Comment by Jugurtha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jugurtha | Hacker News Reader

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I asked for one for use, and teardown. I haven't received a reply.

StarLink is underrated. Where I live, it's $100 a month for 100Mbps Fiber to the Home (it was $200 last month) if you can actually get in touch with the "National" telco, which has a monopoly on FTTH, xDSL. The other operators offer "4G", which goes to 10Mbps at 3 or 4 in the morning. It's also capped as you can only download with "high-speed" about 1GB before it's throttled.

Mostly, though, it's a few kilobytes per second. We lost millions of euros in business because of that, couldn't make video calls with physicians when we needed it the most for extremely urgent situations [tried 8 devices simultaneously with three different networks to get that to work and it did not work]. We bought about six 4G devices (routers, dongles). We bought a 4G antenna. Main xDSL provider took a year to bring us a line. For businesses, it's $300/month for 20Mbps. (Yes, that's 20 mega bits not bytes per second).

There were other providers, but they were shut down by the "regulators" because they were too popular.

Seriously, fuck them. Let StarLink shatter these assholes. It's taking too long.

If there's anyone from StarLink here, I'd like to get some of these babies.

Starlink will never() directly compete with most of the in-ground Internet providers. Even with tens of thousands of birds up, the physics just don't allow the kind of bandwidth density that cables do.

) However: never say never!

Maybe it should say that StarLink will never compete with an in-ground ISP that wants to be competitive themselves.

Or the other way round: why should telcos sink billions into covering rural areas with extremely low population density where they'll never be able to recoup costs even closely? They're not having any incentive to do so now, they'll have even less once Starlink is up and running because half the target customers will be happy with that.

That is why basic telecommunication infrastructure should be built out by the government, similar to roads, sewers/drinking water/gas pipes and postal service. Letting private companies do the job without mandating equal service will always lead to rural areas being dropped off the radar, and besides it's an enormous waste of resources if two or more service providers have to dig up half the country to bury infrastructure.

>Starlink will never() directly compete with most of the in-ground Internet providers.

It only has to compete with in-ground Internet providers that don't provide internet in-ground. There are a lot of them.

StarLink will do for the Internet what satellite dishes did for TV and radio in many, many parts of the world that only had access to government controlled broadcasts. Satellite dishes allowed these people to have access to other cultures and become aware of things their governments were hiding from them.

The reason I say StarLink is underrated is that SpaceX is a U.S. company providing internet from space. Pretty hard for a government body, or a government, to control this. Even if they try, there definitely will be a black market for the receivers and people will get them where they need them. There will be customs agent who will take a bribe from someone importing them illegally.

That's without even addressing the fact that some governments spy on their citizens and arrest them. Granted, nothing guarantees that a StarLink customer won't have U.S. intelligence deep packet inspect the heck of their traffic, but the bigger threat for these people is their own government, and serious jail time for nothing. The lesser of two evils will play a role in adoption.

With satellite TV, you need only receive and controlling who can do that is a matter of DRM which the transmitting companies struggle to implement securely. In the case of some satellite TV broadcasters, no DRM is employed. With satellite internet however, centralized control is trivial because merely listening to the satellite is not sufficient; the satellite must also accept data you transmit to it. This means that it will be trivial for the American government to regulate Starlink. Whether other governments can regulate Starlink as well will depend on a few matters, not least of which will be the American government's willingness to facilitate their regulation. And even in some countries the American government dislikes, access to Starlink will likely be blocked by mandate of the American government (I wouldn't expect feds to tolerate Starlink selling subscriptions to Iranians or providing service to stations located in Iran.)

>(I wouldn't expect feds to tolerate Starlink selling subscriptions to Iranians or providing service to stations located in Iran.)

I would expect that, on the contrary, the U.S. would very much want to get as many citizens of a nation of interest as possible on a network they have some control over.

On the one hand, more people chatting leads to more insight. On the other hand, more people chatting creates noise that allows to hide people exfiltrating "interesting information".

On the more "businessy" side of things, Facebook and Google have been trying to enter China for quite some time. Google has through Dragonfly until there was a leak, and it announced shutting it down last year.

The problem in my opinion is that, to get those few billion people on the internet meant that these corporations had to deal with the Chinese government and "compromise their morals". If getting these people on the network is done through customer-premises equipment, it can be useful. It may prove harder to control the flow of devices than it is to control a corporation.

Facebook may as well become an important SpaceX customer. They tried to increase penetration with internet.org and deals with major telecom companies. Both have tried with balloons and drones. StarLink is a new mode (well, not entirely new, but one that has become more affordable).

It may create tensions between China and the U.S., and the former may restrict imports of these devices, but they'll find their way. It could also give leverage to the U.S.:"you want us to restrict your citizens' access to StarLink, give us something".

Who knows.

Is it like this across USA? In the UK I have a 350mb/15mb connection for £50($66) and I'm paying over the odds to get a business connection that almost never goes offline. I am fairly central to a big city though.

I love the idea of Starlink but it wouldn't make any sense for me here.

Europe in general has much better telecom/internet services than most other areas of the world, both in pricing and performance. I'm really jealous of you guys..

It is. I'm in southern California in a fairly high density area, and my only options until recently were 10mb/1mb cable internet with a 1TB data cap for $60/month and 1.5mb DSL for $15/month (no data caps though). TMobile recently started offering internet over 5G with no data caps, so I'm going to try that to see if it's better.

Saying it is or isn't true is just wrong, there is no one America. How many EU nations could you fit inside of Texas?

I'm in NYC paying $65 a month 500 Mbps (up and down), with no contract, 2 year price lock-in.

For $75 my provider offers Gigabit with a lifetime price lock-in, I just don't have a use for it since I'm not big on streaming.

In Raleigh, NC I was paying $75 for 500 Mbps, same deal on no contract

It's not meant to be a strict statement. At the same time, based on my personal experience and discussions with colleagues at work (with many remote), broadband access in the US tends to be relatively expensive.

The exception to that seems to be where fiber is available, but a lot of the US, even in areas where the population density is similar to Europe, don't have fiber available.

I mean the question was literally "Is it like this across the USA"

If anything the answer is, no it's not (see: places I mentioned)

But realistically it's a poor question.

I can see that. If I took "across" as "everywhere", it's clearly not. If I take "across" as "in many places in", then I think it is, even in some places with high population density, with the exception being fiber and some locally owned wireless providers.

Verizon FiOS?

Out of curiosity, can you name the providers?

Optimum in NYC. It was a while ago so I'm not hundred percent on NC but iirc it was Spectrum

I'm trying T-Mobile internet now. (super sick of calling Comcast every year when they double my rate so they can lock me into another contract)

They sent a 4G LTE modem. I'm getting 5-24 Mbps down, 10-40Mbps up, and 40-60ms ping. It varies quite a bit and, surprisingly, upload is consistently much faster than download. You need to experiment where to put the modem -- 8 feet can make a 10Mpbs difference.

The bandwidth seems acceptable for my in-the-sticks area but the latency is noticeable on conference calls. Not sure I'll keep it.

I'm not in the U.S. I'm in Algiers, Algeria. North Africa.

I will probably buy many StarLink terminals to put in several places, offer to family and friends, and, frankly, out of spite.

https://www.speedtest.net/global-index

Two positions from the bottom. It's faster to start from the bottom. Although if you're on mobile, you won't see the ranking for fixed broadband. It's only better than Yemen and Turkmenistan. It has worse fixed broadband and mobile broadband than fucking war zones. How is that even possible, even if you make efforts to make it possible?

apologies - you wrote the price is $ so I assumed. my bad!

No need to apologize.

> Is it like this across USA?

The person you replied to isn't in the USA.

That said, broadband costs are inversely correlated with population density, more or less. In most (but not all) US cities fast, reliable broadband is easy to come by. Obviously you can find one-off complaints here and there from people who have exceptions, but the general situation isn't as dire as the edge cases.

> I have a 350mb/15mb connection for £50($66)

For comparison, I have 1000Mbps for about the same price in a medium sized US city. I have friends in other US cities who pay more than you for less bandwidth, though. It just depends on the location.

> In the UK...

The challenge with the USA is that we have a lot of land, some of which is very sparsely populated. We have 10 different states that each have more land area than the entire UK. For example, Texas is almost 3 times the size of the UK, but has half the population. It's a challenge to get high speed infrastructure everywhere, and another challenge to keep it updated every decade as speeds advance.

That's where Starlink shines: The sparsely populated areas where running high speed infrastructure to everyone is prohibitively expensive.

Granted, I don't live in a big city (only about 5 million people), and yes, you can get stable internet. But not 1Gbps..

I also move between three or four places and I want consistency. The extreme case I talked about was in the mountains. However, the coverage was good, but the "internet" sucked. It is this that's infuriating. You never know. Sometimes, you have 30Mbps on mobile, sometimes you have 120kbps. If there's no consistency, you can't forecast. You can't rely on something like that.

The operations part also sucks. So, given the unreliability and the inability to be consistent, I'll just sprinkle places with StarLink terminals and have one thing fewer to think about.

>> The challenge with the USA is that we have a lot of land

Ya, try being in Canada. Take those problems and multiply them by 10. Then look at the Starlink satellite inclinations. The first 1400, the bulk of the system, won't even get to where I am standing at the minute (54* latitude). Starlink targets at very specific markets. It is not the globe-spanning uber-ISP that many think it to be.

That doesn't seem right - the Starlinks go up to 53.8 degrees. That means that you should have quite a few satellites above your horizon, once that first shell is finished.

After that, later satellites will be at 70 and 97.6 (retrograde) inclination, so the entire world should be covered upon completion.

Just having sats at an inclination is not enough. It is a numbers game. How many are visible at any one moment, and their slant ranges, at a particular spot dictates available bandwidth. Also: the number of hops to the nearest downlink station. This is a massive structure of sat and ground installations. What we are seeing now is a system that goes just north enough to cover london, leaving much of the north un/underserved.

It's coming, have patience. The beta has already started in Canada, and they are launching more sats every month.

Last mile is expensive, but that’s just a question of local population density. Network backbones are relatively cheap making total land area mostly a meaningless limitation. 4x land area increases average distance between cities by ~2x so that doesn’t change much. Thus while truly rural areas are an issue wiring every suburb and midsized town in the US is roughly as difficult as the UK.

The difference mostly comes down to corruption as the US government heavily subsidized network deployments, but without any requirement they actually build networks. Add a lot of anticompetitive legislation in the US and things really slowed down. It’s slowly gotten better over time, but many areas still have terrible internet availability.

PS: I pay ~66$ per month for 20/20 and live in a 22 story building so density isn’t the issue.

9Mbps download / 0.84 Mbps upload here in the boondocks of New Mexico. And that's the recent new faster speed. Just got the bill: $110.60 last month, which is normal. I plan to buy Starlink as soon as they'll sell it to me.

I have ~350/20 (just tested 342.6/20.9) in a small city in the USA (300k pop). I currently pay $80, but on nonpromotional pricing, its about $100 for internet only. Reliability has been great, but it's important to note that this is the only high speed internet option in my area. Basically, most of America is split between Comcast(xfinity) or Charter(spectrum), and some lucky places have real competition. I _could_ get worse internet via satellite or w/e, but if I want over ~20mps (last time I checked), I have to use Charter. I've used Comcast when living elsewhere, with similar pricing, but anecdotally worse reliability.

Internet is dirt cheap in my city in India now.

But if you wanted to go up to the mountains or the beach or any part of the country that wasn't an overcrowded city, you'd get spotty internet, certainly nothing to run a business on.

I’m in Scotland and get about 3/0.1 and it dies whenever it rains( very often), open reach don’t care. They send someone who measures something and says someone else will come and fix it and they never do. I guess the cost of fixing the line for our one house isn’t worth it. Scottish gov said we’d have fibre optic by now but it’s been pushed back another year. We should receive a £400 payout if it isn’t here by next summer, but again my guess is they’d rather pay the fine than pay the cost of installation.

Can’t wait for starlink to come in and destroy them. I’ll sign up the second it becomes available.

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