Starlink is now available across the United States | Hacker News Reader

Starlink is now available across the United States

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55 pointszolbrek37 comments

I'm currently living on a sailboat with my wife working remote in the Caribbean. There are 5g sim cards for pretty cheap but I think you know what it would be like to only use that in the states to do your job. Sometimes the networks here go down all day.

Starlink makes this life possible and it's a dream. Also owning a boat is a lot of work so don't just imagine beaches and cocktails 24/7. I love it though.

I'm in the same situation! Not in the Carribean..yet, but traveling around U.S. coast in a trawler with my husband. Never would have been possible without Starlink. I would have had to wait for retirement that probably would never have come.

Agreed that owning a boat is a lot of work! I need to remind friends it's not all relaxing with cocktails!

I’ve been working remotely in wilderness areas of the U.S. in my RV, and it’s been great. I wouldn’t have attempted this without Starlink.

Have been thinking about moving to a more remote location in Colorado as the mountain town I’m currently in is pricing me out.

How reliable is the service?

I've had it for two years, pretty much 100% uptime unless it's updating or there's a storm.

> Sometimes the networks here go down all day.

Which country, or countries, specifically, has or have all-day mobile network outages on a regular basis, in your experience?

It's probably not the entire country, more likely it's the area or the tower he's able to reach. But it would be interesting to know if it's like remote towers on an unpopulated Bahamian island or more major areas.

Not mobile outages, but generally the network gets saturated to the point of being practically unusable.

You can see this effect in basically any island country that does not have access to an undersea cable.

Well, after years on the wait-list, I got ahead of general availability by six weeks. Nice.

And now it'll be oversold, likely.

Edit: I'm still totally thrilled to have it, don't let my crankiness override that. It beats the snot out of DSL, which I was already lucky to have!

Cost?

$150/mo and a one-time hardware cost (Dishy) of $599 for the roam package. I believe the fixed residential (where you're geofenced to a service address, although this may no longer apply) is slightly less per month.

(I have the roam package)

Yeah, mine is $120/mo for fixed

Yikes. I want to give the finger to xfinity/Comcast, but I’m paying $50/month or possibly less.

I would recommend championing municipal or coop fiber for your use case.

It’s not for people that have access to cable internet (or better).

its already oversold in most parts of the US. peak perf is atrocious, with 100ms latency to the gateway.

> Product & Service Overview

> Performance : Includes unlimited high-speed, low-latency internet.

What's high-speed? Would be nice to provide a number

whatever elon says it is. or more accurately its inversely proportional to how oversold the region is. for much of the west coast, its very not good, especially at peak times.

I'm curious what you call not good, though. <20Mbps? <10? Or 70?

Does it still beat a 3 mile DSL run?

I have it at my cabin, and get anywhere between 100-200mb/s down and 10-20mb/s up.

I’m in a discounted area and “only” pay $90 per month, so that probably has something to do with the speeds.

I’m also fairly close to the downlink site - not sure if that has any effect.

There are no other non-satellite options available.

Official numbers are provided here: https://www.starlink.com/legal/documents/DOC-1400-28829-70

YMMV, as I'm sure people are preparing to reply to me.

If you have the option to choose another high speed internet provider (>50Mbps) that isn't Starlink, then Starlink probably isn't the right choice. For people who have no other choice, Starlink is a big improvement over traditional satellite internet.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/american-federal-defin...

25up/3down is the definition of broadband.

Unless it were one of my only options, I would rather not. I know it’s slim i would personally be targeted but after hearing how Elon disrupted service for Ukraine during an operation, I would rather not put my towards someone like that.

He didn’t disrupt the service, according to the head of Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence:

———-

KB: This specific case everybody's referring to, there was a shutdown of the coverage over Crimea, but it wasn't at that specific moment. That shutdown was for a month. There might have been some specific cases I'm not aware of. But I'm totally sure that throughout the whole first period of the war, there was no coverage at all.

TWZ: But did he ever put it on and then shut it off?

KB: There have been no problems since it's been turned on over Crimea.

———-

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/exclusive-interview-wi...

"There was a shutdown of the coverage over Crimea" is the disruption of service. It also sounds like there is a translation barrier, or they are being really careful not to upset elon, lest he shutdown their internet for another month

You can't turn off something that was never on

Where's the bandwidth? Lots of people have peak time issues

Not worth the destruction of the nightsky or the waste of replacing the satellites every <5 years

There are multiple competing flotillas in the works. Ukraine shows this is a strategic military capability, so China and Europe will subsidiZe their own

The ship has sailed.

This is a rwlaly defeatist attitude thats all to common in tech circles. Somehow techies are able to both say 'technology progress is great and needs to be embraced' but when a bad tech or aspect is pointed out they switch to 'its inevitable, the ships already sailed'

Its both not true and shows a deep misunderstanding of technological development

With millions of customers, I wouldn't say the replacement satellites are that bad.

And the sky seems fine?

I think what they're referring to is the global increase in light pollution they cause. This article goes over the consequences for both astronomy and the broader human experience if you're interested.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-023-01904-2

Except parts of West Virginia according to the map. Same area you can't have wifi.

Radio astronomy

Interesting large holes in the coverage map that look to be the Great Lakes and the National Radio Quiet Zone.

really cool, looking forward to where it'll go

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