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> the resulting constellation will hugely disrupt the telecom and real estate industries I'm interest to know why you think Starlink would disrupt real estate?

• dkarp 6y ago
  Internet connection was the main blocker for me to move to a rural/off-grid lifestyle. Everything else is a solved problem. It may anecdotal, but not unreasonable to think others feel the same way. Many real estate websites already list available internet speed and cellular signal, so they must believe it impacts on sales.
  • ctdonath 6y ago
    “Off grid” doesn’t have to be very far from company offices. I wanted to buy a place just 90 minutes from my office (which I rarely go to), but zero internet there so no sale. Give me Starlink, and it’s an option - as is remote areas of Wyoming.
• gnarbarian 6y ago
  Yes. Especially with the widespread telecommuting push. Commuting and office space is an incredible drain on the economy. Also when You have the option of working for any company in the country you are much more likely to find a job that really suits you, you find rewarding and interesting. For employers, the talent pool is increased exponentially as well. It's not all positive though. It really helps to have a dedicated home office.
• ckdarby 6y ago
  > Do you think more people will move to rural areas if they had access to high speed internet there? Yes. My wife and I started looking at buying land in mid-2020 and saw a handful of plots we were interested in. What stopped us from committing to buying one was internet service because we're both remote workers who require at least 50/10 mbit for both of us to be working without issue. In the present it is fairly straightforward to get around no power, no water and no sewages with solar, well and septic system. If you don't have internet service though there's not much you can do to get around that. Starlink has changed that. I suspect we'll also see an uprise in prefabricated homes as well. I want to live further out to escape the city, have a family garden, and a couple chickens but I don't want to have to build our home by hand.
  • krastanov 6y ago
    I wonder what your take is on how well this would work for people who want children in their families. Wouldn't access to kindergartens and schools and simply to other kids be an issue?
    • adventured 6y ago
      Depends on where you go of course. I grew up in the middle of nowhere US, very low population density (huge county, less than 50,000 people total), and went to excellent public schools that had astoundingly good teachers that routinely scored high marks in comparison to their best peers in the state. The county and school system didn't have much in terms of money to waste (they did somehow find the money for a computer lab with a few dozen systems circa 1987, enough for each student while a given class was using the lab; probably a state grant). A lot of money wasn't necessary for a great education (which is a mistake the US education system has been making for decades now: just throw more money at it). I wish I had appreciated then how good the teachers were, I just kind of assumed most kids had access to nice public schools (we were poor and we had access to it, why wouldn't everyone). I'd choose that rural public school experience every time over public schools in all US cities. It was safe (a school shooting was unthinkable), zero gang or weapon problems, the focus was always on education, classes were never too crowded (easy to get individual attention from a teacher as needed), and the teachers were great overall (90% older women with decades of experience). Toward the end of my years in that public school system, drug use did begin to infest rural American schools and you could see that was about to get a lot worse. The US has changed a lot in the past 30 years, I suspect my experience is becoming increasingly rare, but there are likely still a lot of nice rural areas (it's a huge country after all).
    • ckdarby 6y ago
      Wife(30) and I(29) have some ways to go before starting a family probably at least 4 years. Here is some content as not everyone has the opportunity to do this. I work in software and she's transitioning into software as well. We could live a above comfortable lifestyle on my salary or a comfortable lifestyle on her salary. The plan has been to build up our investment portfolio where yields cover the minimum to survive by the age of 35. This is to reduce the risk relying of the bulk of income coming from a single source. At that point in time I'd consider looking for part time, freelance or consulting to be able to transition my primary focus into our family but also to reduce the chance of dipping into the yields from the portfolio. With the freed up time I would homeschool and bring the children to activities for social interaction. I don't think this environment would negatively impact them.
• GeekFortyTwo 6y ago
  Yup, the only reason I live in the rural house that I do is because it got fiber for some reason. Starlink speeds would have been enough(I would be fine with 25meg) too. We actually had as a condition of sale a requirement that sufficient internet was confirmed(I was expecting a challenge on that, turned out nicely). With Starlink I would not have hesitated. I'm not far from a big city, and closer still to a small town. Property prices in that town have gone insane during the pandemic. People want their own space. With remote work and good internet, any town can see a boom. If this pandemic had happened once Starlink was fully operational, it would have really changed some of those numbers, I think.
  • Diederich 6y ago
    Are you me? We moved from paying $4800/month for an apartment in Mountain View, CA to paying about $3100/month mortgage 10 minutes outside of Olympia Washington. Here we are gaining equity on a big, beautiful home on five lush acres. Early last year, slightly before the pandemic, we decided to make the permanent move out of the SF bay area. In fact, when the pandemic hit in February, we were in Oregon looking at a property. Prior to that, we were planning on waiting until Starlink became a thing, but decided to push forward without it, with the requirement that the new place have high speed Internet. We made a big spreadsheet and put almost 500 properties in it. The very first thing was to check its Internet speed. My wife spent...many many hours...on the phone with xfinity and a couple of others, going through addresses. When we found this place, the first thing we had our on-site agent do was get the wifi password and run a couple of speed tests. We required that prior to even being (remotely) shown around. We are out in the country here, so there are power and Internet outages, but not too frequent. I did signup for and get a Starlink dish, and it acts as our secondary Internet connection in case comcast is out. It's connected to one of our generator backed up circuits. From what we've heard over the seven months we've been here, property prices are going up all over Thurston county. The contractors we've had in tell us that there are TONS of people like us, largely from the SF bay area, arriving....people with money they're willing to spend.
• briffle 6y ago
  I'm already looking. One of the problems with living 'in the woods' is poor internet connectivity. My job is 100% work from home, so it doesn't matter if I am in SF, or some small town in Colorado.
• Shivetya 6y ago
  quality of life can be so much greater but it does come with the caveat of what you find to improve your life. for me it is the distinct lack of noise and what noise I do hear is of a different quality. followed by less light pollution and overall feeling of calm. for some the need to feel like they are in the center of everything is the primary requirement and what I see as detracting from the experience is just background noise that they may not even notice.
• cweagans 6y ago
  I moved to a more rural area. When I was moving in, the local cable company claimed that they could provide service to that house. Once we moved in and scheduled the install, they decided they couldn't do it after all, so we had to go with a WISP. Really not a good experience. We ended up moving after a year solely because of the internet. At least for me, Starlink would have been a game changer.