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Beta users of Starlink get downloads of 11 to 60 Mbps
- LinuxBender 6y agoMore useful to me would be bufferbloat [1] tests. Any starlink beta testers on HN? Also useful would be nuttcp or iperf3 tests just in case they optimized / prioritized for sites like dslreports and other speed test sites. [1] - http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest
- wtallis 6y agoYep. It's pretty much a given that if you want to compare Starlink to a good terrestrial ISP, you'll be disappointed. But compared to any other satellite ISP, Starlink should be impressive, especially in terms of latency. So testing and media coverage of Starlink should focus more on latency than throughput, and testing latency properly means testing latency under load.
- danw1979 6y ago... and the network only has a handful of beta testers on it at the moment, so any load tests are going to be meaningless.
- mey 6y agoSome of these links start a speed test on page load beware. All of them collect IP info/metrics about you. https://fast.com/ http://speed.ui.com/ http://speedtest.googlefiber.net/ https://www.speedtest.net
- jefft255 6y agoPings and upload speeds seem impressive (although as someone else said we'll see when under load). I come from a place (rural Canada) where a non-trival amount of people who live far away from town centers do not have access to decent internet. This will be a good alternative to existing satellite ISPs, or 5mbps (on a good day) land ISPs. Also potentially amazing for people living off-grid.
- 908B64B197 6y agoI'm fairly confident that the Canadian FCC will find a way to outlaw starlink judging by their track record with existing telecom companies & banning international investments.
- bargl 6y agoIt will also put pressure on land based ISP to either give up customers, or pay to increase infrastructure to get comparable internet to those areas.
- loktarogar 6y agoWhat i'm more interested in is longer term (well, longer than a speedtest) consistency. 11mbps is fine if it's never less than 11mbps. Aiming for "20ms latency for gaming" etc is useless if the thing drops out even once in a game.
- aSockPuppeteer 6y agoIt should be fine unless a helicopter hovers over your dish, wind makes your dish unstable, the satellite reaches end of life, weather affects your frequency(rain/fog/snow), or predicted sun spots occur. The price may be concerning if we compare to the current offers of competition. There are caps and bandwidth limitations. Satellite time is expensive.
- ShakataGaNai 6y agoIf a helicopter is hovering over your dish, close enough to be noticeable amounts of wind (more wind than you say get normally)... you have bigger problems... Like a military group is fast-roping into your home.
- bananaface 6y agoWon't these speeds dramatically reduce once there are a lot of users saturating the connections?
- augusto-moura 6y agoIf the network keep up in this state probably. But the plans are to launch some thousand more satellites
- garblegarble 6y ago>the plans are to launch some thousand more satellites 1000 more in that shell, but overall 11,578 more satellites (most of them lower than the current shell). Their target number is 12,000 satellites, with possible expansion to 42,000 (!!) The sheer scale boggles the mind
- topkai22 6y agoI suspect it will be really serving areas where that is unlikely to happen (rural areas and over ocean transportation).
- BitwiseFool 6y agoI'd switch to Starlink JUST to spite Comcast.
- joezydeco 6y agoIf you have comcast you're probably in range of a T-Mobile tower. Maybe consider their fixed 5G instead. It's coming to my area and Comcast started launching a flurry of deals to try and lock existing customers into a two year contract.
- jsperson 6y agoWhile I totally agree with your sentiments, there is a large section of the population that don’t even have the bad option of Comcast. I hope they put some curbs on adoption by those who have alternatives. Source: farm owner in the middle of nowhere KS. We have fixed wireless, but if it was hilly here we’d be stuck with Hughes and their geosynchronous satellites. The latency is huge - the speed of light isn’t fast enough.
- supernova87a 6y agoWhat is the pricing? No one ever seems to answer this all-important question...
- vmception 6y agoyou already know why. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22940781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22940781
- dencodev 6y agoSurely less than $100 a month, which is how high some existing internet can be anyway
- bryanlarsen 6y agoShotwell has said that it will be competitive with existing Internet pricing at $80. She didn't say it would be $80, but competitive with that pricing. Read that as you will. I'm sure that's only the starting price, that you'll be able to pay a lot more for more bandwidth.
- awesomeideas 6y agoI wonder if it will have location-modulated pricing; $80 wouldn't be competitive where I am.
- duskwuff 6y agoIf anything, I can imagine them ramping up prices in higher-density areas (where other more competitive broadband providers are available) to avoid oversubscription.
- ShakataGaNai 6y ago$100-150/mo for satellite based service would be totally reasonable (depending on data caps, etc). When you figure the average home (wired) internet connection is in the $80/mo range, cell phones start around there too. The people who need this service are the ones whom are so far out that they have no option for DSL, Cable or even 4G tethering.
- jasonpeacock 6y agoHonestly, this is just awesome. It's a working demonstration of high-speed satellite internet, showing this approach is a viable solution for "anywhere on Earth" internet. For all those people who don't have broadband available, this will be life-changing. It'll only get better from here, welcome to the future :) (and remember that perfect is the enemy of good)
- birdyrooster 6y agoI’m still not sure we won’t get develop Kessler Syndrome (runaway debris situation in LEO) so let’s hope you are right.
- infogulch 6y agoLEO is not as much of a problem as higher orbits. At the height that Starlink operates unpropelled debris falls out of the sky relatively quickly due to drag.
- bob33212 6y agoThe greater the surface area the quicker the decay. So if these satellites naturally fall after 3-5 years that means that if they somehow collided with each other creating millions of pieces of debris they would clear out with in less than a year because of the loss of energy during the collisions and the increased surface area.
- elnik 6y agoI wonder what happens on a cloudy day.. currently the satellite based DTH television displays a cloud and refuses to work. Technically is there a work around to that?
- bargl 6y agoCloudy days will 100% affect internet speeds. But it's also possible for them to have better equipment at LEO due to lower launch costs to overcome that affect. It's kinda funny because cloudy cover are a smaller portion of signal loss at GEO, (most loss is due to distance), but it affects that signal quite a bit once satellites are tweaked to get signal to Earth. Most GEO satellites try to have something like 95+% uptime due to average cloudy days in an area, which means they account for those really bad days where the clouds are just too thick. They use weather stats to project how much cloud cover each region will get so they can build bigger beams for that area. In the past those beams would cover large areas (Like the entire USA). Now they're getting smaller (State Sized) so they can tweak how much signal could go to say Washington vs. Idaho. They're always trying to make this stuff better. But those newer sats at GEO cost 300+ million dollars per sat and are expected to last 20+ years. So it'll be a while before this new generation of GEO sat is out there. The workaround would be. More signal power at the satellite (costly), or you as a consumer get a bigger/more powerful receiving antenna.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dougmwne 6y agoThis is already quite an achievement! In just 10 launches, SpaceX is operating the world's largest satellite constellation and can already provide broadband of reasonable quality to some customers. In rural areas, I have struggled to catch weak LTE signals with fixed antennas that often didn't hit these speed and latency numbers. This absolutely seems on track to be an excellent alternative to rural LTE or existing satellite internet providers. If it gets better from here with more launches, it's all gravy as far as I'm concerned.
- derekp7 6y agoI would like to see a kit from SpaceX which provides a solar powered Starlink to LTE bridge. Such kits could be installed anywhere, and provide service to places such as farm communities (install them on top of grain silos, for example). That way Starlink could be available to more customers without them having to have their own premise equipment (beyond an LTE hotspot).
- SEJeff 6y agoI'd sort of expect LTE operators to pay SpaceX for kit to do literally this.
- grecy 6y agoI worked for the Telco that services all of Northern Canada (world's largest operating area for a telco). We installed one of the world's first 3G towers that uses only satellite as backbone. Think fly-in only communities that are thousands of kilometers away from anything in the Arctic. Many of our sites are served by radio backhaul for that reason. The sat backhaul tower is extremely expensive and temperamental. It does work, but not very well. 3G (and LTE) are not very fault tolerant, and phones drop calls when the quality of the call drops below thresholds that can't be set. AFAIK they have not installed another one because of all the problems. For data the cost is astronomical - many thousands of dollars per GB. Hopefully starlink can at least fix that.
- ianai 6y ago
- etaioinshrdlu 6y agoI just got back from an AirBnB where I worked remotely for a week and the internet was DSL. It was about 1.5Mbps up and down. Work was still possible. Even group video calls worked. Uploading and downloading large files was out of the question however. I had to do a lot of work SSH'd into a remote server. So, 11 to 60 is not great, but still useful.
- driverdan 6y agoHow was the LTE signal with a good quality antenna? LTE is already faster than this, assuming you can get at least a half signal.
- etaioinshrdlu 6y agoOf several friends, we all got about 1.5 to 2mbps over LTE there. But the ping was worse... So I used the DSL :)
- Alupis 6y agoYa, the 11Mbps side of it is very disappointing. That's pretty in-line with slow DSL and existing satellite connections. The latency will be interesting to see too, since that was the boldest claim Musk made with this venture. The article seems to have cherry picked the best speedtests to show in their graphic - I'm curious what real-world in-application latencies are, ie. inside Call Of Duty Modern Warefare or something similar.
- ShakataGaNai 6y ago11mbps is amazing for what this is. Sure, it's "slow DSL" speed, but if you can get slow DSL you don't care about satellite internet. This is for all the places in the world that you can't get 4G cell service, let alone DSL. 11mbps plus a ping time of sub100 ms means that most people could telework anywhere in the world, even in the middle of an ocean. Unless your job requires you to download/upload huge amounts of data, it's more than enough for surfing, working, zoom, etc.
- driverdan 6y agoFor reference these are LTE category 3 speeds with better than LTE pings. A good start but nowhere near the Gb they've promised. I'm cautiously optimistic.
- the_mitsuhiko 6y agoBetter than LTE pings? That makes no sense to me. LTE ping should be <25ms if the target server is close to where it terminates which it typically is with speedtest.
- rsynnott 6y ago> better than LTE pings If you're getting latency worse than that on LTE, consider changing provider (and checking that you're _actually_ on LTE). These would be reasonable for the better class of 3G (HDSPA) but not great for LTE. Just did a speed test on my phone with wifi switched off (to a server in the same city). 20ms.
- H8crilA 6y agoHow low will it get once there's 100 (or more) people connecting from a single neighborhood?
- bargl 6y agoStarlink internet is not meant to replace hard line internet. There is no getting around the physics of cable being so much cheaper/easier. Even terrestrial cell towers are more efficient and cheaper than satellites. This is 100% meant to supplement existing infrastructure not to replace it. You will almost always get cheaper and faster internet (for both you and the company providing internet) over a cable to your house. If you can't get that, then maybe a cell tower is better, if that doesn't work, then a land based beaming internet may be better, after that I'd look to space based internet. It can probably supplant land based beaming internet, but I don't see this replacing ISPs/4g/5g anytime soon. The target audience for much of this infrastructure is the places you can't put a cell tower, but want to get signal. Ocean based travel being a big one. EDIT: I will contend. 5g could beat out ISPs at cost (which I thought I'd made more clear above). It's about the cost of infrastructure given the population density. I don't have as much knowledge in that area as I do satellite costs. But satellites won't beat out 5G at cost, not even with the reduced cost to space that SpaceX provides. It could with another couple orders of magnitude cost reduction in space. But there's a reason SpaceX is targeting only 5 million Americans and not 300 million.
- iRobbery 6y agoWeren't they also going to track airplanes with it, to avoid new mh-370 cases where they don't know where it went and where it crashed?
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- welterde 6y agoDidn't it already have Iridium on board as well? I read some claims that the power bus was unstable and thus it shut down the satellite radio multiple times before it could transmit much meaningful data. Which would imply that Starlink wouldn't have changed much in this regard.
- dzhiurgis 6y agoWe kinda know where MH-370 went, just not where it crashed.
- mintyc 6y agoOnce all tesla vehicles use starlink for sending back data to Tesla HQ I'm not sure much will be left for 'rural' broadband. Nice to pick up the grants though.
- hesdeadjim 6y agoAnyone complaining about this has never experienced the frustration of rural living when it comes to internet. This is absolutely amazing, and it will just get better. Even a reliable 10mbps would be a godsend in many places.
- CarelessExpert 6y agoHonestly, one of the barriers to my moving to a more rural area and working remotely was broadband access, but Starlink could very well solve that problem...
- Maximus9000 6y agoYou're not alone there. I wonder if starlink will increase property values in rural areas.
- trothamel 6y agoEspecially with COVID showing the downsides to living in urban areas.
- jonny_eh 6y agoI'd rather live in an urban area during a pandemic. It's counter-intuitive but the access to testing and hospitals is very important. https://theconversation.com/rural-america-is-more-vulnerable-to-covid-19-than-cities-are-and-its-starting-to-show-140532 https://theconversation.com/rural-america-is-more-vulnerable...
- badloginagain 6y agoLarger amounts of people mean more chances of exposure. Being in urban environment means higher dependence on fragile supply chains- food security is totally dependent on JIT grocery store inventories. Rural homes, by virtue of being isolated, are easier to self isolate.
- vondur 6y agoThis is awesome to hear. This will enable more people to move out to more remote places and get some nice speeds. 60MB/s is good enough for most remote work and TV streaming services. I can't wait to see what the major players will respond to this if it's opened up to major cities.
- Barrin92 6y agojust to do some napkin maths, the entire constellation is supposed to be 12k satellites. Some googling gives 20Gbps throughput per satellite, so that'd be about 240k Gbps per second. Now of course the satellites keep exchanging information themselves and not all satellites are everywhere all the time but ignoring that, and let's say you can assume ten times as much bandwidth because not everyone is online at the same time, that still doesn't serve a lot of people right? If you go with their eventual Gigabit speed claims that'd work out to about 2 million customers if I didn't make an error. That's only a single digit percentage of the American rural population let alone anywhere else in the world.
- aaomidi 6y agoBandwidth is over provisioned at 50-100x the amount. Sometimes even more.
- zhoujianfu 6y agoIf that’s the case, assuming 50mbs at 50x overprovisioning and $50/mo average, the 12k satellite system could provide service for 240m people and generate $144B/yr in revenue.
- AuryGlenz 6y agoI don’t think that would still apply. I’m in a rural area and our local ISP speeds go down to 1mbps in the evening, from a supposed 15. Streaming services are used by a lot of people at the same time.
- bob33212 6y agoThis will not be competitive with existing broadband offerings. Especially in competitive markets. Some people pay 70/month or less for 1GB currently in good markets. This will be competitive where the cost is currently 100/month for much slower connections.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hangonhn 6y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giQ8xEWjnBs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giQ8xEWjnBs According to this Engineering Explained video, it may be possible to achieve a lower latency using Star Link than over fiber if the points are far enough. People like high frequency traders might be willing to pay a ton for such a thing.
- Animats 6y agoPlus you have it all to yourself. Anyone remember the early 3G "high speed" demos, when 3G was just coming up?
- gamblor956 6y agoFor comparison, DSL is 1.5 Mbps. 4g is between 5Mbps and 12 Mbps (up to 50Mbps in burst mode), while 5g generally starts at 50Mbps. Cable internet is usually 25 Mbps, and up to 1 Gbps if you're willing to pay, and fiber is up to 10 Gbps if you're lucky enough to live in an area with fiber built out to your home. So in other words, Starlink is useful if you live too far away from a major residential center to have access to better and cheaper forms of internet access. There aren't enough people in the US or EU that live in rural areas far from decent internet connections for Starlink to be more than a tiny fraction of the ISP market. On top of that, unlike existing forms of internet access, Starlink is susceptible to weather conditions.
- arcticbull 6y ago> There aren't enough people in the US or EU that live in rural areas far from decent internet connections for Starlink to be more than a tiny fraction of the ISP market. Oh, I'm not sure that's true. 41,000,000 Americans don't have access to broadband [1]. That's the entire population of Canada and then some. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-19/where-the-u-s-underestimates-the-digital-divide https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-19/where-the...
- gamblor956 6y agoStarlink can't handle that many people, so it's a moot point that there are a theoretical 41 million potential customers. You can build out landlines far more easily than you can launch satellites; you just need the cable/fiber and some guys to dig a trench. The reason it hasn't happened is because it's not worth the financial investment without government subsidies (and this is why the federal government provides some subsidies for rural broadband buildouts). Iridium tried to be Starlink a decade or two ago, and they ran into the same problem: the cost of servicing rural and remote areas far exceeds the money you would receive from rural customers without massive government subsidies.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago> You can build out landlines far more easily than you can launch satellites; Each satellite costs SpaceX about $250K to build and $500K to launch and services thousands of customers. That same $750K might buy you a mile or so of trenching and cable. Many rural customers need multiple miles each.
- ecf 6y agoHigh-quality satellite internet that isn’t hamstrung by ridiculous download caps is one of the things I’m waiting for before attempting a nomad lifestyle. I can’t wait until it’s more available.
- bearjaws 6y agoMy parents house has 2mbps DSL from ATT. This would be a massive upgrade, and for petty much anyone in rural America 1.5mbps has been the dream for years now.
- diimdeep 6y agoI hope they provide global coverage despite totalitarian regimes !
- 627467 6y agoI can't wait to go live in the wilderness with this. seems like pretty good speeds, let's see what price it will get. Not in USA tho...
- codecamper 6y agoaykm?? wasted the sky with this ugly crap for what we already have with 4g? somebody please kick Elon in the nuts for me.
- BenjiWiebe 6y agoThere isn't a usable 4G signal everywhere. Not even everywhere in the US. On my 2 mile commute in Kansas, there's about 1 mile where I cannot even place calls or send texts, much less use data.
- codecamper 6y agoOh i see I have angered the cult. A rare negative submission points for me by daring to criticize the holy one.
- alexwennerberg 6y agoIs anyone concerned about the effect this has on the night sky and astronomical observation? https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/starlink-satellites-change-view-of-night-sky/ https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/starlink-sa...
- Bombthecat 6y agoNope, we destroyed the earth already. Why should we worry about the sky?
- DoingIsLearning 6y ago"...that said, we’ll make sure Starlink has no material effect on discoveries in astronomy. We care a great deal about science." Elon Musk A long exposure of Comet NEOWISE by Photographer Daniel Lopez: https://imgur.com/a/rDI1Onn https://imgur.com/a/rDI1Onn N.B. The white streaks are Starlink constellation passthrough trajectories Starlink currently has 597 orbiting satellites they plan for more than 12k to be deployed. Amazon just got an approval for their own constellation of another 3k low orbiting satellites. Facebook and Alibaba will probably join this trend.
- ColanR 6y agoDo the satellites in the photo have the new shades on them? I'd be interested to know how much the situation has improved with the improved anti-reflection.
- DoingIsLearning 6y agoDo they plan to retrofit the coating on the +500 deployed? Are there regulations that prevent future constellations from Amazon or Facebook, or any other giant, to implement albedo reduction on their constellations?
- busterarm 6y agoThose won't be up forever. They're all in a decaying orbit. They will get replaced in about 5 years.
- mdorazio 6y agoAs has been stated many, many times, the satellites are in very low orbit and naturally degrade over time to burn up in the atmosphere. The ones in the first batches that do not have a shade will only be up for a few years (5 at most).
- bryanlarsen 6y agoThe visor satellites are supposed to be invisible to the naked eye. They're still orbit raising, so we don't have results yet.
- taf2 6y agoThe latency numbers look really good- under 100ms is similar to ground based connections
- 0x38B 6y agoThis would have been awesome in Alaska, where we had only one option for ISP... we weren't in the boonies either. We just barely got DSL.
- arrty88 6y agoCan anyone tell me why this was not previously possible? Both latency and speed? What did Starlink do differently
- neckardt 6y agoI believe the innovation is that the satellites sit in low earth orbit. Traditional internet satellites operate in geostationary orbit, which is around 35,000km above the surface of the earth. This was preferable because with only a handful of satellites you could give the entire globe internet connection. However you have much higher latency due to the distance. Not exactly sure why the bandwidth is so slow, distance probably doesn't help here either. Maybe those companies are also running outdated systems. Starlink satellites operate in low earth orbit which is around 400km, which is way closer, leading to far lower latency. However, at that distance you need to basically cover the sky with satellites in order to always see one. That's why they're planning to launch thousands of them.
- shaklee3 6y agoIt is possible and has been done before in the past. The companies that tried it went bankrupt because the business plan doesn't work out. The ground stations are too expensive for end consumers. Starlink will likely see the same fate unless they get government money.
- kilroy123 6y agoThat's not necessarily true. SpaceX has a massive advantage that previous companies didn't – launch costs. SpaceX is getting all of these satellites up for an insanely low cost.
- seanwilson 6y agoWhat's the limit for how many internet users can use Starlink at the same time?
- bryanlarsen 6y ago50Gbps aggregate per satellite (actually 25 since you have to go up and down). 12000 satellites in the constellation. Those satellites will be over the ocean or unoccupied land most of the time, so estimate about 1% utilization ratios to be conservative. Standard ISP oversubscription allocations allow about 1Mbps per customer. That math gives me 300M customers.
- riantogo 6y agoJust ran speedtest: Wifi = 97 Mbps down 9 (xfinity) LTE = 57 Mbps down (att) Location = SF Bay Area 11 to 60 Mbps global coverage is totally acceptable speeds and if it holds up, would be a game changer.
- iaw 6y agoLatency runs 31 mS to 70 mS in the speedtests shown. I don't buy their claims that you can game with >100 mS latency, that is not a good experience. This is a great step forward for internet accessibility but I really wish they wouldn't oversell the capabilities before we're there.
- semicolon_storm 6y agoAs someone who lives in the middle of the ocean with ~70ms to the nearest major data center, you get used to it. You’re at a disadvantage to people with low ping, but it’s certainly not unplayable.
- smabie 6y agoIt really depends on the game. I would say 70-100ms is the upper acceptable limit for FPSs (though some like CS:GO or Valorant require even lower), but even like 150-250ms is okay for casual MOBA play.
- jokoon 6y agowhat about upload?
- Teknoman117 6y agoThe latency here is the main takeaway for me. It's phenomenal for a space based system. I spent some time at my parents cabin during the quarantine and the only option there is satellite internet. SSH with a ping of multiple seconds is rather frustrating. That and all the systems which have bad bandwidth because that much latency makes them think they've lost connection. As my parents are both techies, they are desperately hoping they're accepted into the beta.
- cryptonector 6y agoOnce they have inter-satellite links I'd expect long-haul latency over those links to beat cable latency for equivalent hauls.
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- netcyrax 6y agoWhat hardware is required to use the Starlink network? Would that be expensive?
- noodle 6y agoI've read somewhere else that its in the territory of $250. But that was reporting from a while ago, and things might be different now.
- 11thEarlOfMar 6y agoI recall when Iridium was going up, there was discussion about the complexity of the software that managed the pattern of transmitting packets among the satellites. The description indicated it was a complex software problem and they were struggling to get it right. (I went looking for articles from the time period, but couldn't track one down, however, came across MIT/Motorola FCC application for what would become Iridium.[1]) It's likely(?) that the orders of magnitude more Starlink satellites, their LEO speed, and other factors that impact optimization (amount of data to transmit, type of data, current load on intervening sats, positional changes during transmission, handoffs, etc.) can make this pretty hard. Or... It could be a learning system via neural net, etc. The notion that the system could get faster and more efficient over time, simply by operating and without the usual trudge of scheduled software releases and upgrades, is an intriguing possibility. Tho somehow, that's not a novel notion... [1] https://web.mit.edu/deweck/www/research_files/comsats_2004_001_v10/Unit1%20Success%20and%20Failure/SAT-AO-19901204-00068.pdf https://web.mit.edu/deweck/www/research_files/comsats_2004_0...
- busterarm 6y agoIIRC, Starlink satellites operate at a much lower orbit, are much more numerous and are a lot closer together which reduces the tracking complexity a fair bit. Also the inter-satellite links on the Iridium network are radio whereas the Starlinks have 4 motorized optical links (laser). They're highly reflective objects against the background of space.
- pacificmint 6y agoAs far as I know, the current satellites don’t have any lasers for satellite to satellite communication yet. That will come in later generations.
- busterarm 6y agoAhh, I had to look this up but you are correct.
- shaklee3 6y ago
- hello_tyler 6y agoThat's great. The pings not even that bad..
- crorella 6y ago11 mbps in the middle of a rural location in the heart of Chile ? Count me in!
- chiph 6y agoIf someone knows - what kind of cable does the unit use out to the antenna? My COVID project is wiring the house with Cat6 and it might be worthwhile putting an enclosed drop out on the deck for the future.
- awad 6y agoAccording to this Reddit thread, the dish only has one cable presumably with POE https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/hqu7p6/data_mining_from_starlink_support_website/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/hqu7p6/data_minin...
- chiph 6y agoI followed a link from there to the FCC test reports. Pages 7 & 8 of this application doc appears to make it out to be standard POE: https://apps.fcc.gov/eas/GetApplicationAttachment.html?id=4805881 https://apps.fcc.gov/eas/GetApplicationAttachment.html?id=48... > Power Supply Rating 56Vdc from PoE adapter 0.3A 802.3af won't do that at any sort of appreciable cable length, so it's most likely 802.3bt. Page 13 indicates it has a standard RJ45 connector, probably on the router to the customer's network. It doesn't explicitly say it's RJ45 to the antenna. But they're pretty ubiquitous and weatherproofing glands exist that will allow a RJ45 to pass through them. So .. probably.
- SCAQTony 6y agoWill having Starlink prevent asteroid detections from ground based telescopes?
- easton_s 6y agoI super excited for the students at my small rural school district. This will be a game changer!
- amiga_500 6y agoThis is more momentum towards decentralization. Fantastic. Little bit discouraged to see one comment stating 2mb/s for Canada, I wonder why it would be slower than the USA? Perhaps there is less overhead coverage there density wise? I also wonder how you can ascertain upload/download speeds before signing up. I know traditional broadband over copper doesn't have this feature, but if feels like this could, if you have the terminal on trial. Very interesting.
- chaostheory 6y agoThis is better than my Verizon data plan. The only time I can get decent speed without any timeouts in most of the Bay Area and even Tahoe is either when no one is awake or during the lockdown. Otherwise, it's Verizon data is near useless for me
- ekianjo 6y ago>The 35 best cities in the world for online gaming have ping rates of 8 to 28ms That statement makes absolutely no sense. That would assume the server is always in the same city as where you are at, which is about never the case when you play different games.
- m3at 6y agoMy understanding is that the FCC is very partial towards existing ISP. If I'm correct, how likely are they to negatively impact starlink accessibility to end user? Do they even have such power? I would very much appreciate if someone more knowledgeable could give her opinion.
- shaklee3 6y agoThe FCC prefers 5G. Starlink will likely never be able to use that spectrum in certain areas.
- XorNot 6y agoI wonder how easy it would be to build the antennas into a laptop screen. Though heck, adding a "sleeve" to my machine which meant it just "always" had internet would be amazing.
- J0_k3r 6y agowe've been able to do this for years using radio-based meshnets but the government won't update the legislation to allow encryption and commercial data on them making them pretty much useless. you wouldn't even need to pay for it.
- jpollock 6y agoThe number of grey market installs of this where people will use _any_ available US address to get the equipment and then take it back to wherever they are? Wow. This isn't just rural USA, this is rural Canada, Europe, South America, Africa. Anywhere and everywhere. Think back to US sat-tv providers selling into Canada. Think back to the original iPhone selling internationally. Regulators be damned.
- dba7dba 6y agoTheoretically one family could even get 2 starlink services if they really needed faster link. No physical line is used so I can totally see some people doing that if they really want to and can afford it.
- praveen9920 6y agoSome states in India ( Andhra Pradesh ) has started infrastructure projects for laying down fiber optic cables across, connecting all villages( nearly all), for both cable, telephone and internet services. This had tremendous impact on internet speeds in rural areas. I am writing this message from one of the remote areas with roughly 60Mbps connection.
- mint2 6y agocox has a monopoly in My area of California. The download speed of 50 mbs we have is fine but expensive. The upload speed between 2.5 and 3mbs is what’s painful. I’d have to pay around $70 or more to get those starlink upload speeds with cox. I’d much rather pay starlink.
- dkdk8283 6y agoI want to be a beta star link user - I am not in a totally rural area but in my area there are frequent natural disasters that take out power and comms. Cell sites work until the generator runs out of fuel, typically 2 or 3 days.
- tw04 6y agoIMO, the throughput isn’t what’s impressive, you can get similar-ish speeds from hughesnet. What’s impressive is the latency. The bandwidth should be (relatively) easy to increase over time. If the latency had been 300+ms, that would’ve been a disaster.
- norswap 6y agoDoes anyone know if these speeds will scale (well, remain constant) as the number of customers increase? For instance, the 4G network can and does get overloaded in crowded places, could the same thing occur to satellite internet?