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When you live in mountainous areas you usually have three options. Dial-up - if its offered still in your area, Point to point internet - if you have neighbou

When you live in mountainous areas you usually have three options. Dial-up - if its offered still in your area, Point to point internet - if you have neighbours in line of sight also participating. or Satellite - if you are in line of sight to the satellite Many people I know up-country usually all they get is satellite, so yeah starlink may not the promised 20ms, but its hella lot better than what traditional satellite is providing (also hopeful starlink provides better reliability and tech support which in satellite is quite atrocious as well) Heh - as far as what's promised vs delivery, read the fine print on satellite internet plans, they have wording saying the hope is to provide the advertised speeds but there is no guarantee that they ever will.

shaklee3 6y ago
Everything you just said applies to starlink as well. Why the double standard? Still need line of sight, they still won't provide advertised speed guarantees ( no ISP does). And most people don't care about latency. Bandwidth is far more important.
- kortilla 6y ago
  > And most people don't care about latency. Bandwidth is far more important. Nobody who has ever used existing satellite says this. Latency becomes a huge issue at 500ms.
  - shaklee3 6y ago
    For real time games, yes, for the vast majority of traffic, no. Streaming and web browsing are plenty interactive enough for this to matter. Even VoIP does perfectly fine if it's tuned properly.
    - kortilla 6y ago
      Browsing on 500ms is terrible and 500ms delay on voice ruins conversations. Most streaming apps don’t even have deep enough buffers to deal with the terrible latencies of satellite. A single web page load of a “modern” website requires 10s of TCP connections to load resources from CDNs, each of which requires TLS handshakes taking 1.5 seconds, which are not initiated until the initial page is downloaded enough to see resources to load. I had to live on this Internet for a summer. It was awful and was only good for long downloads. Everything else was literally better on dial-up. And this was 15 years ago.

shaklee3 6y ago

Everything you just said applies to starlink as well. Why the double standard? Still need line of sight, they still won't provide advertised speed guarantees ( no ISP does). And most people don't care about latency. Bandwidth is far more important.

kortilla 6y ago
> And most people don't care about latency. Bandwidth is far more important. Nobody who has ever used existing satellite says this. Latency becomes a huge issue at 500ms.
- shaklee3 6y ago
  For real time games, yes, for the vast majority of traffic, no. Streaming and web browsing are plenty interactive enough for this to matter. Even VoIP does perfectly fine if it's tuned properly.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    Browsing on 500ms is terrible and 500ms delay on voice ruins conversations. Most streaming apps don’t even have deep enough buffers to deal with the terrible latencies of satellite. A single web page load of a “modern” website requires 10s of TCP connections to load resources from CDNs, each of which requires TLS handshakes taking 1.5 seconds, which are not initiated until the initial page is downloaded enough to see resources to load. I had to live on this Internet for a summer. It was awful and was only good for long downloads. Everything else was literally better on dial-up. And this was 15 years ago.