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Comment by evil-olive | Hacker News Reader

Deadhorse is remote geographically, but it's the hub of oil operations for the entire North Slope, so there's demand for corporate connectivity and not just personal cell phones. there's been a fiber line out to it since 2017 [0].

the remote areas with less connectivity are probably places without deep-pocketed corporate customers that would justify the expense of running fiber. I suspect large swaths of the Alaskan interior fall under that description.

0: https://alaskapublic.org/2017/12/05/new-fiber-optic-cable-sy...

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Yeah, it's not a great argument to cherry pick a place that has 4G and then remark at the fact that it has 4G. The point isn't that given one specific remote settlement you selected on the map it would be extremely difficult to deliver 4G connectivity to that settlement. The point is that there are a ton of remote settlements and it would be extremely difficult to deliver 4G connectivity to all of them.

It used to be that microwave links were the alternative for such places. Not sure what's up with that these days.

Microwave and narrow focused point to point wifi is still definitely a thing in remote areas. Although with Starlink becoming very popular I wonder how long until new deployments decline.

If latency or guaranteed bandwidth matters, microwave will be better than Starlink. Of course, often neither matters in ultra remote areas.

Starlink is LEO, it doesn't have the latency issues of old-style satellite internet (indeed it can theoretically be faster than anything ground-based as soon as you're going further than ~700km).

Nobody said anything about the latency issues of GEO stationary satellites. Starlink very much has real latency differences and potential bandwidth capacity limitations vs a dedicated point to point microwave link as previously stated.

Starlink has to travel minimum of 550km twice + distance from ground station to destination server. For remote locations, you generally also have an additional satellite to satellite relay distance as well. So realistically say 1500km minimum, likely way higher. Speed of light time on that distance is ~5ms, and that doesn’t account for latency losses at each hop and also remember that’s one way time.

There’s a reason microwave is still used, even sometimes over fiber, where latency matters.

> Speed of light time on that distance is ~5ms, and that doesn’t account for latency losses at each hop and also remember that’s one way time.

So it's about +10ms to your ping for nearby destinations, less (and potentially even faster) for more distant destinations. That's really not enough to worry about in most contexts; even for FPS gaming, unless you're a pro 10ms isn't a huge difference maker.

> There’s a reason microwave is still used, even sometimes over fiber, where latency matters.

Only for HFT as far as I know; latency mattering that much is a tiny niche.

> Only for HFT as far as I know; latency mattering that much is a tiny niche.

You obviously live in a tech bubble. Remote industrial machine control definitely has concerns around guaranteed latency.

If your concern is guaranteed latency you'll choose a consistent +10ms rather than a link that goes down whenever it rains. I very much doubt there are any cases for remote industrial machine control where microwaves are the better option.

> rather than a link that goes down whenever it rains.

Oh, so you are finally conceding that Starlink doesn’t fit every use case? Because Starlink definitely goes down during a storm occasionally but a dedicated microwave link with high gain parabolic dishes won’t in the same conditions.

> I very much doubt there are any cases for remote industrial machine control where microwaves are the better option.

Oil and gas industry would beg to differ.

Does Starlink service cover as far north as upper Canada or Alaska yet?

Yes, Starlink satellites have inter-satellite laser links that can provide connectivity even if there's no base station nearby. These have been active since November 2022 [1]. They were supposed to expand coverage to most of the Arctic in early 2023 [2], which indeed seems to have happened [3].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/yllqk6/space_lase... [2] https://www.highnorthnews.com/en/elon-musks-starlink-expands... [3] https://www.starlink.com/map

Huh, neat. I think the last time I checked the coverage extent didn't go terribly far north of the US/Canada border.

Am I misremembering? I thought Starlink coverage started up north and then creeped downwards as they deployed more satellites.

The opposite. They started with low latitudes, up to London. The initial target market was big spenders, and there are progressively fewer of those north of London. Starlink in the high north remains hit or miss, particularly in mountains.

Having just visited a few National Parks there were many cell towers with modern LTE cell radios connected to an old and badly under-provisioned microwave link. In busy parks like Yellowstone the cell service was effectively unusable. The background traffic from the phones in people's pockets (checking email, checking for updates, downloading map tiles or getting directions, etc...) was enough to bring the entire system to its knees.

I was thinking that they were way overdue to replace those microwave dishes with a Starlink terminal.

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