91–100 of 340 posts
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Wouldn’t it be cheaper and more cost effective to cover those areas by 4G mobile phone network?
Have you tried using 4G as your only connection? Even carriers that provide “unlimited” transfer typically throttle your connection after a certain amount of usage.
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> Latency in this case is dominated by time-of-flight to the satellite. Is it though? Starlink orbits at 550 km, time-of-flight from ground to satellite to ground would be only 3.7ms, twice that makes ~20% of the roundtrip latency.
550km is the closest approach. Usually it will be at least sqrt(2) times that (ie at least a slant angle of 45 degrees), maybe 2 times that. Plus the latency from the Gateway to the actual server. And the Gateways can have even greater slant angle to the satellite than the mobile terminals.
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That this works on most of the planet. If you can get fibre or good DSL for a reasonable price, take that. But even in the US large parts don't have fibre available, especially in rural locations. Many countries don't have any networking infrastructure. It will be a total game changer once mobile versions (airplanes, ships, yachts) become available.
The question is: will this stall development of more scalable fibre optic infrastructure and municipal fiber - to support a proprietary single corporation solution?
Starlink is not designed to compete with fiber or copper in areas where you have a high density of internet users over a significant area.
It is for less dense areas, or those few people in areas otherwise well served by fiber or copper that have a house that ended up in a gap between infrastructure build outs.
I'm using Starlink right now. AMA. I'm in East Idaho. Currently my dish angles itself to the north. It rarely moves itself north/south, and slightly moves east/west throughout the day. I've read that right now it locks onto a single satellite, although they're adding multi-satellite support later. My speeds are inconsistent, and interestingly they start slow (around 60 Mbps) but after a couple seconds they'll get to…
I'm using Starlink right now. AMA. I'm in East Idaho. Currently my dish angles itself to the north. It rarely moves itself north/south, and slightly moves east/west throughout the day. I've read that right now it locks onto a single satellite, although they're adding multi-satellite support later. My speeds are inconsistent, and interestingly they start slow (around 60 Mbps) but after a couple seconds they'll get to…
Is the upload/download speed the same? Does your public IP frequently change?
EDIT: Ah -- CGNAT. Missed that part.
> It's powered through PoE++ (using around 100W of power continuously) Not familiar with Sat gear, but this number seems extremely high to me for just powering an antenna (and some motors occasionally)
Other users have measured power consumption around 100W constant in operation. https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/l22f1u/power_cons... Power consumption could probably be a bit lower, but there are limits. Keep in mind that this is a phased array maintaining a relatively high bandwidth and high SNR link with the satellite. This is complicated microwave electronics design, a whole different ball game than old…
Is it transmitting anything to the satellite when you are not actually trying to send internet data?
The cell grouping is interesting. A colleague likes the outdoors, so he's preordered one for his Suzuki Jimny, to mount on it. I wonder if Starlink are considering this use case. I haven't been able to preorder mine, because we're planning on moving out from the city to a small village next year, but the Starlink website requires a street address. Our villages are quite primitive, no street names (I think it's cos no…
Part of the issue is that Starlink cells are going to be very limited in capacity for the foreseeable future: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2020/09/analyst-probes.... Cowen suggests that Starlink "should eventually be able to serve 485,000 simultaneous data streams in the USA with 100Mbps speeds or 1.5 million streams with over-subscription." That's in late 2026 or 2027 when Starlink has deployed around 12,000 satellites (they're at about 10% of that now). If a bunch of people decide to bring Starlinks to a popular area, the cell for that are simply won't have the bandwidth to support all those users. Imagine people going to Burning Man with lots of Starlinks or bringing their Starlink when they go on vacation. It's not meant to be a portable WiFi hotspot. I'm guessing that portable use might cost more since Starlink has to assume that you might be taking up capacity in places where bandwidth is more scarce.
In terms of preordering, you can order without a street address. Starlink's website says, "Can't find your address? Try a Plus Code with City" (and links to https://support.google.com/maps/answer/7047426?co=GENIE.Plat...).
One thing I would also point out about Starlink is that they only guarantee that you'll be able to use the $500 dish (plus $50 shipping) for 12 months before being forced to replace it. Starlink is new tech and I'm guessing SpaceX wants to be able to upgrade things without maintaining support for less-efficient, older equipment. I don't expect them to force upgrades on people on a whim, but they do spell out that the $500 dish might not be allowed on their network a year after your purchase. I don't think they want to make customers unhappy, but I think they want to make sure they can upgrade their network without getting sued for not supporting expensive customer-purchased equipment forever.
The prices aren’t competitive for metros.. what am I missing?
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Can you compare with T-Mobile’s 5G home Internet plan? Similar numbers advertised, $60 a month, no caps.
I can't because the nearest city to me with 5G is several hours away. The 4G at my house is super spotty. I've used it for Webex calls when my home internet went down and it will mostly handle that, but I would never want to rely on it for my primary connection.
Aside: The router design is as impractical as it is futuristic. The thing would fall over if you looked at it sideways, and the solitary LED on the front was hard to see unless in a dark room or looking closely, straight at it. Hopefully a 2nd iteration will be better! Wow, he's right about the shape of the router. It also looks like it forces the ethernet cable in front if you want to be able to see the LED, and the…