Don't quite understand why you would like to use Starlink in a city, especially without roaming support. Damn hipsters. What is awesome about it is to have internet in remote location that have no chance of ever getting a land line.
Two blocks over there was google fiber and at&t fiber but might as well have been 100 miles away for all the good that did me. Actually it would have been better because I wouldn't get adds telling me about fiber only to find it wasn't available.
You folks have to change that, decouple who lays cables from who can use them, or at least make companies who lay cables let any provider access them, etc... - look at how some european countries deal with it (at least the ones that have the most happy users - details will probably be important) and do the same => no risks.
(Repeating what I wrote in the past ) I'm in Switzerland living nearby Zurich but using a small regional Internet Provider located 50km away (outside the region I'm living in) and my parents are in a different region in a 800-souls village and use a major national provider, and we both ended up getting FTTH, with similar costs and great reliability - cables in both cases initially layed down spontaneously by companies not directly related to the providers, hoping that we would start using them at some point (I waited for 1 year being scared of complications but my parents switched immediately as their old ADSL connection was extremely unreliable) => this is a practical demonstration that this system works & good for everybody (customers & providers & whoever lays down the cables), therefore no reason not to adopt it.
They don't even need to bribe inspectors; the agency itself just rolls over on its own.
This is a city where some buildings have up to about 200Mbit/s on either cable or FTTP, but these are not available at all properties. The best landline speed I can get is "up to" 17Mbit/s downlink, which is slower than the phone, the landline uplink is ridiculously slow, and to top off the landline is more than twice the price of unlimited 4G.
I'd like the speed and latency of FTTP, and failing that a good speed of VDSL over FTTP, but since I can't get either and I'm on the top floor of a 4 story building, I've wondered if Starlink would be an improvement over 4G.
I've worked from home via the Internet since the late 90's, and having a backup has been drilled into me as a hard requirement from hard-won experience. Living in Chicago this came in handy just last year when a box truck took out my primary fiber connection and most of the block for a few days, and I failed over seamlessly to Comcast.
When/if I get approved for Starlink, I'll cancel comcast and be using it as my backup. Hopefully they become mobile soon as well, so I can take it with me on adventures.
If you are in a city there are cheaper back solutions than starlink.
And at least one of those will likely work. If not, I probably don't have much power anyway.
On another topic, I have had Starlink since early 2021. A lot of the people I see complaining are not the target audience. We live 3 hrs from the nearest airport, and it’s night and day difference for everyone outside our “town” who were either using a local WISP or Hughesnet. There are more of those people out there than you think ;)
IMO Starlink is not going to replace hardwired connection options or local 5G, but that’s okay. At least in the USA, there is a lot lot land not covered by cell service. I carry an Iridium messenger in the car just in case I break down in one of these areas (it has happened to me, and is not fun trying to get a tow truck).
For something that spans a week or so like my fiber outage? Worth every penny. As an employee it's my duty to have reliable "transportation" to work - in this case that means Internet access.
I did use a 4G LTE hotspot when I lived in less dense suburbs - it worked quite well. In the city core though, I've found that when there is a widescale outage mobile data slows to a crawl and is unusable for work purposes.
It's expensive, but when I was contracting being unable to take a sev0 on-call escalation would have cost far more in opportunity cost than paying for the backup line for a year.
Although it's more than a backup, I use it daily when I go sit in a park to work, or work from a cafe or whatever.
Starlink is looking pretty good by comparison.
I think Verizon and AT&T also offer 5G Home Internet options, but T-Mobile's offering seems to be the best from what I've seen online.
(Keep in mind that all of these services provide a specialized box that acts as a cell modem and router, and it should offer much stronger and better connectivity to the carrier's network than a mobile phone.)
Even without Starlink, you could have convinced me to donate $100 a month . The fact that my donation comes with a pretty amazing piece of tech is a bonus.
AT&T terminates fiber 1/10 mi from my house, built out under the $0.5B federal broadband subsidy many years back. But FCC did not require them to light it, so AT&T never bothered.
Who is worse, Comcast or AT&T? Each is worse than the other.