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> prioritize rural It's worth pointing out that this will probably be something only people in rural areas will be interested in. "High speed" is in reference

> prioritize rural It's worth pointing out that this will probably be something only people in rural areas will be interested in. "High speed" is in reference to the utter garbage available to these people. The throughput won't be close to what you can get from copper/fiber in an urban/suburban setting. If you want to stick it to Comcast+co, this is unlikely to help you cut your cable [internet]. We'll still need to vote and apply pressure to end this oligopoly.

hedora 6y ago
At least in the SF Bay Area, rural areas have better internet than the suburbs (not counting places covered with small ISP fiber to the premises). Example rural ISPs. East bay: https://www.unwiredltd.com/residential-internet.html https://www.unwiredltd.com/residential-internet.html (3 up, $50/mo, 6 up, $89/mo, 9mbps up, $129/mo, no caps) South bay: https://www.surfnetusa.com/services/ https://www.surfnetusa.com/services/ (Lots of plans: 5 up, $40/mo, or 18mbps up, $103/month, no caps) I’m paying comcast $80 for 6 up, 1TB cap. It’s nominally 75mbps down, but performance is sometimes too slow for netflix 1080p (3-6 mbps down) during prime time. They won’t sell me a cheaper plan.
- corford 6y ago
  Tbh, none of those numbers look good from where I'm sitting. I pay €45/month for 80Mb down/20Mb up fibre. Granted I'm in a city (in Portugal). My parents in rural France pay €39/month for 20Mb down / 8Mb up. None of us have data caps
  - hosh 6y ago
    US broadband pricing is atrocious ... and people here don't even know it.
  - dahfizz 6y ago
    I get a symmetric gigabit fiber connection for $80 a month (€70). If I didn't need the bandwidth I can get 200/20 for $45/month. I'm on the US east coast. I think it highly depends on what's available in your area.
    - corford 6y ago
      That's more like it. Actually, I've just checked and my ISP here in Portugal (MEO) is now offering 1Gbit down / 200Mbit up, no caps, 1 month minimum contract length for €45.99 (... seems I need to move package!).
- pier25 6y ago
  Jesus that's horrible. We live in a somewhat rural area in Mexico (big city is 45 mins away) and we have uncapped 200Mb down / 50Mb up fiber for less than $50 per month.
  - obmelvin 6y ago
    Can I ask you something a bit off-topic? In Spanish (well, specifically in what you've heard in Mexico) do people use the word Jesus like you just did (i.e. Jesus esto es horrible)? Or is there a similar word/phrase that you would say takes that place?
    - pier25 6y ago
      I'm from Spain and there it's only used when someone sneezes. The word "Jesús" is rarely used nowadays to express a strong emotion like astonishment or disgust. It's something my grandparents would have said. My father is in his 60s and sometimes says it but only jokingly. It's more common in Mexico but it's also disappearing. When someone sneezes the usual response is "salud".
  - hedora 6y ago
    Note that these are wireless ISP’s. They put a directional antenna on your roof, and aim it at an omnidirectional antenna on a hill. This is similar to starlink, but with lower latency (to the tower/satellite). I agree that the speeds are awful on an absolute scale, but they’re competing with entrenched monopolies that own legal right of ways that will never be developed. This lets them prevent competitors from running fiber. Starlink is attacking the same ridiculous regulatory problem. Why build an entire reusable launch infrastructure and custom satellites when laying fiber is dirt cheap? Heck, Facebook says they have a robot that will piggy-back 2km of fiber over existing power lines in a day! In California, deploying the robots would mean getting PG&E to cooperate, but I could see it helping out in other states.
    - pier25 6y ago
      I thought you mentioned that some of those numbers where in the suburbs?
- rayhendricks 6y ago
  Rural WA outside Seattle 50mi you can get gig fiber for $60/mo http://www.ifiber.tv/internet/mason-county http://www.ifiber.tv/internet/mason-county there are allot of other similar municipalities (eastern WA/parts of TN) with similar deals. Just don’t let the telcos become a monopoly and this is what you get.
x3haloed 6y ago
Nope. “As confirmed by the company, Starlink will be able to provide speeds of up to a gigabit per second with latencies ranging from 25 milliseconds to 35 milliseconds. Elon Musk has previously stated that it has been designed to run real-time, competitive video games.” It will be plenty good to replace anything else available out there for home internet.
- walrus01 6y ago
  I do think that's highly optimistic. It'll be worlds better than Geostationary consumer VSAT or a crappy wisp, but not as low latency or with as much throughput as a wireline docsis3.1 network or GPON FTTH. The most optimal market is not somewhere like a northern suburb of Seattle with a well-developed Comcast network that also has CenturyLink GPON 1Gbps available, but more rural and fringe areas.
  - jackson1442 6y ago
    To be fair, my 300mbps connection is rarely ever actually 300mbps, even at times like 3am. I don't have access to a gigabit connection where I live, in a well-developed suburb.
    - walrus01 6y ago
      Honestly from a cable operator (Comcast/shaw/charter/whatever type company) I'd rather have only 100Mbps and more than three nines uptime over a one year period, than gigabit and something more flaky. Quality of network engineeeing and how much battery backup and generator protection is put into last mile and middle mile docsis3/3.1 networks varies widely.
      - Reason077 6y ago
        A benefit I have found since switching to wireless (5G) broadband is that uptime is significantly better than it was with my old cable connection. The fibre/cable internet would randomly go down for an hour or so, probably once a month on average - and that's just the times I was home and noticed. But the mobile network almost never goes down. If something happens to a given cell tower/base station, the connection will seamlessly switch over to another. Performance might degrade a bit but you probably won't notice. There is built in resiliency/redundancy with less single points of failure. I imagine a network like Starlink will be the same.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
travbrack 6y ago
I don't care, I want to give a middle finger to CableCo
txcwpalpha 6y ago
Musk himself has said that Starlink is primarily meant for rural customers, and most urbanites should not expect to use it. He even specifically addressed that Starlink will not "stick it" to Comcast+co, and may actually "help" them. > "I want to be clear, it's not like Starlink is some huge threat to telcos. I want to be super clear it is not," Musk said. "In fact, it will be helpful to telcos because Starlink will serve the hardest-to-serve customers that telcos otherwise have trouble doing with landlines or even with... cell towers." > Starlink will likely serve the "3 or 4 percent hardest-to-reach customers for telcos" and "people who simply have no connectivity right now, or the connectivity is really bad," Musk said. "So I think it will be actually helpful and take a significant load off the traditional telcos." https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-says-starlink-isnt-for-big-cities-wont-be-huge-threat-to-telcos/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-...
- shaklee3 6y ago
  Musk originally said this would compete with fiber and other terrestrial carriers. That's where the myth about it being lower latency than fiber started out.
  - judge2020 6y ago
    I think the only claim is that it's gigabit speeds [as fast as fiber], however I can't find a specific tweet other than one talking about 1tbps capacity (they've launched more satellites since then): https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1128834111878193155?s=20 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1128834111878193155?s=20 > That's where the myth about it being lower latency than fiyver started out. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1132903914586529793?s=20 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1132903914586529793?s=20
    - shaklee3 6y ago
      I'm not sure if you're refuting what I said, but there is absolutely no way you will get 20ms end-to-end latency from this. Satellite propagation delay, yes, but for your ping to get to Google and back will be over 50ms.
dghughes 6y ago
From what I can find each Starlink can support about 650 users. I'm not sure how far apart each satellite is and if that means the 651 person is out of luck. Rural areas with sparse populations would make sense rather than dense urban areas with greater populations. Even if like GPS there are several satellite overhead even a dozen may be too few for large cities. The perfect customer is one person who lives in a rural area that doesn't have trees and it doesn't snow.
- nyolfen 6y ago
  isn't the plan to have ~10k satellites eventually? i'd imagine the pace of launches would pick up as they have more success
  - rini17 6y ago
    Some napkin math: Total covered area: 400 000 000 km2/ 40 000 satellites / 650 users = about 15km2 per user i.e. starlink users should be on average 4km or 2,5mi apart
coding123 6y ago
I actually think they should cap Starlink at 10Mbps just so that it IS only competing for Rural. I will likely get Starlink because Frontier is ending support for future development in the rural area I'm building a house. The house will be ready by the end of this year, so I'm hoping I can go with them instead of an ATT connection. Given that it is going to pretty be my only option, it would suck if a bunch of city people suck up all the invites.
- dx034 6y ago
  Or make it more expensive? I'm sure their 1gbps plan won't be cheap. Probably expensive enough that no one in a city would consider taking it. In rural areas however it's the only alternative. Starlink's business is probably more successful anyway if they focus on fewer customers but charge those more. Less congestion and lower bandwidth requirements for their ground stations.
  - coding123 6y ago
    That seems fair, but still, it seems like you should still be required to be in a rural area to get those bandwidths. I can also imagine a scenario where dads in the city decide to buy this so that they can take the internet with them during weekend RV trips. So even if they are paying double what they pay Comcast, it's worth it for the internet everywhere factor. So perhaps, the satellites can give them that high bandwidth in remote regions, but only when the device is truly remote. When it returns to the city, perhaps the bandwidth should not compete with cable.
david38 6y ago
In live in the Bay Area and can’t wait for this. I want to be able to have internet in all the dead spots in California, if which there are a LOT. We have lots of National Forest / BLM land and it usually has almost no reception.
- tnorthcutt 6y ago
  My understanding is that it won’t be particularly portable - the base stations are fairy large.
  - txcwpalpha 6y ago
    Last I saw, it requires an antenna that’s about the size of a television satellite dish. Maybe portable enough to stick on an RV or campervan, but almost certainly not something you can take with you while hiking or backwoods camping.
    - sneak 6y ago
      Sounds like it could easily sit in the bed of a pickup truck, or on the roof of just about any large cargo vehicle (like perhaps a Sprinter). If they aren’t too expensive I hope to have one on a rural property as well as on the RV/truck I drive to get there.
- mattbk1 6y ago
  I go to the wilderness to get away from mobile phone reception.
  - jdietrich 6y ago
    I've got bad news for you: https://www.iridium.com/solutions/land/ https://www.iridium.com/solutions/land/
dev_tty01 6y ago
As a rural customer only 5 miles out of town, I have a DSL bonded pair. No cable service. 20mbit/sec down, 1.5 mbit/sec up. Starlink doesn't have a high threshold to meet for it to be a major improvement to our service. My situation is not unusual in rural settings. Cellular is also spotty, so its not a good option either. Very hilly terrain with low population density. All of my cellular service at home is over wifi via the DSL connection. Comcast has no interest in running cable/fiber the 2.5 miles needed to get to us. No ROI.

hedora 6y ago

At least in the SF Bay Area, rural areas have better internet than the suburbs (not counting places covered with small ISP fiber to the premises). Example rural ISPs. East bay: https://www.unwiredltd.com/residential-internet.html https://www.unwiredltd.com/residential-internet.html (3 up, $50/mo, 6 up, $89/mo, 9mbps up, $129/mo, no caps) South bay: https://www.surfnetusa.com/services/ https://www.surfnetusa.com/services/ (Lots of plans: 5 up, $40/mo, or 18mbps up, $103/month, no caps) I’m paying comcast $80 for 6 up, 1TB cap. It’s nominally 75mbps down, but performance is sometimes too slow for netflix 1080p (3-6 mbps down) during prime time. They won’t sell me a cheaper plan.

corford 6y ago
Tbh, none of those numbers look good from where I'm sitting. I pay €45/month for 80Mb down/20Mb up fibre. Granted I'm in a city (in Portugal). My parents in rural France pay €39/month for 20Mb down / 8Mb up. None of us have data caps
- hosh 6y ago
  US broadband pricing is atrocious ... and people here don't even know it.
- dahfizz 6y ago
  I get a symmetric gigabit fiber connection for $80 a month (€70). If I didn't need the bandwidth I can get 200/20 for $45/month. I'm on the US east coast. I think it highly depends on what's available in your area.
  - corford 6y ago
    That's more like it. Actually, I've just checked and my ISP here in Portugal (MEO) is now offering 1Gbit down / 200Mbit up, no caps, 1 month minimum contract length for €45.99 (... seems I need to move package!).
pier25 6y ago
Jesus that's horrible. We live in a somewhat rural area in Mexico (big city is 45 mins away) and we have uncapped 200Mb down / 50Mb up fiber for less than $50 per month.
- obmelvin 6y ago
  Can I ask you something a bit off-topic? In Spanish (well, specifically in what you've heard in Mexico) do people use the word Jesus like you just did (i.e. Jesus esto es horrible)? Or is there a similar word/phrase that you would say takes that place?
  - pier25 6y ago
    I'm from Spain and there it's only used when someone sneezes. The word "Jesús" is rarely used nowadays to express a strong emotion like astonishment or disgust. It's something my grandparents would have said. My father is in his 60s and sometimes says it but only jokingly. It's more common in Mexico but it's also disappearing. When someone sneezes the usual response is "salud".
- hedora 6y ago
  Note that these are wireless ISP’s. They put a directional antenna on your roof, and aim it at an omnidirectional antenna on a hill. This is similar to starlink, but with lower latency (to the tower/satellite). I agree that the speeds are awful on an absolute scale, but they’re competing with entrenched monopolies that own legal right of ways that will never be developed. This lets them prevent competitors from running fiber. Starlink is attacking the same ridiculous regulatory problem. Why build an entire reusable launch infrastructure and custom satellites when laying fiber is dirt cheap? Heck, Facebook says they have a robot that will piggy-back 2km of fiber over existing power lines in a day! In California, deploying the robots would mean getting PG&E to cooperate, but I could see it helping out in other states.
  - pier25 6y ago
    I thought you mentioned that some of those numbers where in the suburbs?
rayhendricks 6y ago
Rural WA outside Seattle 50mi you can get gig fiber for $60/mo http://www.ifiber.tv/internet/mason-county http://www.ifiber.tv/internet/mason-county there are allot of other similar municipalities (eastern WA/parts of TN) with similar deals. Just don’t let the telcos become a monopoly and this is what you get.

x3haloed 6y ago

Nope. “As confirmed by the company, Starlink will be able to provide speeds of up to a gigabit per second with latencies ranging from 25 milliseconds to 35 milliseconds. Elon Musk has previously stated that it has been designed to run real-time, competitive video games.” It will be plenty good to replace anything else available out there for home internet.

walrus01 6y ago
I do think that's highly optimistic. It'll be worlds better than Geostationary consumer VSAT or a crappy wisp, but not as low latency or with as much throughput as a wireline docsis3.1 network or GPON FTTH. The most optimal market is not somewhere like a northern suburb of Seattle with a well-developed Comcast network that also has CenturyLink GPON 1Gbps available, but more rural and fringe areas.
- jackson1442 6y ago
  To be fair, my 300mbps connection is rarely ever actually 300mbps, even at times like 3am. I don't have access to a gigabit connection where I live, in a well-developed suburb.
  - walrus01 6y ago
    Honestly from a cable operator (Comcast/shaw/charter/whatever type company) I'd rather have only 100Mbps and more than three nines uptime over a one year period, than gigabit and something more flaky. Quality of network engineeeing and how much battery backup and generator protection is put into last mile and middle mile docsis3/3.1 networks varies widely.
    - Reason077 6y ago
      A benefit I have found since switching to wireless (5G) broadband is that uptime is significantly better than it was with my old cable connection. The fibre/cable internet would randomly go down for an hour or so, probably once a month on average - and that's just the times I was home and noticed. But the mobile network almost never goes down. If something happens to a given cell tower/base station, the connection will seamlessly switch over to another. Performance might degrade a bit but you probably won't notice. There is built in resiliency/redundancy with less single points of failure. I imagine a network like Starlink will be the same.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

travbrack 6y ago

I don't care, I want to give a middle finger to CableCo

txcwpalpha 6y ago

Musk himself has said that Starlink is primarily meant for rural customers, and most urbanites should not expect to use it. He even specifically addressed that Starlink will not "stick it" to Comcast+co, and may actually "help" them. > "I want to be clear, it's not like Starlink is some huge threat to telcos. I want to be super clear it is not," Musk said. "In fact, it will be helpful to telcos because Starlink will serve the hardest-to-serve customers that telcos otherwise have trouble doing with landlines or even with... cell towers." > Starlink will likely serve the "3 or 4 percent hardest-to-reach customers for telcos" and "people who simply have no connectivity right now, or the connectivity is really bad," Musk said. "So I think it will be actually helpful and take a significant load off the traditional telcos." https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-says-starlink-isnt-for-big-cities-wont-be-huge-threat-to-telcos/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-...

shaklee3 6y ago
Musk originally said this would compete with fiber and other terrestrial carriers. That's where the myth about it being lower latency than fiber started out.
- judge2020 6y ago
  I think the only claim is that it's gigabit speeds [as fast as fiber], however I can't find a specific tweet other than one talking about 1tbps capacity (they've launched more satellites since then): https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1128834111878193155?s=20 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1128834111878193155?s=20 > That's where the myth about it being lower latency than fiyver started out. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1132903914586529793?s=20 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1132903914586529793?s=20
  - shaklee3 6y ago
    I'm not sure if you're refuting what I said, but there is absolutely no way you will get 20ms end-to-end latency from this. Satellite propagation delay, yes, but for your ping to get to Google and back will be over 50ms.

dghughes 6y ago

From what I can find each Starlink can support about 650 users. I'm not sure how far apart each satellite is and if that means the 651 person is out of luck. Rural areas with sparse populations would make sense rather than dense urban areas with greater populations. Even if like GPS there are several satellite overhead even a dozen may be too few for large cities. The perfect customer is one person who lives in a rural area that doesn't have trees and it doesn't snow.

nyolfen 6y ago
isn't the plan to have ~10k satellites eventually? i'd imagine the pace of launches would pick up as they have more success
- rini17 6y ago
  Some napkin math: Total covered area: 400 000 000 km2/ 40 000 satellites / 650 users = about 15km2 per user i.e. starlink users should be on average 4km or 2,5mi apart

coding123 6y ago

I actually think they should cap Starlink at 10Mbps just so that it IS only competing for Rural. I will likely get Starlink because Frontier is ending support for future development in the rural area I'm building a house. The house will be ready by the end of this year, so I'm hoping I can go with them instead of an ATT connection. Given that it is going to pretty be my only option, it would suck if a bunch of city people suck up all the invites.

dx034 6y ago
Or make it more expensive? I'm sure their 1gbps plan won't be cheap. Probably expensive enough that no one in a city would consider taking it. In rural areas however it's the only alternative. Starlink's business is probably more successful anyway if they focus on fewer customers but charge those more. Less congestion and lower bandwidth requirements for their ground stations.
- coding123 6y ago
  That seems fair, but still, it seems like you should still be required to be in a rural area to get those bandwidths. I can also imagine a scenario where dads in the city decide to buy this so that they can take the internet with them during weekend RV trips. So even if they are paying double what they pay Comcast, it's worth it for the internet everywhere factor. So perhaps, the satellites can give them that high bandwidth in remote regions, but only when the device is truly remote. When it returns to the city, perhaps the bandwidth should not compete with cable.

david38 6y ago

In live in the Bay Area and can’t wait for this. I want to be able to have internet in all the dead spots in California, if which there are a LOT. We have lots of National Forest / BLM land and it usually has almost no reception.

tnorthcutt 6y ago
My understanding is that it won’t be particularly portable - the base stations are fairy large.
- txcwpalpha 6y ago
  Last I saw, it requires an antenna that’s about the size of a television satellite dish. Maybe portable enough to stick on an RV or campervan, but almost certainly not something you can take with you while hiking or backwoods camping.
  - sneak 6y ago
    Sounds like it could easily sit in the bed of a pickup truck, or on the roof of just about any large cargo vehicle (like perhaps a Sprinter). If they aren’t too expensive I hope to have one on a rural property as well as on the RV/truck I drive to get there.
mattbk1 6y ago
I go to the wilderness to get away from mobile phone reception.
- jdietrich 6y ago
  I've got bad news for you: https://www.iridium.com/solutions/land/ https://www.iridium.com/solutions/land/

dev_tty01 6y ago

As a rural customer only 5 miles out of town, I have a DSL bonded pair. No cable service. 20mbit/sec down, 1.5 mbit/sec up. Starlink doesn't have a high threshold to meet for it to be a major improvement to our service. My situation is not unusual in rural settings. Cellular is also spotty, so its not a good option either. Very hilly terrain with low population density. All of my cellular service at home is over wifi via the DSL connection. Comcast has no interest in running cable/fiber the 2.5 miles needed to get to us. No ROI.