I love the idea of Starlink but it wouldn't make any sense for me here.
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.
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.
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.
After that, later satellites will be at 70 and 97.6 (retrograde) inclination, so the entire world should be covered upon completion.
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.
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?
Can’t wait for starlink to come in and destroy them. I’ll sign up the second it becomes available.
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
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.
If anything the answer is, no it's not (see: places I mentioned)
But realistically it's a poor question.
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.
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.