Starlink imposes $100 "congestion charge" on new users in parts of US | Hacker News Reader

Starlink imposes $100 "congestion charge" on new users in parts of US

arstechnica.com

20 pointselorant14 comments

If it's congested, then that's an indication that place needs Wired Broadband internet, preferably FTTH fibre but FTTN copper at the minimum.

FCC can use this as a gauge to force internet providers to offer services in these locations as part of their license, isntead of the current method which uses census blocks, iirc.

They need to consider SLA’s when looking at broadband.

We just got FTTH on our block, but, in 2022, the phone company’s DSL offering only achieved 1 nine for the only people I know that used it (and they switched to starlink). The current marketing materials claim three nines (SLO, not SLA), which is pretty poor.

At this point we’re all waiting a few years to see if the offering is reliable.

By comparison, in Starlink’s worst year, we got 5 nines at our place.

So, we’re happily paying 7x more for 1/10th the bandwidth than the fiber network advertises.

I suspect many places where it is congested already has , and this is designed to make starlink less appealing to customers that have a wired alternative.

From what I understand, if one person in a Census block has Fibre, FCC considers they all have fiber. (please correct me if i am wrong, but that's what I understand from various articles on this topic)

So if a census block is a dozen houses big, there could be 1 house just on the edge of a previous run, which has fiber, but 11 houses down the street where the Comcast or whichever has no interest in digging/trenching for whatever reason and thus they are stuck in dial-up land.

(From the articles, it seemed this wasn't a fake scenario but common place)

They all buy starlink and create a congestion, but they have no real alternative.

11 houses doesn’t make starlink congestion.

Im sure there’s good Starlink use cases in narrow circumstances (only alternative being HughesNet with massive latency and < 30 megabits down, Ukraine, apparently cruise ships) but the more I read about Starlink pricing and constraints (like the predictable latency spikes) I genuinely wonder who it’s for.

Like a fifth of the country is considered rural. That’s not very narrow circumstances.

I don’t think my options are particularly unusual… my options for broadband are 5/0.3Mbps DSL, 25/5Mbps LTE with a punishing bandwidth cap, or 25/1Mbps satellite internet with a 350GB cap.

Friend on Frontier had a 5Mbps plan on a node so oversubscribed that in almost a decade he only saw it get past 1Mbps once… at 3AM one night. The state attorney got involved.

For a modern house where we might want to do something crazy like watch TV while someone’s working none of these will really get us there.

With Starlink I usually get ~150/30Mbps and no caps.

And this isn't "remote Yukon wilderness" or something. I'm right in the middle of three of the largest cities in the country... an hour away from two of them, four from the third. I can get to like 6 different Costcos and three Ikeas within an hour's drive.

There's people who'd want it at $25,000 per dish and $10,000 per month.

All the people who waited for months to get one show there's a market

You forget all the traditional users of satellite Internet. Islands, Planes, Antarctica, regular ships, rockets, drones etc.

Right now it's priced cheap enough for some GA uses.

It’s for the hundreds of millions of people around the world who have no wired option.

It’s a game changer in remote Australia, Yukon and Alaska, etc etc

I live in central Los Angeles and use Starlink as a failover to my cable internet. Sometimes there are outages and Starlink takes over. I've also tested Verizon 5G home internet but Starlink was faster and more affordable.

Starlink at $90 a month was cheaper than Verizon 5G? What was the pricing on that?

I'm using it as a failover so on the Roam plan which gives 50 GB/mo for $50/mo. Verizon was $60/mo.

Imagine being remote in the world during your wondering:)

A map would be really useful

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