All 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 to undo the previous government's mess up of the original roll out post COVID world when everyone discovered remote work is a good idea for many.
Starlink's issue feels like history repeating itself with any service that becomes popular and goes too quickly into high demand
Yes. I am in rural(ish) Canada. A community got together and with regional and national funding created https://fibreargenteuil.ca/en/
It was intense, they had to fight, sometimes publicly, tooth and nail with the utility pole controllers. But I'm typing this from fast, reliable (knock the nearest of many trees) fibre internet with very reasonable (all things considered, though I wish they had a more basic tier for down and out folks) pricing.
I follow a few rural internet groups, at first most members thought Starlink would be all they'd ever need, now they are very unhappy.
One of the awful things I found here in (quasi-rural, near Hamilton) Ontario is this phenomenon:
1. No broadband from any of Rogers, Bell, Cogeco, etc. for multiple decades, and no real local offerings; despite being only a few km from a major centre
2. Nothing seems to be happening, so some local companies start offering point-to-point wireless services which fill a hole. They start putting up antenaes and stringing fibre all around. Fees are high but not awful. Bandwidth is low, but so much better than what one could get before. Also Starlink gets announced and deployed for some people.
3. Suddenly Bell shows up and starts running Fibe up and down the rural roads. What wasn't "economically viable" for them before suddenly super viable. Local wireless companies -- who took big risks to get a product to people -- lose hundreds of customers overnight.
I now have 3gbps fibre optic direct to my house when I had a 15mbps wireless connection a few months ago. But I'm sure some local small ISPs are going to be out of business by the end of the year.
Typical google seemed to think a politics and business problem was actually a technical one and then give up completely when it was clear they would actually have to make a real business investment to get what they wanted.
... still. It's unfathomable why they stopped. They could have singlehandedly created a new semi-national ISP, and they could have sold it off by now to focus on their core competency of launching new increasingly irrelevant messaging apps, rewriting GMail in slower and slower ways, and of course challenging the world, by boldly going where noone has dared going before, dropdown-by-dropdown sub-account-by-sub-account day-by-day they are inching closer to opening the gates of the insanity dimension, and the moment will come when God will get fed up because he/she can't find the fucking property/website/account in Google Analytics...
That's somewhat similar to what happened in the US during the initial timeframe of DSL.
Regional Bell says your DSL is $60-120/month.
Your local ISP buys a circuit to a DSL aggregator (Covad, Northpoint, Rhythms, etc) and starts offering DSL for $50/month (their cost was $25-30/month).
After increase in customers, regional Bell says "we're offering $29.95/month for 6 months to new customers". ISPs nationwide start losing thousands of customers.
One by one, DSL aggregators start to go out of business which means ISP have no DSL connectivity and can't sell DSL anymore.
Here in Canada the CRTC ordered incumbents to file tariffs and phase II cost studies for aggregated FTTP a few weeks ago by April 23rd. That is in part due to the new CRTC chairperson and the new policy directive that came into effect early in February. The CRTC quickly rejected the incumbents' "woe is us, we can't do that" letters last week. The 6 largest Canadian independent ISPs sold out to the large industry players over the past year in large part because they've hemorrhaged customers over the past 5 years without access to FTTP facilities. The regulatory problem being faced now is that competition has been almost completely gutted and now needs to be rebuilt.
A bit of backstory: Ian Scott, former chairperson of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), allegedly held solo/ex parte meetings with Incumbents while a review of a 2019 CRTC decision that reduced fees the big telecoms would be able to charge smaller internet service providers for access to their broadband networks, was underway [0].
> it's a bandaid solution to your governments poor planning and infrastructure rollout ..
Well yes, but a needed bandaid. That's what happens when governments vacate their role - individuals are left to manage on their own (and the devil take the hindmost).
Australian here like you. Generally appalled by the NBN debacle. Starlink's beyond my means, but if I had a remote job I'd find it a godsend where I live (rural Northern Rivers). Our "NBN" is SkyMuster, which is from all accounts not up to much (even if you can get the NBN to connect it).
It's very patchy though even for those in urban areas. Fixed wireless has been way over-used in areas that could easily have been wired.
And SkyMuster is supposed to be a last resort, but is pushed anywhere local topography offers a mild inconvenience for fixed wireless. I'm 4km from a village, and 30km from Lismore - hardly the back of beyond.
And the NBNCo is just an old-style Telco: bloated with plushly-remunerated suits, utterly indifferent to users, and grossly inefficient. Before I knew how bad it was I tried to get signed up with SkyMuster. It never happened. I had multiple appointments made by NBN with different contractors, none of whom knew anything about the other appointments. It never actually happened and I ended up cancelling the whole thing and making my own arrangements.
Yes, fixed wireless has been vastly overused. Presumably when NBN were short of budget for an area, or where there weren't enough wealthy folk calling their pet MP.
Starlink is also having a bad side-effect in other areas - apparently the frequencies on which it communicates muck up weather prediction technology[0]. I'm sure it works great if you're rural/have literally no other means but if you have the infrastructure for it, don't use Starlink.
it was never really intended for people that already had better options. Had it for a while and it was life changing for me coming from a 3MB DSL internet - but dropped it as soon as fiber found its way to my little town.
Notwithstanding the complaints of the OP, Starlink is still a gamechanger in many less urban areas. The alternatives are often not tenable for remote work or even, really, for many things that a lot of people consider near-necessities.
You don't even need to be in the middle of a wilderness area. My brother has a house 10 minutes outside of a smallish Maine city. And his only Starlink options were a 1Mbps down DSL and a very data-capped cellular hotspot.
But a good wired connection is almost always going to be better.
Also Australian - based in Hunter Valley (~ 200km north-west of Sydney). Definitely rural.
I replaced our Skymesh (geo-stationary) satellite (the only barely viable alternative) two years ago with Starlink. Skymesh gave me ~600ms RTT to Sydney servers, and maybe 25Mbps down (at 3am, clear sky, etc). Data cap was around 120GB / month, IIRC. Pricing was probably 75% of what I'm paying for Starlink now.
We can kinda sorta get 3G, but effectively only for voice & SMS - our nearest tower is ~ 10km away, and my yagi / repeater requires power to establish a very feeble back to that. 3G is being retired almost definitely in 2024, at which point I believe the national carriers' plan is to have no plan - as the replacement technology requires a much higher density of tower placements than rural areas will ever substantiate. The joy of a fully privatised communications industry.
The 3G service will be replaced with 4G/5G - it will probably be better, in all likelyhood. The range is based on the spectrum used, not the technology. 3G was kept around only because of old mobile devices (eg. PoS terminals) that needed it to function, not because it was any good.
It's kind of amusing to me that you blame our private telecom industry. I'm relatively sure Australia has some of the best mobile connectivity on the planet, with generally extremely high speeds, high data caps and usually, relatively good coverage. It is absolutely not a given that government service would be better.
You're right, but I don't yet know, and haven't been advised by my telco (who also owns that tower) what will happen during that migration next year.
My handset (Pixel 4A original) will need replacing if they go 5G only - I guess they will go 4 & 5 combined, but see above.
I don't know if my Telstra-installed (~ 2 years ago) repeater will work with 5G, or I'll need to buy a replacement.
I don't know if I have any recourse or remedy in the event that I lose all connectivity after the 3G retirement.
Signal propagation is weird. When the tech installed my repeater and yagi, most of the time was spent finding the optimum direction - he ended up pointing it at a hill probably 10 degrees off the measured direction for the tower (line of sight is impossible for us).
So, yes, you're right ... but still.
Anyway, Australia has some of the best mobile service coverage in populated areas - that's why they talk about percentage of humans that have coverage, not land area. And I totally understand why.
Reviewing https://www.telstra.com.au/coverage-networks/our-coverage - where I am, unboosted 3G, and to a lesser degree, 4G zones are asserted to be within several km of me - but the nearest 5G blob is ~60km. There's no 'coverage coming soon' zones within 300km of me.
And yes, I blame privatisation. Prior to that, if you wanted a landline service, connection fee was flat, no matter where you were. If that had continued on, presumably the same policy would apply today for other services.
Contesting for last-mile means it's now hideously expensive to the consumer - similarly for power connection - compared to a few decades ago.
>I replaced our Skymesh (geo-stationary) satellite (the only barely viable alternative) two years ago with Starlink. Skymesh gave me ~600ms RTT to Sydney servers, and maybe 25Mbps down (at 3am, clear sky, etc). Data cap was around 120GB / month, IIRC. Pricing was probably 75% of what I'm paying for Starlink now.
...what about Starlink's performance over the last 2 years?
Oh, yes, I should have mentioned that -- it feels like no difference in performance or availability to me.
My use case is web, remote desktop, video conf, phone (carrier->wifi voice is a transparent feature for me), streaming audio, syncthing.
Only a couple of those things are sensitive to the few seconds per hour that my dish seems to lose connection, and I suspect part of that is poor placement of my dish.
To your question, and TFA's point, though - I've not noticed any change in the frequency or duration of those ephemeral outages, nor any feeling of overall performance degradation.
I might have occasionally noticed evening drops in throughput, but little of my use case is impacted - I put that down to other customers in my cell ramping up their video streaming services that time of day.
The (mean) ~40ms latency has not changed over those two years (as expected).
NBN isn’t privatised. It’s 100% public. So it’s not fully privatised, I’m sure if folks give the liberals a couple more goes they’ll figure out how to sell it off and buy it back like Telecom
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.
I'm in a farming village in Spain, all of 2 families living here, 45 minutes drive from the nearest population center, and they rolled out symetrical gigabit fibre last year (and not just to us - to every rural village in the region).
The base 300/300 service is price capped at 38 euros/month as well. I'm paying a few bucks more for higher speed.
A 45 minute drive doesn’t even get you out of Brisbane, where I live (and has gigabit down — drives me nuts that our upload is capped at 50mbps. That’s the worst part of our system IMO).
We have a pretty different scale in a lot of ways: Australia is huge and basically empty, density wise.
2.5 Gb/s symmetrical is a sweet deal. Here in Italy in a town of 3k people I got "only" a 1Gb/s symmetrical, but so far I can't complain. It costs 25€/month so it's a pretty great deal
And here I am in the US in a metro area with a population of over a million and I can't get fiber despite AT&T having come door to door hawking their service on the premise that they were installing fiber. Clearly there's just not enough people in my area and it's impossible.
I’m with you on that. I live in Evanston, IL. For those unaware, it is the first city north of Chicago along Lake Michigan. Hardly a backwater.
On the one hand, I have two competing cable providers (RCN/Astound and Comcast/Xfinity). Being able to swap between services as offers change has been huge (hey, competition is a thing!) Currently I’ve got 1400/40 (measured) on Xfinity.
But fiber? Totally absent. AT&T seems to serve other areas nearby but not mine. Why? No clue. But I’d sure love having a symmetric connection.
Incidentally, there are multiple fiber cables strung on the poles in the alley behind my house. Presumably they are the infrastructure for our two cables cos.
I'm in rural Mississippi. AT&T buried fiber lines here a number of years back and never lit them up. I think there were some grants or something. Power company coop ran fiber last year though so AT&T can go to hell.
Ouch. Sorry to hear that. I remember speaking with colleagues in various parts of the US (mostly Seattle and Silicon valley areas) and I was shocked by how expensive and relatively low quality internet and mobile connections compared to most of western Europe. I guess having de-facto cartels in AT&T, Verizon, ... that don't encroach in each other territory is a terrible thing
Well, consumers in Austria and Germany have by far the shittiest internet in all of EU.
That's what you get when you let your corrupt politicians sell your national infrastructure and customer base to private monopolists who will rentseek you instead of competing and investing in infrastructure.
I remember walking into an A1 shop browsing for internet offers for my new apartment and the lady working there straight up told me "you don't need more than 80 mbit" without even asking what I do with it or what I need it for, as if 80mbit is the national standard all citizens should get, like in communism.
Gigabit here is a rare and expensive luxury while in most of EU is a freely available commodity.
Just a few years ago our office (two floors, Fortune 500 company, more than 100 people on site) had a 100Mbps connection to the Internet (and a dedicated 1Gbps to a branch office). We had video conferences, mirrored OSS and back'ed up over the 'net. The dedicated link was at times a bottleneck, but I don't recall that the link to the Internet ever was.
With the shift to cloud computing, at least in the awkward hybrid phase, that won't suffice for a business of that size, but it really isn't obvious what a single person would _need_ a gigabit connection for. Perhaps you can elaborate.
Honestly, I don't saturate my connection 99% of the time. I could have done that 10/15 years ago when I used to torrent a lot.
The download part is great because now it's faster to buy a game on steam for instance and download it than getting in the car, driving to the closest store to purchase a physical copy and bring it home.
Regarding the upload, I built a small utility that stores the videos from the cameras I have at home to the cloud in a rolling window (I didn't want to pay the service from the cameras provider). So at any time I am uploading something like 7 1080p streams (it's more bursty as I chunk the streams every 10 minutes and upload the resulting files). So, while 1Gb is still an overkill, once you have the bandwidth you find uses for it.
Au is only slightly smaller than the USA with 25.7 million people vs just California’s 39.24 and the Netherlands have 17.53 million — but bear in mind Australia is 186 times the size of the NDs. So it’s not surprising service is so good — the density of population makes broadband extremely profitable.
People forget. The numbers tell a really great story.
Yes, absolutely true. I think there’s something like 8M people just in NSW and the majority are Sydney.
Only trying to provide context for the economics of density in places like Singapore and the a Netherlands, not necessarily prove the opposite use case. I just wanted to highlight a contrasting factor that is very important for fiber and other high speed service viability. There are many others!
I also don't need that much bandwidth directly. But, I'm a biologist specialized in the analysis of Next Generation Sequencing data. I'm also self employed and such bandwidths are true enablers of my business. I need Terra Bytes of data analyzed, most of this data comes from research institutes' IT departments. I can avoid a lot costs with a server at home. In fact, it can be a unique differentiator for me if I can sit in the niche where a couple of beefy cpus with a nice array of discs can still outperform the cloud cost-wise.
Yes, one is already sticking up from the ground and will be brought into the house in the next month. And someone just came by to see if a second one can be installed, that one still needs to be brought to the house, somewhere in the next weeks.
It seems wasteful, I know, but it's nice to have competition at least.
Where I live it's very similar to electric and gas supply, where you have a common carrier that you get your supply over. There is one fibre cable into the building that goes out to some kind of interface accessed via a manhole ourside; all the local telcos use that fibre as common carrier and either rent existing fibre thats already been laid and hooked up to that interface, or lay their own at their own cost.
I have choice of half a dozen suppliers this way but only one set of hardware in the house.
> All these talks about Starlink -> Remember it's a bandaid solution to your governments poor planning and infrastructure rollout of a core utility / service.
Lots of core utilities aren't rolled out everywhere. You might need a different water source or use a septic tank rather than roll out central services everywhere, because it's so expensive per capita. Internet from a satellite seems a valid equivalent to that.
Electricity is pretty close to universal in the US (outside of summer cabins and the like) and traditional telephone service was pretty close behind. But beyond that water, sewer, natural gas, and internet are all case by case once you get out of metros. 50 miles outside of a large US city, I still have a septic system.
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.
$25 for 10/10Gbps is crazy cheap. If I were to get 10/10Gbps it would be $250/month. This is using a municipal-run service provider (not particularly common here in the USA) that offers their 1/1Gbps for the relatively fair price of $70/month for a new customer. I pay $50 due to signing up in 2019.
I have no idea how Poland is pulling off such low costs but props for doing so. Other nations should take note.
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.
Like the other poster I agree it's a band-aid. I agree it's not the world's best connection (there is considerable latency sometimes). I agree I shouldn't have to be paying Elon Musk 140 bucks a months to get a decent connection but ... I am, because that's all I can get here.
We're just outside Perth, less than a k from a new(ish) suburb development and our only NBN option is "Fixed Wireless", which guarantees 25Mbit at least once in a given 24 hour period. WTF! There was one non-NBN wireless option which according to all reviews actually managed to be worse, and 5G here is bad, plus Telstra won't (yet?) sell us a 5G 'home' connection. AFAICT my options are starlink or paying $22k to get a fibre put in.
So far it works well for us here, regularly exceeding 200Mbps, fingers crossed our cell isn't going to become oversubscribed anytime soon. I also hope that they spin up a Perth exit node, because AFAICT our traffic pops out in Sydney at the moment, adding to the latency.
But really I hope the government gets its act together and sorts out the NBN for more people. Tony Abbott has a lot to answer for.
(I understand from what I've read that the problems with starlink in the US are a lot less of an issue here, because the populations are an order of magnitude different...)
I moved from Sydney to Auckland and now can get up to 7700Mbps. 1000Mbps costs 60 something AUD. One of my colleagues in Melbourne got the fiber upgrade (under 10k) and claimed the install on his tax so there's that to reduce it a bit.
I moved to Aus from the UK about two years back. In Southampton I was getting 1000/40 for the equivalent of 100AUD a month, but a new fibre company had just started to offer 900/900 for 35AUD.
It’s been a bit of an eye-opener moving back here! I left at the end of the Gillard government, when the future of the Australian internet connection was bright, and came back wondering what had gone wrong!
> 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 applies for other large-area countries such as Germany or Australia as well.
Starlink completely changes the equations there as (for the user) no investment is required other than getting a terminal, and for anything mobile (sea ships, RVs, emergency services) it blows the competition from geostationary satellites completely away.
> 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 regard.
Though on the other hand the United Kingdom is much denser population-weighted-wise than all three of them, and yet from what I've gathered it's no perfect shining example of highspeed broadband rollout either…
The UK took a different approach to most other countries; and IMO was the correct one. Something like 98% of properties could get at least 30meg (via VDSL2, actually more likely to be closer to 80mbit) down, and this has been the case for nearly a decade. 50% of homes have always been able to get much faster speeds via DOCSIS cable from VM (though I will caveat with that that until VM enabled DOCSIS3.1 across their network recently it could be very hit and miss congestion wise).
In the past few years though there has been an explosion in FTTH build. 75% properties can get gigabit service now which is increasing by around about 1% every month.
The priority a decade ago really was on getting the entire country up to 'usable' internet speeds, rather than having a lot of FTTH in some areas and then very slow DSL in many other areas. Only 0.35% of UK properties are below 2mbit/sec down now (unusable), which doesn't include 4G/5G coverage, so in reality it's likely only 1 in 1000 households have utterly terrible connectivity.
So while the UK doesn't rank top of the list of median download speeds it is far less likely you are going to have bad connectivity, which IMO is a greater priority than raw download speeds.
Very few people actually need more than say 100mbit/sec day to day. It's actually hard to get gigabit around the house; most powerline adaptors and wifi solutions top out around 300mbit/sec in my experience, so unless you have ethernet in your house (very rare), the limiting factor is now on in home connectivity, not the external ISP.
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.
Most of the altnets are not government funded - there was a ridiculous amount of money put in them from the low interest rate period, many many billions. I very much doubt they will get a good return given the crazy level of overbuild going on. I have now 4 separate infrastructure-wise FTTH networks available to me in my London apartment.
I believe (without supporting data) that most altnets that are expanding coverage to people with poor broadband are government funded. The economics in London are quite different than that of a rural village.
The vast majority aren't govt funded, the £5bn gigabit scheme is just getting going. Some may be in the future.
Economics aren't actually that different for villages (very rural single dwellings are though of course). Most villages of say 1k ppl already have fibre going to them (for VDSL cabinets), so they can buy the backhaul from Openreach.
Then it's a case of adding the actual fibre which they can use existing telegraph poles for.
There isn't really a huge difference in economics between urban suburbs and villages.
London is actually not as cheap as you'd think, because a lot of properties are apartments and that requires expensive wayleave agreements to be negotiated with the freeholder. This has significantly increased the cost, as many freeholders don't care and don't respond or want a lot of money for the permission, meaning you have to dig up the street regardless and miss a lot of properties and hope they can be added later.
Plus the cost and complexity of closing roads/streets is much higher in London than other areas.
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.
Burying high voltage transmission cables is extremely expensive [1] and usually only done when there is no other choice (such as being in an urban environment, near airports and the likes) as the loss due to capacitance is far greater than on poles.
The exception to the "usually only" is, once again, our beloved "german redneck" government in Bavaria who insisted that the new North-South line Südlink got buried on Bavarian soil to quash local NIMBY resistance [2] - at the price of taking ages longer to build and costing ~8x the amount of pole-run lines.
I think the comment I replied to was referring to normal powerlines for households. Individual solar+batteries is not going to replace high voltage lines.
should read 'a lot of work' and 'a lot of money'. In my own little town, when we (residents) voted to pay for a municipal internet, the residents had to pay to replace close to 50% of the utility owned poles in order to gain access to those poles to run fiber.
and due to the way the laws are written, we had to pay to have an engineer prescribe what work needed to be done to each pole - up to and including replacing it - then submit plans to the utilities, and then pay the utilities to pay 'their' engineer to do the same study - and then when it was agreed that a pole needed to be replaced, we had to pay the full cost of replacing it, and then when the work was done, the utility still owned the pole and rented it back to us for a yearly fee - repeat several hundred times.
Generally speaking, what is the cost differential between hanging wires and digging wires? I would imagine that in rural areas, underground wires require less maintainence since you don't need to monitor them for fallen trees, brush overgrowth, etc. But at the same time I would guess the installation costs are higher? Maybe? Surely avoiding utility poles saves money.
> Generally speaking, what is the cost differential between hanging wires and digging wires?
Orders of magnitude. I actually once worked in construction, specifically in trench digging for German Telekom.
Putting up poles is easy, drill a hole in the ground for the pole, put the pole in, string a fiber on it, done. Even cheaper if you already have poles, all you need there is a truck with a lift. Downside is, unless you own the poles, you have to rent them from the local utility and some of these charge extortion rates for third parties. And there are always drunkards or people with shoddy cars taking down entire series of poles, not to mention adverse weather events and vandals taking pot shots. Phone and electricity lines are easy to fix, you can probably train apes to do that, but splicing fiber still involves specialists.
Trench digging is a whole different beast: you need to pull permits, dig the trench, hope you don't hit something else that's buried, deal with bad soil (sometimes straight out rock) or shit like WW2 bombs, lay down your cable, bury the cable in a first layer of fine sand, place a warning band, bury and fill up that with the coarse soil you removed, restore asphalt/plaster where needed... it takes weeks and multiple dedicated crews - usually you have one crew that deals with cutting up and removing asphalt, one that deals with placing and removing anti-traffic barriers, one with doing the actual dig and backfill, one that runs the cable, and one that restores surface.
There is a third way however, it's virtually "underground poles" - earth displacement hammers. These "rockets" can shoot up to 70m through the soil in one go. Nice shit but needs the right soil to operate and it will cut through anything already buried, including solid water and wastewater mains.
Does any of this calculus change when you're talking about really rural areas, like in the desert of Australia? My guess is that would mean higher cost of sending someone out to fix a pole (point against poles), but also lower likelihood of running into existing infrastructure (point in favor of digging).
For power at least, running it buried is no good idea at all because capacitive losses are larger, so at least as long as an area has a grid connection it makes sense to "dual use" the already existing poles.
Based on popular memes I can imagine, especially in Australia, that it might not be a good idea to bury lines in the open desert because you will get animals burrowing and chewing through the cables.
The problem with that is that the power lines were laid down some 30+ years ago, and a new digging project is not cost-efficient. Laying fiber with other utilities should happen in every new development, but that only helps new developments.
Somehow we managed to get power and POTS lines to pretty much everybody. Hell, the 2700 foot mountain peak behind my house has power run to it. This bullshit that we can't run fiber or some other networking to every house.
It's not that it's economically infeasible. It's that it's just not as profitable for the ISPs as running a smaller, closer network in a populated area. So they won't do it. Why would they care about covering a huge area that doesn't make as much money? All they care about is money over all else.
Last-mile rural connectivity will never reach everybody in the USA. It's just too many people to service. Obama's net "neutrality" which thankfully got shit canned was going to mandate free service for the poor for all new startups, among other considerations which would have made making a new a rural ISP a complete non-starter.
Last-mile rural electrification will never reach everybody in the USA. It's just too many people to service. Roosevelt would've mandated free service for the poor for all new startups, among other considerations which would have made making a new a rural electrical utility a complete non-starter.
Internet without connected power is pretty common around here. Internet is obviously needed for those who work from home. And it's increasingly required for the needs of everyday life (government services moving online, bank branches closing).
So, yes, absolutely - many people without connected power need the internet.
The scenarios you’re describing don’t need fast and low latency connection. Banking and government function can easily be done using traditional satellite, 4G or even dial up modem.
As for remote work, I have to question the decisions of someone that moves to an area without connection to the electricity grid and expects to do remote work from there. IMHO they are putting them self into an extreme scenario which shouldn’t be accommodated for, neither by government nor private enterprise.
You may bring up rural communities that have been neglected for decades as a counterpoint here. To that, I go to ancestor post and state, that those communities deserve traditional infrastructure, paid for from our common funds, not to be forced into a magic solution from a startup looking to make money from them.
4g has very patchy coverage in rural Australia away from main roads. Satellite can be an OK option for some (we have a gov-subsidised option), but is unreliable and subject to lengthy outages and low monthly data caps. There are many other reasons to need decent connectivity - schooling and healthcare among them.
> I have to question the decisions of someone that moves to an area without connection to the electricity grid and expects to do remote work from there.
That's just silly, closed-minded, and ignorant. You must just have very limited experience of the world. I can off the top of my head list hundreds of scenarios where remote work might become the only option for someone already living in the bush. And many other reasons (which I know first hand from people living here) why people may be entirely unable to move from here. These are real facts on the ground, and not subject to your lack of imagination and propensity towards narrow-minded curtain-twitching judgements about whole classes of people you know zip about.
I’m gonna ignore your personal insult and answer the actual claims in your post.
> 4g has very patchy coverage in rural Australia
This goes back to the claim in the original post. Starlink is an excuse not to rollout proper infrastructure.
> schooling and healthcare
Really? Are there honestly scenarios in the real world where people don’t have power but need to do school and healthcare via the internet. I find that hard to believe. Honestly if there exist rural communities where this is a concern than they deserve infrastructure, which goes back to the original post which claims:
> All these talks about Starlink -> Remember it's a bandaid solution to your governments poor planning and infrastructure rollout of a core utility / service.
> I can off the top of my head list hundreds of scenarios where remote work might become the only option for someone already living in the bush.
Do you mind listing some of them? It might be because of my lack of imagination, but I have a hard time seeing someone living in the bush, unable to relocate, suddenly finding a job that requires the need for high speed and low latency connection.
No insult, just a description of what you've posted (idiotically) here
> Starlink is an excuse not to rollout proper infrastructure.
That's ridiculous. Australia's infrastructure plans were laid out long before Starlink was conceived. They were then undermined by a right-wing gov. Invidividuals are then left by government inaction to do what they must. That involves (unfortunately) use of all kinds of less-than-ideal individualistic solutions like Starlink. It's not good for society, but, like private health care, it can be necessitated.
> Really? Are there honestly scenarios in the real world where
people don’t have power but need to do school and healthcare via the internet. I find that hard to believe.
I don't care what you find hard to believe because of your limited experience of life. The solution to limited experience is either to gain more, or to refrain from judgement outside of your realms of competence.
> Remember it's a bandaid solution to your governments poor planning and infrastructure rollout of a core utility / service.
Agree. Like healthcare, it should be there. But again as with healthcare, when it's not, those with the means just have to go where they must. Whether that be health care mercenaries, or Starlink.
> Do you mind listing some of them?
I won't list them. The fact that you, clearly knowing literally nothing about this part of the world, still feel like doubling-down on your ignorance (a factual description, not an insult), makes you not worth enlightening.
Anyway, you're uninteresting and incurious. I shall block you.
Even in the south east of the UK - compared to the US, an very densely populated area - there are some homes that have wired telephones, but rely on generators for power [1]
Presumably because at some point, it was cheaper to buy 30 years of diesel than to run a power cable, and yet cell coverage wasn't widespread enough to replace a wired telephone.
Of course, we can debate whether providing telephone service is us beneficent city dwellers generously subsidising our backwards rural cousins for the good of their children; or us being taken for fools and subsidising the rich's gigantic holiday homes and rental properties.
This is HN, we should be able to find the numbers. How many people live in rural Australia and have no access to grid power? Of those how many could greatly benefit from a high speed low latency internet connection?
I know Australia does keep population statistics, and surely if it is indeed not uncommon for people to do remote work from areas without connection to grid power, somebody must have done a survey, otherwise you’d just be guessing.
We are talking about America. We decided everybody should get electricity and they got it with rural electrification. Should everyone lose the right to have
electricity connections because you think it's too hard? Somehow other countries can do this with the US can't? We could decide just like we did for electricity that everyone should have 100 meg internet to their house.
Unfortunately there seems to be a bipartisan political consensus against the most profitable and useful elements of the New Deal (WPA, TVA, REA, CWA) which would be almost mandatory to go whole hog on this kind of infrastructure proposal, and as we've learned over the last 40 years public-private partnerships are thin gruel as a replacement.
The US seems to have totally lost the ability to produce infrastructure at sane cost, which may be contributing to the decreased support for infrastructure projects.
So 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.
no, it's not a strong sign of that. it's a strong sign that with VC money and government money you can offer unrealistic service at unrealistic prices. but when you need to start showing that you are profitable and launching satellites to maintain the current network is also expensive, both your service and prices start to get more in line with what everybody else already had.
The honeymoon phase of starlink is over. in the best case scenario with starship they can add capacity much cheaper. but even the business case for that is going to be hard to close given the amount of money they're already burning.
This doesn't add up for me. They are launching more powerful satellites with a higher cadence than before. The network is in every measure improving its capacity, and it doesn't seem like money is the issue.
Do you have a source for them burning money at a pace that requires starship in the near future?
Looking in from the outside, their amount of falcon launches don't reflect that.
The new satellites are bigger and weigh more so they are launching fewer on each rocket now. They need starship for better launch capacity for the new satellites.
Doesn't that sound more like they are planning for that higher launch capacity? They're removing a constraint in the future so they're scaling up the satellites now, it means less of the new ones go up in the mean time but it also means a much faster increase in network capacity once Starship is available.
FWIW that is what Starlink has been saying themselves. Their operations have always been linked to cheaper launches. My opinion is that it is easy to get side tracked when your leader gets stuck in political activism.
Do cheap launches help when spectral bandwidth over an area is going to be the true limitation?
Starlink's problem is going to be that most profitable areas are better served by terrestrial LTE/5G, leaving only truly remote areas that are low density enough. But not many people live there...
> Do cheap launches help when spectral bandwidth over an area is going to be the true limitation?
Spectral bandwidth doesn't matter so much with beamforming with reasonably narrow beams. At least not until you get to a lot of satellites overhead at once. Dishy probably obtains a beam ~3 degrees wide; there's a lot of 3x3 degree sectors in the sky.
Similarly, the ground "cells" are 300 sq km; there's a lot of these in view of the satellite.
> Starlink's problem is going to be that most profitable areas are better served by terrestrial LTE/5G
Yup, for the most part I agree. Still, there is a pretty large rural population.
well 3 degrees wide means at best ~28 square degrees on the sky (pi * 3 * 3). But the problem is the other way. It looks like Starlink has 7 GHz total downlink bandwidth from satellite to customers. A cell may be ~300 sq km, but no way you can pipe all that bandwidth in adjacent cells due to interference (or... if you did, you'd probably lose in spectral efficiency). If we assume something like 10 Gbps/cell total downlink bandwidth (based on two polarizations, 1/4 the total bandwidth and 3 bits/Hz efficiency), then you can maybe serve... 500 people / cell reasonably? How many people live in places with fewer than a few people/km^2? Only Alaska averages below that in the US.
> well 3 degrees wide means at best ~28 square degrees on the sky (pi * 3 * 3).
If you use a diameter for a circle area, you need to divide by 4, to get like ~7. I was just going to do 3*3 = 9.
> It looks like Starlink has 7 GHz total downlink bandwidth from satellite to customers. A cell may be ~300 sq km, but no way you can pipe all that bandwidth in adjacent cells due to interference
Both the downlink and the uplink are directional. Yes, there's some power lost in side lobes, but..
So, if you have multiple satellites overhead, you can have a mosaic pattern where satellite A illuminates a hex, and then other satellites illuminate its neighbors. And even though some energy spills over, it's strongly rejected by the receivers because it's coming from the completely wrong direction.
> How many people live in places with fewer than a few people/km^2?
In addition to the incorrect pessimism about downlink bandwidth (also, one should expect ~5bits/Hz)... You're not taking into account any reasonable capacity factor, and you're assuming each service is one person. You're also assuming that you sell through to 100% of the populace and there's no one in the cell served by other technologies. If 95% of a suburban area can get FTTH, cable, or reasonable LTE, that still leaves 5% as possible customers for Starlink to fill in.
> Only Alaska averages below that in the US.
OK, but people are concentrated into cities, leaving a whole lot of land area with concentrations below this even in states with much higher average population density.
Yes, and dvbs-2 also supports very high modulation and code rates. but they're never used in practice since PSD limits don't allow you to transmit that much due to interference on other systems. starlink is not first in line for most of their spectrum, so they're abiding by direct spectral mask limits. I would guess they're at 16APSK at the highest.
> so they're abiding by direct spectral mask limits
Yes, obtained by channelization and OFDM, not by limiting modulation.
Reverse engineering of the 10 to 12.7GHz band has shown a mixture of 16-QAM and 64-QAM frames. There's a bit of periodic 4-QAM too, which seems to be for acquisition and synchronization.
Remember that if they are starting to get near capacity limits, they always have the option to make the antennas on the satellite larger, making the beams narrower, and reduce those 300 sq km cells down to say 30 sq km.
In the current era of phased array antenna prices falling sharply, and assuming they're willing to go for a folding antenna, I think they could probably easily get a 10x antenna area boost without much extra cost.
If you have 10x the antenna area, you need 10x the antenna elements with appropriate phasing... else you suffer from the thinned array curse and lose lots of power in side lobes.
> It looks like Starlink has 7 GHz total downlink bandwidth from satellite to customers.
I think you meant 7 Gbps; that only works if the satellite itself has that much inbound, which may not be the case if the satellites around (for sat-to-sat links) it or the base station that it sees are maxed out.
7GHz is correct; 2GHz of X band and 5GHz of Ka/V band for downlink to subscribers. Multiply by spectral efficiency-- perhaps 5 bits/Hz.
> which may not be the case if the satellites around (for sat-to-sat links)
No real sat-to-sat links yet. The exact specifications aren't disclosed, but they'll likely be 100gbps symmetric links.
> the base station that it sees are maxed out.
You can expect spectral efficiency for the uplinks to be better because of big antennas, and for them to be provisioned with no problem illuminating all the satellites overhead.
Sure, but spectrum isn't infinite, at some point it is maxed out, especially the sat-to-sat links, which effectively halve the available bandwidth (assuming just one hop).
Directionality makes it less inclined to be "maxed out". If you have infrastructure ground stations, and they're built for 5 satellites overhead, you can get 5 times the spectral density total throughput if there's 5 satellites overhead.
> which effectively halve the available bandwidth
I disagree (and I'm not sure where this idea is coming from-- do you think they use the same spectrum or something?) I think they effectively "add" bandwidth for the system by allowing satellites that do not have saturated uplinks to "share" capacity. E.g. a satellite which is mostly over the ocean but can see a ground station can now be more useful.
The downlink/uplink capacity of the satellite that receives data from another or has to send data to another doesn't magically increase. So adding hops reduces the bandwidth available. To reduce it to extremes: if all but one of the satellites used sat-to-sat links and only one had a downlink you'd see a substantial reduction of the available bandwidth per satellite. To a rough approximation the bandwidth available is the bandwidth available to a single sat divided by the number of sats using that one up/down link.
Yes, sat-to-sat enables new use cases. But it also has other effects.
> if all but one of the satellites used sat-to-sat links and only one had a downlink you'd see a substantial reduction of the available bandwidth per satellite.
All the satellites above me have an uplink from a ground station.
Also, satellites above ocean with few people in their footprint can see my uplink but can't use it effectively, because they don't have many users in their footprint (possibly none, because of elevation angle restrictions).
If we have satellite-to-satellite links, then those satellites above ocean can share their bandwidth with satellites above me. Therefore, real system capacity goes up.
Assuming that ground stations are upgraded as the size of the constellation grows-- they're strongly directional. Their throughput is the uplink bandwidth * the spectral efficiency * the number of satellites within LOS of an uplink ground station. Intersatellite links let you use more of this throughput without it going unused and "spoiling"-- that's the main point.
they have spent an immense amount of money and time on fcc filings for spectrum. this is a mixture of asking for spectrum, proving they're not interfering, and trying to beat kuiper and others to market.
> they have spent an immense amount of money and time on fcc filings for spectrum.
Well, sure. It has a multiplicative effect with number of satellites on throughput. Not to mention the proxy warfare they've endured from other constellation vendors through the FCC.
The big point which I responded to was there was a claim that adding more satellites doesn't add throughput ("Do cheap launches help")-- that one could be purely spectrum limited and not benefit from additional satellites. Directional antennas make this not true for any reasonable number of satellites.
> but when you need to start showing that you are profitable and launching satellites to maintain the current network is also expensive, both your service and prices start to get more in line with what everybody else already had.
starlink is a project worth billions with years of planning, there's no fake it till you make it in that league
do you seriously think this is something they stumbled onto? they are rising the prices because they can, it's not a non-profit.
even the article mentions that the service is within stated expectations.
I think you are missing/ignoring most of the history of starlink. You can look at my post history to read more if you'd like. Virtually everything starlink had promised from the start has turned out to either be lies or missed the mark significantly. This isn't just me speculating, the Ookla data shows that both their latency is significantly higher than Musk said, and it's also slower now that they've added more customers. This also has nothing to do with the lack of ISL; the latencies are higher in areas that wouldn't even benefit from ISL. It's purely due to network congestion, which again, is something everyone involved in this industry knew would happen.
Starlink is still not profitable. Musk and Shotwell have hinted at this or directly said it. It requires an immense amount of money to fund the engineering, support, and launches to keep even the current number of subscribers they have.
While Starlink is "successful" by your definition, you have both Oneweb and TeleSat's lightspeed both being relative failures. This isn't because they were worse systems. In fact, Telesat's was supposed to have the best bandwidth economics. But it failed largely because it didn't get the funding SX gets due to Musk, and they realized the economics of a LEO constellation are nearly impossible to sustain.
What you're seeing right now is an ISP that's akin to Uber or Lyft. Are they profitable? No, but they're around and they're big names. Your rides are subsidized from VC money hoping one or the other will lose and the other can raise prices.
Starlink is raising prices because they have to. Not because "they can". They are decreasing prices in unfilled areas just to use the capacity that is otherwise completely stranded. Once those areas fill, wash, rinse, repeat.
take a look at @lionnetpiere on Twitter. he's done extensive analyses on the launch costs and revenue from service. most other estimates leave out big parts of the costs, so he's going the most accurate I've seen.
That's the thing, they don't make a lot of money. there was a WSJ article a few years back that showed they absolutely need StarLink to expand that full capacity very early to be profitable. there are not making enough money on launches to sustain the run rate. originally musk said starlink would be profitable with falcon 9. that clearly changed and now the only way it's profitable is with starship.
Almost all of Starlink’s competitors are completely dependent on government money. The FCC spends billions a year cutting checks to rural ISPs to subsidize them. The FCC took Starlink’s subsidies away because the Biden admin hates Musk now. But I think Musk will still beat many of these clown companies anyway.
FCC spends billions a year cutting checks to big telecom rather than municipal or open access networks. Big telecom is gobbling most of the of the federal grant money too.
your history is a bit off. the fcc commissioner and fcc has generally loved SpaceX, and they were not appointed by Biden. what happened was SpaceX continually got worse in the fcc samknows testing, so much so that their original application for $900M was far from the service they actually offered. for that reason they paused the funding until SpaceX improved things to the point they promised. they still have not improved and have continued declining.
They didn't have to meet any performance targets until 2024 at the earliest so that was a bogus justification. They were fairly close but were cutting performance a bit to reach more customers pending the launch of more satellites.
And just because Rosenworcel was appointed by Obama instead of Biden doesn’t mean she’s not a loyal part of the Biden administration.
>if this was some kind of stunt pulled by the FCC, SpaceX can sue. but in reality, this was exactly by the book and SpaceX accepted it
Again wrong. SpaceX in fact has already appealed the decision to the full Commission. But the chairwoman can legally just sit on that petition for a very long time. And SpaceX can’t sue in court until the FCC makes a decision on that, since you have to exhaust administrative remedies before going to court.
SpaceX was lucky to get an award for RDOF at all given that when they applied there was virtually no evidence that they could serve what they promised, and the FCC even made a special stipulation for constellations that did not exist/were unproven so they could bid. SpaceX would not have even been allowed to bid, but their pressure on the FCC allowed them to. So they were given a chance, and lo and behold, they did not and are not meeting their obligations. The FCC is entirely in the right to sit on the appeal until SpaceX proves that they can provide the service they signed up for.
I'm not sure why you're calling me a leftist or what politics have anything to do with this topic. The FCC has been unusually nice to SpaceX over the years to the point where virtually all other satellite companies were suing because they were being given preferential treatment on things that the FCC never allowed before. Now that the playing field is fair (well, not quite since nobody else in the space got RDOF money), SpaceX isn't so magical.
You leftists are really something to behold. Undeterred by facts, I'm sure you will continue to spread bullshit on this website and refuse to acknowledge your errors.
the fcc is allowed to take their money back if your service is going in a downward trend. I'm not even sure what you're saying for. they showed that Starlink speeds were degrading significantly over a year. this data is also exactly what ookla and others showed. the only possible way it's going to increase before that, given the demand, is starship. that will not likely happen before 2024, so they were completely correct to take the money back.
ajit pai is the one you should be blaming for giving it to them in the first place when it was obvious to anyone with satellite knowledge that they could not offer that service to the amount of people they said in the time they claimed.
>the fcc is allowed to take their money back if your service is going in a downward trend.
That’s not quite right. They can take it if they conclude you will not meet the target. Ups and downs on the way there are totally fine under the rules.
Starlink can scale dramatically just by launching new satellites. The FCC is keen on stopping that too, refusing to approve all of Starlink’s satellite launch proposals and instead making them slow walk their growth.
In addition to hating Musk, the White House thinks fiber to the home is like rural electrification. Starlink, by providing very much good-enough universal service (though they can scale up to gigabit speeds, it’s just a matter of how many satellites they have), is threatening to undermine political support for spending money on fiber buildouts.
this is quite the conspiracy theory. I'm not sure why musk fans say that the FCC is acting egregious here when they are doing the same exact thing they have done for decades. musk fans just don't want the same standards applied to them. they're okay interfering with other systems, but they certainly don't want anybody interfering with them.
No this is not the same thing they’ve done for decades. You just make that assertion but it’s not true.
It’s not some crazy conspiracy. This is the whole point of winning elections. The people in charge of tech policy in this admin want universal fiber service. You don’t get tens of billions from Congress every year for that unless there’s public demand for it. Starlink would undermine that demand despite not being good enough to replace universal fiber service, in the eyes of the administration.
Also you’re free to look up how Starlink’s launch proposals have been slow rolled at the FCC. You can also look at the Republican Commissioner’s statements on the revocation of Starlink’s RDOF award.
keep in mind that at the time the FCC allowed them past the first round of RDOF, they did not know the price of the terminal since StarLink wasn't live. part of their complaint was that the user had to buy a $600 terminal with no subsidies.
this excludes a lot of the population outright since they don't have a payment plan for lower income users to afford it.
the FCC's letter says that they determined they could not deploy a system of the size they promised in the timeframe they promised. whether you agree with it or not, that assertion has been correct so far.
Here in Japan, Starlink price is continuously down (now $50) because only richer techy people (of course they have fiber and live in metropolis) buy it and they don't use much. FTTH coverage is really comprehensive even in very rural area, so there are very few residential practical use case. It would be excellent for camping. It seems that it practically priced.
It's pretty much the same in France, standard internet cost is about 35€ and fiber is being deployed at record speed, I live in the countryside (real countryside, 50 inhabitants village) and I have access to fiber.
I'm not sure starlink has a future in this kind of environment outside of niche applications.
Their business model is difficult in my opinion, they both need a lot of customers from rich countries to recoup the costs but in the same time, the vast majority of those rich countries are well equipped already (or about to) since having a decent internet coverage is critical for their economies.
It seems that Starlink works in places that fail to build either fiber or good 4G/5G coverage. But even there if the demand is too much they might not have capacity to provide good service.
I don't believe it is viable model they are running.
Also, if such an area exists, and there are enough people willing to pay $100/month to congest starlink, then it probably makes sense for someone to set up a WISP, which will be able to provide a better service.
In fact, if this isn't happening at scale already, I would expect that some WISP companies will start using starlink congestion areas to figure out where they should be putting masts.
Yeah that's clearly another issue on top, if there's a place where they have some demand, they'll have a lot of demand, it's an everything or nothing market.
The sentiment has been (up until this point?) that Starlink needs to lower costs for the customers, not increase them, as otherwise the customer base will remain as tiny as it currently is. Last I remember, the cost was ~500 USD + the monthly fee, I wonder how many in a rural environment are ready to pony that up for a measly connection. Maybe not difficult for live-on-a-farm-software-developers, but what about the rest of the spare population?
> Last I remember, the cost was ~500 USD + the monthly fee, I wonder how many in a rural environment are ready to pony that up for a measly connection. Maybe not difficult for live-on-a-farm-software-developers, but what about the rest of the spare population?
If you think $500 setup cost + the ~$90 monthly fee is bad, I got news for you.
The same people using Starlink out in the middle of nowhere now were paying way more than that before switching. Like ~$250/m for subpar speeds and had very small data limit caps + data usage overage costs with crap ISPs.
Can't speak for $250/mo, but I've definitely lived in places where ISP's weren't required to expand in, meaning a big chunk of residents had zero internet options. This wasn't too far out of SEATAC, actually.
Not a fan of Musk, but the calculus becomes pretty simple at that point for someone who wants a home internet connection.
Starlink does not really compete with Comcast in areas Comcast already serves(at least when it comes to speed/price/reliability), it just doesn't make sense to use Starlink when Comcast is available other than maybe as a secondary backup connection. Starlink is significantly faster and cheaper however than other providers like Viasat which serve areas without economical terrestrial based internet options.
Comcast installation costs would be roughly $250,000 to my property and is the only hardline broadband provider in my area.
What I was responding to was the assertion that starlink is ‘too expensive’ at $120/mo, when the normal offering from everyone else is about the same price.
As you note, depending on the area, one will provide better actual service or not. But the pricing isn’t the deciding factor IMO, just service quality.
It’s the ‘go away’ price quote. If someone was desperate enough they were willing to pay it, they’d figure out how to do it (probably), but really don’t want to.
I got a similar quote from PG&E to run power to a remote lot once, with the caveat that ‘maybe’ they could do it.
If Starship works out (and that's admittedly a big if), the price of launching Starlink satellites will plummet and they'll be able to boost the number of satellites in orbit from ~4k to 30k, which will improve bandwidth and cut costs.
Funny story… Century Link got 500 feet of fiber pulled to my house, and I didn’t pay a dime.
When they subdivided my neighborhood it was supposed to have fiber. All my neighbors had it, but not me. There’s supposed to be a major connection every other house, and mine should have it, but it doesn’t.
The person at Century Link that came out to my place and found the problem pulled the original plans for the subdivision, figured out who screwed up, contacted that company, and got fiber to my place. They had to go 500 feet, under a street and two driveways. Now I have fiber.
Thanks dude at Century Link.
p.s. Comcast (Xfinity) came out and looked too. They noped the hell out right away.
> Also, if you think a $500 one-time fee is bad, try asking Comcast how much they'll charge for pulling 20 miles of fiber to your farm.
Made me laugh out loud! :)
Closest wired internet to my place is 6mi South. Also have a big hill between me and the only fixed LOS internet tower in the area. Currently, Starlink is my only real option, and it has worked fine for me so far!
In my experience, an ISP with no real competition is always going to be pricy. The only way to get reasonable rates is to have some competition....
If Starship works out (and that's admittedly a big if), the price of launching Starlink satellites will plummet and they'll be able to boost the number of satellites in orbit from ~4k to 30k, which will improve bandwidth and cut costs.
If I had a dollar for every time Elon Musk said something that didn't pan out or wasn't true, I would be richer than Elon Musk.
"rural" just means sparsely populated compared with dense urban cores. These people aren't impoverished, some of them are wealthy, most of them are middle class with property and acreage. Rural consumers are used to paying equipment costs, for example, they were among the first to adopt satellite TV, back when the dishes were enormous and you needed enough land to even mount one. And those cost thousands of dollars in the 80s and 90s.
If the area is that congested, it's probably in need of wired connections. All the customers suddenly leaving might push ISPs to upgrade their offerings in these areas rather than seeing the customers as a captive audience.
I'd love to believe that, but having seen my parents own street overlooked by cable providers for two decades despite the fact that it's no longer rural and surrounded by tens of thousands of suburban households that have mowed down all the orange groves and cow pastures, they still do not have cable internet as an option in 2023.
Sometimes it is purely a cost / benefit tradeoff analysis. The cable company even if a local monopoly should want my business. Although I suspect the local cable company did the original analysis back in the 90s and never factored for 25+ years of reliable revenue. And every year since some bean counter has looked at short term ROI. At any rate, I remember getting some relief when the first iPhone jailbreak was available and now for sure Starlink is a boon.
> It's a strong sign that the model fundamentally works
I think that's a bit early to tell. If the launch costs + satellite costs don't add up to a very nice profit before the satellite de-orbits then that was a loss. This can look like it is working well until the number of satellites de-orbiting and needing to be replaced becomes larger than your temporary profits after launching the first constellation.
This is why other comms satellite operators chose to play it safe and use geo stationary orbits rather than LEO, those satellites live many times longer and you need far fewer of them. Obviously they are limited in bandwidth and latency but they are ultra reliable.
I am sure there are people that are grateful and pleased they can get it. That doesn't mean that there are enough of those people to support a constellation the size that you need for global coverage.
Satellite internet essentially means that you have to share one cellphone tower with your entire district. I don't see how this can be sustainable for anything but the most rural areas.
Well, why would anyone in an urban area need something Starlink, when there are already plenty of cheap and reliable alternatives, including alternatives at higher bandwidths?
The problem with building your company around rural internet is that there just aren’t that many people to spread the cost around, thus whatever the alternative is very expensive.
I see that my comment has revealed that many people don't bother to read for comprehension before responding.
My comment was that no matter how many rural customers you get, there just isn't enough people to make the per customer cost cheap, simply because the denominator is so small. Further more, Starlink et al. can never grow the pie (i.e. increase the denominator) because no one in an urban environment wants it.
My god. This isn't even a controversial statement, yet... woosh!
I mean...yes and no. Starlink is valuable provided it's cheap: above a certain price point, the number of applications drops off and there's no guarantee the remainder will represent enough to actually fund it.
Starlink actually seems underpriced to me. If the choice is Starlink, Hughes, maybe an equally barely-viable cellular hotspot, not everyone could afford $200-$300/month but a lot would.
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.
Honestly don't understand why people don't understand that the Starlink slogan was "better than nothing".
Starlink is still magnitudes better than my previous as-expensive point-to-point wifi, which was capped at 10 Mbps at best and was nearly unusable 7-9pm every night.
If you can get something better than Starlink, then you should.
Price comes down when meaningful competition enters the space (see what I did there?)
OneWeb seems about ready to start offering service. Remains to be seen if the offering can compete with starlink but good chance it will apply downward pressure to prices.
Then in the medium distant future there is Amazon's constellation that will have to compete with starlink v3 or v4 or whatever they're up to by then.
There's already plenty of competition going for the profitable market segments - I know of at least 4 LEO satellite ISPs that are currently operating aside from SpaceX. Residential ISP in space is not one of those by most good estimates of costs and prices. Even SpaceX themselves are saying this.
I have Starlink in an Airbnb in Puerto Escondido, Mexico.
It has been a blessing. It used to be that we had to deal with either cell carrier 4G wifi or wait until the phone company would finally extend service one block away from its current service area.
Even if you had access to either, both solutions were pretty bad. They were so unreliable that some coworking spaces had *three* providers: "broadband", 4G, and old-school satellite.
Starlink arrived last year in earnest and... really life changing. It even dropped the price some months ago. The internet _just works_.
Anything that bypasses local monopolies and government stasis will get my business with true joy.
I'm pretty sure you can't just launch satellites into orbit randomly without govt blessing it or stream data to ground stations legally (Eg: India doesn't like satellite phones), at a certain point Starlink could itself be the monopoly you dread.
I wish that was a good enough reason... because I wish fiber was everywhere. The truth is that most people won't care that much about 20-40ms of latency. I mean, people use 5g hotspots for their internet and are just happy as clams, ISPs are pushing for it, trying to get everybody on wireless connections. The benefits of fiber for customers doesn't outweigh the profits that wireless drives to ISPs.
And as anecdata, my Starlink connection that I've had since the beta days has been more reliable than Comcast or Centurylink that I've had at other places. I haven't even had weather cause an outage that I've noticed. It's at least good enough that most people won't care.
We are the only people who care, and understand why low latency and high speeds are important.
Might be the same reason China doesn't like satellite phones: the lack of government control over information available to its citizens.
I watched a documentary about the 2008 earthquake in China; one city was completely cut off from the outside world in, and only one person in the whole city had a satellite phone—the mayor.
I get what you're trying to say, but the paperwork isn't just to not get arrested. It's also to make sure your rocket doesn't flatten a building when it comes down uncontrolled, doesn't hit an airplane on the way up, doesn't crash into any other spacecraft in orbit, and doesn't turn into yet another piece of untracked space debris cluttering Earth orbit.
None of which gets in the way of actually making a rocket or launching it though, as unlike for example cars or guns everyone builds and launches their own anyway. Well, 99% of the time anyway.
if you read the article it doesn't just work for a lot of people, and is very slow. this is nothing that wasn't easily predictable, but you having a good experience where there's clearly a surplus of capacity doesn't mean this will last.
It also doesn't mean that it will always be slow. There's another launch scheduled for this month and more to come after that. SpaceX is also launching satellites for many other internet competitors. As long as progress continues at this pace, rural customers will eventually have all the options they could want. Many people here are complaining about lack of infrastructure, look up!
launching more satellites has a tremendous cost, but a small, incremental capacity improvement since most of the capacity is stranded over water at any time.
It went up only 10$ per month in congested areas, and went down by 20$ in uncongested areas. It's still 90$ if you are rural.
They are trying to encourage against people using the service in urban congested areas. Starlink, at least right now, is not ideal for urban situations, that's not very surprising, maybe with newer gen sats capacity will raise, but if not, it's not an "unreliable luxury", it's still perfect for rural situations.
$90 if you're rural?! I'm now going to be paying $120. I live in a small town on the Navajo reservation. We don't have postal service, many here don't even have running water or electricity. The alternative ISP is 6 mbps max.
The figure comes from TFA. The criteria being "rural areas" in unsourced though as all Starlink reported was areas with "excess capacity".
I was able to get 90$/m using an address North Dakota 58647 but not a random address in the middle of nowhere Wyoming. This leads me to think the user capacity in the 24km cell isn't the only factor as the North Dakota address was certainly less rural than the Wyoming one I picked (and both instantly available).
If I had to guess I'd say you do have to be rural enough your user cell isn't near capacity but not in a region where there are a limited number of ground stations for the satellites to connect back to. For the Navajo region there are no ground stations in NM, one in AZ but in the opposite corner of the state, one in NV, one on the opposite end of UT, and one in the opposite end of CO. For Wyoming the story is almost identical. For ND there are 3 ground stations in the state.
Not sure I understand your question. Both speed and usage would be an issue; I average ~70 mbps during the day but drop to ~40 overnight, not much to share before I'm close to our ISP's 6 (which was about half the price, no caps).
It’s very unlikely you have 70mbps sustained usage. Typically it’s an average of peak per X mins.
You likely could save money by sharing your Starlink with a neighbor and neither of you would have much noticeable impact to bandwidth. Your latency might get slightly worse because of possible “noisy neighbor” but gotta ask if that latency is worth the extra $.
No, I meant that's the average speed I get (so if we were splitting it I assume our speeds would each be half that when downloading / streaming simultaneously).
Yes technically, but I think you're unlikely to notice it in practice.
In the worst case, because of buffering, your Netflix video might take an extra 10 seconds to start and then you'd notice no interruptions (unless you're skipping back and forth). But even that worst case would be unlikely to really be an issue.
For example, are you ever interrupted by someone else in your household turning on another TV? It would be similar.
You wouldn't want to share with your neighbor if they are actively abusing this with torrents or some other constant high bandwidth activity, but ideally you'd pick a neighbor you already know well and can trust.
Where I live (Very rural part of southern Missouri) the service is oversold and very expensive. I was on the waiting list for 2 years and then they offered "RV" service at a best effort service level. The service was fast and reliable enough but I canceled when they raised the rate to $170 per month.
They should have simply released a "premium speed" upgrade for $50, which boosts your speeds and reliability for a while. In congested areas, with heavy use, it might last only a few days. In rural areas it might last months.
Then have a checkbox to auto-renew the premium speed when it runs out.
And say on the purchase page "Given your location and recent usage, we expect the premium speed boost will last about X hours/days/months".
Another approach is to say "A subscription is $100/month. But, if you like, you can buy another subscription, and then you'll get double the speed."
And as the network gets more congested, then speeds drop, and more and more people are pushed to buying the double speed upgrade, and eventually the triple speed upgrade, etc.
This approach is effectively a real time market for bandwidth in disguise.
> 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.
> 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?
Disadvantage of satellite cellular vs terrestrial cellular (ie mobile networks and most WISPs) is largely simply that the satellite cells are generally _enormous_. Starlink cells cover 379km^2. Some very large rural LTE cells may be of similar size, but if they hit capacity it is comparatively simple for the provider to build new towers and make them smaller. Urban LTE/5G cells are _much_ smaller.
Latency is a secondary issue; even low earth orbit satellites can't really compete with the sort of latency that 5G can provide, say.
> Why is the performance degradation unsurprising?
Ultimately, for any cellular service, there's only so much bandwidth available for a cell, and the size of the cell is anything from virtually unchangeable (generally the case for satellite services) to difficult/expensive to change. So, if you're the only user of the cell, you get all the bandwidth (subject to any artificial limits placed by the provider). As more people are added to the cell you're sharing with more and more people, and typically the total achievable bandwidth per cell really isn't that much, so things get worse until the provider is forced to deal with it. For terrestrial cellular they'd normally do this by adding towers or upgrading equipment to increase supply; for satellite their options are much more limited, and they're really mostly looking at increasing cost (thereby destroying demand) and allowing degradation.
As a service becomes more popular more people will sign up.
Since the single cell is shared by more people, the speed will be shared around more, so there is a larger scale for it to degrade and the popularity will ensure this happens.
Terrestrial cellular will have a fibre connected to it, and have a smaller area to cover and coverage is going to have less people, meaning the absolute top degradation will be less.
> I would love to ask the Starlink support team for more information since I own the equipment, but I can't because there's no email address, phone number, chat, or other way to message support
That seals it. Better to buy HughesNet or similar. It may be slower but at least you can get support.
We have a cottage where we are considering getting starlink at. This service still seems like a game changer to me. If 4g is also available, running a router with dual-wan sounds like a great option to mitigate connection dropouts. We will try that. If you’re really serious about living in the back of beyond and your income depends on your ability to be on zoom calls, then it’s a small price to pay.
I live in one of the most heavily populated areas of Canada. Almost 20% of the population of the whole country is within an hour of my house. I live directly on a fairly major highway. Utilities are above ground and right at the end of my driveway.
Local internet options are 5mbit DSL, 10 mbit fixed wireless, or 25 mbit fixed LTE.
If this were a “cottage” in the vacation home sense I’d say “Starlink is generally reliable enough”, but we’ve got two people working from home here.
We’ve got the Starlink as the primary (fast) connection and pay another $60USD/mo for the 25mbit fixed LTE as a backup. Missing a day of work due to an outage would pay for about a year of the LTE connection so it seems like some relatively cheap insurance.
I do end up falling back on it relatively frequently when the Starlink isn’t “out” but the service is degraded enough that things like video calls are have a lot of short (1-2s) stutters or high latency. I could do probably live with it, but it’s there anyway so I use it.
On the other end though, Starlink _also_ saved my ass when the whole region was without power for over a week. Cell tower dropped after about an hour and the LTE went out. Starlink relies on no local infrastructure so got the generator fired up and worked through the entire week without any real issue.
If you’re planning to WFH in the “boonies” you’re basically describing my current setup and it’s been very solid. Can definitely recommend.
The only time our Starlink drops is during the heaviest of upper midwest downpours, so I really wouldn't worry about a backup unless you absolutely need 100% instead of 99.999% uptime.
I do full time RV. I basically do this. I have a 4G router and the starlink. I just switch to 4g during the rare times the Starlink is slow. It works great.
It's a pity that cooperative broadband is usually ignored, while people and local governments expect venture backed companies to solve their problems. They work for themselves, not for you. Cooperatives tend to have reasonable prices, reasonable speeds, and work by reasonable principles. They might not be the cheapest and fastest, but will be there for you because you're a member/co-owner, not a customer.
For those prices, traditional sat (geostationary) might not be as fast but it is at least reliable connectivity.
For anyone in the rual flatlands of america, look seriously at rural wifi bridges. Basic off-the-shelf wifi can bridge links over miles. All those cellphone towers have fiber lines. Setup a rural wifi collective and tap into that fiber. My parents ditched traditional sats a few years ago when a local company setup a local wifi tower, itself bridged to the nearest cell tower. Now they have faster internet then i do in my non-rural appartment.
that's not true. satellite internet within the last 15 years has used adaptive modulation and coding, and rain doesn't have nearly the effect you're saying unless it's torrential and at an angle.
Yeah I've used the Starlink in both rain and snow and it's worked admirably through both. Occasionally you get a real dense, severe thunderstorm that affects it, but for most weather it works fine.
$65 billion going into rural broadband over the next 5 years. Not finalized, but my read is the feds want fiber. They are wrangling over maps right now.
This is it exactly. I've got clients I work with in two federally recognized under-served areas that ISPs have gotten government grants for supporting.
And yet, when you try and talk to the ISP about problems with the 2.5-down-.4-up DSL line they provide their literal reply is "You're lucky you have a dialtone."
This is at a location 1.7 miles down the road from a school that has gigabit fiber.
The existing programs are a joke. Nothing short of competition is going to get the ISPs to fix their problems. Centurylink has lost about 7k/month on customers switching to StarLink just on this one road. Maybe someday they'll consider fiber, but until then Starlink is a godsend.
Competition doesn't work, ISPs only care about high-profit dense areas. I bet that they are happy about services like Starlink because regulators are less likely to force them to provide service in remote areas because an alternative exists.
Believe me, I've thought about it. Unfortunately it's a county-owned road.
The local power co-op is considering the idea of considering burying the powerlines, so I'm keeping a close eye on that. I wish I could get them interested in the idea of adding fiber internet to their services, but I'm told they can't do it anywhere they have above-ground power because of an agreement stating that CenturyLink gets to be the only ISP on the poles.
Fiber on utility poles is absolutely a thing, and it's usually far cheaper than buried fiber, not to mention easier to repair.
Here in the USA, the main reason that doesn't happen is incumbent providers. Whoever owns the poles is very unlikely to grant you access to hang fiber on them. The one exception is public utilities, they are generally required to offer open access, however, there are all kinds of rules about space between existing utilities and new ones. Unfortunately, you don't just have to deal with the local government because of incumbent providers, who are already hanging their wires on the existing utility poles. Phone and cable providers have incentive to make sure that the process is as arduous as possible and they will put up bureaucratic roadblocks and drag their feet at every opportunity.
This is just what I came to understand by spending a lot of time researching what it would take to start a rural ISP. It's a project that I abandoned after Starlink was announced.
I live in a place in the US where a couple of the public utility companies are rolling out highspeed internet through their utility lines. Not exactly sure if it just means they're laying-down/hanging-up fiber as they go through the process of servicing existing lines, or if there's a way they actually transmit through the lines themselves, or combination of both.
Whatever these two companies are doing it, i haven't bothered looking into it since we already have 4-5 options and we're already happy; TDS (fiber), Comcast (fiber), T-mobile 5G, Wow (?), can't remember the last.
Who would have thought they could all flourish even when you give customers options? /s
I preordered Starlink in March of 2021, as soon as my first rural isp reneged on 50 megabits and sold me 5. 2 years later in western Virginia I still have no eta for my order and cannot contact anyone about it. I have 12 megabits from that same local ISP and it’s enough to do my job so I cancelled Starlink. I can’t imagine what customer service will be like if I am on preorder for two years and they refuse to give any update other than kicking the can down the road every time the estimated delivery date gets close. When I canceled my estimate was “early 2024”.
I think starlink is deliberately not rolling out any more locations in the USA till their dispute with the FCC about the rural broadband money is sorted out.
They don't want to deploy early, because then they wouldn't be eligible for the funding which is supposed to help them deploy.
Notice that just over the canada and mexico borders have good service available today - suggesting bandwidth isn't the constraint.
It was $1B that they were expected to get... Thats substantially more revenue than they were going to collect from all their US based users in a whole year!
His companies are quintessential products of the money printer and low interest Musk has said says as much when he blames his performance on the fed rate rises. For a luxury car company, of all things.
Believe 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.
I don't think Starlink is commercially viable in the long run unless Starship starts flying regularly. With Starship operational, maintaining a constellation of tens of thousands of satellites should be 'easy'. But with only F9, they have to launch at an insane pace just to keep a few thousand satellites up there. They're presently at 3.5k satellites of their desired 42k.
In fact I think this and similar missions are the true raison d'etre of Starship. Mars colonization isn't going to happen, it's a huge joke. Nobody will have Mars colony infrastructure ready to ship for decades at least, SpaceX is barely even pretending to invest in this. Mars colonization customers just don't exist and couldn't justify the money SpaceX is spending to develop Starship. Therefore, Starship exists to launch massive satellite constellations, particularly Starlink. And it wouldn't exist at all if SpaceX thought they could pull it off with just F9. F9 is a stopgap, to buy them time for Starship's development.
The big gotcha with a system like Starlink is that the antenna has to be within line of sight of satellites that are at times quite low to the horizon. If you have obstructions that means that you are going to have dropouts, at least some of the time. Most people have to live with at least some obstructions, unless they want to put up a tower.
They should gear it towards rural only.. If it's profitable at the moment?
That's what is frustrating me about T-Mobile 5g home internet. I'm rural, work from home, and maintain 3 ISPs (with the proper load balancing network gear to support all of this) to deal with it. People in town are installing directional antennas, pointing towards my rural tower, and using 5G home internet, affecting my speeds, when they have cable/fiber options in town to choose from.
Also, I mean, sure, I'd love fiber ran out this way. Would you like to run fiber about 12 miles to service less than 50 people, with about 20 offshoots to homes off the main road.. increasing the overall distance and trenching by who-knows-how-far?! It's not exactly a thrilling business plan.
no offence, but this perspective doesn't apply worldwide. if you live in a country like Australia a StarLink connection will give you 10x the speed of many NBN (National Broadband Network) wired connections. 3G/4G/5G are metered by MB and not a viable option for a daily WAN link due to that. Unless you were lucky enough to get fibre pulled into your house before the government at the time kneecapped the NBN you'd have a link that is comparable in cost and speed. Most consumers here do not have that link.
So much this. I'm on Starlink in Sydney because Australia's NBN decided to stop their fibre rollout 600 meters from my house and decided that the only option they would provide me is old geostationary satellite. 4G reception is middling with pathetic data caps. I get 5G reception too but none of the providers will offer home broadband services, only mobile Wifi. On Starlink I get ~250mbps down at a price only marginally higher than what I would be paying to get the same speed on a fixed line connection.
I can't be the only one in a situation like mine. Prime candidates for Starlink. The NBN closed quotes for running fibre to my residence. Even if I had the tens-of-thousands to pay for them to run the cable they won't even consider taking my money currently.
this has been repeated countless times, but the only reason you are experiencing good service is because it's not at capacity. as soon as your area gets to capacity, just like it is all over the US, you too will face bad speeds and increasing prices. for some reason people thought starlink had some magical solution to capacity problems and that the high speeds would last forever.
It's gonna be interesting to see how they solve the financials. Targeting a rural/spare population via expensive satellite connections, that market has to be relatively limited. And with a limited amount of customers, how does it make business sense?
Take a look at 5G extended range FWA. That's what Starlink is competing against. Proprietary versions of similar capability are well-proven, but 5G-based extended range FWA enables interoperation, standardization, and competition.
5G extended range FWA piggybacks off 5G infrastructure. You can do similar things with WiFi or proprietary mmWave FWA, but it requires purpose-built infrastructure.
Proprietary mmWave radios are already in wide use in rural areas. The economics of installing and using 5G extended range would be similar or better.
The key difference is the "extended range" part, which is what makes them competitive and in many cases superior in range to proprietary FWA. What standardization adds is inter-operation of equipment.
In areas where it's not oversold it works very nicely: 150-250 down / 10-30 up with 20-55ms ping to 8.8.8.8. Source: me in extremely rural central EU location.
Still makes me a little depressed that instead of evolving Iridium, the best we can do with cheap launches is put up a bazillion bent-pipe satellites. I know all the technical reasons why not, but damn. Seems like a missed opportunity to use low interest rate VC money to build--or just improve--a generationally important system.
> I've talked to others in my area who use Starlink, and since January, we've experienced frequent downtime
This is depressing. I thought Starlink would be at least consistently available in the areas that they are providing service. We don't need another unreliable internet option. Especially if it's also overpriced.
Pretty amazing that you can get faster internet in middle of nowhere sounding area with Starlink than in Central London (Zone 1/2) wired/phone line internet
Starlink is a link in Elon's fragile chain of strategies. Elon, evidently, loves interlinked strategies. The first grand linkage was "How do we make reusable rockets valuable?" because, on their own, with non-reusable second stages, they're cool, but not financially impressive. But, with Starlink using almost all reused Falcon 9 capacity, it looks sexy af.
Elon, of course, can't stop there: How do you use the redonkulous payload-to-orbit capacity of Starship? You make satellites 5X larger that are no longer a "bent pipe" architecture and you make a "backbone-in-orbit" with laser links between satellites.
That might make Starlink make financial sense. But it looks like it is years away from being possible. Meanwhile Starlink "1.5" satellites are a PoC of laser links between satellites, but not anywhere near the scale of the big satellites that need Starship.
I've not had any speed or outage issues beyond the expected (ie storms, I live in tornado alley). I also don't pay $120 / month. And I noticed OP is using the old sat. Wonder if the issue is area/equipment.
According to ITU, more than a third of world population has no (proper) access to the Internet, and that equates to about 2.7 Billion people worldwide [1].
Personally I'd really love Starlink to provide Internet access to all people in the rural areas but it probably will not going to happen. By their own estimate, they are only currently deploying around 5% to 10% of their 42K projected Starlink satellites for global coverage. I'm not seeing that going to happen for at least another ten years (2033) provided they get the funding they're requesting and it does not seems to be the case [2].
The best alternative for satellite link for rural is the terrestrial based fixed wireless access (FWA). There are mainly 3 segments/types of FWA namely [3]:
3) ‘Connect the Unconnected’ (10–100 Mbps, cost USD10 – 20)
This last (3rd segment) is characterized by virtually non-existent fixed broadband alternatives, and mobile broadband using smartphones is the dominant way of accessing the Internet. Average revenue per unit (ARPU) cost are very much limited and user expectations of access speed are relatively low. The irony is that the 3rd segment is the "low hanging fruits" in term of technology while being the hardest to achieve in practice due to the very nature of terrestrial wireless signals. Starlink or any LEO based solution, however attractive, cannot possibly fill this gap due to the high cost involved in the satellite business and its astronomical ROI.
The author of the OP article is from the first (1st) segment of "elite" users and they're very far in between in the grand scale of rural users, i.e. not a typical rural users most probably 5% maximum. It seems to me that Starlink is focusing on this type of "elite" rural to survive and remain profitable not unlike Tesla did with their initial luxury/premium Tesla EV models strategy. But Tesla success is largely hinged and depended on huge (US) govt support for Tesla early days, and Starlink is also counting in the same strategy [4]. However, the latest bidding for govt money for Starlink is not successful and it's evidence from the stalls number of further starlink satellite deployment [5]. Elon Musk has been mentioning on record that one of the first Starlink priorities is not to go bust as what had happenned to its predecessor Motorola's Iridium but the odd seems to be against them at least for now.
I think it's the best for most of the countries that struggling with rural internet access (e.g. all countries US included) is to go for terrestrial fixed wireless access (FWA) for the third (3rd) segment i.e. connecting the unconnected. But if US cannot make satellite based Internet access work what are the chances that other countries might have?
Probably the best solution is to be flexible in tackling the Internet access for the 3rd segment with FWA perhaps similar to approach taken by Magma [5]. It's still early days for the rural areas connectivity but the sooner we can tackle this issues is better, as demonstrated during the height of the pandemic where travels are limited and digital divide phenomenon is at its worst.
[1] Measuring digital development Facts and Figures 2022:
[5] Building Flexible, Low-Cost Wireless Access Networks With Magma (to appear in 20th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation 2023):
I think it probably should be more expensive to live off the beaten path.
The per-capita CO2 consumption of people who rely on cars for everything is far higher than for people who can walk places or take public transport, and those environmental costs aren't passed on effectively to consumers.
If only we lived in a market economy that made things more expensive in places that were harder/more expensive to get to. Oh wait....
I guess you have never had the pleasure of paying $5 for a frozen cheeseburger that you had to heat up yourself in a microwave at a filling station in Max, North Dakota! Lots of benefits to rural life, but things being cheep is not usually one of them.
I think it would be fantastic if delusional urban people would grow their own food and supply their own cities with non rural distribution chains. Hey, it's local first after all. No potatoes from Idaho. No more avocados from Mexico, no coffee beans from South America to supply your morning latte habit.
Thanks to the inevitable drop in population upon enacting such a shortsighted policy, it would also fix any admittedly ephemeral concerns you might have about CO2.
Pricing in CO2 costs would not mean the end of avocados and coffee beans — it would just make them more expensive.
You can grow can grow potatoes just about anywhere, so the total distance travelled for that staple absolutely could be reduced in a more carbon-conscious world.
Am I being unfair, but doesn't this article seem a bit of a selfish whine. I feel sometimes we forget how amazing the things humans are doing to.
We had a person and his teams literally build re-usable rockets and then blanket the earth in thousands of satellites, largely on private funding. This seemed unconceivable 10 years ago. This of all the people tat said this was ridiculous and bound to fail financially or technologically when announced.
Then a few years later someone is 'my internet in the middle of nowhere is a more expensive, the price changed because its so popular and has dropouts"...like your using internet from a fleet of more satellites put up in a couple of years than humans created in the 50 years before.
I think we need to step back and take perspective on this one. Its freaking incredible we have this services. Its fairly new tech and will probably get better and better over coming decades.
For me, Starlink has been a game changer living in a rural area that still had copper ADSL. Its more expensive and sometimes (not often) has dropouts but I still marvel at what has been achieved.
Less often these days but sometimes I still got to the Starlink maps, spin the globe and feel amazed. Try it: https://satellitemap.space/
> Am I being unfair, but doesn't this article seem a bit of a selfish whine.
It does for sure and I was debating whether I should comment and say it or not.
> I think we need to step back and take perspective on this one.
Disagree here though. If we were taking account of the global state of things, sure. When OP pays for a service, gets unreliable service, and prices go up, they have a legit reason to complain and not be told to take in the big picture.
—
It might seem like I’m taking both sides, but really I’m not. OP decided to live in the middle of nowhere (I grew up in the same state, so I speak from experience), with that comes tradeoffs. Want fast and reliable internet? Be ready to pay for multiple providers! Yes, $200/month for internet seem high compared to other costs of living in rural Kansas, but it’s the compromise you endure for living so remote but wanting a job that requires you to be connected.
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 to undo the previous government's mess up of the original roll out post COVID world when everyone discovered remote work is a good idea for many.
Starlink's issue feels like history repeating itself with any service that becomes popular and goes too quickly into high demand