101–110 of 348 posts
I have Starlink in an Airbnb in Puerto Escondido, Mexico. It has been a blessing. It used to be that we had to deal with either cell carrier 4G wifi or wait until the phone company would finally extend service one block away from its current service area. Even if you had access to either, both solutions were pretty bad. They were so unreliable that some coworking spaces had *three* providers: "broadband", 4G, and old…
So Starlink has been so effective and so popular that — utterly unsurprisingly — it is becoming more congested and they're raising rates. This is good news and not bad. It's a strong sign that the model fundamentally works and they will be able to fund continuous improvements to meet strong demand.
Here in Japan, Starlink price is continuously down (now $50) because only richer techy people (of course they have fiber and live in metropolis) buy it and they don't use much. FTTH coverage is really comprehensive even in very rural area, so there are very few residential practical use case. It would be excellent for camping. It seems that it practically priced.
I'm not sure starlink has a future in this kind of environment outside of niche applications.
Their business model is difficult in my opinion, they both need a lot of customers from rich countries to recoup the costs but in the same time, the vast majority of those rich countries are well equipped already (or about to) since having a decent internet coverage is critical for their economies.
Demand skyrockets (heh).
Price increases.
User moans and complains.
Supply will increase.
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If the area is that congested, it's probably in need of wired connections. All the customers suddenly leaving might push ISPs to upgrade their offerings in these areas rather than seeing the customers as a captive audience.
I'd love to believe that, but having seen my parents own street overlooked by cable providers for two decades despite the fact that it's no longer rural and surrounded by tens of thousands of suburban households that have mowed down all the orange groves and cow pastures, they still do not have cable internet as an option in 2023.
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Well, why would anyone in an urban area need something Starlink, when there are already plenty of cheap and reliable alternatives, including alternatives at higher bandwidths? The problem with building your company around rural internet is that there just aren’t that many people to spread the cost around, thus whatever the alternative is very expensive.
> when there are already plenty of cheap and reliable alternatives, including alternatives at higher bandwidths That’s not true even in California. Plenty of small town where the only alternative is line of sight wireless internet.
All these talks about Starlink -> Remember it's a bandaid solution to your governments poor planning and infrastructure rollout of a core utility / service. I say this as an Australian who watched one government plan a national rollout of fibre while another came in justifying most people don't need a connection better than 25/5 (based on usage data at the time) and went ahead and gutted the project. We're now trying…
Like the other poster I agree it's a band-aid. I agree it's not the world's best connection (there is considerable latency sometimes). I agree I shouldn't have to be paying Elon Musk 140 bucks a months to get a decent connection but ... I am, because that's all I can get here.
We're just outside Perth, less than a k from a new(ish) suburb development and our only NBN option is "Fixed Wireless", which guarantees 25Mbit at least once in a given 24 hour period. WTF! There was one non-NBN wireless option which according to all reviews actually managed to be worse, and 5G here is bad, plus Telstra won't (yet?) sell us a 5G 'home' connection. AFAICT my options are starlink or paying $22k to get a fibre put in.
So far it works well for us here, regularly exceeding 200Mbps, fingers crossed our cell isn't going to become oversubscribed anytime soon. I also hope that they spin up a Perth exit node, because AFAICT our traffic pops out in Sydney at the moment, adding to the latency.
But really I hope the government gets its act together and sorts out the NBN for more people. Tony Abbott has a lot to answer for.
(I understand from what I've read that the problems with starlink in the US are a lot less of an issue here, because the populations are an order of magnitude different...)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, why would anyone in an urban area need something Starlink, when there are already plenty of cheap and reliable alternatives, including alternatives at higher bandwidths? The problem with building your company around rural internet is that there just aren’t that many people to spread the cost around, thus whatever the alternative is very expensive.
According to the article, the system is alreay overloaded in rural Kansas.
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> Do cheap launches help when spectral bandwidth over an area is going to be the true limitation? Spectral bandwidth doesn't matter so much with beamforming with reasonably narrow beams. At least not until you get to a lot of satellites overhead at once. Dishy probably obtains a beam ~3 degrees wide; there's a lot of 3x3 degree sectors in the sky. Similarly, the ground "cells" are 300 sq km; there's a lot of these in…
well 3 degrees wide means at best ~28 square degrees on the sky (pi * 3 * 3). But the problem is the other way. It looks like Starlink has 7 GHz total downlink bandwidth from satellite to customers. A cell may be ~300 sq km, but no way you can pipe all that bandwidth in adjacent cells due to interference (or... if you did, you'd probably lose in spectral efficiency). If we assume something like 10 Gbps/cell total dow…
If you use a diameter for a circle area, you need to divide by 4, to get like ~7. I was just going to do 3*3 = 9.
> It looks like Starlink has 7 GHz total downlink bandwidth from satellite to customers. A cell may be ~300 sq km, but no way you can pipe all that bandwidth in adjacent cells due to interference
Both the downlink and the uplink are directional. Yes, there's some power lost in side lobes, but..
So, if you have multiple satellites overhead, you can have a mosaic pattern where satellite A illuminates a hex, and then other satellites illuminate its neighbors. And even though some energy spills over, it's strongly rejected by the receivers because it's coming from the completely wrong direction.
> How many people live in places with fewer than a few people/km^2?
In addition to the incorrect pessimism about downlink bandwidth (also, one should expect ~5bits/Hz)... You're not taking into account any reasonable capacity factor, and you're assuming each service is one person. You're also assuming that you sell through to 100% of the populace and there's no one in the cell served by other technologies. If 95% of a suburban area can get FTTH, cable, or reasonable LTE, that still leaves 5% as possible customers for Starlink to fill in.
> Only Alaska averages below that in the US.
OK, but people are concentrated into cities, leaving a whole lot of land area with concentrations below this even in states with much higher average population density.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do cheap launches help when spectral bandwidth over an area is going to be the true limitation? Spectral bandwidth doesn't matter so much with beamforming with reasonably narrow beams. At least not until you get to a lot of satellites overhead at once. Dishy probably obtains a beam ~3 degrees wide; there's a lot of 3x3 degree sectors in the sky. Similarly, the ground "cells" are 300 sq km; there's a lot of these in…
well 3 degrees wide means at best ~28 square degrees on the sky (pi * 3 * 3). But the problem is the other way. It looks like Starlink has 7 GHz total downlink bandwidth from satellite to customers. A cell may be ~300 sq km, but no way you can pipe all that bandwidth in adjacent cells due to interference (or... if you did, you'd probably lose in spectral efficiency). If we assume something like 10 Gbps/cell total dow…
I think you meant 7 Gbps; that only works if the satellite itself has that much inbound, which may not be the case if the satellites around (for sat-to-sat links) it or the base station that it sees are maxed out.