Starlink internet is going from rural savior to unreliable luxury • Hacker News Board

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

#281

Post by marcosdumay » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 3:45 PM UTC

cozzyd wrote: post #55

pastage wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW that is what Starlink has been saying themselves. Their operations have always been linked to cheaper launches. My opinion is that it is easy to get side tracked when your leader gets stuck in political activism.

Do cheap launches help when spectral bandwidth over an area is going to be the true limitation? Starlink's problem is going to be that most profitable areas are better served by terrestrial LTE/5G, leaving only truly remote areas that are low density enough. But not many people live there...

> Do cheap launches help when spectral bandwidth over an area is going to be the true limitation?

I don't get the question. Do costs matter when revenue is limited?

Of course they matter. They matter even more the more limited is the potential revenue.

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

#282

Post by lazide » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 3:47 PM UTC

whermans wrote: post #143

lazide wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you CAN do all of those things - until a gov’t comes knocking anyway. Paperwork isn’t required to launch a rocket, just to not get arrested later when they try to find who did it.

I get what you're trying to say, but the paperwork isn't just to not get arrested. It's also to make sure your rocket doesn't flatten a building when it comes down uncontrolled, doesn't hit an airplane on the way up, doesn't crash into any other spacecraft in orbit, and doesn't turn into yet another piece of untracked space debris cluttering Earth orbit.

None of which gets in the way of actually making a rocket or launching it though, as unlike for example cars or guns everyone builds and launches their own anyway. Well, 99% of the time anyway.

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

#283

Post by chatmasta » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 3:48 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #258

chatmasta wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally speaking, what is the cost differential between hanging wires and digging wires? I would imagine that in rural areas, underground wires require less maintainence since you don't need to monitor them for fallen trees, brush overgrowth, etc. But at the same time I would guess the installation costs are higher? Maybe? Surely avoiding utility poles saves money.

> Generally speaking, what is the cost differential between hanging wires and digging wires? Orders of magnitude. I actually once worked in construction, specifically in trench digging for German Telekom. Putting up poles is easy, drill a hole in the ground for the pole, put the pole in, string a fiber on it, done. Even cheaper if you already have poles, all you need there is a truck with a lift. Downside is, unless…

Thanks for the detailed reply!

Does any of this calculus change when you're talking about really rural areas, like in the desert of Australia? My guess is that would mean higher cost of sending someone out to fix a pole (point against poles), but also lower likelihood of running into existing infrastructure (point in favor of digging).

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

#284

Post by lazide » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 3:49 PM UTC

jameshilliard wrote: post #123

lazide wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comcast is over $120/mo in California.

> Comcast is over $120/mo in California. Starlink does not really compete with Comcast in areas Comcast already serves(at least when it comes to speed/price/reliability), it just doesn't make sense to use Starlink when Comcast is available other than maybe as a secondary backup connection. Starlink is significantly faster and cheaper however than other providers like Viasat which serve areas without economical terres…

Good points.

What I was responding to was the assertion that starlink is ‘too expensive’ at $120/mo, when the normal offering from everyone else is about the same price.

As you note, depending on the area, one will provide better actual service or not. But the pricing isn’t the deciding factor IMO, just service quality.

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

#285

Post by marcosdumay » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 3:52 PM UTC

XorNot wrote: post #9

xenospn wrote: post #5

I wonder why it’s so unreliable - I’m assuming they oversubscribed, but rural areas by definition should not have too many users.

This is all in LEO though. The satellites which can see a rural house are also going to be able to see a bunch of cities.

Well, up to some 100 or 200km.

That's quite a bit of rural area, but I wonder if the complaints are really concentrated there.

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

#286

Post by greenie_beans » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 4:06 PM UTC

seu wrote: post #121

It's a pity that cooperative broadband is usually ignored, while people and local governments expect venture backed companies to solve their problems. They work for themselves, not for you. Cooperatives tend to have reasonable prices, reasonable speeds, and work by reasonable principles. They might not be the cheapest and fastest, but will be there for you because you're a member/co-owner, not a customer.

we have it in mississippi and it works well.

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

#287

Post by runarberg » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 4:09 PM UTC

crispinb wrote: post #83

runarberg wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they still need internet?

Internet without connected power is pretty common around here. Internet is obviously needed for those who work from home. And it's increasingly required for the needs of everyday life (government services moving online, bank branches closing). So, yes, absolutely - many people without connected power need the internet.

The scenarios you’re describing don’t need fast and low latency connection. Banking and government function can easily be done using traditional satellite, 4G or even dial up modem.

As for remote work, I have to question the decisions of someone that moves to an area without connection to the electricity grid and expects to do remote work from there. IMHO they are putting them self into an extreme scenario which shouldn’t be accommodated for, neither by government nor private enterprise.

You may bring up rural communities that have been neglected for decades as a counterpoint here. To that, I go to ancestor post and state, that those communities deserve traditional infrastructure, paid for from our common funds, not to be forced into a magic solution from a startup looking to make money from them.

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

#288

Post by londons_explore » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 4:11 PM UTC

cozzyd wrote: post #91

mlyle wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do cheap launches help when spectral bandwidth over an area is going to be the true limitation? Spectral bandwidth doesn't matter so much with beamforming with reasonably narrow beams. At least not until you get to a lot of satellites overhead at once. Dishy probably obtains a beam ~3 degrees wide; there's a lot of 3x3 degree sectors in the sky. Similarly, the ground "cells" are 300 sq km; there's a lot of these in…

well 3 degrees wide means at best ~28 square degrees on the sky (pi * 3 * 3). But the problem is the other way. 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 (or... if you did, you'd probably lose in spectral efficiency). If we assume something like 10 Gbps/cell total dow…

Remember that if they are starting to get near capacity limits, they always have the option to make the antennas on the satellite larger, making the beams narrower, and reduce those 300 sq km cells down to say 30 sq km.

In the current era of phased array antenna prices falling sharply, and assuming they're willing to go for a folding antenna, I think they could probably easily get a 10x antenna area boost without much extra cost.

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

#289

Post by guenthert » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 4:37 PM UTC

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #194

zwirbl wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, consumers in Austria and Germany have by far the shittiest internet in all of EU. That's what you get when you let your corrupt politicians sell your national infrastructure and customer base to private monopolists who will rentseek you instead of competing and investing in infrastructure. I remember walking into an A1 shop browsing for internet offers for my new apartment and the lady working there straight up…

Just a few years ago our office (two floors, Fortune 500 company, more than 100 people on site) had a 100Mbps connection to the Internet (and a dedicated 1Gbps to a branch office). We had video conferences, mirrored OSS and back'ed up over the 'net. The dedicated link was at times a bottleneck, but I don't recall that the link to the Internet ever was.

With the shift to cloud computing, at least in the awkward hybrid phase, that won't suffice for a business of that size, but it really isn't obvious what a single person would _need_ a gigabit connection for. Perhaps you can elaborate.

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

#290

Post by n8henrie » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 4:40 PM UTC

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #150

n8henrie wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$90 if you're rural?! I'm now going to be paying $120. I live in a small town on the Navajo reservation. We don't have postal service, many here don't even have running water or electricity. The alternative ISP is 6 mbps max. Any idea how I apply for this rural pricing?

Do you know if the issue of congestion is bandwidth, or if its bound by satellite to ground connections? If its the latter, have you tried finding a neighbor or two and paying $60 each or $40 each?

Not sure I understand your question. Both speed and usage would be an issue; I average ~70 mbps during the day but drop to ~40 overnight, not much to share before I'm close to our ISP's 6 (which was about half the price, no caps).

I'm also at about 80% of the usage cap.