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

Setting up Starlink

jeffgeerling.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 340 posts

Re: Setting up Starlink

#321

Post by tekknik »

skissane wrote: post #293
mvanbaak wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTTH with asynchronous speeds? Thats bullshit. The only reason for that is that they use cable or dsl somewhere in the path from you into their core network

I take it you mean asymmetric speeds. It is done for market segmentation purposes, not because there is a technical requirement for it. Asymmetric vs symmetric is used to separate residential from business customers, and charge the later category higher prices. If they offer symmetric speeds to home users, they worry that business customers will try to switch to residential plans in order to save money.

> If they offer symmetric speeds to home users, they worry that business customers will try to switch to residential plans in order to save money.

If their key differentiator between the two connection types are upload speeds then they should adjust the pricing and/or clarify (or actually add some) the value add for the business line. That is just unfortunate

Re: Setting up Starlink

#322

Post by ytjohn »

walrus01 wrote: post #284
ytjohn wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but the Protectli is just hardware and you install your own OS. So it is running your own computer with "scripting and such", just a separate low-power, small footprint computer with dual NICs. This is good for managing network for your entire house/office/remote site. I've got some PC-based firewalls like the Protecli. Mini-ITX, atom-based, 8gb ram. I can often find these for I recently setup 3 of these for…

> VyOS is debian arm based not to quibble too much but I think the bulk of vyos development takes place on x86-64 and the standard build-your-own-install ISO guide is for x86-64. Though it certainly can be compiled for various types of arm CPU. this is because if you want things like eight or ten 10GbE interfaces, or eight 10GbE and four 100GbE in one server, the only economically viable and fully stable platform for…

Right you are. In fact, I was thinking of the EdgeOS on EdgeRouter, and I was wrong there as well, since that is actually mips64.

https://www.debian.org/ports/mips/

Re: Setting up Starlink

#323

Post by shaklee3 »

walrus01 wrote: post #316
shaklee3 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hughes and viasat idle at about 30W and peak at 70W. Both are capable of 100/15 speeds.

but in real world use, often much, much less. The average screenshot of speed tests I see from unhappy viasat and hughesnet customer is like 2 to 5 Mbps down and 0.9 Mbps up. Maybe at 0300 in the morning. What I was referring to is the class of VSAT equipment much more costly than a proprietary viasat or hughesnet terminal, which the ordinary consumer will never see, that's capable of doing a dedicated 100/15.

Fair enough, and you seem reasonable based on all your comments. Why is anyone giving any credence to the starlink speed tests? They are maybe 5% of the target user base they'll need to be profitable with this number of satellites, yet again and again, nobody mentions that. The funny thing is that everyone dismisses the common outages as a beta issue, but the speed and latency are never considered a beta feature.

Re: Setting up Starlink

#324

Post by Jedd »

daveevad wrote: post #235
yhager wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you been using ssh at all? How's that experience? That's my main use case. How about video/audio calls? does Wi-Fi calling work well?

Not OP but I've setup a continuous reverse SSH from a farm in the South to a Comcast residential service in the Bay area. SSH works but there's enough latency and other general network variation that makes me think it's not quite good enough an experience to spend a day remotely editting files. For anything not requiring really low-latency, Starlink absolutely shines. Watching the local news from my childhood farm on…

Ahh, kids of today.

I'm on traditional satellite for one week out of every two - at 600ms RTT. I'm either SSH'ing into hosts over that link, or worse, using a Citrix VDI to access (mostly) SSH terminals at the far end.

It's tolerable but far from enjoyable.

30ms latency would be an utter delight, not just compared to geostationary, but also compared to what we had in the late 20th century in terms of terrestrial connections.

Re: Setting up Starlink

#325

Post by Jedd »

parsimo2010 wrote: post #47
poisonborz wrote: post #31

> 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…

Are you in the UK? (Wondering where pennys are still in common usage.)

Here in Australia, for 100W / hour I'm going to be paying ~ A$250 / year to keep it powered. That's about 160 euro, or 200 usd.

Re: Setting up Starlink

#326

Post by 0x426577617265 »

freedomben wrote: post #117
0x426577617265 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use pfsense with the Protectli -- what exactly are you doing with CentOS just manually configuring as a FW for your LAN? Is the upload/download speed the same? Does your public IP frequently change? EDIT: Ah -- CGNAT. Missed that part.

Yep, I just enable IPv4 packet forwarding and use firewalld to manage ports. I use dnsmasq to provide DHCP and DNS services. Here are my config files if you're interested. I've redacted my domain and some of the mac addresses. One of these is a shell script that sets up the firewall: https://gist.github.com/FreedomBen/f8a50c7a98c07171a99c419a5...

Thanks for taking the time to post the files. I actually learned a few things and like the setup. Might give it a shot. I haven’t been happy lately with the business behind pfsense, this might push me to configure my own.

Re: Setting up Starlink

#327

Post by freedomben »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #166
freedomben wrote: post #73

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…

Besides Starlink, I'm curious to hear more about your Protectli. Why do you like it so much? What can it do, that you can't do on your own computer with some scripting and such?

Sorry I missed this question earlier!

I love that it runs vanilla Linux/BSDs and is a complete white box. I'm able to configure it exactly the way I want it, and I can even run non-trivial services on it. These days I mostly just port forward as I like to keep things as separate as possible so that when one thing goes down I don't lose everything, but it's great to have options.

Especially while I've got two ISPs, the ability to bond and use both at the same time is super neat.

These have not been prettied up for public consumption, but this is how I have it configured if you're interested: https://gist.github.com/FreedomBen/f8a50c7a98c07171a99c419a5...

Re: Setting up Starlink

#328

Post by snurfer »

walrus01 wrote: post #252
snurfer wrote: post #41

Our Starlink connection (backup WAN) recently switched from a New York ip to one near Chicago. I think we've switched to a downlink station that is geographically closer and we're getting better pings and, possibly, better throughout (needs more testing). The service is expensive, but it's been a fun way to "participate" with all the exciting stuff SpaceX is working on.

for a very brief period of time my starlink connection was exiting the cgnat to the internet in chicago (the first hop that was a public IP was 1-2ms from various ISPs' looking glasses in chicago), and the latency matched for return trip to LEO/back, down to earth station in the pacific northwest, and then transport circuit to chicago and back. Then after a couple of days it went back to Seattle.

Is your impression that the service is improving?

[We are South of the 45th parallel, by the way.] I think service is improving for us; we don't get the regular 5-10 second disconnects that were occurring every 10 or 15 minutes. According to fast.com, our loaded and unloaded latency has improved. Most media consumption (web pages, video, etc) compares favorably to a terrestrial service.

However, Xbox Live (the limit of our online gaming) is still inconsistent. We get disconnected from game servers and from Live itself pretty regularly.

Re: Setting up Starlink

#329

Post by eigenschwarz »

pugworthy wrote: post #315
eigenschwarz wrote: post #193

I have Starlink and am in a wooded part of New England. I mostly agree with freedomben's points. All I will add is I still use my cell phone hotspot (Verizon -- only carrier that gets a modicum of service where I am) for Zoom calls or similar. Starlink is definitely fast but too many hiccups for video calls. Edit: More musings. There is a push to get broadband in our area within the year. If that happens and Starlink…

"Rural" and East Coast is basically the metropolis some other areas of the world. Not surprising you'll have something better than Starlink sooner or later. Lots of other places? Not gonna happen.

I never claimed I was in a "rural" area, just a "wooded" one. Indeed, Starlink will be a great option for many places. I personally hope they improve the coverage with more satellites so I can continue using it.

Re: Setting up Starlink

#330

Post by yosito »

coder543 wrote: post #234
yosito wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Probably because a plus code is harder for someone to screw up Probably because a plus code is harder for someone to use with non-Google services and open source map tools

It's open source... anyone can encode and decode plus codes: https://github.com/google/open-location-code

TIL!
Post reply on HN