, if you have multiple satellites overhead, you can have a mosaic pattern where satellite A illuminates a hex, and then other satellites illuminate its neighbors. And even though some energy spills over, it's strongly rejected by the receivers because it's coming from the completely wrong direction.
> How many people live in places with fewer than a few people/km^2?
In addition to the incorrect pessimism about downlink bandwidth (also, one should expect ~5bits/Hz)... You're not taking into account any reasonable capacity factor, and you're assuming each service is one person. You're also assuming that you sell through to 100% of the populace and there's no one in the cell served by other technologies. If 95% of a suburban area can get FTTH, cable, or reasonable LTE, that still leaves 5% as possible customers for Starlink to fill in.
> Only Alaska averages below that in the US.
OK, but people are concentrated into cities, leaving a whole lot of land area with concentrations below this even in states with much higher average population density.
Yes, obtained by channelization and OFDM, not by limiting modulation.
Reverse engineering of the 10 to 12.7GHz band has shown a mixture of 16-QAM and 64-QAM frames. There's a bit of periodic 4-QAM too, which seems to be for acquisition and synchronization.
Even 16-QAM can climb basically to 5 bits/Hz.
I think you meant 7 Gbps; that only works if the satellite itself has that much inbound, which may not be the case if the satellites around (for sat-to-sat links) it or the base station that it sees are maxed out.
> which may not be the case if the satellites around (for sat-to-sat links)
No real sat-to-sat links yet. The exact specifications aren't disclosed, but they'll likely be 100gbps symmetric links.
> the base station that it sees are maxed out.
You can expect spectral efficiency for the uplinks to be better because of big antennas, and for them to be provisioned with no problem illuminating all the satellites overhead.
> which effectively halve the available bandwidth
I disagree (and I'm not sure where this idea is coming from-- do you think they use the same spectrum or something?) I think they effectively "add" bandwidth for the system by allowing satellites that do not have saturated uplinks to "share" capacity. E.g. a satellite which is mostly over the ocean but can see a ground station can now be more useful.
Yes, sat-to-sat enables new use cases. But it also has other effects.
All the satellites above me have an uplink from a ground station.
Also, satellites above ocean with few people in their footprint can see my uplink but can't use it effectively, because they don't have many users in their footprint (possibly none, because of elevation angle restrictions).
If we have satellite-to-satellite links, then those satellites above ocean can share their bandwidth with satellites above me. Therefore, real system capacity goes up.
Assuming that ground stations are upgraded as the size of the constellation grows-- they're strongly directional. Their throughput is the uplink bandwidth * the spectral efficiency * the number of satellites within LOS of an uplink ground station. Intersatellite links let you use more of this throughput without it going unused and "spoiling"-- that's the main point.
In the current era of phased array antenna prices falling sharply, and assuming they're willing to go for a folding antenna, I think they could probably easily get a 10x antenna area boost without much extra cost.
I don't get the question. Do costs matter when revenue is limited?
Of course they matter. They matter even more the more limited is the potential revenue.
And just because Rosenworcel was appointed by Obama instead of Biden doesn’t mean she’s not a loyal part of the Biden administration.
why not? seems like they should have had to
Again wrong. SpaceX in fact has already appealed the decision to the full Commission. But the chairwoman can legally just sit on that petition for a very long time. And SpaceX can’t sue in court until the FCC makes a decision on that, since you have to exhaust administrative remedies before going to court.
I'm not sure why you're calling me a leftist or what politics have anything to do with this topic. The FCC has been unusually nice to SpaceX over the years to the point where virtually all other satellite companies were suing because they were being given preferential treatment on things that the FCC never allowed before. Now that the playing field is fair (well, not quite since nobody else in the space got RDOF money), SpaceX isn't so magical.
ajit pai is the one you should be blaming for giving it to them in the first place when it was obvious to anyone with satellite knowledge that they could not offer that service to the amount of people they said in the time they claimed.
That’s not quite right. They can take it if they conclude you will not meet the target. Ups and downs on the way there are totally fine under the rules.
Starlink can scale dramatically just by launching new satellites. The FCC is keen on stopping that too, refusing to approve all of Starlink’s satellite launch proposals and instead making them slow walk their growth.
In addition to hating Musk, the White House thinks fiber to the home is like rural electrification. Starlink, by providing very much good-enough universal service (though they can scale up to gigabit speeds, it’s just a matter of how many satellites they have), is threatening to undermine political support for spending money on fiber buildouts.
It’s not some crazy conspiracy. This is the whole point of winning elections. The people in charge of tech policy in this admin want universal fiber service. You don’t get tens of billions from Congress every year for that unless there’s public demand for it. Starlink would undermine that demand despite not being good enough to replace universal fiber service, in the eyes of the administration.
Also you’re free to look up how Starlink’s launch proposals have been slow rolled at the FCC. You can also look at the Republican Commissioner’s statements on the revocation of Starlink’s RDOF award.
this excludes a lot of the population outright since they don't have a payment plan for lower income users to afford it.
the FCC's letter says that they determined they could not deploy a system of the size they promised in the timeframe they promised. whether you agree with it or not, that assertion has been correct so far.
And the letter of course says that. That doesn’t mean it’s their real motive or a correct conclusion.
Do you have a source for them burning money at a pace that requires starship in the near future?
Looking in from the outside, their amount of falcon launches don't reflect that.
https://spaceflightnow.com/2023/02/26/spacex-unveils-first-b...
I didn't expect that, since the company makes a lot of money. I guess they also invest a lot.
Anyway, thinks for the info update!
starlink is a project worth billions with years of planning, there's no fake it till you make it in that league
do you seriously think this is something they stumbled onto? they are rising the prices because they can, it's not a non-profit.
even the article mentions that the service is within stated expectations.
Starlink is still not profitable. Musk and Shotwell have hinted at this or directly said it. It requires an immense amount of money to fund the engineering, support, and launches to keep even the current number of subscribers they have.
While Starlink is "successful" by your definition, you have both Oneweb and TeleSat's lightspeed both being relative failures. This isn't because they were worse systems. In fact, Telesat's was supposed to have the best bandwidth economics. But it failed largely because it didn't get the funding SX gets due to Musk, and they realized the economics of a LEO constellation are nearly impossible to sustain.
What you're seeing right now is an ISP that's akin to Uber or Lyft. Are they profitable? No, but they're around and they're big names. Your rides are subsidized from VC money hoping one or the other will lose and the other can raise prices.
Starlink is raising prices because they have to. Not because "they can". They are decreasing prices in unfilled areas just to use the capacity that is otherwise completely stranded. Once those areas fill, wash, rinse, repeat.
The problem with building your company around rural internet is that there just aren’t that many people to spread the cost around, thus whatever the alternative is very expensive.
That’s not true even in California. Plenty of small town where the only alternative is line of sight wireless internet.
My comment was that no matter how many rural customers you get, there just isn't enough people to make the per customer cost cheap, simply because the denominator is so small. Further more, Starlink et al. can never grow the pie (i.e. increase the denominator) because no one in an urban environment wants it.
My god. This isn't even a controversial statement, yet... woosh!
But yeah, I totally agree with your points
There is room in space for near infinite number of Starlink satellites.
I think that's a bit early to tell. If the launch costs + satellite costs don't add up to a very nice profit before the satellite de-orbits then that was a loss. This can look like it is working well until the number of satellites de-orbiting and needing to be replaced becomes larger than your temporary profits after launching the first constellation.
This is why other comms satellite operators chose to play it safe and use geo stationary orbits rather than LEO, those satellites live many times longer and you need far fewer of them. Obviously they are limited in bandwidth and latency but they are ultra reliable.
The business model is strong, especially with V2 on its way
In the same way that finding out about having a terminal illness is good news!
> It's a strong sign that the model fundamentally works and they will be able to fund continuous improvements to meet strong demand.
The main question is: "can it scale to offer decent speeds to more than 10 people, without having to create a dyson sphere in the sky?"
Because it looks like it was yet another elon's scams to raise money with no substance.
This is not a reasonable position.
Congestion seemed like an obvious outcome from the point they announced the idea of internet via satellite ?
Starlink is still magnitudes better than my previous as-expensive point-to-point wifi, which was capped at 10 Mbps at best and was nearly unusable 7-9pm every night.
If you can get something better than Starlink, then you should.
It has been a blessing. It used to be that we had to deal with either cell carrier 4G wifi or wait until the phone company would finally extend service one block away from its current service area.
Even if you had access to either, both solutions were pretty bad. They were so unreliable that some coworking spaces had *three* providers: "broadband", 4G, and old-school satellite.
Starlink arrived last year in earnest and... really life changing. It even dropped the price some months ago. The internet _just works_.
Anything that bypasses local monopolies and government stasis will get my business with true joy.
And as anecdata, my Starlink connection that I've had since the beta days has been more reliable than Comcast or Centurylink that I've had at other places. I haven't even had weather cause an outage that I've noticed. It's at least good enough that most people won't care.
We are the only people who care, and understand why low latency and high speeds are important.
Paperwork isn’t required to launch a rocket, just to not get arrested later when they try to find who did it.
I watched a documentary about the 2008 earthquake in China; one city was completely cut off from the outside world in, and only one person in the whole city had a satellite phone—the mayor.
They are trying to encourage against people using the service in urban congested areas. Starlink, at least right now, is not ideal for urban situations, that's not very surprising, maybe with newer gen sats capacity will raise, but if not, it's not an "unreliable luxury", it's still perfect for rural situations.
Any idea how I apply for this rural pricing?
Fingers crossed something exists for you though.
I was able to get 90$/m using an address North Dakota 58647 but not a random address in the middle of nowhere Wyoming. This leads me to think the user capacity in the 24km cell isn't the only factor as the North Dakota address was certainly less rural than the Wyoming one I picked (and both instantly available).
If I had to guess I'd say you do have to be rural enough your user cell isn't near capacity but not in a region where there are a limited number of ground stations for the satellites to connect back to. For the Navajo region there are no ground stations in NM, one in AZ but in the opposite corner of the state, one in NV, one on the opposite end of UT, and one in the opposite end of CO. For Wyoming the story is almost identical. For ND there are 3 ground stations in the state.
If its the latter, have you tried finding a neighbor or two and paying $60 each or $40 each?
I'm also at about 80% of the usage cap.
You likely could save money by sharing your Starlink with a neighbor and neither of you would have much noticeable impact to bandwidth. Your latency might get slightly worse because of possible “noisy neighbor” but gotta ask if that latency is worth the extra $.
In the worst case, because of buffering, your Netflix video might take an extra 10 seconds to start and then you'd notice no interruptions (unless you're skipping back and forth). But even that worst case would be unlikely to really be an issue.
For example, are you ever interrupted by someone else in your household turning on another TV? It would be similar.
You wouldn't want to share with your neighbor if they are actively abusing this with torrents or some other constant high bandwidth activity, but ideally you'd pick a neighbor you already know well and can trust.
You're probably right though.
Rural areas are the only place there is demand for Starlink. Nobody buys 95% reliable internet in a city that has fiber.
They should have simply released a "premium speed" upgrade for $50, which boosts your speeds and reliability for a while. In congested areas, with heavy use, it might last only a few days. In rural areas it might last months.
Then have a checkbox to auto-renew the premium speed when it runs out.
And say on the purchase page "Given your location and recent usage, we expect the premium speed boost will last about X hours/days/months".
And as the network gets more congested, then speeds drop, and more and more people are pushed to buying the double speed upgrade, and eventually the triple speed upgrade, etc.
This approach is effectively a real time market for bandwidth in disguise.
I mean, this was always going to happen; this will happen with _any_ cellular internet solution (it'll be particularly bad here as the cells are particularly large, but the principle is the same). I'm a little surprised that people seem so surprised by this; I would have thought that the target market for this (rural, no fixed line available, willing and able to pay over $100/month) would have seen it all before with mobile telcos and WISPs.
> For the last two months, I've gone back to T-Mobile Home Internet because I can get T-Mobile for only $50 per month and because speed and reliability are on par with what I'd been getting from Starlink.
Again, fairly unsurprising; if you have terrestrial cellular available to you, all else being equal, it's generally going to be a better option than satellite cellular.
> if you have terrestrial cellular available to you, all else being equal, it's generally going to be a better option than satellite cellular.
Can you elaborate? What is the disadvantage? Why is the performance degradation unsurprising?
Disadvantage of satellite cellular vs terrestrial cellular (ie mobile networks and most WISPs) is largely simply that the satellite cells are generally _enormous_. Starlink cells cover 379km^2. Some very large rural LTE cells may be of similar size, but if they hit capacity it is comparatively simple for the provider to build new towers and make them smaller. Urban LTE/5G cells are _much_ smaller.
Latency is a secondary issue; even low earth orbit satellites can't really compete with the sort of latency that 5G can provide, say.
> Why is the performance degradation unsurprising?
Ultimately, for any cellular service, there's only so much bandwidth available for a cell, and the size of the cell is anything from virtually unchangeable (generally the case for satellite services) to difficult/expensive to change. So, if you're the only user of the cell, you get all the bandwidth (subject to any artificial limits placed by the provider). As more people are added to the cell you're sharing with more and more people, and typically the total achievable bandwidth per cell really isn't that much, so things get worse until the provider is forced to deal with it. For terrestrial cellular they'd normally do this by adding towers or upgrading equipment to increase supply; for satellite their options are much more limited, and they're really mostly looking at increasing cost (thereby destroying demand) and allowing degradation.
As a service becomes more popular more people will sign up.
Since the single cell is shared by more people, the speed will be shared around more, so there is a larger scale for it to degrade and the popularity will ensure this happens.
Terrestrial cellular will have a fibre connected to it, and have a smaller area to cover and coverage is going to have less people, meaning the absolute top degradation will be less.
That seals it. Better to buy HughesNet or similar. It may be slower but at least you can get support.
https://support.starlink.com/create-support-ticket
But don't take my word for it. Or do, because you've clearly settled on a decision without researching the problem.
Local internet options are 5mbit DSL, 10 mbit fixed wireless, or 25 mbit fixed LTE.
If this were a “cottage” in the vacation home sense I’d say “Starlink is generally reliable enough”, but we’ve got two people working from home here.
We’ve got the Starlink as the primary (fast) connection and pay another $60USD/mo for the 25mbit fixed LTE as a backup. Missing a day of work due to an outage would pay for about a year of the LTE connection so it seems like some relatively cheap insurance.
I do end up falling back on it relatively frequently when the Starlink isn’t “out” but the service is degraded enough that things like video calls are have a lot of short (1-2s) stutters or high latency. I could do probably live with it, but it’s there anyway so I use it.
On the other end though, Starlink _also_ saved my ass when the whole region was without power for over a week. Cell tower dropped after about an hour and the LTE went out. Starlink relies on no local infrastructure so got the generator fired up and worked through the entire week without any real issue.
If you’re planning to WFH in the “boonies” you’re basically describing my current setup and it’s been very solid. Can definitely recommend.
For anyone in the rual flatlands of america, look seriously at rural wifi bridges. Basic off-the-shelf wifi can bridge links over miles. All those cellphone towers have fiber lines. Setup a rural wifi collective and tap into that fiber. My parents ditched traditional sats a few years ago when a local company setup a local wifi tower, itself bridged to the nearest cell tower. Now they have faster internet then i do in my non-rural appartment.
https://www.commerce.gov/news/fact-sheets/2021/11/fact-sheet...
And yet, when you try and talk to the ISP about problems with the 2.5-down-.4-up DSL line they provide their literal reply is "You're lucky you have a dialtone."
This is at a location 1.7 miles down the road from a school that has gigabit fiber.
The existing programs are a joke. Nothing short of competition is going to get the ISPs to fix their problems. Centurylink has lost about 7k/month on customers switching to StarLink just on this one road. Maybe someday they'll consider fiber, but until then Starlink is a godsend.
The local power co-op is considering the idea of considering burying the powerlines, so I'm keeping a close eye on that. I wish I could get them interested in the idea of adding fiber internet to their services, but I'm told they can't do it anywhere they have above-ground power because of an agreement stating that CenturyLink gets to be the only ISP on the poles.
Here in the USA, the main reason that doesn't happen is incumbent providers. Whoever owns the poles is very unlikely to grant you access to hang fiber on them. The one exception is public utilities, they are generally required to offer open access, however, there are all kinds of rules about space between existing utilities and new ones. Unfortunately, you don't just have to deal with the local government because of incumbent providers, who are already hanging their wires on the existing utility poles. Phone and cable providers have incentive to make sure that the process is as arduous as possible and they will put up bureaucratic roadblocks and drag their feet at every opportunity.
This is just what I came to understand by spending a lot of time researching what it would take to start a rural ISP. It's a project that I abandoned after Starlink was announced.
Whatever these two companies are doing it, i haven't bothered looking into it since we already have 4-5 options and we're already happy; TDS (fiber), Comcast (fiber), T-mobile 5G, Wow (?), can't remember the last.
Who would have thought they could all flourish even when you give customers options? /s
They don't want to deploy early, because then they wouldn't be eligible for the funding which is supposed to help them deploy.
Notice that just over the canada and mexico borders have good service available today - suggesting bandwidth isn't the constraint.
Is there a resource online where one can find reported up/down speeds by geolocation ?
In fact I think this and similar missions are the true raison d'etre of Starship. Mars colonization isn't going to happen, it's a huge joke. Nobody will have Mars colony infrastructure ready to ship for decades at least, SpaceX is barely even pretending to invest in this. Mars colonization customers just don't exist and couldn't justify the money SpaceX is spending to develop Starship. Therefore, Starship exists to launch massive satellite constellations, particularly Starlink. And it wouldn't exist at all if SpaceX thought they could pull it off with just F9. F9 is a stopgap, to buy them time for Starship's development.
That's quite a bit of rural area, but I wonder if the complaints are really concentrated there.
That's what is frustrating me about T-Mobile 5g home internet. I'm rural, work from home, and maintain 3 ISPs (with the proper load balancing network gear to support all of this) to deal with it. People in town are installing directional antennas, pointing towards my rural tower, and using 5G home internet, affecting my speeds, when they have cable/fiber options in town to choose from.
Also, I mean, sure, I'd love fiber ran out this way. Would you like to run fiber about 12 miles to service less than 50 people, with about 20 offshoots to homes off the main road.. increasing the overall distance and trenching by who-knows-how-far?! It's not exactly a thrilling business plan.
But the header photo shows a starlink device with trees that are clearly within the 25 degrees above the horizon 'must-be-clear' zone.
I suspect OP's reliability issues are self inflicted by not mounting starlink on a post to avoid trees in the signal path...
If you can get those other options, Starlink is not a product designed for you.
Go remote, and Starlink is an absolute game changer without even a remotely close equal.
> This innovation extends mmWave coverage from a few hundred meters to more than 7km
That doesn't seem very impressive... That doesn't even come close to what various long-range WiFi connections have been able to do.
The key difference is the "extended range" part, which is what makes them competitive and in many cases superior in range to proprietary FWA. What standardization adds is inter-operation of equipment.
Also the sats are some of the cheapest, most mass-produced ever, and SpaceX's launch costs are a tiny fraction of anything done previously.
Given what they've achieved so far, I kind of trust SpaceX to have run the numbers on this more than you or I.
I can't be the only one in a situation like mine. Prime candidates for Starlink. The NBN closed quotes for running fibre to my residence. Even if I had the tens-of-thousands to pay for them to run the cable they won't even consider taking my money currently.
it's just another ISP.
Im been watching this as this is a potential issue for my location. So far speeds are OK and usually 30+ and sometimes closer to 200mb down.
[1] Not original to him, but he said it. <https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/08/29/too-crowded/>
This is depressing. I thought Starlink would be at least consistently available in the areas that they are providing service. We don't need another unreliable internet option. Especially if it's also overpriced.
Elon, of course, can't stop there: How do you use the redonkulous payload-to-orbit capacity of Starship? You make satellites 5X larger that are no longer a "bent pipe" architecture and you make a "backbone-in-orbit" with laser links between satellites.
That might make Starlink make financial sense. But it looks like it is years away from being possible. Meanwhile Starlink "1.5" satellites are a PoC of laser links between satellites, but not anywhere near the scale of the big satellites that need Starship.
Personally I'd really love Starlink to provide Internet access to all people in the rural areas but it probably will not going to happen. By their own estimate, they are only currently deploying around 5% to 10% of their 42K projected Starlink satellites for global coverage. I'm not seeing that going to happen for at least another ten years (2033) provided they get the funding they're requesting and it does not seems to be the case [2].
The best alternative for satellite link for rural is the terrestrial based fixed wireless access (FWA). There are mainly 3 segments/types of FWA namely [3]:
1) ‘Wireless Fiber’ (100 – 1K Mbps, cost USD50 – 100)
2) ‘Build with Precision’ (50 – 200 Mbps, cost USD20 – 60)
3) ‘Connect the Unconnected’ (10–100 Mbps, cost USD10 – 20)
This last (3rd segment) is characterized by virtually non-existent fixed broadband alternatives, and mobile broadband using smartphones is the dominant way of accessing the Internet. Average revenue per unit (ARPU) cost are very much limited and user expectations of access speed are relatively low. The irony is that the 3rd segment is the "low hanging fruits" in term of technology while being the hardest to achieve in practice due to the very nature of terrestrial wireless signals. Starlink or any LEO based solution, however attractive, cannot possibly fill this gap due to the high cost involved in the satellite business and its astronomical ROI.
The author of the OP article is from the first (1st) segment of "elite" users and they're very far in between in the grand scale of rural users, i.e. not a typical rural users most probably 5% maximum. It seems to me that Starlink is focusing on this type of "elite" rural to survive and remain profitable not unlike Tesla did with their initial luxury/premium Tesla EV models strategy. But Tesla success is largely hinged and depended on huge (US) govt support for Tesla early days, and Starlink is also counting in the same strategy [4]. However, the latest bidding for govt money for Starlink is not successful and it's evidence from the stalls number of further starlink satellite deployment [5]. Elon Musk has been mentioning on record that one of the first Starlink priorities is not to go bust as what had happenned to its predecessor Motorola's Iridium but the odd seems to be against them at least for now.
I think it's the best for most of the countries that struggling with rural internet access (e.g. all countries US included) is to go for terrestrial fixed wireless access (FWA) for the third (3rd) segment i.e. connecting the unconnected. But if US cannot make satellite based Internet access work what are the chances that other countries might have?
Probably the best solution is to be flexible in tackling the Internet access for the 3rd segment with FWA perhaps similar to approach taken by Magma [5]. It's still early days for the rural areas connectivity but the sooner we can tackle this issues is better, as demonstrated during the height of the pandemic where travels are limited and digital divide phenomenon is at its worst.
[1] Measuring digital development Facts and Figures 2022:
https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/facts-figures-2...
[2] FCC decides against giving Starlink $1b in rural broadband subsidies:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/11/fcc_starlink_rural_in...
[3] Fixed Wireless Access handbook (2023 Edition) by Ericsson:
https://www.ericsson.com/en/fixed-wireless-access
[4] SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network wins $885M in federal aid for rural broadband:
https://www.geekwire.com/2020/spacexs-starlink-satellite-net...
[5] Building Flexible, Low-Cost Wireless Access Networks With Magma (to appear in 20th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation 2023):
Demand skyrockets (heh).
Price increases.
User moans and complains.
Supply will increase.
The per-capita CO2 consumption of people who rely on cars for everything is far higher than for people who can walk places or take public transport, and those environmental costs aren't passed on effectively to consumers.
I guess you have never had the pleasure of paying $5 for a frozen cheeseburger that you had to heat up yourself in a microwave at a filling station in Max, North Dakota! Lots of benefits to rural life, but things being cheep is not usually one of them.
Thanks to the inevitable drop in population upon enacting such a shortsighted policy, it would also fix any admittedly ephemeral concerns you might have about CO2.
You can grow can grow potatoes just about anywhere, so the total distance travelled for that staple absolutely could be reduced in a more carbon-conscious world.
We had a person and his teams literally build re-usable rockets and then blanket the earth in thousands of satellites, largely on private funding. This seemed unconceivable 10 years ago. This of all the people tat said this was ridiculous and bound to fail financially or technologically when announced.
Then a few years later someone is 'my internet in the middle of nowhere is a more expensive, the price changed because its so popular and has dropouts"...like your using internet from a fleet of more satellites put up in a couple of years than humans created in the 50 years before.
I think we need to step back and take perspective on this one. Its freaking incredible we have this services. Its fairly new tech and will probably get better and better over coming decades.
For me, Starlink has been a game changer living in a rural area that still had copper ADSL. Its more expensive and sometimes (not often) has dropouts but I still marvel at what has been achieved.
Less often these days but sometimes I still got to the Starlink maps, spin the globe and feel amazed. Try it: https://satellitemap.space/
So if your in a urban location, its not mean for you, price sux. If you have a cabin in hte middle of nowhere, this seems cheap and amazing to me.
And for speed, tested as typing this, I'm running 210mb down: https://prnt.sc/dXDNiqWQdtaC - I guess benefits of not being overly congested yet
It does for sure and I was debating whether I should comment and say it or not.
> I think we need to step back and take perspective on this one.
Disagree here though. If we were taking account of the global state of things, sure. When OP pays for a service, gets unreliable service, and prices go up, they have a legit reason to complain and not be told to take in the big picture.
—
It might seem like I’m taking both sides, but really I’m not. OP decided to live in the middle of nowhere (I grew up in the same state, so I speak from experience), with that comes tradeoffs. Want fast and reliable internet? Be ready to pay for multiple providers! Yes, $200/month for internet seem high compared to other costs of living in rural Kansas, but it’s the compromise you endure for living so remote but wanting a job that requires you to be connected.