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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

#261

Post by anthomtb »

Adiqq wrote: post #208
me551ah wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile in India, I am paying ~50$ a month for 1 Gbps fiber connection. On speedtest and fast.com, I easily average about 800+ Mbps download speeds on ethernet.

In Poland I pay ~$15/month for symmetrical 1/1Gbps fiber and there's even possibility for 10/10Gbps at $25, but I can't imagine making use of it. It's not available everywhere, but it covers a lot of smaller cities, so I'm happy that at least that's one thing that is done correctly here.

$25 for 10/10Gbps is crazy cheap. If I were to get 10/10Gbps it would be $250/month. This is using a municipal-run service provider (not particularly common here in the USA) that offers their 1/1Gbps for the relatively fair price of $70/month for a new customer. I pay $50 due to signing up in 2019.

I have no idea how Poland is pulling off such low costs but props for doing so. Other nations should take note.

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

#262

Post by mlyle »

shaklee3 wrote: post #243
mlyle wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> bandwidth matters a lot. Sure, how much data you can exchange per satellite is roughly proportional to the bandwidth. Increasing bandwidth or increasing satellites increases data rate. > it's why SpaceX pays so much on legal fees for fcc filings Note that a whole lot of the paper that goes to the FCC relates to the FCC's statutory authority over space debris and constellation licensing.

they have spent an immense amount of money and time on fcc filings for spectrum. this is a mixture of asking for spectrum, proving they're not interfering, and trying to beat kuiper and others to market.

> they have spent an immense amount of money and time on fcc filings for spectrum.

Well, sure. It has a multiplicative effect with number of satellites on throughput. Not to mention the proxy warfare they've endured from other constellation vendors through the FCC.

The big point which I responded to was there was a claim that adding more satellites doesn't add throughput ("Do cheap launches help")-- that one could be purely spectrum limited and not benefit from additional satellites. Directional antennas make this not true for any reasonable number of satellites.

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

#263

Post by mschuster91 »

msh wrote: post #236
mschuster91 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Solar+battery tech has made power lines not only unnecessary, but in some states arguably not worth the fire risk anymore. Power lines aren't an inherent fire risk. Unmaintained power lines, however, are. Primarily, you need to maintain clearance from bushes and trees.

Or bury the cables.

Burying high voltage transmission cables is extremely expensive [1] and usually only done when there is no other choice (such as being in an urban environment, near airports and the likes) as the loss due to capacitance is far greater than on poles.

The exception to the "usually only" is, once again, our beloved "german redneck" government in Bavaria who insisted that the new North-South line Südlink got buried on Bavarian soil to quash local NIMBY resistance [2] - at the price of taking ages longer to build and costing ~8x the amount of pole-run lines.

[1] see page 64, https://www.amprion.net/Dokumente/Dialog/Downloads/Studien/E...

[2] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/bayern/energiewende-warum-erdkab...

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

#264

Post by mlyle »

shaklee3 wrote: post #241
mlyle wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> well 3 degrees wide means at best ~28 square degrees on the sky (pi * 3 * 3). If you use a diameter for a circle area, you need to divide by 4, to get like ~7. I was just going to do 3*3 = 9. > 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 Both the downlink and the upli…

5bps/Hz is way overestimating their spectral efficiency.

64 QAM with FEC is specified as the original modulation in regulatory filings. This predicts 4.5-5.5 bits/Hz.

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

#265

Post by londons_explore »

fundad wrote: post #259
londons_explore wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think starlink is deliberately not rolling out any more locations in the USA till their dispute with the FCC about the rural broadband money is sorted out. They don't want to deploy early, because then they wouldn't be eligible for the funding which is supposed to help them deploy. Notice that just over the canada and mexico borders have good service available today - suggesting bandwidth isn't the constraint.

That sweet government money!

It was $1B that they were expected to get... Thats substantially more revenue than they were going to collect from all their US based users in a whole year!

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

#266

Post by ghaff »

411111111111111 wrote: post #179
happytiger wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

For that matter, Australia as a whole--like some other low density areas like Alaska--actually has fairly concentrated population centers.

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

#267

Post by shaklee3 »

publicmenace wrote: post #254
shaklee3 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the fcc is allowed to take their money back if your service is going in a downward trend. I'm not even sure what you're saying for. they showed that Starlink speeds were degrading significantly over a year. this data is also exactly what ookla and others showed. the only possible way it's going to increase before that, given the demand, is starship. that will not likely happen before 2024, so they were completely cor…

> the fcc is allowed to take their money back if your service is going in a downward trend. That’s not quite right. They can take it if they conclude you will not meet the target . Ups and downs on the way there are totally fine under the rules. Starlink can scale dramatically just by launching new satellites. The FCC is keen on stopping that too, refusing to approve all of Starlink’s satellite launch proposals and i…

this is quite the conspiracy theory. I'm not sure why musk fans say that the FCC is acting egregious here when they are doing the same exact thing they have done for decades. musk fans just don't want the same standards applied to them. they're okay interfering with other systems, but they certainly don't want anybody interfering with them.

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

#268

Post by shaklee3 »

publicmenace wrote: post #244
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They didn't have to meet any performance targets until 2024 at the earliest why not? seems like they should have had to

Because that’s how the RDOF program was designed. You have a number of years to meet your targets in exchange for the subsidies to help you do it.

if this was some kind of stunt pulled by the FCC, SpaceX can sue. but in reality, this was exactly by the book and SpaceX accepted it

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

#269

Post by publicmenace »

shaklee3 wrote: post #267
publicmenace wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the fcc is allowed to take their money back if your service is going in a downward trend. That’s not quite right. They can take it if they conclude you will not meet the target . Ups and downs on the way there are totally fine under the rules. Starlink can scale dramatically just by launching new satellites. The FCC is keen on stopping that too, refusing to approve all of Starlink’s satellite launch proposals and i…

this is quite the conspiracy theory. I'm not sure why musk fans say that the FCC is acting egregious here when they are doing the same exact thing they have done for decades. musk fans just don't want the same standards applied to them. they're okay interfering with other systems, but they certainly don't want anybody interfering with them.

No this is not the same thing they’ve done for decades. You just make that assertion but it’s not true.

It’s not some crazy conspiracy. This is the whole point of winning elections. The people in charge of tech policy in this admin want universal fiber service. You don’t get tens of billions from Congress every year for that unless there’s public demand for it. Starlink would undermine that demand despite not being good enough to replace universal fiber service, in the eyes of the administration.

Also you’re free to look up how Starlink’s launch proposals have been slow rolled at the FCC. You can also look at the Republican Commissioner’s statements on the revocation of Starlink’s RDOF award.

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

#270

Post by shaklee3 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #255
shaklee3 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes. this is easily verified. they have done many rounds of funding.

Huh. Looks like you're right: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/space-exploration-te... I didn't expect that, since the company makes a lot of money. I guess they also invest a lot. Anyway, thinks for the info update!

That's the thing, they don't make a lot of money. there was a WSJ article a few years back that showed they absolutely need StarLink to expand that full capacity very early to be profitable. there are not making enough money on launches to sustain the run rate. originally musk said starlink would be profitable with falcon 9. that clearly changed and now the only way it's profitable is with starship.
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