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But to reiterate what has been stated every where else over and over: for most regions in the US, there are at most 1 provider with usable speeds available, and

But to reiterate what has been stated every where else over and over: for most regions in the US, there are at most 1 provider with usable speeds available, and they get to do whatever they want with their customers. There are many regions with hardly any competition, and the lucky few areas with 2 or more usually comprise of another high speed provider that changes in lock step with the local #1, and a bunch of smaller providers on DSL or some other old technology. Wireless is even more capped, high latency, and, thanks to the FCC, can be more privacy invasive or restricted than land line internet. It's not all roses in the US.

loeg 6y ago
Absolutely. Hence: > Comcast is often a monopoly I live in Seattle and we had a Comcast monopoly for something like 15 years until 2017 or 2018. I do not mean to suggest that real competition exists in most places or that anything about the situation in general is rosy.
Retric 6y ago
I really wonder how Starlink is going to shake things up. It’s currently expensive, but a continuously improving service could represent a huge risk to otherwise stagnant ISP’s.
- est31 6y ago
  Starlink has a constant density they can't vary, so likely they'll have lots of unused capacity in the rural areas while having lots of used capacity in the urban areas. Thus, they'll likely want to increase the price in urban areas to reduce the number of customers while keeping it cheap in rural areas. Otherwise they have to come up with some other system that keeps customer usage low. Maybe they'll offer "mobile internet" at a price point somewhere between rural and urban pricing that you can e.g. use in your car. Maybe folks will then hack their parked car and use it as a home uplink, while driving around to keep the "mobile" pricing level. As for the price in the urban area where density is too big for them to serve everyone, likely it'll be modelled after the price the incumbent ISP has, and be a bit cheaper, but not too cheap as they can't serve everyone in that area. TLDR: nothing much will change. So in urban areas they likely won't cause any change, but in lightly populated places there will be a big revolution, and people there will be very happy :). At least if Starlink choses to make internet cheap. Maybe they don't want to, and instead want to orient themselves after the local ISP, being significantly cheaper so that almost everyone switches to them, but not being as cheap as they can be. Entirely possible, brings them more money, but is obviously not very nice for customers :). We'll see a real revolution when we have multiple competing companies in space that try to outbid each other in a fight for market share.
  - Retric 6y ago
    From what I have read they can deploy nearly arbitrarily amounts of satellites with nearly linear cost increases. They can’t really adjust density for specific areas very well, but total bandwidth is highly variable over time. Publicly they have stated 10% of local Internet traffic, in high-density cities as their benchmark, that’s likely an economic not technical limitation based on the percentage of time a satellite spends over dense cities vs rural areas etc. Anyway, it’s really not a question of total bandwidth so much as any meaningful competition stopping the most egregious abuses. Assuming they can reach even 1/2 that it’s still plenty to provide stiff competition in midsized cities, suburbs, and rural areas which are generally the most problematic areas.
    - est31 6y ago
      You can put a lot of satellites into the sky, but spectrum puts an upper limit onto bandwidth. Eventually you'll probably adapt directed motorized antennae, but those are way more complicated. Internet traffic is increasing dramatically around the globe, sooner or later we'll hit the limit. In the long term, only fiber can serve the bandwidth needs.
      - Retric 6y ago
        Their already using phased-array antenna that can be steered to point in different directions without physical movement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array. At most their aimed to maximize the amount of viable sky not individual satellites. It’s not going to scale to infinite satellites, but 10x their current target should be viable.

loeg 6y ago

Absolutely. Hence: > Comcast is often a monopoly I live in Seattle and we had a Comcast monopoly for something like 15 years until 2017 or 2018. I do not mean to suggest that real competition exists in most places or that anything about the situation in general is rosy.

Retric 6y ago

I really wonder how Starlink is going to shake things up. It’s currently expensive, but a continuously improving service could represent a huge risk to otherwise stagnant ISP’s.

est31 6y ago
Starlink has a constant density they can't vary, so likely they'll have lots of unused capacity in the rural areas while having lots of used capacity in the urban areas. Thus, they'll likely want to increase the price in urban areas to reduce the number of customers while keeping it cheap in rural areas. Otherwise they have to come up with some other system that keeps customer usage low. Maybe they'll offer "mobile internet" at a price point somewhere between rural and urban pricing that you can e.g. use in your car. Maybe folks will then hack their parked car and use it as a home uplink, while driving around to keep the "mobile" pricing level. As for the price in the urban area where density is too big for them to serve everyone, likely it'll be modelled after the price the incumbent ISP has, and be a bit cheaper, but not too cheap as they can't serve everyone in that area. TLDR: nothing much will change. So in urban areas they likely won't cause any change, but in lightly populated places there will be a big revolution, and people there will be very happy :). At least if Starlink choses to make internet cheap. Maybe they don't want to, and instead want to orient themselves after the local ISP, being significantly cheaper so that almost everyone switches to them, but not being as cheap as they can be. Entirely possible, brings them more money, but is obviously not very nice for customers :). We'll see a real revolution when we have multiple competing companies in space that try to outbid each other in a fight for market share.
- Retric 6y ago
  From what I have read they can deploy nearly arbitrarily amounts of satellites with nearly linear cost increases. They can’t really adjust density for specific areas very well, but total bandwidth is highly variable over time. Publicly they have stated 10% of local Internet traffic, in high-density cities as their benchmark, that’s likely an economic not technical limitation based on the percentage of time a satellite spends over dense cities vs rural areas etc. Anyway, it’s really not a question of total bandwidth so much as any meaningful competition stopping the most egregious abuses. Assuming they can reach even 1/2 that it’s still plenty to provide stiff competition in midsized cities, suburbs, and rural areas which are generally the most problematic areas.
  - est31 6y ago
    You can put a lot of satellites into the sky, but spectrum puts an upper limit onto bandwidth. Eventually you'll probably adapt directed motorized antennae, but those are way more complicated. Internet traffic is increasing dramatically around the globe, sooner or later we'll hit the limit. In the long term, only fiber can serve the bandwidth needs.
    - Retric 6y ago
      Their already using phased-array antenna that can be steered to point in different directions without physical movement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array. At most their aimed to maximize the amount of viable sky not individual satellites. It’s not going to scale to infinite satellites, but 10x their current target should be viable.