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The upsetting part is the greed of it all and lack of any meaningful competition to switch to. If Elon’s Starlink works well it may be the nudge AT&T and Comca

The upsetting part is the greed of it all and lack of any meaningful competition to switch to. If Elon’s Starlink works well it may be the nudge AT&T and Comcast need. Would also love to see a line of sight ISP and more towns start ISPs like there are in some states and other countries since laying the wires is too big of a startup cost for any new players that don’t have billions of dollars.

stefan_ 6y ago
The irony is that of all of these fraudsters, Starlink would be the most reasonable to have data caps to begin with.
- wmf 6y ago
  It would be great if Starlink could innovate an alternative to data caps since they're a very crude way to manage congestion.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    Giving each customer a guaranteed bandwidth and a burst bandwidth should work. When the network is free you can use up to your burst speed, but the network is guaranteed to be large enough to support your minimum speed. During congestion, all packets beyond your minimum speed are at a lower priority and will be dropped as needed.
    - wmf 6y ago
      Minimum speeds tend to be tricky because they depend on the density of customers (if your neighbor signs up your minimum goes down) and they tend to be very low, like 1 Mbps.
bryanlarsen 6y ago
I'm not sure how much Starlink will help. Starlink will only be viable in rural settings. A popular saying on Ars Technica is "Starlink is for those who wish they had Comcast to hate, not those who hate their Comcast."
mschuster91 6y ago
> Would also love to see a line of sight ISP The problem with rural broadband, no matter if line-of-sight, FTTN, FTTB or even LTE/5G is that there will always be some sort of "concentrator point" needed which will need a high speed uplink themselves. And since we're talking about rural, this uplink is the expensive part as you will want to put it below ground so that random car crashes, forest fires, lighting strikes, wind damage, falling trees or anything don't take down the single uplink for days. You can link up such concentrators using directional wireless (this is how many LTE stations are uplinked, for example), but suffer from degraded performance in bad weather, lower total performance for the satellite stations/APs, and it isn't always possible (as it's line-of-sight based). Source: worked in constructions digging trenches for FTTN buildouts in Germany.
tzs 6y ago
The way Starlink works there is a certain amount of bandwidth available between a satellite and a ground terminal, and a certain amount available satellite to satellite. This means that there is a limit on how many customers they can handle per square kilometer without degrading performance. That limit is much lower than the number of customers the major terrestrial ISPs serve in urban and suburban areas. Their plans are to support 5 million customers total across the whole US. That’s less than 10% of the number of cable broadband customers.

stefan_ 6y ago

The irony is that of all of these fraudsters, Starlink would be the most reasonable to have data caps to begin with.

wmf 6y ago
It would be great if Starlink could innovate an alternative to data caps since they're a very crude way to manage congestion.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  Giving each customer a guaranteed bandwidth and a burst bandwidth should work. When the network is free you can use up to your burst speed, but the network is guaranteed to be large enough to support your minimum speed. During congestion, all packets beyond your minimum speed are at a lower priority and will be dropped as needed.
  - wmf 6y ago
    Minimum speeds tend to be tricky because they depend on the density of customers (if your neighbor signs up your minimum goes down) and they tend to be very low, like 1 Mbps.

bryanlarsen 6y ago

I'm not sure how much Starlink will help. Starlink will only be viable in rural settings. A popular saying on Ars Technica is "Starlink is for those who wish they had Comcast to hate, not those who hate their Comcast."

mschuster91 6y ago

> Would also love to see a line of sight ISP The problem with rural broadband, no matter if line-of-sight, FTTN, FTTB or even LTE/5G is that there will always be some sort of "concentrator point" needed which will need a high speed uplink themselves. And since we're talking about rural, this uplink is the expensive part as you will want to put it below ground so that random car crashes, forest fires, lighting strikes, wind damage, falling trees or anything don't take down the single uplink for days. You can link up such concentrators using directional wireless (this is how many LTE stations are uplinked, for example), but suffer from degraded performance in bad weather, lower total performance for the satellite stations/APs, and it isn't always possible (as it's line-of-sight based). Source: worked in constructions digging trenches for FTTN buildouts in Germany.

tzs 6y ago

The way Starlink works there is a certain amount of bandwidth available between a satellite and a ground terminal, and a certain amount available satellite to satellite. This means that there is a limit on how many customers they can handle per square kilometer without degrading performance. That limit is much lower than the number of customers the major terrestrial ISPs serve in urban and suburban areas. Their plans are to support 5 million customers total across the whole US. That’s less than 10% of the number of cable broadband customers.