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Comment by kamranjon | Hacker News Reader

I am traveling in Europe currently and got a Saily SIM card - 5g coverage is really good and seems to be expanding fast - a small village I visited 2 years ago that had no cell coverage at all I was getting 250mbps download, faster than than the wired internet at most of the places I was visiting. This prompted me to actually look into Starlink speeds and apparently 5g is generally faster than Starlink...

This made me wonder if Starlink is a much more niche product than I thought - I actually thought it was significantly faster than cell data - but it seems it's just for folks in super remote areas at this point?

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Remote areas of USA (and other third world countries when it comes to the communication infrastructure) + companies that operate in remote areas (logistic, resource extraction, etc) + military are main customer base.

There are plenty of super remote areas in Europe as well. Even more in the US, where population is more clustered to population centers

But the big selling points of Starlink are either as a backup connection (which the consumer plan actively enables: in months where you use less than 10GB you pay $10/month) or as a connection for ships and airplanes

Theoretical max speed of 4G/5G are like 5Gbps down/1Gbps up, without going into mmWave. Actual link speeds of Starlink terminals don't seem to be published in the open, but it's at least throttled to up to 310Mbps down/44Mbps up for Priority plans. Looks like it's supposed to reach 1Gbps down with V3 sats, but then again, cellular is like up to 5Gbps yesterday, at least in the spec.

It's just that Starlink being a new thing and with zero users tended to be less congested, hence it tended to do better in somewhat of an unfair comparison in a remote cabin side by side against an LTE equipment. It was NEVER faster in theory compared to terrestrial cellular.

> Actual link speeds of Starlink terminals don't seem to be published in the open, but it's at least throttled to up to 310Mbps down/44Mbps up for Priority plans.

I had it last year in the Canary Islands (where I assume subscription is way below max capacity - no priority plan) before my current provider placed fiber, and I was getting up to 430Mbps down/100Mbps up with a consistent no-bufferbloat ~70ms ping, which is really not bad.

I guess in populated areas it can only reduce in speed as subscriptions increase, but in sparsely populated ones where fiber is not an option and 5G is crappy and priced similarly to Starlink, it's a valid alternative with no contenders for now. Not to mention that the ISP infrastructure it relies on does not depend on ground infrastructure, so if you're off-grid, you also don't depend on cabling/5G towers/etc for internet access.

Just look at the price and you see it’s for those without other alternatives

Presumably local telecoms would be able to sell it for cheaper? "travel esim" providers like saily are basically paying roaming rates for whatever carrier the customer is physically in, it's definitely not the cheapest price available.

> but it seems it's just for folks in super remote areas at this point?

TBF that's like 70% of the US, large parts of the Southern Hemisphere in general, much of China, India, Russia, etc.

But yes, StarLink is best when it has some user density but not too much user density. It will be this way until... probably forever.

If I go camping? StarLink. Otherwise no cell/internet service.

70% seems a little extreme? Here is a helpful mobile coverage map: https://www.fcc.gov/BroadbandData/MobileMaps/mobile-map

A few years ago I actually traveled all around the US and worked remotely with a 4g unlimited data sim card and was pretty amazed at the coverage, only very few places was I left without coverage. I'm guessing it's even better now?

You should spend more time out west or midwest in places like: Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma, Washington, North Dakota, or head up to Alaska, etc.

There are a lot of places in and around the Appalachian and Blue Ridge mountains that have no service.

Note: I know a lot of rural ISPs serving these markets, or that have been trying to for decades - I know precisely when StarLink will work like crap or be great for the customer (given options at all).

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