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I took down my Starlink dish (but haven't cancelled)

jeffgeerling.com

131–140 of 258 posts

Re: I took down my Starlink dish (but haven't cancelled)

#131

Starlink is definitely demonstrating that there is demand and a willingness to pay. Part of me wonders if it will suffer the same fate as Iridium - terrestrial service came in and took the market away. Especially if the rollout continues to be so slow.

Well if that happens that's great.

I think there will always be some sort of market for it if they can get ships/planes onboarded.

Re: I took down my Starlink dish (but haven't cancelled)

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, reminds me of the tiny 3G picostations you could get from your mobile operator for a while when 3G was in its infancy - if you said you had really poor signal at your home, they would send you a small 3G station you could use in your home and which used your own internet for data and calls....but the hardware had a GPS built in to make sure it was never moved from the address it was assigned to(otherwise you coul…

I only ever heard the term Femtocell for this. Also, wouldn't an IP check suffice? Are you sure it had GPS?

My static IP geolocates to a town 50 miles away. So unless it's some list that has good accuracy i wouldn't think so.

Re: I took down my Starlink dish (but haven't cancelled)

#133

“Then there are other people reading who think he's the commensurate con-man” Does anyone actually think this about Elon? Think what you will about the guy’s persona, but it seems undeniable that he is doing big things in the world (and outside of it).

OT: does this use of "commensurate" make sense, or did the author mean "consummate"?

commensurate: corresponding in size or degree; in proportion.

consummate: showing a high degree of skill and flair; complete or perfect.

Re: I took down my Starlink dish (but haven't cancelled)

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point of satellite internet if you can't move the dish around? That would seem to be one of the USPs...

Due to the design of satellite based internet they are fundamentally limited on how many dishes they can support in a certain area while still achieving advertised bandwidth rates. There is a very, very high probability that if they allowed people to move starlink transceivers/dishes around that a number of areas would end up with higher concentrations than wanted, and starlink would have a lot of angry customers.

I can just imagine what Burning Man would look like under a sea of Starlink dishes and still no one can get bandwidth.

Re: I took down my Starlink dish (but haven't cancelled)

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest gripe is the fact I can't transfer it to my cousin, who lives on a farm with 300 Kbps DSL, 70 miles away. Back when preorders started, it wasn't obvious how slow Starlink would be to expand, and it also wasn't obvious transfers wouldn't be a supported feature for many months. Even so, my cousin also signed up in hopes to get Starlink, and 11 months later her date was moved from 'late 2021' to 'late 2022'.…

Early adopters have early adopter problems. Are you genuinely surprised Starlink doesn't support something they didn't claim to support and that most users don't even need? Complaining about "beta" labels, which everyone knows are meaningless? FYI: I unsubscribed because of this video (previous to it showing up on HN). It's obviously disingenuous clickbait. Look at the title alone. And it even goes into a pointless d…

I don't interpret it as complaining or disingenuous. It feels like he's sharing his experience and says a lot of positive things about it. But it just turns out it can't do what he intentionally bought it for.

I was genuinely informed by the experience.

Re: I took down my Starlink dish (but haven't cancelled)

#137
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hype a couple of years ago was at a fever pitch. Starlink was going to replace all forms of internet with space-ey goodness. Millions of people getting 100mbps for $50/m on cable who just didn't like the cable company's call center reps were clamoring for Elon to save them from their predicament. I was working in the ISP space, and we did some rough back of the envelope calculations which showed that Starlink cou…

I don't think the general hype was that Starlink would replace existing ISPs everywhere. It was always understood that this product was for rural/remote areas that don't have direct lines for internet connection.

Well, at least in my case there was some hope that it would set a floor for internet service in larger towns where the local cable/telco monopoly just milks the customers for $100+ a month for really subpar internet service (I pay about that for 20Mbit upload from the cable co, the DSL provider can barely do 2 up 40 mbits down for roughly the same price). Where as a couple miles away the DSL provider strung fiber to compete with google and the price is less than they would charge me for said crummy internet.

The joke here is that the lucky few percent of people who can get fiber here have two choices, but the rest of us are stuck in the 1990s. And this is a dense area, far more dense than 100 miles W of here in the little towns of population 1k that can also get fiber from their local telco co-op.

Re: I took down my Starlink dish (but haven't cancelled)

#138
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hype a couple of years ago was at a fever pitch. Starlink was going to replace all forms of internet with space-ey goodness. Millions of people getting 100mbps for $50/m on cable who just didn't like the cable company's call center reps were clamoring for Elon to save them from their predicament. I was working in the ISP space, and we did some rough back of the envelope calculations which showed that Starlink cou…

I don't think the general hype was that Starlink would replace existing ISPs everywhere. It was always understood that this product was for rural/remote areas that don't have direct lines for internet connection.

That was totally the hype. I had multiple friends, living in SF, telling me how they'll finally ditch Comcast and use Starlink. I also had other friends telling me how SpaceX is going to bankrupt all ISPs in the world, and they'll make trillions of dollars in revenue. And even here, in comments to this very article, you can still find people waiting for Starlink, to lower down their internet cost, while they live in suburbs of big metropolitan areas.

Anything that's coming from Musk has a huge hype, for better or worse.

Re: I took down my Starlink dish (but haven't cancelled)

#139

I don't understand why cable connections are so bad when there is DOCSIS 3.1. Is it that the cable provider just has such a limited link on their end that people are getting speeds sub 100mbit? Are they vastly over provisioning their networks?

In my case, Spectrum has decided that they want a flashy "gigabit tier", so they provision everything as download bandwidth (940 Mbps), and then only assign 35 Mbps upload. I'd pay extra for business class service, but it doesn't even help, it's the same speed just with some more guarantees and a stable IP.

Starlink does much the same, no? The median Starlink upload appears to be 14Mbit/sec, per Ookla/Speedtest.

Re: I took down my Starlink dish (but haven't cancelled)

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you already have internet, then Starlink is not for you. We bought a property in a very rural area in mid 2020. One of the hard requirements was verified high speed Internet access. Our home has good performing Comcast. But I also pay $100/month and have a Dishy on my roof. Fortunately our home is very tall and we're able to get about 95% visibility, since our home is in the middle of a forest. Why am I paying a…

It would be no surprise to hear, I think, that a lot of us on this forum are well off 'tech persons'. Internet scores higher than running water for me on prioritization, but I still couldn't bear to waste the resources to have a sat uplink for the 1-2 days a year comcast goes down. Taking a slot from somebody that actually needs it feels off to me too. It would only likely be worth it if your particular area has abno…

All fair points, thank you. And congrats on your property!

The comcast outages are far above anything that's 'normal'. And honestly if it was just me, as a decades long 'devops' person, losing network connectivity briefly every few days and for tens of minutes or longer multiple times a month would not be too bad. But my wife does zoom/video professionally all day every day with paying clients, so when comcast goes to crap it's very important for her to be able to reconnect over starlink ASAP.

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