Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Starlink Is a Big Deal

sneak.berlin

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 365 posts

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#71

Post by Jamwinner »

grahamburger wrote: post #21
Barrin92 wrote: post #10

> "Hundreds of cities and dozens of countries, fine for living but previously entirely unsuitable for a place of business, will blink from red to green on the map once Starlink goes live." this reads like a marketing piece rather than actual analysis. Throughput of a single satellite is 20Gbps. The finished constellation if I recall correctly is supposed to be about 12k satellites. So about ~250.000Gbps. So assuming…

That's true for dedicated circuits but no residential or even small business Internet plans are dedicated. You can put at least 200 customers on a 1 gigabit connection and they'll still get 100 Mbps+ speedtests even during peak usage times of the day.

My ISP seems to share your optimism, but I fear it must be grossly overprovisioned, or they have no intention of providing the agreed upon and advertised speeds.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#72

Post by headcanon »

pwinnski wrote: post #4

I am skeptical of anything like 600Mbps being offered to anyone at anything like an affordable price, but overall, sure, globally-available internet seems like a good thing. Too bad we have to give up the night sky for it, though.

I don't think we give up the night sky for this. naked-eye observers will never notice except close to sunrise and sunset, and even if astronomers are complaining about it now, there are solutions for their issues, either in image processing or with better scheduling (scheduling is straightforward if you have tracking data, so I imagine they're doing both already to some extent). Also, better heavy-lift capabilities will likely make space telescopes easier to manufacture and deploy.

We're going to have a lot of satellites and even space stations (hopefully) in our future, its just the way it is.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#73

Post by Jamwinner »

buboard wrote: post #57

Yet people flock to cities en masse and in acceleration. The most technically educated/capable flock to even fewer cities, even where connectivity is terrible. Centralization of technology is a reality and what could be more centralizing than a single-interest entity controlling the global satellite network. Starlink is surely a big deal, but of limited applicability.

Odd, most of the smartest tech people I know fled the cities years ago. The city is where you go when you arent the brightest, because all the easy jobs are there.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#74

Post by grahamburger »

Jamwinner wrote: post #71
grahamburger wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true for dedicated circuits but no residential or even small business Internet plans are dedicated. You can put at least 200 customers on a 1 gigabit connection and they'll still get 100 Mbps+ speedtests even during peak usage times of the day.

My ISP seems to share your optimism, but I fear it must be grossly overprovisioned, or they have no intention of providing the agreed upon and advertised speeds.

Probably they're overselling at a much worse ratio than I described, or there are other problems in their infrastructure causing poor performance (likely both). It's not at all uncommon for ISPs to put even like 10,000 customers on a 10gbps line. 10 years ago that actually would have been fine, but bandwidth usage per customer has increased since then and naturally ISPs don't upgrade fast enough.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#76

Post by sneak »

Barrin92 wrote: post #10

> "Hundreds of cities and dozens of countries, fine for living but previously entirely unsuitable for a place of business, will blink from red to green on the map once Starlink goes live." this reads like a marketing piece rather than actual analysis. Throughput of a single satellite is 20Gbps. The finished constellation if I recall correctly is supposed to be about 12k satellites. So about ~250.000Gbps. So assuming…

Do you think California would be prosperous without connectivity?

It’s not 100% of it, but it is absolutely an essential prerequisite. Slow or no internet makes places a nonstarter. Having a fallback option to a single national telco lets lots of places start the long process of building an information economy that they cannot begin at all without it.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#77

Post by twunde »

Barrin92 wrote: post #10

> "Hundreds of cities and dozens of countries, fine for living but previously entirely unsuitable for a place of business, will blink from red to green on the map once Starlink goes live." this reads like a marketing piece rather than actual analysis. Throughput of a single satellite is 20Gbps. The finished constellation if I recall correctly is supposed to be about 12k satellites. So about ~250.000Gbps. So assuming…

Regarding the social impact, while likely overstated it has the possibility of making a real impact. Rural communities in upstate NY (Catskills, Adirondacks) have had their tourist season drop to ~6 weeks in the summer, basically because people can't take so much time off while being out of contact (there is limited internet and cell phone service. Not having either is the norm). Being able to work remotely from those types of locations will extend that tourist season and help the local economies there. For some areas, this may be enough to move the economy from depressed to prosperous.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#78

Post by partiallypro »

I am actually pretty excited for it. My parents don't have access to high speed internet (that is reliable) outside of 4G (which is either very expensive or has tight data caps,) so finally they might be able to get themselves Netflix, etc.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#79

Post by fragmede »

Barrin92 wrote: post #10

> "Hundreds of cities and dozens of countries, fine for living but previously entirely unsuitable for a place of business, will blink from red to green on the map once Starlink goes live." this reads like a marketing piece rather than actual analysis. Throughput of a single satellite is 20Gbps. The finished constellation if I recall correctly is supposed to be about 12k satellites. So about ~250.000Gbps. So assuming…

There are scant details about what the launched product will look like in practice, but keep in mind that urban and suburban areas are spoiled by high-speed 4G LTE and wired gigabit. The vast majority of the US, by land area, has to chose from dial-up and very expensive pre-Starlink satelite Internet service. Even 1 Mbit is a huge improvement over 56 kbps.

I'm haven't looked into the economics of running fiber everywhere, as compared to launching an extensive constellation of satellites but I will note that SpaceX has the competitive advantage of having at-cost access to reusable rockets, compared to an outside party paying SpaceX market rates for transit to space.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#80

Post by swiley »

fragmede wrote: post #79
Barrin92 wrote: post #10

> "Hundreds of cities and dozens of countries, fine for living but previously entirely unsuitable for a place of business, will blink from red to green on the map once Starlink goes live." this reads like a marketing piece rather than actual analysis. Throughput of a single satellite is 20Gbps. The finished constellation if I recall correctly is supposed to be about 12k satellites. So about ~250.000Gbps. So assuming…

There are scant details about what the launched product will look like in practice, but keep in mind that urban and suburban areas are spoiled by high-speed 4G LTE and wired gigabit. The vast majority of the US, by land area, has to chose from dial-up and very expensive pre-Starlink satelite Internet service. Even 1 Mbit is a huge improvement over 56 kbps. I'm haven't looked into the economics of running fiber everyw…

The pre-starlink stuff isn’t just expensive. It’s slow, has crazy high latency, and low transfer caps (the biggest you can get for geosynchronous might be 20GB a month no matter how much you want to pay.)

Really anything is better than what’s currently available in the rural US. Having grown up there I’m kind of mad that we give so much spectrum to cell companies who block people from setting up terrestrial radio networks in places like this.

Post reply on HN