It was covered recently on Linus Techtips:
Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders
61–70 of 541 posts
Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders
#62I'm currently in the middle of trying to help loads of human rights defenders in Myanmar plan to deal with the internet shut downs that are happening. Satellite stuff like Iridium is too crazily expensive to be useful. I really wish some thing like this was available.
How can someone help you out with this? I think this is really important work.
Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders
#63I was able to place an actual order just last week in St. Louis, MO. I will be using it and doing some tests in an area that actually has cable Internet (though spotty, and until very recently was limited to less than 20 Mbps up, no matter how much you paid). But you have to realize, when you look at the $600 initial cost and $100 monthly fee—this will bring 100+ Mbps down and 15+ Mbps up to so many places (even in s…
UH??? Serious Question: So are the early adopters subsidizing the masses down the line? i.e. so at $100/mo + $600 start-up/set-up fee -- thats for early adopters ... so the "african farmer who can pay And the encryption policy? The Privacy policy? The data-mining-of-location-history policy? Yeah, it's a Nope from me dawg... And I folow Elon closely, and I like a lot of what he says and stands for - but he is at the b…
> So are the early adopters subsidizing the masses down the line?
"Subsidizing"? No, they're paying for a service. It may or may not get cheaper over time... but that's rather irrelevant. SpaceX isn't a charity, they are in this to make money. It's also not like SpaceX is making a ton of money off of the early adopters. The satellite dish almost certainly costs the vast majority of those 600 dollars to produce, and the $100/mo service fees from the small set of early adopters aren't going to pay for the satellites and launches any time soon.
> the encryption policy
They don't prevent you from encrypting your traffic... just like any other ISP. What more do you want?
I don't know if they further encrypt traffic inside their network, but I rather assume not because that would be rather pointless. The traffic you send out should be considered more or less public because the internet will send it to malicious third parties regardless of what SpaceX does to it, see all the BGP highjacking attacks that have taken place for instance. SpaceX is obviously unable to encrypt things once they're out of their network into the internet at large... that's just not how the internet works.
> The Privacy policy
Is quite good for an ISP really https://www.starlink.com/legal/privacy-policy
Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders
#64I have been using a starlink beta terminal for 3 months now, ask me whatever you want. Day job is senior network engineer for a regional-sized (4 US states) fiber based ISP. My most important message to everyone reading this is that it's not intended to compete with properly implemented wireline based services. It's going to absolutely blow away consumer-grade highly oversubscribed, bottom of the barrel ku and ka ban…
One of the big issues I’ve had with anything but wired ISPs is latency. They specifically talk about 20-40ms latency being expected in most locations, but don’t specify to where. I currently get about 20 +/- 4 ms from me to 8.8.8.8 consistently. Is their latency to my first hop? Also, what is their IPv6 support like? Can I get a routable /60 or similar? Static IPv4/IPv6? And do you need to use their router or can you…
a. absolute lowest latency I've seen to a major IX point in seattle is about 15.8ms. More often it's 22-23ms. On a longer term, averages between 20-30ms. That's for the combined total of four 550km paths through space plus terrestrial latency from their earth station to seattle.
Keep in mind that on something like a DOCSIS3 cable coax last mile segment can have a minimum latency of 12-16ms from just the cablemodem to the local CMTS in the neighborhood, so that's actually really good. It's not as good as fiber but it's significantly better than many other options. One has to account for the need for the antenna/modem to modulate and apply FEC on the Tx at both my CPE antenna and the spacex earth station on the other end (at least a few ms).
b. no ipv6 yet. They have people who know what they are doing for neteng so I am sure it is planned.
c. all IPs are in cgnat IP space right now. Nobody is getting a discrete dhcp-assigned public ipv4 /32 yet. You can hook up whatever router you want, anything you plug into the PoE injector that is an ordinary 1000BaseT 1500 mtu DHCP client will be given an address. The router they hand out is a very bare bones 802.11ac 2x2 MIMO thing that is based on openwrt.
restrictions, you can't move it from your designated service location. That's part of the beta TOS.
Using it, it is a real 150 Mbps down x 16.5 Mbps up. I have put non technical guest users on it doing various things and from their perspective it cannot be distinguished from the separate terrestrial connection at the same location.
Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders
#65I am not sure if this is wishful thinking but can Starlink lead to growth of smaller communities that are self-sustaining (produce their own renewable electricity, food, etc) that cannot simply exist due to connectivity constraints? I have a dream of the world where we live in 1-10k population small towns littered around the globe, connected through starlink and public ways, and the idea of cities would become obsole…
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Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
The incredible thing is that despite not having to compete with wired connections, it is almost competitive with them. They likely have to price it a bit above wired connections just to keep load manageable in dense areas, but it puts an upper bound on how badly monopolist incumbents can treat their customers. While I don't think it will actually replace cable/fiber, I think it will drive prices down and service qual…
What is the latency? I find there is a material difference in my internet experience with 5ms fiber connection vs 100ms+ cable connection. I imagine it’s worse for satellite links due to the limitations of physics.
20 ms was cited elsewhere in the thread. Unlike older satellite Internet solutions that use geostationary satellites (~36000 km altitude), this uses satellites in low earth orbit (~550 km altitude, with additional, slightly lower and higher levels planned).
Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders
#67I am not sure if this is wishful thinking but can Starlink lead to growth of smaller communities that are self-sustaining (produce their own renewable electricity, food, etc) that cannot simply exist due to connectivity constraints? I have a dream of the world where we live in 1-10k population small towns littered around the globe, connected through starlink and public ways, and the idea of cities would become obsole…
A fiber and 4G/5G station won't work for such scale community?
Correct. These places aren’t getting fiber or strong 4G/5G connections. Have you visited rural towns?
Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders
#68I have been using a starlink beta terminal for 3 months now, ask me whatever you want. Day job is senior network engineer for a regional-sized (4 US states) fiber based ISP. My most important message to everyone reading this is that it's not intended to compete with properly implemented wireline based services. It's going to absolutely blow away consumer-grade highly oversubscribed, bottom of the barrel ku and ka ban…
What is the term of the contract? I have a family cabin in an area that is not served by cable, it's not a place I am going to spend 12 months or whatever and at $100/mo I am probably not going to pay for 12 months out of the goodness of my heart. But I would love the ability to go up for a couple weeks or a month and just work from up there. Could I sign up month by month, or for say a quarter at a time?
Or I guess more generally, as an existing user of the service who is seeing dashboards I'm not seeing, how do you think this would play out for "occasional" users.
Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the big issues I’ve had with anything but wired ISPs is latency. They specifically talk about 20-40ms latency being expected in most locations, but don’t specify to where. I currently get about 20 +/- 4 ms from me to 8.8.8.8 consistently. Is their latency to my first hop? Also, what is their IPv6 support like? Can I get a routable /60 or similar? Static IPv4/IPv6? And do you need to use their router or can you…
a. absolute lowest latency I've seen to a major IX point in seattle is about 15.8ms. More often it's 22-23ms. On a longer term, averages between 20-30ms. That's for the combined total of four 550km paths through space plus terrestrial latency from their earth station to seattle. Keep in mind that on something like a DOCSIS3 cable coax last mile segment can have a minimum latency of 12-16ms from just the cablemodem to…
> b. no ipv6 yet. They have people who know what they are doing for neteng so I am sure it is planned.
heh, my assumption when I hear that people who know what they're doing are involved is the opposite ;)
Thank you for the detailed report! I'm very excited for the tech, especially once the lasers are up and it doesn't rely on the base station (i.e. I can take my uplink on a road trip)
Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders
#70I have been using a starlink beta terminal for 3 months now, ask me whatever you want. Day job is senior network engineer for a regional-sized (4 US states) fiber based ISP. My most important message to everyone reading this is that it's not intended to compete with properly implemented wireline based services. It's going to absolutely blow away consumer-grade highly oversubscribed, bottom of the barrel ku and ka ban…
What is the term of the contract? I have a family cabin in an area that is not served by cable, it's not a place I am going to spend 12 months or whatever and at $100/mo I am probably not going to pay for 12 months out of the goodness of my heart. But I would love the ability to go up for a couple weeks or a month and just work from up there. Could I sign up month by month, or for say a quarter at a time? Or I guess…
there is no contract for the beta, it's month to month, you can cancel whenever you want. unknown what they will do in the longer term.
there is no seasonal 'pause' service plan offered yet.