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Starlink internet is going from rural savior to unreliable luxury

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

#171

Post by ejb999 »

noirscape wrote: post #148
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…

Starlink is also having a bad side-effect in other areas - apparently the frequencies on which it communicates muck up weather prediction technology[0]. I'm sure it works great if you're rural/have literally no other means but if you have the infrastructure for it, don't use Starlink. [0]: https://nltimes.nl/2023/01/27/dutch-meteorologists-say-musks...

it was never really intended for people that already had better options. Had it for a while and it was life changing for me coming from a 3MB DSL internet - but dropped it as soon as fiber found its way to my little town.

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

#172

Post by Gustomaximus »

theaussiestew wrote: post #76
shaklee3 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Starlink cells are 25km. It's quite easy to be semi rural and within 25km of town. If town people get/need starlink it will congest.

Im been watching this as this is a potential issue for my location. So far speeds are OK and usually 30+ and sometimes closer to 200mb down.

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

#173

Post by melbournegrad »

crispinb wrote: post #86
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 a bandaid solution to your governments poor planning and infrastructure rollout .. Well yes, but a needed bandaid. That's what happens when governments vacate their role - individuals are left to manage on their own (and the devil take the hindmost). Australian here like you. Generally appalled by the NBN debacle. Starlink's beyond my means, but if I had a remote job I'd find it a godsend where I live (rural N…

I don't want to get off topic but the NBN hasn't even worked. I'm only offered wireless in my apartment 4km from the CBD, currently 1.7 Mbps

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

#174

Post by swiftcoder »

teekert wrote: post #118
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…

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.

I'm in a farming village in Spain, all of 2 families living here, 45 minutes drive from the nearest population center, and they rolled out symetrical gigabit fibre last year (and not just to us - to every rural village in the region).

The base 300/300 service is price capped at 38 euros/month as well. I'm paying a few bucks more for higher speed.

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

#175

Post by martinald »

iggldiggl wrote: post #145
mschuster91 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All these talks about Starlink -> Remember it's a bandaid solution to your governments poor planning and infrastructure rollout of a core utility / service. Partially. The thing is, the US is so unbelievably huge that it is economically infeasible to serve extremely rural areas with high-speed wired (i.e. fiber, DSL) or wireless (microwave, 4G/5G phone) internet, even with massive government subsidies - and that ap…

> other large-area countries such as Germany or Australia as well Putting Germany in the same category as Australia or the US seems a bit weird when the former two have truly continental dimensions whereas Germany is a bit smaller than California, although there's an interesting twist: Going by population-weighted density, Australia definitively comes out ahead and even the US is somewhat denser than Germany in that…

The UK took a different approach to most other countries; and IMO was the correct one. Something like 98% of properties could get at least 30meg (via VDSL2, actually more likely to be closer to 80mbit) down, and this has been the case for nearly a decade. 50% of homes have always been able to get much faster speeds via DOCSIS cable from VM (though I will caveat with that that until VM enabled DOCSIS3.1 across their network recently it could be very hit and miss congestion wise).

In the past few years though there has been an explosion in FTTH build. 75% properties can get gigabit service now which is increasing by around about 1% every month.

The priority a decade ago really was on getting the entire country up to 'usable' internet speeds, rather than having a lot of FTTH in some areas and then very slow DSL in many other areas. Only 0.35% of UK properties are below 2mbit/sec down now (unusable), which doesn't include 4G/5G coverage, so in reality it's likely only 1 in 1000 households have utterly terrible connectivity.

So while the UK doesn't rank top of the list of median download speeds it is far less likely you are going to have bad connectivity, which IMO is a greater priority than raw download speeds.

Very few people actually need more than say 100mbit/sec day to day. It's actually hard to get gigabit around the house; most powerline adaptors and wifi solutions top out around 300mbit/sec in my experience, so unless you have ethernet in your house (very rare), the limiting factor is now on in home connectivity, not the external ISP.

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

#176

Post by martinald »

rkangel wrote: post #156
iggldiggl wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> other large-area countries such as Germany or Australia as well Putting Germany in the same category as Australia or the US seems a bit weird when the former two have truly continental dimensions whereas Germany is a bit smaller than California, although there's an interesting twist: Going by population-weighted density, Australia definitively comes out ahead and even the US is somewhat denser than Germany in that…

The UK was a bit slow to get going but is going in the right direction at a reasonable pace now. Openreach has been doing a rollout covering most people and the DCMS voucher scheme is funding independents to fill in the gaps. I believe there will still be a rural segment relying on cellular for a while yet, but it's a shrinking minority.

Most of the altnets are not government funded - there was a ridiculous amount of money put in them from the low interest rate period, many many billions. I very much doubt they will get a good return given the crazy level of overbuild going on. I have now 4 separate infrastructure-wise FTTH networks available to me in my London apartment.

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

#177

Post by DebtDeflation »

chrisco255 wrote: post #60
capableweb wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sentiment has been (up until this point?) that Starlink needs to lower costs for the customers, not increase them, as otherwise the customer base will remain as tiny as it currently is. 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 r…

"rural" just means sparsely populated compared with dense urban cores. These people aren't impoverished, some of them are wealthy, most of them are middle class with property and acreage. Rural consumers are used to paying equipment costs, for example, they were among the first to adopt satellite TV, back when the dishes were enormous and you needed enough land to even mount one. And those cost thousands of dollars i…

When I was kid in the 1980s, I wanted a big C-band satellite dish so bad. Never could convince my parents to get one though.

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

#178

Post by Gustomaximus »

Am I being unfair, but doesn't this article seem a bit of a selfish whine. I feel sometimes we forget how amazing the things humans are doing to.

We had a person and his teams literally build re-usable rockets and then blanket the earth in thousands of satellites, largely on private funding. This seemed unconceivable 10 years ago. This of all the people tat said this was ridiculous and bound to fail financially or technologically when announced.

Then a few years later someone is 'my internet in the middle of nowhere is a more expensive, the price changed because its so popular and has dropouts"...like your using internet from a fleet of more satellites put up in a couple of years than humans created in the 50 years before.

I think we need to step back and take perspective on this one. Its freaking incredible we have this services. Its fairly new tech and will probably get better and better over coming decades.

For me, Starlink has been a game changer living in a rural area that still had copper ADSL. Its more expensive and sometimes (not often) has dropouts but I still marvel at what has been achieved.

Less often these days but sometimes I still got to the Starlink maps, spin the globe and feel amazed. Try it: https://satellitemap.space/

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

#179

Post by 411111111111111 »

happytiger wrote: post #170
sourcecodeplz wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The population density is a correlated number, but it's not necessarily an issue, which makes this into one of my pet peeves.

You could have a gigantic nation which is completely centralized into one city, giving you a super low population density on paper.

It's not the case in any of your example, so not really an issue here. Nonetheless...

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

#180

Post by adriancr »

teekert wrote: post #118
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…

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.

which provider goes to 2500/2500?
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