5 ms·

I 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 grou

I 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 ago
How 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 ago
  Of 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 ago
  Ya, 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 ago
    11mbps 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.
    - Alupis 6y ago
      OK maybe, but Elon promised 1Gbps speeds. 11Mbps is very, very far cry from that.
      - loufe 6y ago
        Ok, but at the same time this is the BETA period. Attacks on his claim should wait until the public availability of the service begins.
        Alupis 6y ago
        Fair enough... except everyone here is in awe of 11Mbps satellite service, as-if satellite internet is some brand new thing.
        yencabulator 6y ago
        If Hughes had been serving 11-60 Mbps at 31-94 ms ping without caps, Starlink wouldn't need to exist. Starlink is absolutely not the same as the previous generation of satellite internet. This is a brand new thing.
        Alupis 6y ago
        OK, but they've touted each satellite in the cluster being capable of driving 20Gbps all by itself. So why are people only getting 11Mbps? Beta or not, that's a very far cry from the promised specs.
grahamburger 6y ago
11 to 60 is actually really good. If you look at the total throughput on a residential connection, even a gigabit fiber connection, they will almost never burst above about 30mbps download. For most people 4K streaming is about the most bandwidth intensive thing they'll do, and that only requires about 20mbps per stream. As you indicated, video conference streams really don't use that much bandwidth (although they are very sensitive to latency.) The only real exception to this on residential networks (even during Covid with everyone working from home) is big game updates.
rckoepke 6y ago
When I worked on oil rigs in Saudi Arabia, ~300kbps seemed to be the minimum necessary for WhatsApp/Facebook messenger/low-intensity web browsing like old reddit or arstechnica. HN might work a little lower but probably not much before HTTP fails for other reasons (if your speeds are that low, likely your packet loss is far too high to keep things working over 2G/3G/4G). Truly even 0.3Mbps made all the difference in the world to the people who had been stuck on those rigs for the past 30-800 days. Often it was the first time in over a week, sometimes over a month that they could talk with their families. It became a necessary part of my job to spend 6-12 hours/day rationing access to the WiFi hotspots so that each of the 60 or so personnel could talk with their families each day. I purchased with my own money all the WiFi modems and a set of 8 different antennas for various frequencies, with very long cables. Generally took about 2-6 hours to align everything correctly to get any usable signal. Used public cell tower databases to find the GPS coordinates of the nearest towers and used vectors to those positions as starting points. Some of the locations I never could get any signal and no one could talk to their families or keep up with the news. Hopefully Starlink eventually connects these people to their families on a much more regular basis.

driverdan 6y ago

How 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 ago
Of 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 ago
Ya, 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 ago
  11mbps 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.
  - Alupis 6y ago
    OK maybe, but Elon promised 1Gbps speeds. 11Mbps is very, very far cry from that.
    - loufe 6y ago
      Ok, but at the same time this is the BETA period. Attacks on his claim should wait until the public availability of the service begins.
      - Alupis 6y ago
        Fair enough... except everyone here is in awe of 11Mbps satellite service, as-if satellite internet is some brand new thing.
        yencabulator 6y ago
        If Hughes had been serving 11-60 Mbps at 31-94 ms ping without caps, Starlink wouldn't need to exist. Starlink is absolutely not the same as the previous generation of satellite internet. This is a brand new thing.
        Alupis 6y ago
        OK, but they've touted each satellite in the cluster being capable of driving 20Gbps all by itself. So why are people only getting 11Mbps? Beta or not, that's a very far cry from the promised specs.

grahamburger 6y ago

11 to 60 is actually really good. If you look at the total throughput on a residential connection, even a gigabit fiber connection, they will almost never burst above about 30mbps download. For most people 4K streaming is about the most bandwidth intensive thing they'll do, and that only requires about 20mbps per stream. As you indicated, video conference streams really don't use that much bandwidth (although they are very sensitive to latency.) The only real exception to this on residential networks (even during Covid with everyone working from home) is big game updates.

rckoepke 6y ago

When I worked on oil rigs in Saudi Arabia, ~300kbps seemed to be the minimum necessary for WhatsApp/Facebook messenger/low-intensity web browsing like old reddit or arstechnica. HN might work a little lower but probably not much before HTTP fails for other reasons (if your speeds are that low, likely your packet loss is far too high to keep things working over 2G/3G/4G). Truly even 0.3Mbps made all the difference in the world to the people who had been stuck on those rigs for the past 30-800 days. Often it was the first time in over a week, sometimes over a month that they could talk with their families. It became a necessary part of my job to spend 6-12 hours/day rationing access to the WiFi hotspots so that each of the 60 or so personnel could talk with their families each day. I purchased with my own money all the WiFi modems and a set of 8 different antennas for various frequencies, with very long cables. Generally took about 2-6 hours to align everything correctly to get any usable signal. Used public cell tower databases to find the GPS coordinates of the nearest towers and used vectors to those positions as starting points. Some of the locations I never could get any signal and no one could talk to their families or keep up with the news. Hopefully Starlink eventually connects these people to their families on a much more regular basis.