Comment by Diederich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Diederich | Hacker News Reader

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> If you already have internet, then Starlink is not for you.

We bought a property in a very rural area in mid 2020. One of the hard requirements was verified high speed Internet access.

Our home has good performing Comcast. But I also pay $100/month and have a Dishy on my roof. Fortunately our home is very tall and we're able to get about 95% visibility, since our home is in the middle of a forest.

Why am I paying an extra $100/month? Because our Comcast has outages. It's not surprising since we're at the end of miles and miles of above ground cable that has hundreds of trees pushing up against the wires and poles.

I'm a pretty well off 'tech person' so an additional $100/month to cover a few hours of use makes sense.

(Wireless coverage is terrible around here, so that was never a backup possibility.)

I'm pretty convinced that Starlink is not only going to revolutionize many people's lives, but it's also going to be a cash cow for SpaceX, in large part funding their Mars ambitions.

It would be no surprise to hear, I think, that a lot of us on this forum are well off 'tech persons'.

Internet scores higher than running water for me on prioritization, but I still couldn't bear to waste the resources to have a sat uplink for the 1-2 days a year comcast goes down. Taking a slot from somebody that actually needs it feels off to me too. It would only likely be worth it if your particular area has abnormally bad comcast uptime.

That said, we just purchased a beautiful rural property with a wonderful house, and will rent it out until starlink or fiber( local company is 1-2 years out) hits it. So maybe I'm just sore that people are taking starlink slots when they absolutely don't need it and its 2 years out =P

All fair points, thank you. And congrats on your property!

The comcast outages are far above anything that's 'normal'. And honestly if it was just me, as a decades long 'devops' person, losing network connectivity briefly every few days and for tens of minutes or longer multiple times a month would not be too bad. But my wife does zoom/video professionally all day every day with paying clients, so when comcast goes to crap it's very important for her to be able to reconnect over starlink ASAP.

> so when comcast goes to crap it's very important for her to be able to reconnect over starlink ASAP

Have you looked at something like Firewalla and multi-wan setup? https://help.firewalla.com/hc/en-us/articles/360051575473-Fi...

Thanks for the link! I have considered such technologies, and I'll probably end up implementing one at some point. It's on my TODO list. (:

My wife reports that she's able to switch WIFI from Comcast to Starlink in a matter of seconds, which doesn't actually break the video chat session. Not ideal, but not terrible.

My parents have it - first to do load balanced DSL, and then later to do DSL fail over for Starlink. Both of those features were critical during the virtual schooling timeframe and having enough bandwidth to support two school zoom sessions and household usage.

When discussing it with some of the sysadmins that I work with, they had a "hmm... interesting" thought with it - the configuration for it compared to the dual wan router setups that they have for their home labs is (from their standpoint) much easier.

The issue isn't so much a "can you do it" but rather a "how much time do you want to invest in designing your own setup?"

Sort of how Iridium made tons of money? I'm skeptical of it being a cash cow since for almost everyone LTE makes more sense (technologically, not necessarily any specific plan..). There aren't THAT many people living in the woods...

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