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Comment by lom | Hacker News Reader

> The Starlink constellation could serve up to 188,160 MB/sec to Earth.

Does that feel very slow to anyone else?

Even more:

> Starlink is the world’s most advanced satellite internet constellation, beaming terabytes per second to the most remote parts of Earth. Made possible by the advent of reusable rocketry, Starlink marks the beginning of a new age of orbital technology.

And 188 Gbit/s is still quite far away from Tbytes/s.

Also the later counters of Tbytes of "bandwidth" per day are somewhat weird measures. Unfortunately way too often people denote the measure of data/time as bandwidth while it is more accurately named throughput. Also as a rate it shouldn't be counting up like that. I suspect it means data transferred today.

Generally speaking I think the website is quite cool, but I wish they'd dial down the fanboyism.

Isn't that 188GB per second - roughly 1.5tbit?

My understanding was the intent is to serve traffic across the mesh and only downlink it at the closest terrestrial point, which should allow for significantly more.

And spread across their 2.6 million customers, it doesn't seem like a lot.

The numbers I find a bit confusing here.

"The Starlink constellation could serve up to 188.160 MB/sec to Earth."

So is that dot a decimal point? I suppose so, because it's used like that in the following numbers

"9,373,421.84 gigabytes total bandwidth to Earth so far today"

But isnt the 188 MB/sec the bandwith and the 9 million gigabytes the transferred amount of data? How can that amount go up way faster than 188 MB / sec?

I'm confused.

The maps nice though.

Depends on where you live.

So 100Mbps for ~16k people. Barely useful. I can only ever see it being useful for real rural people, who don't get any 4G signal, but these people might also not want to pay the crazy subscription fees or $500+ for the equipment.

I don't see any reason why anyone living in or <100km near a city would ever want this. 5G mobile can already provide 500Mbps and fiber is just unbeatable. At least the night sky was ruined for a billionaire's useless constellation.

Nobody uses 100Mbps continuously. Not even close. Would probably average about 0.5% of that capacity. 16000/0.005 = 3.2 million customers. That's quite close to the 2.6 million they have on the page.

> Nobody uses 100Mbps continuously

Only because nobody can sensibility obtain 100Mbps as a connection. I'm still stuck on 2Mb ADSL.

Where games are now 30-60GB in download, family streaming is a thing. This would be topped pretty easily.

100/1024*86400/8 = 1054 GB every day

You'd have to download 17 of those games every day to saturate your 100 Mbps connection.

It's about 350 hours of Netflix streaming per day.

The "crazy subscription fees" are about $40 more than the $80/month I pay for pretty modest Internet. Not everyone has great cellular service. I barely get it 50 miles west of Boston--presumably because I live at the base of a hill between myself and the tower. I routinely lose cell entirely when I take the train in through some of the highest-end suburbs in the area.

Starlink really is a game-changer for people who don't have other good Internet options. And there are a lot of them even if they don't live on a montaintop in Wyoming someplace. Can everyone in rural locations afford broadband at all? No. But Starlink is actually pretty competitive with equivalent broadband offerings.

I am a long way from being a Musk fanboy but Starlink is genuinely extremely useful for a lot of people.

I agree - for a while it was my only option, and I would have paid 10X what they charged to have it. Now I have other options (FTTH), but was quite happy with Starlink while I had it installed.

>>I don't see any reason why anyone living in or <100km near a city would ever want this

Do you think being within 100km of a city guarantees good service? I used to live literally right on the outskirts of a major British city, the best internet I could get was 10mbps ADSL, not because there was nothing better in the area but because the local exchange was oversubscribed and no one could connect us with no estimate of when a space might free up. Also mobile signal was really crappy because it was in a valley.

But even ignoring that weird edge case - plenty of small villages around here where internet is really poor and there are no 5G masts anywhere nearby. A friend of mine has starlink because the only other option was 36mbps through BT, even though he lives few miles out of a city.

>>. At least the night sky was ruined for a billionaire's useless constellation.

On that we 10000% agree.

Forget rural areas and small villages...

I live in Los Angeles (the city, not the county), directly in between Century City and UCLA - https://maps.app.goo.gl/vUetG5fBjaiCkfXm8.

When we moved into our house in 2020, the best wired internet we could get was 12mbit/sec ADSL. There were no 5G providers. It took months to get one cable ISP to pull wire to enable us to get >100mbit/sec downstream, but it's still limited to 20mbit/sec upstream.

Currently there is fiber internet from AT&T that comes within 200 meters of our house, but they have no announced plans come to our block.

My reading is that's current throughput, not possible throughput.

Also, 100mbps internet is not achievable via normal means for most of the worlds population. Your view appears fairly narrow.

>I don't see any reason why anyone living in or <100km near a city would ever want this.

Because not every country has widespread consumer-grade 5G and fiber-optic infrastructure set up? I swear some of you here live in a bubble and don't consider that there's an entire world much bigger than just your <insert place of residence>.

I live in that kind of a country in the Balkan, and the overwhelming majority of people here get way less than 100mbs download speed in their homes, no matter how much they're willing to pay for better internet, because at the end of the day, there is no infrastructure, and the monopoly (*technically* a duopoly) of isps don't see any reason whatsoever to broaden their infrastructure

Exactly, I am a happy starlink user, I live in a rural area around 70km from a nearest city and only options here are crappy 4G which can do 20 mbps on a good day and starlink which gives me up to 200 mbps download speeds. I highly doubt there will be faster 5G/whateverG here anytime in the future since the population in this area is so low and declining so starlink is pretty much only option here.

I have Starlink. I'm 12km away from a town that has cable internet, but the only wired connection I can get is dial-up (fibre should be available in about 2 years: https://www.ontario.ca/page/ontario-connects-making-high-spe...).

Previously I subscribed to a local ISP that only supported 5mb/s, then one of the large Telcos (Bell) offered a 4G wireless internet, but it only had 100GB cap. With the overage charges I incurred the cost was greater than Starlink and then they oversold the service so it was nearly unusable from the time the kids got home from school until about 9pm.

Starlink has been rock solid for me, it's been well worth the money.

Same, we went from long-range WiFi that cost us over $250/month and dropped out constantly to rock-solid 50Mbps for $120. Starlink gets slower during Netflix hours but never slow enough you can't run a few simultaneous video streams.

I went to https://www.starlink.com/map to see coverage you can see that dark areas marked by political boundaries, not physical: Venezuela, Cuba, China, Russia, Makes you think.

Venezuela and Iran have service

Starlink was never meant for the urban masses. Its usecase (from the start) was for people in rural areas where low or no speed options are available. This is perfect for people like my parents living at the top of a mountain in rural SC. They just managed to get a cellular signal a few years ago. And their only choice of internet was dialup or DirectTV (HughesNet? -- slow, high latency and expensive).

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