Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I took down my Starlink dish (but haven't cancelled)

jeffgeerling.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 258 posts

Re: I took down my Starlink dish (but haven't cancelled)

#101

Post by the-dude »

gambiting wrote: post #74
reportingsjr wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dish won't work since it knows where it is via GPS and where it is supposed to be. There is a little bit of tolerance in where the dish can be moved, but certainly not 70 miles of leeway.

Ha, reminds me of the tiny 3G picostations you could get from your mobile operator for a while when 3G was in its infancy - if you said you had really poor signal at your home, they would send you a small 3G station you could use in your home and which used your own internet for data and calls....but the hardware had a GPS built in to make sure it was never moved from the address it was assigned to(otherwise you coul…

I only ever heard the term Femtocell for this. Also, wouldn't an IP check suffice? Are you sure it had GPS?

Re: I took down my Starlink dish (but haven't cancelled)

#102

Post by anarazel »

ShakataGaNai wrote: post #98
anarazel wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's within the feasible distance for a point to point wireless bridge. If geography permits - which is not that likely. Not cheap, but might be better than alternatives.

If my handy online calculators are working correctly, 70km distant would require a 300+ ft tall tower on each side for that P2P bridge. Just to deal with the curvature of the earth and not counting for anything else that might be in the way.

It would likely have to be more than one hop, yes...

Re: I took down my Starlink dish (but haven't cancelled)

#103

Post by Androider »

gambiting wrote: post #82
mprev wrote: post #27

If you can get high speed, low latency, affordable internet access another way then Starlink probably isn't for you. We've just moved to a place where our only other option was a £400 a month leased line delivering synchronous 100Mbps. For less than a quarter of that, Starlink gives us roughly 120-150Mbps down, around 7Mbps up, and pings around the 30 ms mark. Upload is slow but workable for now. It's easy to complai…

>> The power draw is around the same as a fairly typical lightbulb from 20 years ago, so I can totally live with that. Since you mentioned pounds, I just want to address the power consumption part. At averaged 100W power usage, the system will use 2.4kWh of electricity every day. In UK the energy prices are absolutely exploding - with the government estimating that the "average" consumer will be paying 28p/kWh of ele…

For comparison, my US bill is currently 9.5c/kWh, which is 7p/kWh. Your UK price is 4x that of mine! The SpaceX office where the dish was designed is just down the road from here, so I can totally see the engineers thinking "What's the big deal, it's only 100W? That's a few dollars a month."

Re: I took down my Starlink dish (but haven't cancelled)

#104

Post by iptrans »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #79
NDizzle wrote: post #11

I've had Starlink in Rural AR for 10 months now. I have it currently set to "failover only" on my Ubiquiti device, as it's snowing sideways and there is a tremendous (read: 30%) amount of packet loss at the moment. I don't yet know how to do automatic failover due to packet loss on a UBNT device, but that's what I'm looking up this afternoon. Anyways - I have 3 ISPs, with two of them being LTE. One is the unlimited A…

CGNAT ?!? Huh, I would have expected Starlink to be IPv6 only...

The Internet does not work without IPv4.

It’s either CGNAT or ponying up $60 per IPv4 address.

Re: I took down my Starlink dish (but haven't cancelled)

#105

Post by humanlion87 »

woah wrote: post #88
fastaguy88 wrote: post #3

I get it. If you already have internet, then Starlink is not for you. There are lots of questionable design choices (particularly in version 2), it's picky about placement, etc. etc. But if your other choice is HughesNet or its competitors, that throttles you after 15 GB (2 days of non-streaming usage for me), or 50 GB, the Starlink "shortcomings" are irrelevant. With Starlink, if you can get it, and if you can site…

The hype a couple of years ago was at a fever pitch. Starlink was going to replace all forms of internet with space-ey goodness. Millions of people getting 100mbps for $50/m on cable who just didn't like the cable company's call center reps were clamoring for Elon to save them from their predicament. I was working in the ISP space, and we did some rough back of the envelope calculations which showed that Starlink cou…

I don't think the general hype was that Starlink would replace existing ISPs everywhere. It was always understood that this product was for rural/remote areas that don't have direct lines for internet connection.

Re: I took down my Starlink dish (but haven't cancelled)

#106

Post by geerlingguy »

stickfigure wrote: post #94
ncallaway wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As mentioned in the article, though, how much could the added cost of an Ethernet connector be? That can’t increase the BOM that much, right?

Taking a wild guess here: Standard PoE+ is 30w, and even the newest PoH maxes out at 90w. The new hardware draws more than that, so Starlink made up their own PoEish standard with proprietary cable/connectors. The $20 dongle is probably a custom PoE adapter. The good thing about this setup is you only need a single cable run up to your roof. Adding an RJ45 jack directly to dishy might actually complicate the construc…

We're talking about a typical 1 Gbps (non-PoE) LAN port on the router, so you could plug in another computer hardwired (or a switch).

The jack is pennies, and the rest of the chips to support the extra Ethernet interface are still readily available. Version 1 of the router had a LAN port (labeled AUX).

Re: I took down my Starlink dish (but haven't cancelled)

#107

Post by staunch »

geerlingguy wrote: post #12
fastaguy88 wrote: post #3

I get it. If you already have internet, then Starlink is not for you. There are lots of questionable design choices (particularly in version 2), it's picky about placement, etc. etc. But if your other choice is HughesNet or its competitors, that throttles you after 15 GB (2 days of non-streaming usage for me), or 50 GB, the Starlink "shortcomings" are irrelevant. With Starlink, if you can get it, and if you can site…

My biggest gripe is the fact I can't transfer it to my cousin, who lives on a farm with 300 Kbps DSL, 70 miles away. Back when preorders started, it wasn't obvious how slow Starlink would be to expand, and it also wasn't obvious transfers wouldn't be a supported feature for many months. Even so, my cousin also signed up in hopes to get Starlink, and 11 months later her date was moved from 'late 2021' to 'late 2022'.…

Early adopters have early adopter problems. Are you genuinely surprised Starlink doesn't support something they didn't claim to support and that most users don't even need? Complaining about "beta" labels, which everyone knows are meaningless?

FYI: I unsubscribed because of this video (previous to it showing up on HN). It's obviously disingenuous clickbait. Look at the title alone. And it even goes into a pointless discussion about Elon Musk that has nothing to do with Starlink itself. Lots of good technical YouTubers avoid this crap. I was surprised you felt the need to engage in it. I'm not mad, just disappointed :-)

Re: I took down my Starlink dish (but haven't cancelled)

#108

Post by jacquesm »

jagger27 wrote: post #68
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand though. His cousin is 70 miles away, are the satellite coverages that small?

It’s about the base station capacity, in theory. Though it seems super unlikely that an address that’s only 70 miles away would be on a different base station. This will change dramatically once sat-to-sat laser comms are fully online as it will put more base stations “in range”.

I'm not so sure about that. At 200 Km altitude that the footprint of the satellite wouldn't be all that large depending on the phase array arrangement. It might not be able to swing that far sideways and still get enough signal strength. These antennas don't move physically, the use phase based signal steering (black magic to me).

Re: I took down my Starlink dish (but haven't cancelled)

#109

Post by geerlingguy »

stickfigure wrote: post #81
qayxc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But what happens if he just places the dish there? That's exactly what he tried a few months back. It didn't work (no connection was possible IIRC). The service was basically geo-fenced back then and still might be.

Did he say that in the video? He never said so in the article, and its absence is conspicuous.

I mentioned it in the previous review (just linked from the article). If only it were that easy :(

Re: I took down my Starlink dish (but haven't cancelled)

#110

Post by CivBase »

fastaguy88 wrote: post #3

I get it. If you already have internet, then Starlink is not for you. There are lots of questionable design choices (particularly in version 2), it's picky about placement, etc. etc. But if your other choice is HughesNet or its competitors, that throttles you after 15 GB (2 days of non-streaming usage for me), or 50 GB, the Starlink "shortcomings" are irrelevant. With Starlink, if you can get it, and if you can site…

The same could be said of critical reviews of HughesNet. Its value is usually in being the least bad of a limited, very bad options. That doesn't make the critisism any less valuable.

Say I'm considering moving to a rural location. One of my barriers to moving is the quality of my internet access. Along comes this fancy new Starlink service and I might be tempted to think "problem solved". But reviews like this allow me to anticipate problems with the service and reconsider moving altogether.

If Starlink is the least bad of your bad options, then this review probably just isn't for you.

Post reply on HN