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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

#221

Post by throwaway4aday »

shaklee3 wrote: post #46
huevosabio wrote: post #14

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…

if you read the article it doesn't just work for a lot of people, and is very slow. this is nothing that wasn't easily predictable, but you having a good experience where there's clearly a surplus of capacity doesn't mean this will last.

It also doesn't mean that it will always be slow. There's another launch scheduled for this month and more to come after that. SpaceX is also launching satellites for many other internet competitors. As long as progress continues at this pace, rural customers will eventually have all the options they could want. Many people here are complaining about lack of infrastructure, look up!

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

#222

Post by ghaff »

ejb999 wrote: post #171
noirscape wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Notwithstanding the complaints of the OP, Starlink is still a gamechanger in many less urban areas. The alternatives are often not tenable for remote work or even, really, for many things that a lot of people consider near-necessities.

You don't even need to be in the middle of a wilderness area. My brother has a house 10 minutes outside of a smallish Maine city. And his only Starlink options were a 1Mbps down DSL and a very data-capped cellular hotspot.

But a good wired connection is almost always going to be better.

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

#223

Post by bcrl »

oogali wrote: post #212
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the awful things I found here in (quasi-rural, near Hamilton) Ontario is this phenomenon: 1. No broadband from any of Rogers, Bell, Cogeco, etc. for multiple decades, and no real local offerings; despite being only a few km from a major centre 2. Nothing seems to be happening, so some local companies start offering point-to-point wireless services which fill a hole. They start putting up antenaes and stringing…

That's somewhat similar to what happened in the US during the initial timeframe of DSL. Regional Bell says your DSL is $60-120/month. Your local ISP buys a circuit to a DSL aggregator (Covad, Northpoint, Rhythms, etc) and starts offering DSL for $50/month (their cost was $25-30/month). After increase in customers, regional Bell says "we're offering $29.95/month for 6 months to new customers". ISPs nationwide start lo…

Here in Canada the CRTC ordered incumbents to file tariffs and phase II cost studies for aggregated FTTP a few weeks ago by April 23rd. That is in part due to the new CRTC chairperson and the new policy directive that came into effect early in February. The CRTC quickly rejected the incumbents' "woe is us, we can't do that" letters last week. The 6 largest Canadian independent ISPs sold out to the large industry players over the past year in large part because they've hemorrhaged customers over the past 5 years without access to FTTP facilities. The regulatory problem being faced now is that competition has been almost completely gutted and now needs to be rebuilt.

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

#224

Post by throwaway4aday »

doogieboo wrote: post #213
roer wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The new satellites are bigger and weigh more so they are launching fewer on each rocket now. They need starship for better launch capacity for the new satellites. https://spaceflightnow.com/2023/02/26/spacex-unveils-first-b...

Doesn't that sound more like they are planning for that higher launch capacity? They're removing a constraint in the future so they're scaling up the satellites now, it means less of the new ones go up in the mean time but it also means a much faster increase in network capacity once Starship is available.

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

#225

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

publicmenace wrote: post #77
shaklee3 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your history is a bit off. the fcc commissioner and fcc has generally loved SpaceX, and they were not appointed by Biden. what happened was SpaceX continually got worse in the fcc samknows testing, so much so that their original application for $900M was far from the service they actually offered. for that reason they paused the funding until SpaceX improved things to the point they promised. they still have not impr…

They didn't have to meet any performance targets until 2024 at the earliest so that was a bogus justification. They were fairly close but were cutting performance a bit to reach more customers pending the launch of more satellites. And just because Rosenworcel was appointed by Obama instead of Biden doesn’t mean she’s not a loyal part of the Biden administration.

>They didn't have to meet any performance targets until 2024 at the earliest

why not? seems like they should have had to

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

#226

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #71
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.

> 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…

[deleted]

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

#227

Post by shaklee3 »

throwaway4aday wrote: post #221
shaklee3 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you read the article it doesn't just work for a lot of people, and is very slow. this is nothing that wasn't easily predictable, but you having a good experience where there's clearly a surplus of capacity doesn't mean this will last.

It also doesn't mean that it will always be slow. There's another launch scheduled for this month and more to come after that. SpaceX is also launching satellites for many other internet competitors. As long as progress continues at this pace, rural customers will eventually have all the options they could want. Many people here are complaining about lack of infrastructure, look up!

launching more satellites has a tremendous cost, but a small, incremental capacity improvement since most of the capacity is stranded over water at any time.

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

#228

Post by registeredcorn »

anaganisk wrote: post #36
huevosabio wrote: post #14

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…

I'm pretty sure you can't just launch satellites into orbit randomly without govt blessing it or stream data to ground stations legally (Eg: India doesn't like satellite phones), at a certain point Starlink could itself be the monopoly you dread.

Any idea why India doesn't like sat phones? I've never heard of this.

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

#229

Post by ghaff »

robertlagrant wrote: post #144
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…

> All these talks about Starlink -> Remember it's a bandaid solution to your governments poor planning and infrastructure rollout of a core utility / service. Lots of core utilities aren't rolled out everywhere. You might need a different water source or use a septic tank rather than roll out central services everywhere, because it's so expensive per capita. Internet from a satellite seems a valid equivalent to that.

Electricity is pretty close to universal in the US (outside of summer cabins and the like) and traditional telephone service was pretty close behind. But beyond that water, sewer, natural gas, and internet are all case by case once you get out of metros. 50 miles outside of a large US city, I still have a septic system.

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

#230

Post by nikcub »

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…

Australia has a real problem with getting the last ~2% of residents connected. SkyMuster cost $2B and has 100k connections - so $20k per connection.
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