6 ms·

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 mil

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.
  - mrep 6y ago
    So true for cable internet. My parents just upgraded from 300 to 600 and it did nothing from what I can tell as they are still getting like 25 mbps. It is freaking ridiculous how bad it is for what they are advertising.
    - yetanta 6y ago
      One thing people need to consider also is their router. If they plug a 1gig network into an old 802.11g wireless router or an old 100/10 network card with cat4 cables, you are not getting what you pay for at all. Rock on over to my parents house. They were paying for 40 and had it plugged into a wireless usb dongle that could maybe manage 2.5 on a good day. That came from the ISP. Bought them a better one and they were getting near the rate they were paying for.
- BenjiWiebe 6y ago
  A good WISP will even beat it. The one we are on has latency (measured to 1.1.1.1) of 17-20ms. We are quite rural.
liability 6y ago
It can match other options for speed, but what about speed/price?
martinald 6y ago
As has been pointed out on every Starlink thread, problem isn't latency or speed, it's contention. Each satellite only has 20gbit/sec per beam of capacity. It's likely even in small cities that will not be enough (it's only 1-3k users streaming Netflix for example). There is no way you can connect a city of even 100k people with 20gig/sec of capacity these days, never mind major metro areas many times that size. Elon Musk has admitted this himself, and the problem gets worse over time (bandwidth requirements grow every year, but satellites capacity is fixed), so the 20gbps they have now will seem even more limited in 3-5 years when the satellites are becoming EoL. This is not to say that Starlink is fundamentally flawed, it has great potential for rural access.
- lumberingjack 6y ago
  I have friends on the Indiana Ohio border that are only offered ISP from a monopoly, ISP offers one plan $45 mo 60/40mbps. They have the first fiber optic Network ever laid in the country from adelphia cable but Time Warner Cable bought it and turned it off 20 years ago.
  - sigmaprimus 6y ago
    I just gave Starlink my address as per the email request they sent out today. I'm currently on an 5Mb down 1Mb up LTE connection with a total data limit of 250Gb/Month for the low price of 100 bucks a month. I do have very low latency < 20ms, but last month my friends kid was over and managed to burn through 95 gigs playing and updating some game called PubG that ended up putting me over my limit and I got to pay an extra 50 bucks for the next tier of usage. If I get the opportunity to try out Starlink I will be more than happy to do so as it's very frustrating being forced to use an ISP monopoly provider, especially when there is fiber available to properties less than 5 miles away from mine.
    - 34679 6y ago
      You should really check out Visible. Unlimited 4G data, even on the hotspot. $25 per month if you join a party, which takes about 5 minutes after searching for "Visible Party".
mbreese 6y ago
Plenty good, yes. But if you already have decent service, you’re not likely to be an early adopter of this. I live in a decently sized Midwestern city with fiber available. I’m not going to switch over to Starlink. However, my father, who lives in a rural area, has had to work with a) satellite or b) LTE internet. He is going to switch over to this in a heartbeat. At least initially, this is going to primarily be a rural and/or mobile warrior type of service. And I don’t believe those latency figures at all until I see them working in the wild. It will be significantly better than geosynchronous satellite service, but the question is by how much.
rsynnott 6y ago
‘Up to’ is a load-bearing phrase, there, I assume.
txcwpalpha 6y ago
...and if you look at the second half of wherever you are quoting that from, you'll see that the person you're replying to is correct. Starlink is meant for rural customers, and according to Elon Musk himself it will not be "plenty good to replace anything else available out there for home internet" for urbanites. > Despite that, the SpaceX CEO argued that Starlink won't be a major threat to telcos because the satellite service won't be good enough for high-population areas and will mostly be used by rural customers without access to fast broadband. > The amount of bandwidth available will be enough to support typical Internet usage, at least in rural areas, Musk said. > So will Starlink be a good option for anyone in the United States? Not necessarily. Musk said there will be plenty of bandwidth in areas with low population densities and that there will be some customers in big cities. But he cautioned against expecting that everyone in a big city would be able to use Starlink. 1: 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-...
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  So what does this mean for people like me who are rural, but right next to a major city? Right now, I am 5 minutes from the city but have to rely on a slow 10mbps-ish (down, don't ask about up) 900mhz point to point wireless connection. If I end up with Starlink as an option am I going to be fighting with urban users for bandwidth? In many ways those of us in this scenario get the worst of both world because infrastructure spending / subsidies for rural Internet improvement gets used in real remote places, while most people don't realize that if you drive one street over from the suburbs, out into the farmland, you're unlikely to even be able to get low quality DSL. It's simply not available to me. When the sprawl finally brings the bulldozers in to build McMansions around me, I guess that's when the fiber lines will come in...
  - wmf 6y ago
    If I end up with Starlink as an option am I going to be fighting with urban users for bandwidth? No, because there won't be any urban users on Starlink. It doesn't make any sense for them (ignoring a small number of vocal fanboys).

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.
- mrep 6y ago
  So true for cable internet. My parents just upgraded from 300 to 600 and it did nothing from what I can tell as they are still getting like 25 mbps. It is freaking ridiculous how bad it is for what they are advertising.
  - yetanta 6y ago
    One thing people need to consider also is their router. If they plug a 1gig network into an old 802.11g wireless router or an old 100/10 network card with cat4 cables, you are not getting what you pay for at all. Rock on over to my parents house. They were paying for 40 and had it plugged into a wireless usb dongle that could maybe manage 2.5 on a good day. That came from the ISP. Bought them a better one and they were getting near the rate they were paying for.
BenjiWiebe 6y ago
A good WISP will even beat it. The one we are on has latency (measured to 1.1.1.1) of 17-20ms. We are quite rural.

liability 6y ago

It can match other options for speed, but what about speed/price?

martinald 6y ago

As has been pointed out on every Starlink thread, problem isn't latency or speed, it's contention. Each satellite only has 20gbit/sec per beam of capacity. It's likely even in small cities that will not be enough (it's only 1-3k users streaming Netflix for example). There is no way you can connect a city of even 100k people with 20gig/sec of capacity these days, never mind major metro areas many times that size. Elon Musk has admitted this himself, and the problem gets worse over time (bandwidth requirements grow every year, but satellites capacity is fixed), so the 20gbps they have now will seem even more limited in 3-5 years when the satellites are becoming EoL. This is not to say that Starlink is fundamentally flawed, it has great potential for rural access.

lumberingjack 6y ago
I have friends on the Indiana Ohio border that are only offered ISP from a monopoly, ISP offers one plan $45 mo 60/40mbps. They have the first fiber optic Network ever laid in the country from adelphia cable but Time Warner Cable bought it and turned it off 20 years ago.
- sigmaprimus 6y ago
  I just gave Starlink my address as per the email request they sent out today. I'm currently on an 5Mb down 1Mb up LTE connection with a total data limit of 250Gb/Month for the low price of 100 bucks a month. I do have very low latency < 20ms, but last month my friends kid was over and managed to burn through 95 gigs playing and updating some game called PubG that ended up putting me over my limit and I got to pay an extra 50 bucks for the next tier of usage. If I get the opportunity to try out Starlink I will be more than happy to do so as it's very frustrating being forced to use an ISP monopoly provider, especially when there is fiber available to properties less than 5 miles away from mine.
  - 34679 6y ago
    You should really check out Visible. Unlimited 4G data, even on the hotspot. $25 per month if you join a party, which takes about 5 minutes after searching for "Visible Party".

mbreese 6y ago

Plenty good, yes. But if you already have decent service, you’re not likely to be an early adopter of this. I live in a decently sized Midwestern city with fiber available. I’m not going to switch over to Starlink. However, my father, who lives in a rural area, has had to work with a) satellite or b) LTE internet. He is going to switch over to this in a heartbeat. At least initially, this is going to primarily be a rural and/or mobile warrior type of service. And I don’t believe those latency figures at all until I see them working in the wild. It will be significantly better than geosynchronous satellite service, but the question is by how much.

rsynnott 6y ago

‘Up to’ is a load-bearing phrase, there, I assume.

txcwpalpha 6y ago

...and if you look at the second half of wherever you are quoting that from, you'll see that the person you're replying to is correct. Starlink is meant for rural customers, and according to Elon Musk himself it will not be "plenty good to replace anything else available out there for home internet" for urbanites. > Despite that, the SpaceX CEO argued that Starlink won't be a major threat to telcos because the satellite service won't be good enough for high-population areas and will mostly be used by rural customers without access to fast broadband. > The amount of bandwidth available will be enough to support typical Internet usage, at least in rural areas, Musk said. > So will Starlink be a good option for anyone in the United States? Not necessarily. Musk said there will be plenty of bandwidth in areas with low population densities and that there will be some customers in big cities. But he cautioned against expecting that everyone in a big city would be able to use Starlink. 1: 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-...

cmrdporcupine 6y ago
So what does this mean for people like me who are rural, but right next to a major city? Right now, I am 5 minutes from the city but have to rely on a slow 10mbps-ish (down, don't ask about up) 900mhz point to point wireless connection. If I end up with Starlink as an option am I going to be fighting with urban users for bandwidth? In many ways those of us in this scenario get the worst of both world because infrastructure spending / subsidies for rural Internet improvement gets used in real remote places, while most people don't realize that if you drive one street over from the suburbs, out into the farmland, you're unlikely to even be able to get low quality DSL. It's simply not available to me. When the sprawl finally brings the bulldozers in to build McMansions around me, I guess that's when the fiber lines will come in...
- wmf 6y ago
  If I end up with Starlink as an option am I going to be fighting with urban users for bandwidth? No, because there won't be any urban users on Starlink. It doesn't make any sense for them (ignoring a small number of vocal fanboys).