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Starlink internet is going from rural savior to unreliable luxury

xda-developers.com

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Re: Starlink internet is going from rural savior to unreliable luxury

#161

Post by rsynnott »

Ekaros wrote: post #135
realusername wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty much the same in France, standard internet cost is about 35€ and fiber is being deployed at record speed, I live in the countryside (real countryside, 50 inhabitants village) and I have access to fiber. 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 recou…

It seems that Starlink works in places that fail to build either fiber or good 4G/5G coverage. But even there if the demand is too much they might not have capacity to provide good service. I don't believe it is viable model they are running.

Also, if such an area exists, and there are enough people willing to pay $100/month to congest starlink, then it probably makes sense for someone to set up a WISP, which will be able to provide a better service.

In fact, if this isn't happening at scale already, I would expect that some WISP companies will start using starlink congestion areas to figure out where they should be putting masts.

Re: Starlink internet is going from rural savior to unreliable luxury

#162

Post by londons_explore »

The article complains about reliability...

But the header photo shows a starlink device with trees that are clearly within the 25 degrees above the horizon 'must-be-clear' zone.

I suspect OP's reliability issues are self inflicted by not mounting starlink on a post to avoid trees in the signal path...

Re: Starlink internet is going from rural savior to unreliable luxury

#163

Post by sourcecodeplz »

l3x4ur1n wrote: post #153
teekert wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile here I am in the Netherlands (semi-rural I'd say), having two fiber modems installed because we have 2 competing fiber networks here. At least one of them goes to 2500/2500 for about 75 eur a month. Probably it'll go much higher in the future.

"Semi-rural" Proportion of urban population 92.57% https://www.statista.com/statistics/276724/urbanization-in-t...

Not to mention NL is like a blip on the world map as compared to AU on size..:)

Re: Starlink internet is going from rural savior to unreliable luxury

#164

Post by bombolo »

imwillofficial wrote: post #100
bombolo wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is good news and not bad. In the same way that finding out about having a terminal illness is good news! > It's a strong sign that the model fundamentally works and they will be able to fund continuous improvements to meet strong demand. The main question is: "can it scale to offer decent speeds to more than 10 people, without having to create a dyson sphere in the sky?" Because it looks like it was yet anothe…

This is a completely and utterly unfounded comment in the light of the massive gains in progress for not only SpaceX, but also Starlink.

I was just reading an article about how incredibly fast and reliable starlink connection is /s

Re: Starlink internet is going from rural savior to unreliable luxury

#165

Post by mrjin »

tedk-42 wrote: post #22

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…

It's true for any shared media as the bandwidth is limited, thus wireless is really only suitable for where fiber is not a viable solution.

Re: Starlink internet is going from rural savior to unreliable luxury

#166

Post by roer »

shaklee3 wrote: post #49
lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #7

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.

no, it's not a strong sign of that. it's a strong sign that with VC money and government money you can offer unrealistic service at unrealistic prices. but when you need to start showing that you are profitable and launching satellites to maintain the current network is also expensive, both your service and prices start to get more in line with what everybody else already had. The honeymoon phase of starlink is over.…

This doesn't add up for me. They are launching more powerful satellites with a higher cadence than before. The network is in every measure improving its capacity, and it doesn't seem like money is the issue.

Do you have a source for them burning money at a pace that requires starship in the near future?

Looking in from the outside, their amount of falcon launches don't reflect that.

Re: Starlink internet is going from rural savior to unreliable luxury

#167

Post by mrjin »

Nursie wrote: post #142
killingtime74 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved from Sydney to Auckland and now can get up to 7700Mbps. 1000Mbps costs 60 something AUD. One of my colleagues in Melbourne got the fiber upgrade (under 10k) and claimed the install on his tax so there's that to reduce it a bit.

I moved to Aus from the UK about two years back. In Southampton I was getting 1000/40 for the equivalent of 100AUD a month, but a new fibre company had just started to offer 900/900 for 35AUD. It’s been a bit of an eye-opener moving back here! I left at the end of the Gillard government, when the future of the Australian internet connection was bright, and came back wondering what had gone wrong!

You know, copper network is not a great option technically, but nothing better to just exhaust the budget.

Re: Starlink internet is going from rural savior to unreliable luxury

#168

Post by c12 »

teekert wrote: post #131
killingtime74 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the two fiber modems hooked up to different networks?

Yes, one is already sticking up from the ground and will be brought into the house in the next month. And someone just came by to see if a second one can be installed, that one still needs to be brought to the house, somewhere in the next weeks. It seems wasteful, I know, but it's nice to have competition at least.

Where I live it's very similar to electric and gas supply, where you have a common carrier that you get your supply over. There is one fibre cable into the building that goes out to some kind of interface accessed via a manhole ourside; all the local telcos use that fibre as common carrier and either rent existing fibre thats already been laid and hooked up to that interface, or lay their own at their own cost.

I have choice of half a dozen suppliers this way but only one set of hardware in the house.

Re: Starlink internet is going from rural savior to unreliable luxury

#169

Post by rsynnott »

sovietmudkipz wrote: post #160
rsynnott wrote: post #155

> However, since I first began using these low-orbit satellites to power my internet, not only has the price gone up $30 per month, but the speeds and reliability have degraded significantly. I mean, this was always going to happen; this will happen with _any_ cellular internet solution (it'll be particularly bad here as the cells are particularly large, but the principle is the same). I'm a little surprised that peo…

> this will happen with _any_ cellular internet solution (it'll be particularly bad here as the cells are particularly large, but the principle is the same) > if you have terrestrial cellular available to you, all else being equal, it's generally going to be a better option than satellite cellular. Can you elaborate? What is the disadvantage? Why is the performance degradation unsurprising?

> What is the disadvantage?

Disadvantage of satellite cellular vs terrestrial cellular (ie mobile networks and most WISPs) is largely simply that the satellite cells are generally _enormous_. Starlink cells cover 379km^2. Some very large rural LTE cells may be of similar size, but if they hit capacity it is comparatively simple for the provider to build new towers and make them smaller. Urban LTE/5G cells are _much_ smaller.

Latency is a secondary issue; even low earth orbit satellites can't really compete with the sort of latency that 5G can provide, say.

> Why is the performance degradation unsurprising?

Ultimately, for any cellular service, there's only so much bandwidth available for a cell, and the size of the cell is anything from virtually unchangeable (generally the case for satellite services) to difficult/expensive to change. So, if you're the only user of the cell, you get all the bandwidth (subject to any artificial limits placed by the provider). As more people are added to the cell you're sharing with more and more people, and typically the total achievable bandwidth per cell really isn't that much, so things get worse until the provider is forced to deal with it. For terrestrial cellular they'd normally do this by adding towers or upgrading equipment to increase supply; for satellite their options are much more limited, and they're really mostly looking at increasing cost (thereby destroying demand) and allowing degradation.

Re: Starlink internet is going from rural savior to unreliable luxury

#170

Post by happytiger »

sourcecodeplz wrote: post #163
l3x4ur1n wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Semi-rural" Proportion of urban population 92.57% https://www.statista.com/statistics/276724/urbanization-in-t...

Not to mention NL is like a blip on the world map as compared to AU on size..:)

Au is only slightly smaller than the USA with 25.7 million people vs just California’s 39.24 and the Netherlands have 17.53 million — but bear in mind Australia is 186 times the size of the NDs. So it’s not surprising service is so good — the density of population makes broadband extremely profitable.

People forget. The numbers tell a really great story.

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