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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

#181

Post by Havoc »

Gustomaximus wrote: post #178

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 te…

The fact that starlink is technologically impressive doesn't really change that paying 150 for a "30-50/2-10Mbps" connection is worth a whine

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

#182

Post by Jedd »

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…

Also Australian - based in Hunter Valley (~ 200km north-west of Sydney). Definitely rural.

I replaced our Skymesh (geo-stationary) satellite (the only barely viable alternative) two years ago with Starlink. Skymesh gave me ~600ms RTT to Sydney servers, and maybe 25Mbps down (at 3am, clear sky, etc). Data cap was around 120GB / month, IIRC. Pricing was probably 75% of what I'm paying for Starlink now.

We can kinda sorta get 3G, but effectively only for voice & SMS - our nearest tower is ~ 10km away, and my yagi / repeater requires power to establish a very feeble back to that. 3G is being retired almost definitely in 2024, at which point I believe the national carriers' plan is to have no plan - as the replacement technology requires a much higher density of tower placements than rural areas will ever substantiate. The joy of a fully privatised communications industry.

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

#183

Post by zwirbl »

marcyb5st wrote: post #138
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.

2.5 Gb/s symmetrical is a sweet deal. Here in Italy in a town of 3k people I got "only" a 1Gb/s symmetrical, but so far I can't complain. It costs 25€/month so it's a pretty great deal

and here in Austria I just cannot get symmetrical, running on 1000/50 Mb/s right now

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

#184

Post by jsjohnst »

Gustomaximus wrote: post #178

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 te…

> Am I being unfair, but doesn't this article seem a bit of a selfish whine.

It does for sure and I was debating whether I should comment and say it or not.

> I think we need to step back and take perspective on this one.

Disagree here though. If we were taking account of the global state of things, sure. When OP pays for a service, gets unreliable service, and prices go up, they have a legit reason to complain and not be told to take in the big picture.

—

It might seem like I’m taking both sides, but really I’m not. OP decided to live in the middle of nowhere (I grew up in the same state, so I speak from experience), with that comes tradeoffs. Want fast and reliable internet? Be ready to pay for multiple providers! Yes, $200/month for internet seem high compared to other costs of living in rural Kansas, but it’s the compromise you endure for living so remote but wanting a job that requires you to be connected.

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

#185

Post by happymellon »

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?

When cells are large, they cover more people.

As a service becomes more popular more people will sign up.

Since the single cell is shared by more people, the speed will be shared around more, so there is a larger scale for it to degrade and the popularity will ensure this happens.

Terrestrial cellular will have a fibre connected to it, and have a smaller area to cover and coverage is going to have less people, meaning the absolute top degradation will be less.

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

#186

Post by m2fkxy »

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.

> NL

> (semi-)rural

Pick one.

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

#187

Post by ta1243 »

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.

> semi-rural I'd say

How many hundered km are you from the nearest settlement of >10,000 people?

People in England, Netherlands, etc don't really get what remote means.

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

#188

Post by ejb999 »

lstamour wrote: post #141
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…

Yes, the US is huge, but if an area can get power, we should be able to rollout fibre along the same routes. It just takes a bit of work.

should read 'a lot of work' and 'a lot of money'. In my own little town, when we (residents) voted to pay for a municipal internet, the residents had to pay to replace close to 50% of the utility owned poles in order to gain access to those poles to run fiber.

and due to the way the laws are written, we had to pay to have an engineer prescribe what work needed to be done to each pole - up to and including replacing it - then submit plans to the utilities, and then pay the utilities to pay 'their' engineer to do the same study - and then when it was agreed that a pole needed to be replaced, we had to pay the full cost of replacing it, and then when the work was done, the utility still owned the pole and rented it back to us for a yearly fee - repeat several hundred times.

Several million dollars for about 500 households.

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

#189

Post by thfuran »

marcyb5st wrote: post #138
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.

2.5 Gb/s symmetrical is a sweet deal. Here in Italy in a town of 3k people I got "only" a 1Gb/s symmetrical, but so far I can't complain. It costs 25€/month so it's a pretty great deal

And here I am in the US in a metro area with a population of over a million and I can't get fiber despite AT&T having come door to door hawking their service on the premise that they were installing fiber. Clearly there's just not enough people in my area and it's impossible.

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

#190

Post by rsynnott »

senectus1 wrote: post #85
jacquesm wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a strong sign that the model fundamentally works I think that's a bit early to tell. If the launch costs + satellite costs don't add up to a very nice profit before the satellite de-orbits then that was a loss. This can look like it is working well until the number of satellites de-orbiting and needing to be replaced becomes larger than your temporary profits after launching the first constellation. This is wh…

I know three people in Australia personally that have starlink and are incredibly grateful and pleased they can get it. The business model is strong, especially with V2 on its way

People liking a service doesn’t in itself mean the business model is good. For that, the figures have to add up.
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