Always was.
Starlink internet is going from rural savior to unreliable luxury
151–160 of 348 posts
Re: Starlink internet is going from rural savior to unreliable luxury
#152Believe it or not but in responding to queries and requests they are even worse than Google. My employer have been trying to contact them for over a year now. We're a fortune 100 company.
Re: Starlink internet is going from rural savior to unreliable luxury
#153All 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…
Meanwhile here I am in the Netherlands (semi-rural I'd say), having two fiber modems installed because we have 2 competing fiber networks here. At least one of them goes to 2500/2500 for about 75 eur a month. Probably it'll go much higher in the future.
"Semi-rural"
Proportion of urban population 92.57%
https://www.statista.com/statistics/276724/urbanization-in-t...
Re: Starlink internet is going from rural savior to unreliable luxury
#154Earlier 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.
India towns/villages dont have reliable electricity. So not sure what is the point of bringing up India.
Similarly Netherlands is not even as big as most provinces/states of the bigger countries where internet wiring challenges exists. So not sure what is the point of bringing up the Netherlands.
Re: Starlink internet is going from rural savior to unreliable luxury
#155> However, since I first began using these low-orbit satellites to power my internet, not only has the price gone up $30 per month, but the speeds and reliability have degraded significantly.
I mean, this was always going to happen; this will happen with _any_ cellular internet solution (it'll be particularly bad here as the cells are particularly large, but the principle is the same). I'm a little surprised that people seem so surprised by this; I would have thought that the target market for this (rural, no fixed line available, willing and able to pay over $100/month) would have seen it all before with mobile telcos and WISPs.
> For the last two months, I've gone back to T-Mobile Home Internet because I can get T-Mobile for only $50 per month and because speed and reliability are on par with what I'd been getting from Starlink.
Again, fairly unsurprising; if you have terrestrial cellular available to you, all else being equal, it's generally going to be a better option than satellite cellular.
Re: Starlink internet is going from rural savior to unreliable luxury
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
> All these talks about Starlink -> Remember it's a bandaid solution to your governments poor planning and infrastructure rollout of a core utility / service. Partially. The thing is, the US is so unbelievably huge that it is economically infeasible to serve extremely rural areas with high-speed wired (i.e. fiber, DSL) or wireless (microwave, 4G/5G phone) internet, even with massive government subsidies - and that ap…
> other large-area countries such as Germany or Australia as well Putting Germany in the same category as Australia or the US seems a bit weird when the former two have truly continental dimensions whereas Germany is a bit smaller than California, although there's an interesting twist: Going by population-weighted density, Australia definitively comes out ahead and even the US is somewhat denser than Germany in that…
The UK was a bit slow to get going but is going in the right direction at a reasonable pace now. Openreach has been doing a rollout covering most people and the DCMS voucher scheme is funding independents to fill in the gaps.
I believe there will still be a rural segment relying on cellular for a while yet, but it's a shrinking minority.
Re: Starlink internet is going from rural savior to unreliable luxury
#157Re: Starlink internet is going from rural savior to unreliable luxury
#158So 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.
This is a reasonable argument for higher cost and lower capacity. It is not a good argument for unreliability in a service that should be fairly mature by now.
Re: Starlink internet is going from rural savior to unreliable luxury
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
> All these talks about Starlink -> Remember it's a bandaid solution to your governments poor planning and infrastructure rollout of a core utility / service. Partially. The thing is, the US is so unbelievably huge that it is economically infeasible to serve extremely rural areas with high-speed wired (i.e. fiber, DSL) or wireless (microwave, 4G/5G phone) internet, even with massive government subsidies - and that ap…
Yes, the US is huge, but if an area can get power, we should be able to rollout fibre along the same routes. It just takes a bit of work.
Starlink is delivering internet to otherwise off-grid homes... Solar+battery tech has made power lines not only unnecessary, but in some states arguably not worth the fire risk anymore.
Re: Starlink internet is going from rural savior to unreliable luxury
#160> However, since I first began using these low-orbit satellites to power my internet, not only has the price gone up $30 per month, but the speeds and reliability have degraded significantly. I mean, this was always going to happen; this will happen with _any_ cellular internet solution (it'll be particularly bad here as the cells are particularly large, but the principle is the same). I'm a little surprised that peo…
> this will happen with _any_ cellular internet solution (it'll be particularly bad here as the cells are particularly large, but the principle is the same)
> if you have terrestrial cellular available to you, all else being equal, it's generally going to be a better option than satellite cellular.
Can you elaborate? What is the disadvantage? Why is the performance degradation unsurprising?