SpaceX's Starlink Failing to Meet Expectations | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX's Starlink Failing to Meet Expectations

speedtest.net

9 pointsshaklee314 comments

I got to this part and huffed.

" to a disappointment (67.9% slower in Clay County, Missouri)."

I live in Clay County Missouri right now, it has _Google Fiber_. That's caused other broadband providers to improve service, driving up the average speed. The incumbents weren't happy about it.

I still get mad thinking about the bold faced lies the Spectrum retention specialist slovenly projected in my direction while I was switching. She told me Google Fiber was so fast that it could damage my devices, including my Smart TV! NP, I'll take that risk lady.

Despite sounding like it's in the middle of nowhere, Clay County, Missouri has some of the fastest internet in the country now.

I've been on the Starlink waiting list for another Missouri county a few hours away. The best internet speeds out there are measured in kbps. I look upon the light blue "oh this is bad" 50 Mbps map with white knuckle desire.

Email me back soon papa Elon, so I can move out to my farm at last. I doubt I'll be the only Starlink migrant in this country. If it works like I think it will, there will be some pretty weird societal changes in our near future.

>She told me Google Fiber was so fast that it could damage my devices, including my Smart TV!

How? How on earth could fast internet damage anything?

Surely somebody has written some verilog somewhere to blow a fuse if something starts oscillating too fast!

Because that wasn't her only lie, I'm not going to give her the benefit of the doubt that she was giving good faith retention arguments, however.

Hm. Not entirely impossible, even without intentional fuse blowing. There is so much old(and new!) trash out there, that's not entirely impossible to imagine them melt by overheating when confronted with the traffic and thereby cpu load which really fast internet enables.

This test took into account which isps were already in that area. I don't see why you think this will be better. Clearly not all those places on the map had fiber.

Isn't the expectation at this point literally, "better than nothing"?

In rural America where fixed line, high speed providers do not want to spend money laying cable, a service like Starlink fills a needed gap. But so will 6G or 7G, which will "probably" fix the high speed at a distance issue with 5G...and require a new phone to be purchased.

That being said, I don't think it's really the end game of Starlink. It's a gap, to provide funding for the service to be fully launched (pun, I guess), and make it near break even. But is there such a market to support the large investment in the system? Much less, the additional two or three competitors who are planning to do the same thing?

I suspect, the end game with Starlink is going to be connected (er, linked) to future functionality in the Tesla fleet. Instead of using cellular networks to provide data updates for maps, etc., Tesla may build the receivers into the cars (Not sure how well the system is designed to work with a moving receiver) and use their own network for data updates.

I've long said that Level 5 autonomy will require smart roads and car-to-car communication, this could be a stepping stone in that direction.

I should also add that I'm not familiar with how well Starlink is designed to work in large metropolitan areas with a high number of simultaneous connections. Do the satellites have a higher bandwidth/connection capability then cell towers, etc.

The end game with starlink is to get government funding. It's far easier to close the business when you get free money without any obligations. In fact, the 900M they were given for rdof is under false pretenses since this data shows they are not meeting the 100Mbps everywhere.

another dimension is missing from this and that is Starlink's lack of data cap. Starlink in theory will be about equal to my LTE connection, maybe even a little slower, but with the massive exception that there is no data cap.

For me that is worth the cost and even a drop in speed, might finally be able to stream TV with out worrying about how much data I'm using.

No data cap for how long though?

That is a good point, there is nothing stopping them from setting one.

There are no LTE contracts without one (in the UK) so I guess just have to hope.

I have unlimited data on LTE in the UK

Unlimited just means your speed is capped more and more as you move into higher usage tiers. Nothing is unlimited.

from https://www.speedtest.net/ ...Hmm.. I don't even trust speedtest for accurate speedtests let alone cosmological news. Speedtest.net's results are hilariously inaccurate, both way higher, and way lower than my actual connection bandwidth.

I use fast.com or cURL for more accurate tests.

Ex.

$ curl -s http://speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com/downloads/test500.zip

Reply on news.ycombinator.com