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

jeffgeerling.com

171–180 of 258 posts

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

#171

I get it. If you already have internet, then Starlink is not for you. There are lots of questionable design choices (particularly in version 2), it's picky about placement, etc. etc. But if your other choice is HughesNet or its competitors, that throttles you after 15 GB (2 days of non-streaming usage for me), or 50 GB, the Starlink "shortcomings" are irrelevant. With Starlink, if you can get it, and if you can site…

> 15 GB (2 days of non-streaming usage for me) This sounds exceptionally high. What do you do that uses so much?

There are a lot of data guzzlers in a modern household... seriously, the proliferation of high-speed broadband internet has had massive consequences for everyone not enjoying that luxury.

The worst offenders are social networks like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, especially if you have video auto play enabled. Because almost everyone has an ultra-high-DPI screen these days, they expect high video and image quality, and that's a lot of data.

Next up are media sites: auto-playing videos again, followed by "normal" advertising and actual content. Just for popular papers and media: A single (!) page load of the front page of Germany's respected newspaper Süddeutsche clocks in at 7.7 MB, Spiegel has 6.6 MB, tabloid BILD has 10 MB. US NYT is 9 MB, Fox News is 6MB, CNBC 8.7 MB. Even relatively plain Stackoverflow's front page clocks in at 2 MB.

And then, there are all the updaters (looking at you, Windows Update), the other phone-home telemetry and analytics stuff, even more ads side-loaded by modern "smart TVs"...

Where the fuck have we gone wrong? Is there any chance to get "the old" Internet back without putting everyone in advertising in jail for a decade?

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

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I am a very happy Starlink customer that has no other option for internet besides terrible LTE. Starlink never originally advertised the ability to transfer service or even sell your hardware. It was very clear from the beginning you had to use it for the address you provided, and their communication was very clear to that effect. You are definitely correct that logically you should be able to sell your k…

>(Elon has said you’ll eventually be able to use it on an RV) Mobile antennas will also require separate FCC approval.

That just seems crazy. Why?

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

#173
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar situation but I switched to T-Mobile. I have a Starlink order but it got delayed 6 months. At this point, I'll just cancel it because T-Mobile Home Internet is a game changer.

I thought about switching to one of those mobile internet providers, but it wasn’t available in my area, which I don’t quite understand. My providers network is certainly available, as I use it on my phone daily. Maybe it’s using some different band?

My location “didn’t have coverage” as I live at the edge of my town followed by Murdoch’s ranch next to me. I talked to the rep to the point of just let me try it as there’s nothing to lose. They already provide full refund on the product for the first 30 days. At the beginning the signal and speeds were shit(using trashcan). I installed a couple of MIMO antennas. Now, I have 30Mbs up/down consistently. I believe 5G is gonna be a game changer for rural areas. It’s just easy: plug it, turn it on, use it. No technicians, no wiring (if you don’t use antennas), no fixed place in your house.

Also check cellmapper to check for near by antennas and bands. More info in r/tmobileisp

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

#174
post #127
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starlink is a game changer if you don't have decent wired broadband. We had about 1 Mbps download and were the last house on the road who could get it. Then we didn't even have that. Verizon hotspot was "ok" but data was expensive so you had to watch your usage. Starlink isn't perfect--had a couple of days downtime over Christmas--but basically it works fine with 20+ Mbps bandwidth. With the prior DSL, I couldn't hav…

For those of us outside US, how far from the urban area you have to be to not have good LTE and/or fiber internet? (Also, does Amazon deliver in those places?)

It's hard to answer something like this. Even for Europe, it's hard to answer something like this. There's a big difference between Inverness in Scotland (47,000 people in the city and 63,000 in the urban area) and London. Are you measuring from the city center or from where things drop off to farmland?

In Europe, cities often drop off into farmland very abruptly. You have built-up areas and then very abruptly farmland. In the US, you can have suburbs where there's 1 house on an acre (4,000 square meters) going for a long time. Even 1 house every 2-4 acres (8,000-12,000 square meters) isn't unusual.

If you look at a satellite map between cities in the Netherlands, you can see that there isn't any sprawling houses between Rotterdam and Utrecht. Places like Oudewater exists, but it's dense. It might not be as dense as larger cities, but people don't have enormous plots of land. You can easily walk to neighbors and shops. In the US, a lot of people live in areas where it can be 5 miles to get to shops.

In the US, people often have the issue that the wired internet doesn't go up their street which might be a couple miles with only a handful of houses. In the US, they might face costs getting it from the street to their house because their house is set back a hundred meters from the road. This isn't super typical, but it's typical enough that it effects a lot of people.

I think part of the issue is that there is no real demarcation between the urban area and outside it in the US. I can look at a satellite view of a city in Europe and clearly discern city vs farmland. In the US, a lot of rich people left the city for suburbs where they could set land use policies that kept lower income people (and often minorities they didn't want around) out of their town (and out of their schools and out of their tax base). They still wanted to be able to commute into the city, but often passed laws mandating minimum lot sizes, minimum setbacks from the street for houses, and emphasized local control to prevent housing they deemed undesirable from being made. These places have fine wired internet.

But they kinda slowly melt into progressively more rural places rather than having a clear demarcation. The US's emphasis on cars and a certain cultural idealism around rural life means that there are people that want to live semi-rural while not really having a rural lifestyle or job. They just drive farther and cheap fuel and subsidies make that possible.

The lack of coherent land use policies means that the area where people consider themselves as part of an urban area can keep expanding. Maybe a developer wants to build new housing. The city and suburbs don't want more housing and so the developer picks a piece of land just past the last suburb. It's another 15 minutes from the city by car, but with skyrocketing housing prices, there are probably going to be some people who think it's a reasonable trade-off. What's the difference between an hour commute and an hour and 15 minute commute? Why shouldn't I trade 10 hours of my life every month for a larger house?

A lot of European countries have greenbelts around their cities where you aren't allowed to do a lot of development. It prevents things like the US suburbs which initially were thought of as 5-10 miles outside the city and now often go all the way to the next city creating a giant area that people commute from.

But these suburbs aren't the problem. The thing is that the suburbs then meld into really rural areas - but those really rural areas aren't that far from the suburbs that rich people live in and commute to the city from and those suburbs have big-box stores like Walmart and Target and they have high speed internet. If you live in a rural area that's 5 miles from such a suburb, you think "I'm not in the middle of nowhere! I'm just 5 miles from this place that has a Walmart and high speed internet and a supermarket!" If you're 5 miles outside a city in Europe, you're in farmland - but very often the houses all seem to be on one main road even through that farmland rather than up winding roads that lead nowhere (other than a few people's houses).

In the US, because there's this gradual drop-off in density, there can be this "why not just a little more" mentality. "Why not just a little farther out to get a tiny bit more land? It's working for the suburb next door that's just a tiny bit denser."

And a lot of Americans want to live in a rural area with acres of land, but in a commuting way. US policy often supports this choice - fuel prices, road subsidies, same-price delivery by the postal service, and billions spent trying to give them modern communications choices. That last one is key for this. The US is offering billions for rural internet and Starlink is going after that money.

Starlink is partly happening because the US government put a large amount of money available to anyone creating rural broadband options. The US Postal Service makes sure that rural areas can still get their deliveries.

I think "how far outside the urban area" is a hard question to answer because it's hard to answer where the urban area is in the US. The issue is that there's a lot of people that live in pretty rural areas in the US. Amazon and other deliveries are available. LTE and often even 5G is available, though often not with enough bandwidth at the moment to supply home internet (though companies are looking to change that). A lot of places with low density have fine wired internet. But when there isn't a clear demarcation of urban vs rural, there's still going to be a place where certain things stop, but people are going to wonder about the cut-off: I'm just outside the place that has broadband and it's only 15% less dense here.

I think that's the big thing. You might be 50 or 100 miles outside the city, but the gradual reduction in density while still being surrounded by non-farmers can make you feel like you're still a part of non-rural life while your neighbors and shops get farther and farther apart. Good wired home internet usually extends well away from cities in terms of miles (though often with annoying monopolies), but people really spread themselves out in the US.

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

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No post body was provided.

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

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dish won't work since it knows where it is via GPS and where it is supposed to be. There is a little bit of tolerance in where the dish can be moved, but certainly not 70 miles of leeway.

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…

> hardware had a GPS built in to make sure it was never moved from the address it was assigned to

There are also 911 implications.

https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.nena.org/resource/collection/1F053...

If you move it, and call 911 - how does the carrier determine the address where the call originated?

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

#177
Regarding the number of proposed starlink satellites:

The constellation is proposed to be approximately 10,000 satellites.

I wondered how this compares to the number of US commercial flights per year. The FAA claims it handles 45,000 flights per day [1]. If we assume each aircraft has 5 flights per day and spends half it's time on the ground, then we might guess there are approximately 4,500 aircraft flying above the USA at any given instant.

The USA is only a portion of the globe, let's say it's 1/50 of the global surface area, and let's assume starlink satellites are distributed evenly across the sky. From this we can guess, there will be approximately 200 starlink satellites above the CONUS at any instant.

So the starlink constellation will be about 5% of the problem that commercial air traffic is.

[1] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/by_the_numbers/

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

#178

I get it. If you already have internet, then Starlink is not for you. There are lots of questionable design choices (particularly in version 2), it's picky about placement, etc. etc. But if your other choice is HughesNet or its competitors, that throttles you after 15 GB (2 days of non-streaming usage for me), or 50 GB, the Starlink "shortcomings" are irrelevant. With Starlink, if you can get it, and if you can site…

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'.…

You should have done more research before signing up imo.

I have synchronous gigabit wireless internet from Sail Internet. It has pretty much all the same issues you mentioned about Starlink except the last one, but I'm not making a video to complain about it.

Engineering involves trade-offs, and it's just a reality.

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

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> so when comcast goes to crap it's very important for her to be able to reconnect over starlink ASAP

Have you looked at something like Firewalla and multi-wan setup? https://help.firewalla.com/hc/en-us/articles/360051575473-Fi...

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

#180
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But they have no satellite coverage in that area according to their own map. There is nowhere in the lower 48 where starlink has no satellite coverage, I believe there are still areas where they have not built out ground stations though, and since most of the satellites don't have laser links to talk to other satellites (due to issues with their original lasers not fully burning up on re-entry - now fixed) they nee…

You're just arguing nuance & semantics. For an ISP that uses satellites, ground stations are equivalent to satellite coverage. It doesn't matter how many satellites they have, if there isn't a ground station to connect to you don't have coverage. Inter-satellite links also don't do anything useful if you don't have enough ground stations. Even if you had a ground station with infinite bandwidth there is no way a sing…

> This is completely different than something like a military communications satellite where both ends of the connection are communicating through the same satellite.

Tell us you know nothing about military satcom without telling us you know nothing about military satcom.

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