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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

#321

Post by crispinb »

fsloth wrote: post #93
crispinb wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Internet without connected power is pretty common around here." Oh, that's interesting! I always thought this to be an outlier scenario. What is "here"? Can you estimate the size of population to this applies?

"Here" is Northern NSW, Australia. I have no idea of the numbers, but it's not uncommon in rural Australia.

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

#322

Post by crispinb »

runarberg wrote: post #287
crispinb wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 shou…

4g has very patchy coverage in rural Australia away from main roads. Satellite can be an OK option for some (we have a gov-subsidised option), but is unreliable and subject to lengthy outages and low monthly data caps. There are many other reasons to need decent connectivity - schooling and healthcare among them.

> 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.

That's just silly, closed-minded, and ignorant. You must just have very limited experience of the world. I can off the top of my head list hundreds of scenarios where remote work might become the only option for someone already living in the bush. And many other reasons (which I know first hand from people living here) why people may be entirely unable to move from here. These are real facts on the ground, and not subject to your lack of imagination and propensity towards narrow-minded curtain-twitching judgements about whole classes of people you know zip about.

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

#323

Post by crispinb »

michaelt wrote: post #128
fsloth wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Internet without connected power is pretty common around here." Oh, that's interesting! I always thought this to be an outlier scenario. What is "here"? Can you estimate the size of population to this applies?

Even in the south east of the UK - compared to the US, an very densely populated area - there are some homes that have wired telephones, but rely on generators for power [1] Presumably because at some point, it was cheaper to buy 30 years of diesel than to run a power cable, and yet cell coverage wasn't widespread enough to replace a wired telephone. Of course, we can debate whether providing telephone service is us…

Fortunately here we have sun and don't need generators ;)

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

#324

Post by Jedd »

Casteil wrote: post #310
Jedd wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sor…

>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. ...what about Starlink's performance over the last 2 years?

Oh, yes, I should have mentioned that -- it feels like no difference in performance or availability to me.

My use case is web, remote desktop, video conf, phone (carrier->wifi voice is a transparent feature for me), streaming audio, syncthing.

Only a couple of those things are sensitive to the few seconds per hour that my dish seems to lose connection, and I suspect part of that is poor placement of my dish.

To your question, and TFA's point, though - I've not noticed any change in the frequency or duration of those ephemeral outages, nor any feeling of overall performance degradation.

I might have occasionally noticed evening drops in throughput, but little of my use case is impacted - I put that down to other customers in my cell ramping up their video streaming services that time of day.

The (mean) ~40ms latency has not changed over those two years (as expected).

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

#325

Post by imwillofficial »

bombolo wrote: post #164
imwillofficial wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a completely and utterly unfounded comment in the light of the massive gains in progress for not only SpaceX, but also Starlink.

I was just reading an article about how incredibly fast and reliable starlink connection is /s

You are arguing that because perfection was not achieved, it is a scam.

This is not a reasonable position.

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

#326

Post by n8henrie »

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #312
n8henrie wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s very unlikely you have 70mbps sustained usage. Typically it’s an average of peak per X mins. You likely could save money by sharing your Starlink with a neighbor and neither of you would have much noticeable impact to bandwidth. Your latency might get slightly worse because of possible “noisy neighbor” but gotta ask if that latency is worth the extra $.

No, I meant that's the average speed I get (so if we were splitting it I assume our speeds would each be half that when downloading / streaming simultaneously).

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

#327

Post by Jedd »

Panzer04 wrote: post #195
Jedd wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sor…

The 3G service will be replaced with 4G/5G - it will probably be better, in all likelyhood. The range is based on the spectrum used, not the technology. 3G was kept around only because of old mobile devices (eg. PoS terminals) that needed it to function, not because it was any good. It's kind of amusing to me that you blame our private telecom industry. I'm relatively sure Australia has some of the best mobile connec…

You're right, but I don't yet know, and haven't been advised by my telco (who also owns that tower) what will happen during that migration next year.

My handset (Pixel 4A original) will need replacing if they go 5G only - I guess they will go 4 & 5 combined, but see above.

I don't know if my Telstra-installed (~ 2 years ago) repeater will work with 5G, or I'll need to buy a replacement.

I don't know if I have any recourse or remedy in the event that I lose all connectivity after the 3G retirement.

Signal propagation is weird. When the tech installed my repeater and yagi, most of the time was spent finding the optimum direction - he ended up pointing it at a hill probably 10 degrees off the measured direction for the tower (line of sight is impossible for us).

So, yes, you're right ... but still.

Anyway, Australia has some of the best mobile service coverage in populated areas - that's why they talk about percentage of humans that have coverage, not land area. And I totally understand why.

Reviewing https://www.telstra.com.au/coverage-networks/our-coverage - where I am, unboosted 3G, and to a lesser degree, 4G zones are asserted to be within several km of me - but the nearest 5G blob is ~60km. There's no 'coverage coming soon' zones within 300km of me.

And yes, I blame privatisation. Prior to that, if you wanted a landline service, connection fee was flat, no matter where you were. If that had continued on, presumably the same policy would apply today for other services.

Contesting for last-mile means it's now hideously expensive to the consumer - similarly for power connection - compared to a few decades ago.

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

#328

Post by Jedd »

onethought wrote: post #210
Jedd wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sor…

NBN isn’t privatised. It’s 100% public. So it’s not fully privatised, I’m sure if folks give the liberals a couple more goes they’ll figure out how to sell it off and buy it back like Telecom

You're absolutely right. (Including your predictions.)

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

#329

Post by runarberg »

crispinb wrote: post #322
runarberg wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 shou…

4g has very patchy coverage in rural Australia away from main roads. Satellite can be an OK option for some (we have a gov-subsidised option), but is unreliable and subject to lengthy outages and low monthly data caps. There are many other reasons to need decent connectivity - schooling and healthcare among them. > I have to question the decisions of someone that moves to an area without connection to the electricity…

I’m gonna ignore your personal insult and answer the actual claims in your post.

> 4g has very patchy coverage in rural Australia

This goes back to the claim in the original post. Starlink is an excuse not to rollout proper infrastructure.

> schooling and healthcare

Really? Are there honestly scenarios in the real world where people don’t have power but need to do school and healthcare via the internet. I find that hard to believe. Honestly if there exist rural communities where this is a concern than they deserve infrastructure, which goes back to the original post which claims:

> 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 can off the top of my head list hundreds of scenarios where remote work might become the only option for someone already living in the bush.

Do you mind listing some of them? It might be because of my lack of imagination, but I have a hard time seeing someone living in the bush, unable to relocate, suddenly finding a job that requires the need for high speed and low latency connection.

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

#330

Post by runarberg »

crispinb wrote: post #321
fsloth wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Internet without connected power is pretty common around here." Oh, that's interesting! I always thought this to be an outlier scenario. What is "here"? Can you estimate the size of population to this applies?

"Here" is Northern NSW, Australia. I have no idea of the numbers, but it's not uncommon in rural Australia.

This is HN, we should be able to find the numbers. How many people live in rural Australia and have no access to grid power? Of those how many could greatly benefit from a high speed low latency internet connection?

I know Australia does keep population statistics, and surely if it is indeed not uncommon for people to do remote work from areas without connection to grid power, somebody must have done a survey, otherwise you’d just be guessing.

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