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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

#431

Post by [deleted] »

bob33212 wrote: post #65
Barrin92 wrote: post #59

just to do some napkin maths, the entire constellation is supposed to be 12k satellites. Some googling gives 20Gbps throughput per satellite, so that'd be about 240k Gbps per second. Now of course the satellites keep exchanging information themselves and not all satellites are everywhere all the time but ignoring that, and let's say you can assume ten times as much bandwidth because not everyone is online at the same…

This will not be competitive with existing broadband offerings. Especially in competitive markets. Some people pay 70/month or less for 1GB currently in good markets. This will be competitive where the cost is currently 100/month for much slower connections.

[deleted]

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

#432

Post by dpweb »

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.

It's about expectations. Yes, 10-50 Mbps is pretty acceptable. Today. It won't be in 5-10 years. 5G will make 1000 Mbps at 1ms, pretty much the expectation, and the apps of tomorrow will need it.

In 10 years people will be talking about 50MBps like they do 3G today. I cannot operate hardly a single app on my phone on 3G. It's worthless in 2020.

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

#433

Post by hansvm »

est31 wrote: post #337
macintux wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, if you’re able to work from home, you can self-isolate pretty much anywhere, and drive wherever you need to get food. If urban environments start seriously breaking down due to a food supply chain problem, rural areas won’t be safe from desperate people. Anyway, both approaches have their pros and cons, but as someone who has a fairly severe back problem and not much inclination to try to live off the grid,…

> rural areas won’t be safe from desperate people. That's why you need to buy yourself a private, remote island, or at least a farm on a remote island. Also, if you don't live on it alone (regardless of ownership), it may not import more food than it exports, otherwise the other inhabitants will want to get your food. Of course this is hard to find such an island as there aren't many such places and unless you're ver…

> unless you're very rich it'll be beyond your budget anyways

I mean, there's a decent supply of islands (many with houses) that go for barely more than a Bay Area single-family home.

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

#434

Post by hansvm »

kortilla wrote: post #295
Frondo wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if rural folks may realize how well-armed we are in the cities. Nearly everyone I know has a gun, and none of us is the crowd you'd normally associate with gun owners in cities.

Well the the stats don’t lie. Gun ownership is significantly lower in cities than in rural areas/small towns.

Is it possible that the stats are of the flavor (total guns)/(total people) and inflate rural ownership because of a gun for small game, a gun for large game, a gun for self defense, and in certain parts of the country a gun for extremely big fish? Or is gun ownership when computed as (count of people with guns)/(total people) still inflated in rural areas?

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

#435

Post by jpollock »

kickopotomus wrote: post #292
curiousllama wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. Also - my frustrations over the last few days compel me to point out that the latest AAA shooter is in fact 227 GB, plus >100GB of updates.

Has anyone come out with a reason for the size? I mean they seem to reuse a lot of the same textures throughout the game so I have a hard time understanding how it managed to swell to that.

Here are some reasons I can come up with (3 is weak):

1) Fancy updaters with bindiff and compression take time and money. As a first step, you need repeatable builds.

2) A broken fancy updater results in a reinstall, support calls and refunds.

3) If the updates are pushed by the store, there is no incentive to reduce the cost.

With those three, if you can get away with shipping everything that's changed, you're going to do it.

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

#436

Post by NickNameNick »

wlesieutre wrote: post #429
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume it must be a massive refusal to deduplicate. For example in the Verdansk map, many of the houses and buildings are cut and pasted. In theory, these could be aliases of the same model, but I suspect they are all baked in. Other than that I just don't know. Maybe they used bad settings for whatever is their compression algo and they don't have any experts who could actually identify the problem? It's a prepost…

The house models themselves might use the same geometry and textures, but if you pre-bake any lighting then that’s a unique texture across every single surface in the world that can’t be deduplicated.

Depending on how the models are expressed in the environment, theres a good chance they end up as triangle meshes with unique coordinates by the time the running game eversees them.

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

#437

Post by jpollock »

The number of grey market installs of this where people will use _any_ available US address to get the equipment and then take it back to wherever they are?

Wow. This isn't just rural USA, this is rural Canada, Europe, South America, Africa. Anywhere and everywhere.

Think back to US sat-tv providers selling into Canada. Think back to the original iPhone selling internationally.

Regulators be damned.

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

#438

Post by hnick »

thinkcontext wrote: post #390
bdamm wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Main advantage of Starlink over existing satellite is a (much) lower latency. Starlink constellation is flying by with a new satellite overhead every 10 minutes or less, and they're operating just above the atmosphere. Musk has claimed 20ms latency, which if true, would be absolutely a smash victory for rural Internet users everywhere.

The article says the beta testers are seeing 30-90ms.

Location matters, so FWIW it seems to be from northern US / southern Canada to LA.

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

#439

Post by BigJono »

dylan604 wrote: post #376
choeger wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rubbish. I went to New Zealand once and the fucking mozzies were the size of a golf ball.

I'll take the one redback encounter every 5 years in Australia thanks.

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

#440

Post by myself248 »

war1025 wrote: post #427
dylan604 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I remember as a teen I'd go on Digg and open all the articles in separate tabs so that by the time I was done reading the text ones some of the images would be loaded on the ones with pictures. We've come a long way.

Oh, you had tabs! We had to use new browser instances! Uphill, in the snow!

Seriously though, I still do this out of habit, as it's just how I like to read. Skim a front page, open all the articles in tabs, and then go back and peruse them.

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