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

jeffgeerling.com

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

#191
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…

What about a small coop ISP? If you manage to use electric or telephone posts deploying fiber and getting a carrier is doable, at least here in Spain.

Some towns in the US have done this, but it isn't without difficulties.

Just looking at a satellite map of Spain, I see La Langa. It seems like it has very few people, but they all live in a small town center. Looking at Uclés, it's the same: tiny place, but everyone is living in the town center.

Let's look at Potomac, MD in the US. The roads are sprawling with giant houses all far apart. That's a lot more distance to run fiber to get it to each house. Potomac is a rich suburb of DC and has fine internet (it's still dense enough for that), but the US keeps sprawling. Look at a satellite view of Pike Township, PA. There's a lot of houses with huge distances in between and no discernible town center.

> If you manage to use electric or telephone posts deploying fiber and getting a carrier is doable

I think this can also be an issue in the US since place might not have easy/cheap access to those utility poles. Title II carriers in the US get cheap, regulated access to utility poles. That's traditionally been your phone company. I believe the FCC tried reclassifying broadband as Title II under the Obama administration, but it might have been reversed under the Trump administration. If you're someone that already has access to the utility poles, you don't want more people getting cheap access to them.

Even if you have access to the utility poles, you can face difficulty. As noted, you aren't wiring up a town center, you can be wiring up places with a huge amount of distance between people. Even if that isn't a problem, property owners might want new cables buried. Even when power lines are above ground, sometimes they're underground from the street to the house. Many houses might be set back from the street by 50 meters so it can be a larger distance. You can have a 300m road with 3 houses on it each with a 50m set back from the street.

That's not to say it isn't possible (and some towns have created coop ISPs), but costs add up. Uclés has 140 people in it, but everyone seems to live within a 250m radius of the city center. That seems pretty easy to wire up. Pike Township, PA has 1,700 people that are incredibly spread out. That seems a lot harder to wire up. It's not impossible, but it seems harder.

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

#192
post #70
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, it's very "SEE THIS INSANE DESIGN FLAW IN STARLINK"-esque. And the design flaw is "They elected to use weather-proof proprietary connectors, instead of letting me crimp my own CAT6

Starlink is not the first device to use CAT6 outdoors. There are plenty of existing RJ45 options.

But there are no 100W ones.

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

#193

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…

ATT's product along this line was a complete failure for me. I didn't have a street address at the fixed (albeit remote) location, and there were no street addresses I could pretend to have within its tolerable radius. They had no way of enabling the device without it being near a street address.

The technology would have worked just fine, they just couldn't fill in their E911 entry with anything that would work.

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

#194

>> These connectors are dumb, and I can't think of a good reason they exist. There are ways SpaceX could improve networking hardware, but proprietary non-standard connectors ain't one of 'em. Did he ever think they might be weather proof? Looks like some rubber seals on those connectors. You know, since the dish is outdoors and has to deal with rain, sleet, or snow. I certainly wouldn't put a standard RJ45 on it. I'd…

[deleted]

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

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well given that I worked on military comms for over a year I'd say I'm pretty knowlegeable.

Let's see, this system predates even my birth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_Satellite_Communications...

It's still in use as recently as 2009, by pirates however. Newer systems include some form of conditional access to prevent anyone with the gear from using them.

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

#196
post #10

$240 per month for internet, wow. I didn't realise things were that expensive for people living in remote areas. I'm currently paying ~$40 (converted from EUR) per month for a 100Mb/s fiber connection.

https://broadbandnow.com/national-broadband-map is informative.

Select max speed and then go zoom in somewhere rural and see "1Mbps to 25Mbps" and then switch over to min price or provider counts...

There aren't a lot of options in rural areas and running wire to the spot is expensive.

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

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Even though Musk was saying that it's not really meant for cities and wouldn't be a serious competitor there?

"the SpaceX CEO argued that Starlink won't be a major threat to telcos because the satellite service won't be good enough for high-population areas and will mostly be used by rural customers without access to fast broadband."

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-...

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

#198
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Thanks for the link! I have considered such technologies, and I'll probably end up implementing one at some point. It's on my TODO list. (:

My wife reports that she's able to switch WIFI from Comcast to Starlink in a matter of seconds, which doesn't actually break the video chat session. Not ideal, but not terrible.

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

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(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?

The FCCs primary concern is devices not interfering with each other. Part of that is cutting up areas geographically and by spectrum, so you know that the 100MHz FM station in one area won't over lap with another's and both can transmit. My guess would be that mobile transmitters are required to fill out paperwork about how they won't interfere anywhere in the US. I could be wrong though.

"Requires separate approvals" does not always mean that approval is hard to get. It might require a version of the dish that doesn't do something v1 or v1 and v2 current do however.

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

#200
post #88

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…

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…

"Incremental" is not the right word when you go from 700ms latency down to 30ms
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