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Beta users of Starlink get downloads of 11 to 60 Mbps

arstechnica.com

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Re: Beta users of Starlink get downloads of 11 to 60 Mbps

#371

Post by foota »

enkid wrote: post #329
antris wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't duplicated textures get de-duplicated by any halfway-decent compression algorithm though? I'd assume the game is sent over the wire compressed

That's not how compression would work. Think about if they are adding a new level. The algorithm would have nothing to compare the files against except what is actually being sent. If the texture appears in each level, and each level comes in a separate update, there's no way for the algorithm to reference or incorporate the files that are already in your computer, so it has to compress it like it's a brand new file.…

I think AAA games do this now anyway to allow this like smaller patches and playing while the game downloads.

Re: Beta users of Starlink get downloads of 11 to 60 Mbps

#372

Post by ckdarby »

e12e wrote: post #150
jliptzin wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your math assumes all 100 million customers will be downloading at 10Mbps at the same time, all the time. Obviously that is not the case.

Not "all the time", but at any one time - at the same time (eg: watching superbowl - but of course any kind of multicast/broadcast is a little different). At any rate, it's mostly about the bandwidth each satellite has to route. I don't know what the likely number of subscribers for any one LEO sattelite will be? Will it really be on the order of 100 million not also served by 4g cellular, dsl and other broadband? Sa…

Couldn't the satellites themselves cache content that are for world wide events like this?

Edit: Even further, if they're launching 12000 of these couldn't that be a CDN network itself?

Re: Beta users of Starlink get downloads of 11 to 60 Mbps

#373

Post by foota »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #365
grecy wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for the Telco that services all of Northern Canada (world's largest operating area for a telco). We installed one of the world's first 3G towers that uses only satellite as backbone. Think fly-in only communities that are thousands of kilometers away from anything in the Arctic. Many of our sites are served by radio backhaul for that reason. The sat backhaul tower is extremely expensive and temperamental. It…

> many thousands of dollars per GB Which year was that? Depending on airline, I was able to use free to $20 per long haul leg sat net and stream 4K YouTube...

I imagine they mean GB/s of capacity, not per GB.

Re: Beta users of Starlink get downloads of 11 to 60 Mbps

#374

Post by burtonator »

hesdeadjim wrote: post #53

Anyone complaining about this has never experienced the frustration of rural living when it comes to internet. This is absolutely amazing, and it will just get better. Even a reliable 10mbps would be a godsend in many places.

I'm living in a canyon about 30 minutes from down. Our fastest internet is about 5Mbit... I used to live in downtown SF where I had a gigabit.

As soon as I can get Starlink I'm on it.

Re: Beta users of Starlink get downloads of 11 to 60 Mbps

#375

Post by dylan604 »

hesdeadjim wrote: post #53

Anyone complaining about this has never experienced the frustration of rural living when it comes to internet. This is absolutely amazing, and it will just get better. Even a reliable 10mbps would be a godsend in many places.

When I was growing up, 56.6kbps was the hotness. However, in the boonies where I lived, the best I could do was 33.6kbps. Most of the time, I was lucky to get 28.8, but would never get less than 14.4. Turned out, that the central switch for our town was so old and we were so far from it that there was no way for it to provide a clean enough signal for >33.6.

When HughesNet came out, we tried it. It was horrible. Only if we were lucky would we get a signal better than our dial-up's download speed. The thing about Hughes is that we still connected with a dial-up for Tx. Only Rx came from space.

All of that to say HELL YES, those are amazing speeds. However, as an adult, I became cityfolk, and have full 1Gbps up/down via fiber.

Re: Beta users of Starlink get downloads of 11 to 60 Mbps

#376

Post by dylan604 »

choeger wrote: post #284
medion wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Australia I moved to a very rural place, buying a house based on where I could get wireless broadband as part of our nationwide broadband rollout - I now live in a beautiful remote place overlooking the ocean with 50/20mbps Internet. Before here, I lived in another rural place near the ocean, however there was no broadband and 4G was too expensive. I ended up making friends with someone who had a 1gbps fibrelink 1…

Ok you got me with "overlooking the ocean". I will admit, I was a little bit envious. But then I recalled the great Terry Pratchett quote that you are living on a continent where pretty much every animal, except for maybe some sheep, is equipped with some venom and actively trying to kill you. Plus some of the plants. So I guess it's fair play.

Move one more island over to New Zealand. The animal kingdom is much more friendly.

Re: Beta users of Starlink get downloads of 11 to 60 Mbps

#377

Post by RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u »

pmlnr wrote: post #351
busterarm wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of what you're saying isn't actually true here. Light moves significantly (47%) slower through optical fiber than through space. This drastically reduces the latency of long distance connections. We're talking NY round trip to Japan in the same time it takes NY roundtrip to the UK now. The cost of backhaul and ongoing maintenance of cables is a lot more than SpaceX launching their own satellites by an entire or…

> Light moves significantly (47%) slower through optical fiber than through space The what? As far as I know c is a constant.

In a vacuum. See Cherenkov radiation[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation

Re: Beta users of Starlink get downloads of 11 to 60 Mbps

#378

Post by api »

hesdeadjim wrote: post #53

Anyone complaining about this has never experienced the frustration of rural living when it comes to internet. This is absolutely amazing, and it will just get better. Even a reliable 10mbps would be a godsend in many places.

Hell for some 'holler down in West Virginia or Kentucky a reliable 3mbps would be amazing. Many of those sorts of places have 384kbps-768kbps DSL or even dialup... in 2020. They just don't have the infrastructure and it costs way too much to build out last mile over vast stretches of land with few customers, and it's compounded in some areas by a lack of even stable right-of-way where you can easily run cable.

The market for this is huge. It's probably not going to displace high-end broadband in medium sized to larger metro areas, but it can clean up when it comes to anything outside of that. The only possible competitor is fixed wireless using next-generation modulations that provide incredible range, but that's hard to deploy over a wide area if the land is not really really flat. I guess 4G could compete too if they radically cut their prices, but I'm not sure the backhaul networks out in them 'thar hills would even be up to the traffic.

Re: Beta users of Starlink get downloads of 11 to 60 Mbps

#379

Post by amiga_500 »

This is more momentum towards decentralization. Fantastic.

Little bit discouraged to see one comment stating 2mb/s for Canada, I wonder why it would be slower than the USA? Perhaps there is less overhead coverage there density wise?

I also wonder how you can ascertain upload/download speeds before signing up. I know traditional broadband over copper doesn't have this feature, but if feels like this could, if you have the terminal on trial.

Very interesting.

Re: Beta users of Starlink get downloads of 11 to 60 Mbps

#380

Post by dangoljames »

tetha wrote: post #105
hesdeadjim wrote: post #53

Anyone complaining about this has never experienced the frustration of rural living when it comes to internet. This is absolutely amazing, and it will just get better. Even a reliable 10mbps would be a godsend in many places.

Reliable 10mbps is a stable full hd stream and 5ish mbps to spare. Easily one stable video call or two at lower quality. It'll be annoying if you want to download the latest AAA shooter coming in at dozens and dozens of gigabytes, sure. But you can do a lot at 10mbps as 1-2 people needing the uplink. That's really nice.

This right here. In 1997 I resold a 56k connection over dialup and did a bang-up business until the local phone company put me out of business.
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