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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

And vastly slower speeds...

Starlink is a replacement for dial-up, satellite, and in some cases legacy DSL- pretty much nothing else.

That's simply not true in my direct experience. I built a WISP back in the day, and although I don't have customers now, I still use the backhaul network to feed my office (typing this over that network). I have Starlink as a backup. Starlink is about as fast as my fixed wireless terrestrial link. It's often faster for download, and about 2/3 as fast for upload. Way, way faster than dialup and DSL.

What kind of equipment are you using? Have you realigned it recently?

You can push gigabit[1] ptp over the air these days for pretty cheap. Starlink seems to top out around 200Mbps in the best case.

[1] https://store.ui.com/us/en/collections/uisp-wireless-airfibe...

1Gbs? Why not go for 6Gbs?

https://ca.store.ui.com/ca/en/pro/category/all-60ghz-wireles...

I'm on the basic plan and usually see about 75mbps. It can drop to 20 or so during peak netflix hours. But that's still plenty fast enough for multiple HD video streams. What we had before was much slower and much, much less reliable.

If you can get a fast wired connection, do it. Starlink is for people who can't, and it's far and away the best option for them.

What kind of wired connection did you have previously?

The target audience for Starlink in the continental US seems to be people who's other options are traditional satellite, dial-up, or sometimes DSL (typically implying you're in a more rural area, but not always). For people in those situations, Starlink can be a good alternative.

However, if you have access to modern cable or FTTH... well, it's not a substitute.

I think this is going to depend somewhat on how congested your area is, but Starlink is my home ISP and I sometimes get faster (download) speeds at home than I do at the office where we have fiber at 200 Mbps down. It has a little more variance but is consistently quite fast. If the backend is on GCP, it amazes me how fast it will go.

Why does your office only have fibre at 200Mbps down? Last office I was involved in setting up, we didn’t need symmetrical gigabit but the cost was fairly inconsequential compared to lower speeds, so we just went with the gigabit… Really strange that service providers even bother running fibre at lower speeds for commercial accounts…

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