111–120 of 348 posts
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> 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.
That’s a rural town. I explicitly said “urban”.
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> Last I remember, the cost was ~500 USD + the monthly fee, I wonder how many in a rural environment are ready to pony that up for a measly connection. Maybe not difficult for live-on-a-farm-software-developers, but what about the rest of the spare population? If you think $500 setup cost + the ~$90 monthly fee is bad, I got news for you. The same people using Starlink out in the middle of nowhere now were paying way…
> ~$90 monthly fee is bad ~$120 in California
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.
I mean...yes and no. Starlink is valuable provided it's cheap: above a certain price point, the number of applications drops off and there's no guarantee the remainder will represent enough to actually fund it.
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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…
> It looks like Starlink has 7 GHz total downlink bandwidth from satellite to customers. 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.
> which may not be the case if the satellites around (for sat-to-sat links)
No real sat-to-sat links yet. The exact specifications aren't disclosed, but they'll likely be 100gbps symmetric links.
> the base station that it sees are maxed out.
You can expect spectral efficiency for the uplinks to be better because of big antennas, and for them to be provisioned with no problem illuminating all the satellites overhead.
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this has been repeated countless times, but the only reason you are experiencing good service is because it's not at capacity. as soon as your area gets to capacity, just like it is all over the US, you too will face bad speeds and increasing prices. for some reason people thought starlink had some magical solution to capacity problems and that the high speeds would last forever. it's just another ISP.
It'll never get to capacity where he lives, because he lives in a semi-rural area that has a low population density.
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> It looks like Starlink has 7 GHz total downlink bandwidth from satellite to customers. 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.
7GHz is correct; 2GHz of X band and 5GHz of Ka/V band for downlink to subscribers. Multiply by spectral efficiency-- perhaps 5 bits/Hz. > which may not be the case if the satellites around (for sat-to-sat links) No real sat-to-sat links yet. The exact specifications aren't disclosed, but they'll likely be 100gbps symmetric links. > the base station that it sees are maxed out. You can expect spectral efficiency for th…
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7GHz is correct; 2GHz of X band and 5GHz of Ka/V band for downlink to subscribers. Multiply by spectral efficiency-- perhaps 5 bits/Hz. > which may not be the case if the satellites around (for sat-to-sat links) No real sat-to-sat links yet. The exact specifications aren't disclosed, but they'll likely be 100gbps symmetric links. > the base station that it sees are maxed out. You can expect spectral efficiency for th…
Sure, but spectrum isn't infinite, at some point it is maxed out, especially the sat-to-sat links, which effectively halve the available bandwidth (assuming just one hop).
> which effectively halve the available bandwidth
I disagree (and I'm not sure where this idea is coming from-- do you think they use the same spectrum or something?) I think they effectively "add" bandwidth for the system by allowing satellites that do not have saturated uplinks to "share" capacity. E.g. a satellite which is mostly over the ocean but can see a ground station can now be more useful.
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…
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Last-mile rural connectivity will never reach everybody in the USA. It's just too many people to service. Obama's net "neutrality" which thankfully got shit canned was going to mandate free service for the poor for all new startups, among other considerations which would have made making a new a rural ISP a complete non-starter. If you want Internet, you can pay for it.
We are talking about America. We decided everybody should get electricity and they got it with rural electrification. Should everyone lose the right to have electricity connections because you think it's too hard? Somehow other countries can do this with the US can't? We could decide just like we did for electricity that everyone should have 100 meg internet to their house.
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Last-mile rural connectivity will never reach everybody in the USA. It's just too many people to service. Obama's net "neutrality" which thankfully got shit canned was going to mandate free service for the poor for all new startups, among other considerations which would have made making a new a rural ISP a complete non-starter. If you want Internet, you can pay for it.
Last-mile rural electrification will never reach everybody in the USA. It's just too many people to service. Roosevelt would've mandated free service for the poor for all new startups, among other considerations which would have made making a new a rural electrical utility a complete non-starter. If you want Electricity, you can pay for it.