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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

#441

Post by ghthor »

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…

I'm pretty sure it could with that DIDO technology that Rearden Labs produced. The think the sub company they started it under was Artemis. I always thought they're tech would work very well with satellite constellations.

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

#442

Post by crdotson »

api wrote: post #378
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 ma…

Our holler in Kentucky has fiber to the premises through a federal grant a few years back, but I’ll admit that’s unusual. :)

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

#443

Post by Auracle »

aaomidi wrote: post #63
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…

Bandwidth is over provisioned at 50-100x the amount. Sometimes even more.

I don’t think that would still apply. I’m in a rural area and our local ISP speeds go down to 1mbps in the evening, from a supposed 15. Streaming services are used by a lot of people at the same time.

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

#444

Post by crdotson »

dylan604 wrote: post #375
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…

Actually the way 56k worked is that the ISP would provide a digital signal to the phone switch, and not all phone switches supported this. The problem might have been distance but it was probably the age of the switch!

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

#445

Post by bawolff »

Alupis wrote: post #149
RandomBacon wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a bunch or articles that talk about people using balloons to send material to North Korea. The Human Rights Foundation even collects flash drives to load them up with content to smuggle into North Korea: https://flashdrivesforfreedom.org

For private groups, or individuals, sure you can get away with this. For a government to do this? How could that not lead to an armed conflict?

Because if the government is the USA, who is really going to go to war with them over this?

You're not wrong, information/propaganda warfare is aggressive. Sometimes it makes more strategic sense then open warfare, and sometimes states can get away with it when they can't get away with open warfare.

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

#446

Post by wlesieutre »

NickNameNick wrote: post #436
wlesieutre wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wouldn’t they want to keep reused objects instanced for performance, or is there some other advantage to just meshing everything out into a unique set of level parts?

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

#447

Post by _-___________-_ »

eddieh wrote: post #222
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.

Viasat is already available and provides 12-100 Mbps service. Viasat only uses 4 satellites. HughesNet provides up to 25 Mbps service and I think has 5 satellites. Caveat: Of course I've never used either service myself, so I can not speak to the actual download speeds vs advertised speeds.

They're both slower than advertised, have tiny data caps, and have extremely high latency. The latency is the real killer.

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

#448

Post by dylan604 »

BigJono wrote: post #439
dylan604 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Haha, an Aussie complaining about the insects from other countries. That's rich!! When the mosquitoes are that size, they are easy to see and catch. Here in the southern part of the US, we have to keep our small kids on leashes lest the "mozzies" carry them away.

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

#449

Post by dmix »

bargl wrote: post #45

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 h…

One of the big excuses for the telecom/ISP monopolies in Canada is that they help serve rural areas (same deal with Canada Post).

I'm curious to see if this ends up having any effect on the current system.

Technically you could just directly subsidize access to the rural areas, for those who can't afford the much cheaper new satellite systems themselves, instead of giving these anti-consumer monsters free reign on the whole country in exchange for managing expensive infrastructure just to serve a small percentage of the population.

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

#450

Post by murp »

mmm_grayons wrote: post #278
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 At least for America, most city folk don't seem to understand just how armed their rural counterparts are. They'd be pretty darn safe.

That's actually a pretty good pro to stay in cities.

Mass hysteria + lots of guns = not a place I'd like to be.

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