Beta users of Starlink get downloads of 11 to 60 Mbps • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by chuckhendo » Fri, Aug 14, 2020, 6:36 PM UTC

Alupis wrote: post #36

xenadu02 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having this kind of network is a good thing but the idea that any kind of satellite or wireless can replace wires is just fantasy. Delivering just 10Mbps to 100 million customers is over 900 Tbps. There is absolutely no way a satellite network can clear that kind of downlink bandwidth. And that's just a tiny fraction of the market. Physical cables/fiber represent several orders of magnitude more capacity and always w…

And even in remote areas, building out VDSL2 networks with relatively decent speeds (200Mbps down and 100Mbps up[1]) would be better, honestly. Most homes already have a phone line and can support a DSL network... and in some countries a phone line is mandated by law, so the infrastructure already exists. But, DSL is not nearly as "sexy" as thousands of satellites... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL#:~:text=VDS…

I mean, you're not wrong, VDSL in rural areas would be great! But it also hasn't happened.

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

#42

Post by H8crilA » Fri, Aug 14, 2020, 6:37 PM UTC

How low will it get once there's 100 (or more) people connecting from a single neighborhood?

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

#43

Post by SEJeff » Fri, Aug 14, 2020, 6:40 PM UTC

derekp7 wrote: post #32

dougmwne wrote: post #18

This is already quite an achievement! In just 10 launches, SpaceX is operating the world's largest satellite constellation and can already provide broadband of reasonable quality to some customers. In rural areas, I have struggled to catch weak LTE signals with fixed antennas that often didn't hit these speed and latency numbers. This absolutely seems on track to be an excellent alternative to rural LTE or existing s…

I would like to see a kit from SpaceX which provides a solar powered Starlink to LTE bridge. Such kits could be installed anywhere, and provide service to places such as farm communities (install them on top of grain silos, for example). That way Starlink could be available to more customers without them having to have their own premise equipment (beyond an LTE hotspot).

I'd sort of expect LTE operators to pay SpaceX for kit to do literally this.

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

#44

Post by rckoepke » Fri, Aug 14, 2020, 6:40 PM UTC

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #21

I just got back from an AirBnB where I worked remotely for a week and the internet was DSL. It was about 1.5Mbps up and down. Work was still possible. Even group video calls worked. Uploading and downloading large files was out of the question however. I had to do a lot of work SSH'd into a remote server. So, 11 to 60 is not great, but still useful.

When I worked on oil rigs in Saudi Arabia, ~300kbps seemed to be the minimum necessary for WhatsApp/Facebook messenger/low-intensity web browsing like old reddit or arstechnica. HN might work a little lower but probably not much before HTTP fails for other reasons (if your speeds are that low, likely your packet loss is far too high to keep things working over 2G/3G/4G).

Truly even 0.3Mbps made all the difference in the world to the people who had been stuck on those rigs for the past 30-800 days. Often it was the first time in over a week, sometimes over a month that they could talk with their families. It became a necessary part of my job to spend 6-12 hours/day rationing access to the WiFi hotspots so that each of the 60 or so personnel could talk with their families each day.

I purchased with my own money all the WiFi modems and a set of 8 different antennas for various frequencies, with very long cables. Generally took about 2-6 hours to align everything correctly to get any usable signal. Used public cell tower databases to find the GPS coordinates of the nearest towers and used vectors to those positions as starting points.

Some of the locations I never could get any signal and no one could talk to their families or keep up with the news. Hopefully Starlink eventually connects these people to their families on a much more regular basis.

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

#45

Post by bargl » Fri, Aug 14, 2020, 6:41 PM UTC

Starlink internet is not meant to replace hard line internet. There is no getting around the physics of cable being so much cheaper/easier. Even terrestrial cell towers are more efficient and cheaper than satellites.

This is 100% meant to supplement existing infrastructure not to replace it. You will almost always get cheaper and faster internet (for both you and the company providing internet) over a cable to your house. If you can't get that, then maybe a cell tower is better, if that doesn't work, then a land based beaming internet may be better, after that I'd look to space based internet.

It can probably supplant land based beaming internet, but I don't see this replacing ISPs/4g/5g anytime soon.

The target audience for much of this infrastructure is the places you can't put a cell tower, but want to get signal. Ocean based travel being a big one.

EDIT: I will contend. 5g could beat out ISPs at cost (which I thought I'd made more clear above). It's about the cost of infrastructure given the population density. I don't have as much knowledge in that area as I do satellite costs. But satellites won't beat out 5G at cost, not even with the reduced cost to space that SpaceX provides. It could with another couple orders of magnitude cost reduction in space. But there's a reason SpaceX is targeting only 5 million Americans and not 300 million.

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

#46

Post by SEJeff » Fri, Aug 14, 2020, 6:42 PM UTC

xenadu02 wrote: post #25

jasonpeacock wrote: post #12

Honestly, this is just awesome. It's a working demonstration of high-speed satellite internet, showing this approach is a viable solution for "anywhere on Earth" internet. For all those people who don't have broadband available, this will be life-changing. It'll only get better from here, welcome to the future :) (and remember that perfect is the enemy of good)

Having this kind of network is a good thing but the idea that any kind of satellite or wireless can replace wires is just fantasy. Delivering just 10Mbps to 100 million customers is over 900 Tbps. There is absolutely no way a satellite network can clear that kind of downlink bandwidth. And that's just a tiny fraction of the market. Physical cables/fiber represent several orders of magnitude more capacity and always w…

    There is absolutely no way a satellite network can clear that kind of downlink bandwidth.

Evergreen comment. Encoding and compression software and hardware continue to improve. The only constant in technology is change. Will we be able to do this sort of bandwith to LEO eventually? Yes. Can we do it this very moment? No one has tried.

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

#47

Post by grecy » Fri, Aug 14, 2020, 6:42 PM UTC

derekp7 wrote: post #32

dougmwne wrote: post #18

This is already quite an achievement! In just 10 launches, SpaceX is operating the world's largest satellite constellation and can already provide broadband of reasonable quality to some customers. In rural areas, I have struggled to catch weak LTE signals with fixed antennas that often didn't hit these speed and latency numbers. This absolutely seems on track to be an excellent alternative to rural LTE or existing s…

I would like to see a kit from SpaceX which provides a solar powered Starlink to LTE bridge. Such kits could be installed anywhere, and provide service to places such as farm communities (install them on top of grain silos, for example). That way Starlink could be available to more customers without them having to have their own premise equipment (beyond an LTE hotspot).

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 does work, but not very well. 3G (and LTE) are not very fault tolerant, and phones drop calls when the quality of the call drops below thresholds that can't be set. AFAIK they have not installed another one because of all the problems.

For data the cost is astronomical - many thousands of dollars per GB. Hopefully starlink can at least fix that.

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

#48

Post by bargl » Fri, Aug 14, 2020, 6:42 PM UTC

jefft255 wrote: post #4

Pings and upload speeds seem impressive (although as someone else said we'll see when under load). I come from a place (rural Canada) where a non-trival amount of people who live far away from town centers do not have access to decent internet. This will be a good alternative to existing satellite ISPs, or 5mbps (on a good day) land ISPs. Also potentially amazing for people living off-grid.

It will also put pressure on land based ISP to either give up customers, or pay to increase infrastructure to get comparable internet to those areas.

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

#49

Post by grahamburger » Fri, Aug 14, 2020, 6:42 PM UTC

Alupis wrote: post #36

xenadu02 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having this kind of network is a good thing but the idea that any kind of satellite or wireless can replace wires is just fantasy. Delivering just 10Mbps to 100 million customers is over 900 Tbps. There is absolutely no way a satellite network can clear that kind of downlink bandwidth. And that's just a tiny fraction of the market. Physical cables/fiber represent several orders of magnitude more capacity and always w…

And even in remote areas, building out VDSL2 networks with relatively decent speeds (200Mbps down and 100Mbps up[1]) would be better, honestly. Most homes already have a phone line and can support a DSL network... and in some countries a phone line is mandated by law, so the infrastructure already exists. But, DSL is not nearly as "sexy" as thousands of satellites... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL#:~:text=VDS…

I haven't personally deployed VDSL2, but I have deployed DSL and other data-over-twisted pair systems including recent G.fast, G.hn and MOCA. I strongly doubt that VDSL can achieve those kinds of speeds reliably at the distances and densities needed to provide this service to the areas that need it most. In rural areas the copper lines are too long and too old to achieve these speeds (but they're fine for voice/POTS, so there's no mandate to upgrade.) Twisted pair is also really susceptible to noise and crosstalk, so in more densely populated areas once you start doing DSL to a lot of customers whose cables are bundled together they start to interfere with each other and everybody's service gets bad. In both cases the problem is signal to noise ratio - long cables mean poor signal, density means high noise, and twisted pair copper just isn't designed to deal with either very well.

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

#50

Post by rsynnott » Fri, Aug 14, 2020, 6:43 PM UTC

driverdan wrote: post #23

For reference these are LTE category 3 speeds with better than LTE pings. A good start but nowhere near the Gb they've promised. I'm cautiously optimistic.

> better than LTE pings

If you're getting latency worse than that on LTE, consider changing provider (and checking that you're _actually_ on LTE). These would be reasonable for the better class of 3G (HDSPA) but not great for LTE. Just did a speed test on my phone with wifi switched off (to a server in the same city). 20ms.