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Comment by dredds | Hacker News Reader

These articles ignore a vast number of global web users who are living in or around major cities and towns just to have connectivity, who will likely be early adopters seeking the freedom to live in more affordable rural locations. The potential size of this group is hard to judge, so it seems there's some reluctance to even speculate on a figure.

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I could see it even driving migration out of cities. One of the big reasons for not already doing so is the terrible connections for remote workers further out.

I mean... satellite internet exists. North America in particular has full satellite internet coverage.

Satellite internet with high latency exists. The stuff SpaceX is putting out will have significantly lower latency, which is huge difference.

For reference GEO is something like 250ms and in LEO you can get sub 50ms.

I did the math a year ago and so numbers may be a little off due to memory, but they should be in the ball park. Also these would be optimal numbers, so realistic would be worse.

Don't forget to account for the initial SSL handshake...

And, honestly, who needs less than 250ms? Gamers? How many websites open in under a second anyhow?

The existing Internet satelite are incredible expensive and not only the latency is really bad, but the bandwidth is also very limited, you can not consider it as a broadband ISP. Starlink will be a true alternative to the fiber optic ISPs, and for world-wide will be even faster thanks to the direct lasser link among the constellation.

Plenty. One example is voice or video conversations. You're going to have a bad time if you try to Skype on conventional satellite internet.

Yes and people pay for it, even though it can be upwards of $200/mo with datacaps, high latency, and terribly reliability.

Any disruption in the current sat-internet market is welcome.

The current state of satellite is the dial-up of high speed internet. The latency is horrible. You can't video conference or play online games with it. SpaceX's satellites are a lot lower, so they have better latency.

It is high bandwidth though. I can stream YouTube and Netflix no problem. Maybe I just don't notice because I'm not an online gamer.

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