23 ms·

Starlink review, four months in

509 points by geerlingguy 5y ago

sschueller 5y ago
I am curious how long Startlink will remain in beta. Looking at FSD at Tesla it has always been in beta and will probably never leave beta. The next question is if it is acceptable to sell a product to customers that will never be what it was promised to be. So in essence I sell a promise of a product but never really deliver since you know, it's still beta.
- bussierem 5y ago
  In specific to Tesla: they have found that this exact business model works astonishingly well with their customer base, so I can't imagine they'll have any reason to stop without some kind of backlash to their bottom line. RE: the problem in general, I don't have any specific answer, but this also relates directly to the "Early Access" program that Steam and games in general have, along with the whole "Day 1 DLC" that may or may not be there for you. It's becoming pretty endemic to our society and I do think it's just because _it works incredibly well_ on us.
  - piptastic 5y ago
    Google was one of the frontrunners, Gmail was in beta for 5 years
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      And still doesn't support fractional word search.
    - eplanit 5y ago
      And feels like it still is.
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    It's a great funding strategy: sell the MVP to get the funds to develop the full product (either directly or by showing the product is worth dedicating resources to). It also enables the most important element from agile development: early and frequent feedback from all stakeholders. Imagine an alternative world SpaceX had launched a fleet of rockets to bring the constellation up in a couple days while shipping receivers to customers; only to then find out that the satellites reflect too much light and the receivers are too temperate sensitive. The slow beta program is just the better development approach
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Day 1 DLC is a consequence of spinning shiny discs is it not? They have to finalize a version to send to disc manufacturing months in advance of actual release date just like any typical physical goods manufacturing/distribution. There's clearly lots of work that can and is done on the code during that shiny disc making period. So it stands to reason that what ever the code is on the shiny disc once released is so antiquated it is not even worth the plastic is stamped in. Do digital release only games suffer from Day 1 DLC like this? I'm not a gamer, so I have no experience with this.
- Retric 5y ago
  StarLink hasn’t even filled enough of their constellation for global coverage so calling it beta is quite reasonable. Many major features are still missing such as the ability to use StarLink with RV’s. If they still call it beta in 5 years then sure, but for now customers should realize it’s not ready to be their only form of internet access. FSD isn’t ready either. I don’t know if it will ever be but as much as people harp on their marking of self driving, calling it beta is more realistic.
- stingraycharles 5y ago
  Tesla and Starlink / SpaceX are two entirely different businesses. FSD is a feature of a car, where Starlink is an entire business — it’s not just an “experimental feature”, it’s an entire business out of itself. Secondly, FSD having bugs could cause actual deaths, which is not the case for Starlink. I would be surprised if Starlink would still be in beta in 2023.
  - josefx 5y ago
    > Secondly, FSD having bugs could cause actual deaths, which is not the case for Starlink. One of the issues reported with Starlink in its current state seems to be overheating receivers. If those where buggy you would have a few burned down houses instead of complaints about unreliable internet in the summer due to automatic shutdown.
    - stingraycharles 5y ago
      Don’t these satellites evaporate in the atmosphere before they reach the ground?
      - josefx 5y ago
        You need a specialized receiver / satellite dish on the ground to connect with them.
        stingraycharles 5y ago
        That’s fair enough, but I still don’t consider it as problematic as autonomous driving; it’s more the equivalent of a microwave overheating, and it’s fairly easy to build in a fail safe for this. As a matter of fact, as far as I understand, the receivers actually shut down when they overheat. This problem is not nearly as big as solving autonomous driving, in terms of “how to prevent deaths”.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  Getting FSD out of beta requires significant technological advances. Getting Starlink out of beta, to oversimplify a bit, mostly just requires more launches.
- stickfigure 5y ago
  Even if it never advanced beyond its current state, Starlink would still be a massive improvement over what I have now. My internet looks like the "farm" example in the article, and I'm only a 1:15 drive to downtown SF. I'll take it, beta or not.
- GuB-42 5y ago
  Starlink in beta does exactly what it is supposed to do: you get internet, and possibly with a better connection than in the final version, because of the limited number of users. With FSD beta, the car doesn't fully drives itself. I have absolutely no problem with the first scenario. It is not available to everyone, but for those who do, they get what they pay for. The second is more dubious, you don't get what you paid for, but promise, later, you will.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    If starlink doesn't satisfy, you can stop paying them or get a refund. If the autopilot kills you, the market doesnt have a mechanism to make you whole again.
- matz1 5y ago
  It shouldn't matter if they called beta forever or whatever. As consumer you should never believe what the company promise anyway. I would evaluate it myself or refer to trusted third party reviewer based on what it can actually do right now not what it may become.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Maybe beta is just part of the name that we've all just misunderstood the meaning of? Maybe the next version will be called BetaMax
    - matz1 5y ago
      yes assume its just a part of name.
- ecpottinger 5y ago
  Ask Microsoft first. As far as I can tell Windows 7 was they first 'good' OS since DOS.
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
    That title should go to Windows 2000. I still miss it.
yardstick 5y ago
No mention of this in the article, but I know someone with starlink and the router received a dhcp lease with a /10 subnet (100.64.0.0/10). I’ve got no problem with the CGNAT IP given, but found it odd the mask was a /10 and not a /31 normally seen in single device assignments like normally with PPP.
- Siecje 5y ago
  Does this limit what a customer can do?
orzig 5y ago
This is an exceptionally good review, and (well small in the grand scheme of the worlds problems) a beautiful example of how a passionate happiest can sure goodness with the world. Thank you this is an exceptionally good review, and (while small in the grand scheme of the worlds problems) a beautiful example of how a passionate hobbiest can sure goodness with the world. Thank you!
dougmwne 5y ago
It's sort of mentioned, but not emphasized in this review that connection dropouts happen every few minutes for a few seconds. That makes starlink fine for any kind of asynchronous content like web browsing, torrenting or video streaming, but unusable for video calls, stream hosting, voip, or online gaming. It's implied that this is due to the trees obstructing a full view of the sky, but I have actually heard these connection dropouts are just about universal due to the constellation not having enough infill. Just a warning that for most of us we are still several hundred satellites short and some connection handoff updates away from this being a useful internet connection. I have a property where Starlink would be perfect and I would pay triple the price to be able to do zoom calls over the connection.
- JulianMorrison 5y ago
  I would expect that won't stay a problem for long, they're still pouring those things up there.
- bin_bash 5y ago
  I hope that the problem really is due to lack of infill because that means it'll be temporary.
- geerlingguy 5y ago
  Honestly when I first got the dish, and had it in an open field, that was the case—but now the momentary dropouts between satellites are less than 1-2 seconds. They had 1000 or so satellites when I first started testing, and there are now something like 1600 or so. Most of the time, I don't even notice when it switches satellites. If you were doing some more real-time work or extremely latency-sensitive operations, then yes, you need to stick to a different type of connection. But it's really seamless now, compared to even a few months ago. Most of the software I used either showed no sign of the dropout, or at worst would freeze a frame or show a loading indicator for a brief moment before getting back to normal. Online multiplayer gaming and/or streaming are the main areas where I'd have to not recommend Starlink for now.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
JulianMorrison 5y ago
I recall reading that Starlink orbits below the usual level that other satellites are at, so they shouldn't be too much of a threat for Kessler syndrome.
- qayxc 5y ago
  They still are. The lower orbit only means that the satellites themselves deorbit within a few decades at most. Debris from a collision, however, goes every which way including higher orbits and can still damage other spacecraft. The satellites in geostationary orbits will stay up there for millions of years, but there's much more room between them and there's orders of magnitude fewer of them.
stefan_ 5y ago
Why on earth would you continue this test when the app already tells you about one third of the dishs FoV is obstructed? It's impossible to tell what part of this is a meaningful result and what is just a broken setup.
- panzagl 5y ago
  Oddly enough rural areas have a lot of trees too, so reporting on a non-optimal setup is very valuable.
kalefranz 5y ago
Real-time visualization of the Starlink constellation: https://satellitemap.space/ https://satellitemap.space/
- dylan604 5y ago
  That's interesting to see with knowing that just a fraction of the planned constellation is there. That's a lot of dots already. I'm guessing that the few visible string of dots are more recent launches that haven't quite reached their final positions yet. That's also interesting to see how long it takes the train to not be a train any longer, while at the same time showing how frequently new launches have been occurring.
  - NelsonMinar 5y ago
    I believe the constellation is about 90-95% complete now. The first shell at least. There's plans for more shells but that's for redundancy, not coverage.
    - mastax 5y ago
      I was going to comment about how surprised I was that they almost finished the first shell without deploying laser links but apparently they have: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/spacex-adds-laser-links-to-starlink-satellites-to-serve-earths-polar-areas/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/space...
      - scrumbledober 5y ago
        I think the laser interlinks are proving more difficult than SpaceX anticipated. I had expected them much earlier in the deployment than now, and it seems they are currently only planning them for polar orbits.
    - sebzim4500 5y ago
      I think they need quite a lot of satellites in polar orbits to get coverage at the poles, and they have barely launched any yet. They are close to 100% coverage of the rest of the world already though.
XCSme 5y ago
That is honestly a lot better than I expected. I think it is a game-changer for remote areas. You could build a house anywhere and still have energy (solar panels) and internet (Starlink).
BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
It's been a very long time since I worked with directional radios, but it feels very weird to learn that a tree counts as a sky obstruction significant enough to kill the signal. It's just a tree, not a giant steel building or a mountain. Leaves are barely there, relatively speaking.
- DanTheManPR 5y ago
  Is that a function of the wavelength it's using? A quick search suggests that starlink uses 10-12ghz, are trees opaque at those frequencies?
- bbarnett 5y ago
  I have a backup 4G modem here, and when the leaves come out on the trees in the summer, I see a signal drop. 4 bars to 2 bars. The trees (forest) is line of sight between me and the only tower. I presume it's all that water in the leaves.
  - qchris 5y ago
    I think that your observation of water is probably spot-on. When it comes which RF frequencies get absorbed, with water the answer is pretty much "yes". Combined with what I'd imagine is some really fun scattering math tossed in, tree cover is a pretty good bet for reducing signal quality, especially if it's more than one.
- bityard 5y ago
  For RF absorption, the rule of thumb is that the higher the frequency, the more the signal is attenuated. Once you get into the gigahertz range, things like leaves block (actually: absorb) a huge amount of the energy. This is why if you have a wifi router with both 2.4 and 5 GHz bands, the 2.4 GHz band usually has much better range. Visible light is in the THz spectrum which is blocked by anything solid that isn't clear or translucent.
- ecpottinger 5y ago
  I had a digital TV antenna in Oshawa pointed direct at the CN Tower in Toronto, there was only one tree in my direct line of sight, come summer when the leaves were fully developed I lost a number of channels because the signals was not strong enough. The tree was not on my property so I could not cut it.
varelse 5y ago
I've had Starlink for about 6 months and it is a massive improvement on upload speed at 10-25 Mb. Download speed is a mixed bag wildly oscillating from 5 to 100 Mb and back. It's okay for downloading things but it's terrible for any sort of video conferencing. There are brief dropouts on average every 6 minutes or so and my obstruction map is better than the author's. My neighbor up the street got slightly better service by mounting his dishy on a 20-ft antenna pole above his house. Local ground service is 20 Mb download and 2 Mb upload. And that's just barely sufficient for watching streaming video and video conferencing. Gigabit service is but a mile and a half away but no one is going to pay to lay the fiber into our neighborhood. So the last mile and a half is copper from 20 years ago. I think that's going to require political will to fix and I don't think that political will exists right now nor will it in the near future. We could have paid $5,000 per house to lay it ourself but our own neighborhood couldn't come to consensus on that. Now imagine that at a national level. So if they just deliver 100/100 within a year or two, this is an epic win IMO and I will cancel ground service. And if they don't someone else will so I'm not worried. But it took Teslas to spark the electric vehicle industry. Now there's a lot of choice. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens here.
- jld89 5y ago
  > But it took Teslas to spark the electric vehicle industry. Now there's a lot of choice. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens here. I really hope not. There are enough satellites out there, there are already too many, space pollution is real. Maybe we can find a better solution to this particular problem.
  - ncallaway 5y ago
    I think these LEO constellations are actually the least concerning part of space pollution. There are many more LEO satellites, true, but their orbital placement is such that the satellite's orbit naturally decays in a few years. Which means if a satellite becomes uncontrollable (or is destroyed in some way), the debris will clear in a relatively short period of time. I'm actually much more concerned about the much smaller number of satellites in medium and geostationary orbits, where the decay time is decades or centuries. Failed satellites or debris in these orbits will take a very long time to clear, and strikes me as a much larger concern than the larger number of LEO sats
bluepanda928752 5y ago
Technology is pretty solid (no comparison to FSD), order of magnitude better than previous iterations of satellite internet. The solution is still getting our collective heads out of our asses and running fiber everywhere though
verytrivial 5y ago
100W 24x7? That's quite a lot, right? This adds some color perhaps to the argument that this is for underserviced regions -- they don't mean third-world or impoverished even though it sounds like that, at least when I heard people defending Starlink.
- flyingfences 5y ago
  100W is a couple of light bulbs. It's not nothing, but it's not all that much. It'd be challenging off-grid, but not a concern anywhere with electrical infrastructure.
  - humanistbot 5y ago
    100W is a lot. It is a couple of very old incandescent bulbs or ten 60W equivalent LED bulbs.
    - ls612 5y ago
      It is a lot but it’s also outside so it won’t heat up your house and in most places it only adds up to about $10 a month or less on your power bill
    - katbyte 5y ago
      perspective i guess - i used to use 2 100watt bulbs to light a single room.
      - user5994461 5y ago
        For perspective, these will cost around $0.3 a day in electricity, when in the room you spend most of your time in. And yes, that's easily over a hundred dollar a year.
    - tigershark 5y ago
      No, it’s ONE incandescent bulb. And much less than the bulbs that were needed to light a fairly large room. We used to have a lot of 100W lights until not many years ago, honestly I don’t see the problem in spending that amount of energy if you have no other means to access a fast internet connection.
xoa 5y ago
I've had Starlink deployed for a client since mid-January or so up around the 45th parallel (near the US/Canadian border). Installed it in a brisk -20 windchill too, good times. That was kind of a best place replacement scenario even early beta, as their previous solution was a 10/2 connection that cost >$200/month, so Starlink didn't have to be stellar to beat the competition there. I was able to place it with zero obstructions. This was never used with the native router which just stayed unopened in the box, it was right into a OPNsense gateway. We left the old landline connection up for a few months with Starlink as primary and the old one as a failover. For the first month and a half or so, there were regular dropouts every day, though only for a minute or two. That noticeably dropped over the course of March, and we dumped the previous service by mid-April. Overall experience has been excellent for wireless, as good as a high quality WISP despite the much greater technical challenges. And it's continued to improve: as well as latency and uptime, bandwidth u/d has increased from around 100-130/10-30 to nearly always 220-250/30-45. At no extra price. Tell me the last time you got that from an ISP ;). Overall experience is similar to this review, a few observations following along the review: >Hard cable This is annoying, but my perspective is coming from someone who does a lot of network termination and has thousands of dollars in fluke testing gear, rolls of cat8 cable and certified jacks and so on which is obviously absolutely not the norm. I needed it to go farther, but I ended up just plugging the 802.3bt injector it comes with into fiber optic anyway which thus also gave me guaranteed isolation from the rest of the network without having to worry about grounding. I suspect once it's in full service and they start to branch out they'll do a "Business Class" version or something aimed at more advanced deployments. >Your own router This does work fine. In order to get statistics though you'll need to static route 192.168.100.1. It's not needed for it to operate, but probably still a good idea. Lots of instructions around on the net for that. When I first set it up, IPv6 was still wonky whether you had your own router or not. Easily worked around with a permanent WireGuard tunnel for a VLAN to a cheap VPS with a static IP. Anything that needs a static IP can just get put there. >Power consumption Real, but as the article said in the context of rural internet pricing it's frankly fairly meaningless. Effectively means it's $105-115/month which is still so much frigging better than most options available at the speed that it's plenty competitive. If we had fiber we'd use it, but we don't. >Latency Where that will REALLY get interesting is once intersat optical links go live constellation-wide (can't remember the timeline on that, v0.9 for polar went up last year, I think they're now on new ones going forward). Most latency tests are local hops only, which is relevant of course and Starlink will always be at a disadvantage for. But once you start cross continents or oceans, Starlink definitely has the potential to easily beat many people's fiber connections (particularly rural ones its aimed at). CDNs are a lot, but not everything. It'll be cool to see how that affects the market. >it's potential to increase the risk of the Kessler syndrome This is a meme, not reality. I wish it would stop coming up. Starlink sats are in quite Low Earth Orbit (LEO), and the majority of the constellation yet to be launched will be V-band ones in V(ery)LEO. At those altitudes, natural orbital decay will eliminate debris or sats even if they fail, and if they don't they deorbit themselves. SpaceX has thought this through, part of the delay on optics was specifically figuring out how to make sure they'd all burn up. Other planned megaconstellations higher up do indeed represent more concern, but Starlink does not. SpaceX is leveraging its overwhelming and soon to grow more-so advantage in launch capability and economics in a host of self-reinforcing ways, and this is one of them. They get to lean on higher numbers and faster replacement to get more performance and stop Kessler risk. >Astronomy They've been working on shading them to reduce apparent magnitude, but that only fully works when sats are fully deployed and the trains going up are there. Even reduced magnitude will still affect some instruments and observations. I'm afraid though astronomy is just going to have to deal with that for a decade, looking forward to major development of cheap space based industry allowing lunar/space telescopes like never before eventually supplanting ground-based entirely. Cold comfort to a few who really will be messed up at a point in their careers that will be awkward for that, but this is frankly more important. >Other This will be MIND BLOWING FOR MARINE/AEROSPACE. If you think your rural connection is bad go look at merchant marine pricing. Aircraft too obviously, but one area I think many people haven't thought about yet is the potential for other satellites themselves. SpaceX is really setting themselves up as a major space infrastructure company.
blakesterz 5y ago
I just wanted to say thanks, that review was super interesting. And thanks for all your many ansible roles! I use the heck out of several :-)
only_as_i_fall 5y ago
I dislike Elon Musk as much as anyone but I think it's becoming clear that starlink could turn out to be a very good idea. What I haven't seen anyone do and something I'd be very interested to see is a comparison of the relative environmental costs of so many starlink launches in contrast to the building and upkeep of last mile connections to the backbone.
- runarberg 5y ago
  idk. It could turn out to be a very bad idea (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome). And it still hasn’t proven it self to be better then traditional infrastructure. The last mile connection problem can much easier be solved with a 5G tower then a constellation of satellites.
  - hungryforcodes 5y ago
    Additionally, I'm not sure how great it will be for air quality if we have thousands and thousands of satellites burning up in the atmosphere over the next few decades. I certainly don't want to be breathing in vaporized satellite ash. Your point about 5G is well made.
    - anchpop 5y ago
      It's probably not zero, but I imagine the effect on air quality is completely miniscule compared to things like millions of ICE cars driving around or the wildfires on the west coast. Additionally I think they burn up in the upper atmosphere, which makes it less likely for the particles to end up in your breathing air (compared to cars which emit their waste at ankle level right outside your doorstep)
      - only_as_i_fall 5y ago
        Also the rocket used to launch each satellite has ejected more than 20x the mass of its payload as burnt rocket fuel by the time it reaches orbit.
soheil 5y ago
> Starlink uses CGNAT Just curious what is the security implications of using carrier grade NAT? If I start DDoS'ing a bunch of websites and get blocked, does that mean effectively I also block all my neighbors sharing the same IP4? This seems like a lot of power over their internet usage.
- bityard 5y ago
  Yes, it has all of the pitfalls of other kinds of NAT. However, in 2021, blocking all traffic from entire subnets or NATted IPs is an extremely blunt defense and doesn't even work for certain kinds of attacks like UDP floods. "Websites" do not typically do their own traffic filtering or attack mitigation for this reason and many others. They leave that up to their upstream provider. And any provider worth their salt is paying big bucks for a system that can recognize and mitigate attacks based on traffic patterns and deep packet inspection while letting most of the "good" traffic through. Source: I work for a company that makes these products.
  - soheil 5y ago
    You're basically saying it's magic and trust me because I work on this stuff. That's fair, but how can you tell if I send you 1MM curl commands to download large_ugly_cow{i}.bmp from your server or if it's my neighbor doing that if we both share the same IP address?
    - spookthesunset 5y ago
      > your server or if it's my neighbor doing that if we both share the same IP address? It depends on how sloppy you are running your attack. Most of the time the attacker will be sloppy and hit the system using the same useragent with the same cookies. Or maybe they'll go the other way and every single request will have some random BS for a useragent and random cookies. Plus they will only hit that exact single URL and won't bother loading the rest of the page. So if you look at your logs, you'll see a million requests for "large_ugly_cow.bmp" coming from the same IP with a useragent that doesn't bother loading anything else. In short, to a human such an attack usually stands out like a sore thumb. Writing the filter rules to block them... that is a different beast. With the right tools and a smart tech, it is totally possible though.
NelsonMinar 5y ago
I'm typing this message from Starlink. For me it's absolutely transformative; 10x the bandwidth I can get from any other source and very reliable. Except for outages related to obstructions. That's a real problem and the author's situation is not good. There's ways to work around it on your property; a taller mount, a tree install, cutting some trees. But ultimately Dishy needs a clear view to the north and there's no getting around it. I have some smaller obstructions for my install and it was a little annoying but fine. But in the past week or two it's gotten way better: my packet loss went from 2% to 0.6%. Details here: https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2021/07/20/starlink-improvements/ https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2021/07/20/starlink-improve...
- detritus 5y ago
  huh. perhaps I'm exhibiting my total ignorance here, but why do they have to point North? I know that our Satellite TV dish when I was a kid had to point to a specific angle southwards, to match the geostationary position, but I'd not expect that with Starlink, unless you were in the Falklands or Antarctica, or something?
  - coder543 5y ago
    It's a purposeful choice to avoid interfering with radio bandwidth allocations to existing geostationary satellites. As I understand it, Starlink dishes aren't allowed to send signals to a portion of the sky around the equator where the geostationary satellites are located. Starlink would probably work even better if they didn't have to deal with this restriction, but Starlink might not have been allowed to exist if they didn't design it to work this way.
    - detritus 5y ago
      Huh. I had no idea, but makes a lot of sense, thinking about it. Thanks!
  - mzkply 5y ago
    North is where all the satellites cluster as they reach the peak latitude of their orbit period: https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/190208-starlink.png https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/190208-s...
jgrodziski 5y ago
I'm one of the few client here in France for a few days. I moved from Paris to a quite isolated area (Vercors mountains) with only ADSL (no mobile coverage), and it's night and day, I now get between 100 Mbps and 200 mbps with 30/40 ms latency... I don't have a lot of time with the service to give an exhaustive feedback, but for the moment I'm able to do video conferencing and call perfectly. And the setup experience is great!
soheil 5y ago
> Most well-known apps like Netflix, FaceTime, and Zoom, handled things well without any incident. It was really the apps and services that are obviously outsourced. Not sure why he threw in outsourced there, but ok. I know this could be as simple as using the right library for your video chat app, but at a low level how is something like this achieved? If I establish a tcp connection with a handshake and everything and my internet connection drops or IP is changed the tcp connection gets terminated. Other than using udp is there a way to keep the tcp connection going when the IP address changes without having to establish a new connection, which takes non-trivial amount of time?
- geerlingguy 5y ago
  The reason I threw that in is because I've personally worked on a few of these apps, and also some of the backing APIs the apps consumed. I know first-hand that many of the ones that suffer from weird and annoying quirks would be a thousand times better if they had any reliable QA process (most don't), and were run by teams that were invested in the company's success. Outsourced doesn't only mean 'to other countries', but in many cases to consultancies, since for some strange reason many media companies don't see their apps as being a core competency, so they farm it out, and the results are always 2nd-tier at best.
clvx 5y ago
I’m in a rural area in Montana and luckily I have access to a 5G tower. My impression is if you are close to one, it’s better and cheaper than going with Starlink even if you have to pay extra money to set up an external MIMO antenna to improve your signal. I think Starlink is useful in many areas and industries, but 5G home internet is reliable for many cases at least in the US. Starlink will do great in the South hemisphere where providers struggle even in metropolitan areas. I see that as a huge win for many as long as the prices go down as the current prices could be a barrier for not so wealthy countries.
- adkadskhj 5y ago
  I don't know much about Starlink, but isn't one point of Starlink that eventually it could even beat wired connections for distance latency? Ie it's a shorter and more direct trip to use Starlink to get from US West to US East, for example. Though this is quite a ways out i imagine. Best of all this idea works in current tech, and can get even better with future tech when Starlink starts going Satellite <-> Satellite, avoiding unnecessary land hops. I'm interested in Starlink for all use cases, once they get more satellites up.
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    My understanding is that in addition to distance latency there is some non-trival amount of latency due to the use of TDMA. Unlike CDMA where everybody piles on the same spectrum at the same time, TDMA gives a timeslot to every station and you gotta wait your turn before TX/RX (this is a gross oversimplification of course). While it doesn't add that much latency it is more than CDMA.
    - syncsynchalt 5y ago
      Not just TDMA - lasers in vacuum travel at the speed of light, but signals in optical fiber and coax copper are both 2/3 of that. This means that if (and that's still an if, not yet a when) starlink does laser between satellites it can beat terrestrial speeds. I could see the end result being that we still do bent-pipe signaling over land and only laser interlinks for crossing oceans and for customers that pay for low ping to financial markets.
rootusrootus 5y ago
I'm waiting for my turn (I had a beta offer last year but declined to proceed at the time, now I get to wait like everyone else). Hoping that real soon it gets opened up for mobile use. I have a campsite about 50 miles away that I'd spend a lot more time at if I could work from there. Trees would be a little bit of an issue, but not a deal killer for me.
0x0000000 5y ago
> Starlink uses CGNAT This is why I'm cancelling my subscription (though I have the privilege of multiple terrestrial providers in my area). For what Starlink charges, they shouldn't be using CGNAT. It's not an Internet connection if I can't get anything inbound.
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
My email Feb 24: "Starlink now available to order" So I put an order in right away. It's now July 22nd, and I haven't heard anything, despite the original email saying "mid-2021" for order shipment. So I go to check: "Starlink is currently at capacity in your area through 2021, your order might not be fulfilled until late 2022." Despite having taken my money for deposit they never sent an email at any point to let me know this. I think that's a rather dubious customer service practice.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  Elon Musk, famous for Tesla, is willing to take your money and not deliver a product for several years. I am shocked.
robscallsign 5y ago
I'm in Ontario, Canada, 46.5 degrees latitude and typing this on Starlink. Even with the occasional dropouts Starlink is 10-100x better than any other option that we have here (the only options are LTE, or other satellites, like xplornet). Even though we're only a few minutes drive from a municipality of 160,000 people and on a major highway, there, is no wired connection, and doesn't really seem likely that a wired connection will ever happen. Since moving here 7 years ago the pricing/data rates for the LTE data packages available have doubled in price. Literally doubled. With Covid we had two adults working from home, and two kids home schooling, on a slow LTE connection with a total bandwidth of 100GB up/down. Even things like windows updates required planning and rationing of the internet. The state of connectivity in Canada is so abysmal. At this point I hope Starlink matures enough to add a voice service.
cblconfederate 5y ago
how much available bandwidth can starlink support? I thought the primary users would be remote users, or mobile users or sailboats but apparently people here are considering it an alternative to cables
- sudhirj 5y ago
  Each satellite supports 20GBPS, from what I've read. So if you have an exclusive lock on one satellite, and that has a direct/exclusive route to a ground station, that's probably a theoretical max.
skellington 5y ago
Some of the comments here are kind of ridiculous. They are complaining (or just pointing out) issues that are EXPECTED at this stage of the beta. Starlink has like 1700 of the planned 42,000 satellites in orbit now. Of course there are going to be temporarily blips in service plus the random longer dropouts during system upgrades. Even with the current issues, the service is revolutionary in the remote areas that it's intended to service. Why Geerling thinks it's appropriate to compare beta starlink to his home cable/fiber service is beyond me. It's totally fair to review the current state of starlink, but to then conclude that "I don't love it" because it's not as good as his cable service is just plain dumb. Why did you even begin the review with the expectation that it could be better than your land service in it's current beta form? You're not even supposed to be on the starlink service if you have great landline bandwidth and starlink should block you from their service as you're stealing bandwidth from people who don't have access to high speed internet. One person even said "I hope they can figure out why it drops occasionally" as if some of the smartest people on the earth don't know exactly why it drops out. It drops because the satellite mesh network is only 4% complete!
- nexuist 5y ago
  I mean, Starlink is available as a closed beta commercial product. There's nothing wrong with comparing it in its current form to cable service in its current form, especially if you're going to pay $$$ for it. The point is for the reader to figure out if they should try Starlink right now (if eligible) or if they should wait for some of these issues to be resolved. To put it another way: would you complain that reviewers were judging Google Glass unfairly, because Google had grandiose plans for it in the future (that ultimately never happened)? Or would you recognize that Google made the decision to sell Google Glass in its current form, and thus accepted that it would be judged against its competitors?
  - skellington 5y ago
    It's totally fair to review the current state of a beta service. It could be informative for people who are unsure if they want to try the beta-service. But to compare it as an equal, in it's beta form, against a service that it's not even built to compete against is just plain dumb. If you already have access to high speed internet, starlink it not intended for you. His final comment about "Liking, but not loving starlink" implies that he's comparing starlink to cable internet as equal competitors. They are not and they are not intended to be and that's even considering the fact that starlink is in beta. This guy should not even be allowed on starlink (in the long run) because he already has access to high speed internet. This whole comment section is full of stupidity like: "isn't 100watts a lot of power?" <-- typed from gaming computer with a 1000watt power supply "what about space garbage, isn't space garbage bad" <-- as if LEO garbage won't just decay back to earth "will starlink be like FSD and maybe never get delivered" <-- as if they are related issues, they are not "I don't like Elon" <- because reasons, but also irrelevant "starlink bad because worky less good when obstructed" <-- too dumb for words "i'm worried about the starlink monopoly" <-- you should be banned from the internet
lmilcin 5y ago
Starlink is supposed to operate 30k satellites, and it currently has something around 1,5k (correct me if I am wrong). What this means is we can expect that in future obstructions will be much less of a problem, because there will be much better chance that at any point in time there will be a satellite on visible part of the sky. Also, I think, main reason of Starlink is to have access anywhere, even in extremely remote areas. I think some inconvenience is expected and fair. I don't expect Starlink is going to replace a traditional broadband -- for that it will never have the bandwidth necessary.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  That 30k / 42k number is mostly Musk lies. It's very unlikely to ever happen given the size of the market, the cost of launches, and the short lifetime of satellites in LEO. Basically, they would have to constantly launch significantly more satellites than they do today to ever maintain a 30-40k satellite network in LEO. And even Musk estimates like 500k customers - this would basically mean 1 satellite for every 10-20 customers, once every few years. There is no way for that to make economic sense. My prediction is that they will stop somewhere around the current number of satellites, in fact. At the very most, they might triple the current number.
parksy 5y ago
One thing that caught me as interesting about the article was the obstruction map and what could be achieved with that kind of data if it was gathered and correlated with millions of other users. I am no expert but it seems that traditional observation from space has always been limited by the resolution from up on high. Flip the problem and have ground-based observers in densely populated areas track shadows in a rotating grid of point sources in the sky, and you can build a 3d map outwards instead, the only problem being how to increase the density, consistency, and spread of the ground-based sensor array.
markandrewj 5y ago
I am not sure if this is a helpful comment, or possible, you might want to try attaching the dish to the top of tallest tree if you can though. I have had to do this with satellite dishes in the past while working in remote locations. When I say remote, I am talking surrounded by mountains, deep inside the boreal forests of British Columbia.
linsomniac 5y ago
@geerlingguy: Consider checking out some global latency comparisons between StarLink and cable. I believe their long-term plan is to have the satellites route traffic between themselves using space lasers rather than hit a ground station and traverse undersea cables and the like. Not sure if they have that fully implemented yet, but might be interesting looking at the path and latency traffic to .au or Asia or Africa takes on Starlink vs cable. A couple factors may come into play: "as the crow flies" and light speed in vacuum vs glass. I know Evi Nemeth (RIP) talking on the CAIDA project showed some nice graphs of the "speed of light cone" re: latencies vs. geography. See about halfway down on this: https://web.archive.org/web/20160103034640/http://www.isoc.org/inet2000/cdproceedings/8e/8e_3.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20160103034640/http://www.isoc.o...
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  The lasers are more a nice idea than a plan. It's entirely possible they are not doable with realistic technology, given the speeds and other constraints of space, even in LEO. They are certainly not going to be there in the near future, anyway.
  - relativ575 5y ago
    Not just an idea anymore. They've started experimenting with it since last year. Gwynne Shotwell said in April that third generation, yes third generation, of laser intersatellite links would be launched in "the next few months": https://spacenews.com/spacex-adds-to-latest-funding-round/ https://spacenews.com/spacex-adds-to-latest-funding-round/
    - matmatmatmat 5y ago
      Yeap, and full self-driving is coming at the end of this year.
    - shaklee3 5y ago
      It's an idea. They have not been demonstrated successfully.
NDizzle 5y ago
My Starlink experience has gotten a lot better recently. In the past few months. I'm in rural Arkansas, near the southern edge of the rollout still I believe. I have maintained 3 ISPs this whole time. I have an EM160R LTE modem that will do 5x carrier aggregation and pulls around 240-250 mbit from my local AT&T tower. I also have T-Mobile's 4g home internet (5g works here on my phone, but they won't give me the home internet for whatever reason) which pulls 100-115 mbit. Starlink itself is somewhere between 180 and 240 down, but only 15 up. On the ATT line I can get 40-60 mbit upload, and that's one of the main reasons I keep things set up this way. I'm about to try disabling the wan port for T-Mobile to see what it's like without that ISP. I don't do any connection bonding - straight up round robin load balancing with no stickyness, and with the amount of servers and services that use multiple TCP streams I can see 300+mbit downloads often. Pings range from 30 (when using Starlink) to 90. (when using one of the LTE connections) I no longer game enough to comment on it. My kids play Roblox and PS4 online games and don't whine about it, so I think it's sufficient. I don't really do Zoom meetings. MS Teams is what we use. I don't use the camera very often, but the calls will pause and drop and the people I work with have coined this as, "being Starlinked". Usually a few seconds and rarely does it take an actual redial to reconnect anymore. Just a dead period.
- driverdan 5y ago
  If you get 250Mb from AT&T why bother with the others?
  - NDizzle 5y ago
    Reliability. I’m also trying to not use too much data on each provider. Afraid of getting kicked off.
  - dboreham 5y ago
    Cell service is metered, even if they say it isn't.
_wldu 5y ago
It's my understanding that the Starlink signal is almost straight up, so if that is true, the trees would have to be rather close to the house. Does anyone know if this is true?
- geerlingguy 5y ago
  Starlink currently wants a 100° view of the sky (pretty broad), and you can actually download the Starlink App on your phone (even without service) and use the obstruction finder to view specifically how much of the sky it needs. But in my case, that tree is pretty close to the back of my house (and there are 75-100' trees pretty much everywhere on my property).
rdca 5y ago
Amazing how starlink reviewers never bother to mention if it is possible to run a publicly available web server - at least over IPv6.
bahmboo 5y ago
100 watt power draw makes off grid solar much more challenging.
mariojv 5y ago
I am so excited for this to become available to more people. Especially during the pandemic, a lot of people realized how crucial fast internet is to modern life. One relative didn't have internet the entire time - would have cost thousands to install - and had to break quarantine in order to use internet that he needed to work.
joelm 5y ago
Shameless plug - if you're using Starlink and want to fix the dropouts, plus get a static public IPv4 address that works over any ISP, get our SD-WAN service: https://www.bigleaf.net/ https://www.bigleaf.net/. With a 2nd internet connection, our platform will auto-ID your sensitive traffic and route it over the best performing connection (e.g. aware of jitter, dropouts, etc), plus your bulk data traffic (e.g. Netflix) will route over your highest-throughput connection. 30-day money-back guarantee, so no risk to try. As a former wireless ISP architect/engineer, it's wonderful to see the leadership that Starlink is providing in LEO satellite connectivity (due to the low latency compared to geostationary). I hope the "block the sky with satellites" visual/astronomy concerns won't play out as an actual issue, because this seems like a great platform to address connectivity needs in harder-to-reach areas.
mdesq 5y ago
I have Starlink at my home located in a rural area where the only alternative is DSL at ~1.0MBPS average downlink. Using Starlink made it possible to actually do interactive work from the house without tethering to my spotty LTE service or traveling to a better location. My own experience is that the service has been quite reliable (often 12 hour stretches without an outage), but I do have unobstructed views of the sky. I do find that streaming audio/video can be glitchy and I usually have some kind of audio issues.
nixpulvis 5y ago
cool, so they put lame memes in the router's ssh connection, gimp https://*.*.*.1 https://*.*.*.1 and force an app to configure instead. > ... and also happy you can use your own if you want. You shouldn't be happy, you should be expecting this ability. Anything else would be worth being very upset about.
sunstone 5y ago
A lot of talk about drops and latentcy here. It may be that once/if they get the optical links between satellites working, along with just more satellites, most these issues may fade into the paat. Say two to five years.
peter_d_sherman 5y ago
If Dishy can do beamforming to have a radio signal hit a fast moving satellite several hundred kilometers away, in space -- then couldn't two or more Dishies be repurposed/reprogrammed -- to create point-to-point line-of-sight terrestrial Internet links -- a wireless mesh network -- on the ground -- covering long distances? You know, if there's ever a Zombie Apocalypse -- and Starlink for whatever reason, becomes unavailable... Of course, we hope it never happens... but it seems like two or more repurposed Dishies -- would make a great Internet bridge (or wireless mesh segment) over long line-of-sight distances -- on the ground... Also, multiple dishies in space, at different distances from the Earth, acting as repeaters -- might make a great future way to get Internet (and other space-related communications) to the Moon or Mars or beyond...
telesilla 5y ago
From a friend, a few days after he installed it (in a remote area, non-US): "So delighted!!! I went from 3mb download to just under 300mb download. Not consistently, but the first time I've had decent internet!!!"

509 points by geerlingguy 5y ago

I am curious how long Startlink will remain in beta. Looking at FSD at Tesla it has always been in beta and will probably never leave beta. The next question is if it is acceptable to sell a product to customers that will never be what it was promised to be. So in essence I sell a promise of a product but never really deliver since you know, it's still beta.

bussierem 5y ago
In specific to Tesla: they have found that this exact business model works astonishingly well with their customer base, so I can't imagine they'll have any reason to stop without some kind of backlash to their bottom line. RE: the problem in general, I don't have any specific answer, but this also relates directly to the "Early Access" program that Steam and games in general have, along with the whole "Day 1 DLC" that may or may not be there for you. It's becoming pretty endemic to our society and I do think it's just because _it works incredibly well_ on us.
- piptastic 5y ago
  Google was one of the frontrunners, Gmail was in beta for 5 years
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    And still doesn't support fractional word search.
  - eplanit 5y ago
    And feels like it still is.
- wongarsu 5y ago
  It's a great funding strategy: sell the MVP to get the funds to develop the full product (either directly or by showing the product is worth dedicating resources to). It also enables the most important element from agile development: early and frequent feedback from all stakeholders. Imagine an alternative world SpaceX had launched a fleet of rockets to bring the constellation up in a couple days while shipping receivers to customers; only to then find out that the satellites reflect too much light and the receivers are too temperate sensitive. The slow beta program is just the better development approach
- dylan604 5y ago
  Day 1 DLC is a consequence of spinning shiny discs is it not? They have to finalize a version to send to disc manufacturing months in advance of actual release date just like any typical physical goods manufacturing/distribution. There's clearly lots of work that can and is done on the code during that shiny disc making period. So it stands to reason that what ever the code is on the shiny disc once released is so antiquated it is not even worth the plastic is stamped in. Do digital release only games suffer from Day 1 DLC like this? I'm not a gamer, so I have no experience with this.
Retric 5y ago
StarLink hasn’t even filled enough of their constellation for global coverage so calling it beta is quite reasonable. Many major features are still missing such as the ability to use StarLink with RV’s. If they still call it beta in 5 years then sure, but for now customers should realize it’s not ready to be their only form of internet access. FSD isn’t ready either. I don’t know if it will ever be but as much as people harp on their marking of self driving, calling it beta is more realistic.
stingraycharles 5y ago
Tesla and Starlink / SpaceX are two entirely different businesses. FSD is a feature of a car, where Starlink is an entire business — it’s not just an “experimental feature”, it’s an entire business out of itself. Secondly, FSD having bugs could cause actual deaths, which is not the case for Starlink. I would be surprised if Starlink would still be in beta in 2023.
- josefx 5y ago
  > Secondly, FSD having bugs could cause actual deaths, which is not the case for Starlink. One of the issues reported with Starlink in its current state seems to be overheating receivers. If those where buggy you would have a few burned down houses instead of complaints about unreliable internet in the summer due to automatic shutdown.
  - stingraycharles 5y ago
    Don’t these satellites evaporate in the atmosphere before they reach the ground?
    - josefx 5y ago
      You need a specialized receiver / satellite dish on the ground to connect with them.
      - stingraycharles 5y ago
        That’s fair enough, but I still don’t consider it as problematic as autonomous driving; it’s more the equivalent of a microwave overheating, and it’s fairly easy to build in a fail safe for this. As a matter of fact, as far as I understand, the receivers actually shut down when they overheat. This problem is not nearly as big as solving autonomous driving, in terms of “how to prevent deaths”.
ceejayoz 5y ago
Getting FSD out of beta requires significant technological advances. Getting Starlink out of beta, to oversimplify a bit, mostly just requires more launches.
stickfigure 5y ago
Even if it never advanced beyond its current state, Starlink would still be a massive improvement over what I have now. My internet looks like the "farm" example in the article, and I'm only a 1:15 drive to downtown SF. I'll take it, beta or not.
GuB-42 5y ago
Starlink in beta does exactly what it is supposed to do: you get internet, and possibly with a better connection than in the final version, because of the limited number of users. With FSD beta, the car doesn't fully drives itself. I have absolutely no problem with the first scenario. It is not available to everyone, but for those who do, they get what they pay for. The second is more dubious, you don't get what you paid for, but promise, later, you will.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  If starlink doesn't satisfy, you can stop paying them or get a refund. If the autopilot kills you, the market doesnt have a mechanism to make you whole again.
matz1 5y ago
It shouldn't matter if they called beta forever or whatever. As consumer you should never believe what the company promise anyway. I would evaluate it myself or refer to trusted third party reviewer based on what it can actually do right now not what it may become.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Maybe beta is just part of the name that we've all just misunderstood the meaning of? Maybe the next version will be called BetaMax
  - matz1 5y ago
    yes assume its just a part of name.
ecpottinger 5y ago
Ask Microsoft first. As far as I can tell Windows 7 was they first 'good' OS since DOS.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  That title should go to Windows 2000. I still miss it.

yardstick 5y ago

No mention of this in the article, but I know someone with starlink and the router received a dhcp lease with a /10 subnet (100.64.0.0/10). I’ve got no problem with the CGNAT IP given, but found it odd the mask was a /10 and not a /31 normally seen in single device assignments like normally with PPP.

Siecje 5y ago
Does this limit what a customer can do?

orzig 5y ago

This is an exceptionally good review, and (well small in the grand scheme of the worlds problems) a beautiful example of how a passionate happiest can sure goodness with the world. Thank you this is an exceptionally good review, and (while small in the grand scheme of the worlds problems) a beautiful example of how a passionate hobbiest can sure goodness with the world. Thank you!

dougmwne 5y ago

It's sort of mentioned, but not emphasized in this review that connection dropouts happen every few minutes for a few seconds. That makes starlink fine for any kind of asynchronous content like web browsing, torrenting or video streaming, but unusable for video calls, stream hosting, voip, or online gaming. It's implied that this is due to the trees obstructing a full view of the sky, but I have actually heard these connection dropouts are just about universal due to the constellation not having enough infill. Just a warning that for most of us we are still several hundred satellites short and some connection handoff updates away from this being a useful internet connection. I have a property where Starlink would be perfect and I would pay triple the price to be able to do zoom calls over the connection.

JulianMorrison 5y ago
I would expect that won't stay a problem for long, they're still pouring those things up there.
bin_bash 5y ago
I hope that the problem really is due to lack of infill because that means it'll be temporary.
geerlingguy 5y ago
Honestly when I first got the dish, and had it in an open field, that was the case—but now the momentary dropouts between satellites are less than 1-2 seconds. They had 1000 or so satellites when I first started testing, and there are now something like 1600 or so. Most of the time, I don't even notice when it switches satellites. If you were doing some more real-time work or extremely latency-sensitive operations, then yes, you need to stick to a different type of connection. But it's really seamless now, compared to even a few months ago. Most of the software I used either showed no sign of the dropout, or at worst would freeze a frame or show a loading indicator for a brief moment before getting back to normal. Online multiplayer gaming and/or streaming are the main areas where I'd have to not recommend Starlink for now.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

JulianMorrison 5y ago

I recall reading that Starlink orbits below the usual level that other satellites are at, so they shouldn't be too much of a threat for Kessler syndrome.

qayxc 5y ago
They still are. The lower orbit only means that the satellites themselves deorbit within a few decades at most. Debris from a collision, however, goes every which way including higher orbits and can still damage other spacecraft. The satellites in geostationary orbits will stay up there for millions of years, but there's much more room between them and there's orders of magnitude fewer of them.

stefan_ 5y ago

Why on earth would you continue this test when the app already tells you about one third of the dishs FoV is obstructed? It's impossible to tell what part of this is a meaningful result and what is just a broken setup.

panzagl 5y ago
Oddly enough rural areas have a lot of trees too, so reporting on a non-optimal setup is very valuable.

kalefranz 5y ago

Real-time visualization of the Starlink constellation: https://satellitemap.space/ https://satellitemap.space/

dylan604 5y ago
That's interesting to see with knowing that just a fraction of the planned constellation is there. That's a lot of dots already. I'm guessing that the few visible string of dots are more recent launches that haven't quite reached their final positions yet. That's also interesting to see how long it takes the train to not be a train any longer, while at the same time showing how frequently new launches have been occurring.
- NelsonMinar 5y ago
  I believe the constellation is about 90-95% complete now. The first shell at least. There's plans for more shells but that's for redundancy, not coverage.
  - mastax 5y ago
    I was going to comment about how surprised I was that they almost finished the first shell without deploying laser links but apparently they have: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/spacex-adds-laser-links-to-starlink-satellites-to-serve-earths-polar-areas/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/space...
    - scrumbledober 5y ago
      I think the laser interlinks are proving more difficult than SpaceX anticipated. I had expected them much earlier in the deployment than now, and it seems they are currently only planning them for polar orbits.
  - sebzim4500 5y ago
    I think they need quite a lot of satellites in polar orbits to get coverage at the poles, and they have barely launched any yet. They are close to 100% coverage of the rest of the world already though.

XCSme 5y ago

That is honestly a lot better than I expected. I think it is a game-changer for remote areas. You could build a house anywhere and still have energy (solar panels) and internet (Starlink).

BugsJustFindMe 5y ago

It's been a very long time since I worked with directional radios, but it feels very weird to learn that a tree counts as a sky obstruction significant enough to kill the signal. It's just a tree, not a giant steel building or a mountain. Leaves are barely there, relatively speaking.

DanTheManPR 5y ago
Is that a function of the wavelength it's using? A quick search suggests that starlink uses 10-12ghz, are trees opaque at those frequencies?
bbarnett 5y ago
I have a backup 4G modem here, and when the leaves come out on the trees in the summer, I see a signal drop. 4 bars to 2 bars. The trees (forest) is line of sight between me and the only tower. I presume it's all that water in the leaves.
- qchris 5y ago
  I think that your observation of water is probably spot-on. When it comes which RF frequencies get absorbed, with water the answer is pretty much "yes". Combined with what I'd imagine is some really fun scattering math tossed in, tree cover is a pretty good bet for reducing signal quality, especially if it's more than one.
bityard 5y ago
For RF absorption, the rule of thumb is that the higher the frequency, the more the signal is attenuated. Once you get into the gigahertz range, things like leaves block (actually: absorb) a huge amount of the energy. This is why if you have a wifi router with both 2.4 and 5 GHz bands, the 2.4 GHz band usually has much better range. Visible light is in the THz spectrum which is blocked by anything solid that isn't clear or translucent.
ecpottinger 5y ago
I had a digital TV antenna in Oshawa pointed direct at the CN Tower in Toronto, there was only one tree in my direct line of sight, come summer when the leaves were fully developed I lost a number of channels because the signals was not strong enough. The tree was not on my property so I could not cut it.

varelse 5y ago

I've had Starlink for about 6 months and it is a massive improvement on upload speed at 10-25 Mb. Download speed is a mixed bag wildly oscillating from 5 to 100 Mb and back. It's okay for downloading things but it's terrible for any sort of video conferencing. There are brief dropouts on average every 6 minutes or so and my obstruction map is better than the author's. My neighbor up the street got slightly better service by mounting his dishy on a 20-ft antenna pole above his house. Local ground service is 20 Mb download and 2 Mb upload. And that's just barely sufficient for watching streaming video and video conferencing. Gigabit service is but a mile and a half away but no one is going to pay to lay the fiber into our neighborhood. So the last mile and a half is copper from 20 years ago. I think that's going to require political will to fix and I don't think that political will exists right now nor will it in the near future. We could have paid $5,000 per house to lay it ourself but our own neighborhood couldn't come to consensus on that. Now imagine that at a national level. So if they just deliver 100/100 within a year or two, this is an epic win IMO and I will cancel ground service. And if they don't someone else will so I'm not worried. But it took Teslas to spark the electric vehicle industry. Now there's a lot of choice. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens here.

jld89 5y ago
> But it took Teslas to spark the electric vehicle industry. Now there's a lot of choice. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens here. I really hope not. There are enough satellites out there, there are already too many, space pollution is real. Maybe we can find a better solution to this particular problem.
- ncallaway 5y ago
  I think these LEO constellations are actually the least concerning part of space pollution. There are many more LEO satellites, true, but their orbital placement is such that the satellite's orbit naturally decays in a few years. Which means if a satellite becomes uncontrollable (or is destroyed in some way), the debris will clear in a relatively short period of time. I'm actually much more concerned about the much smaller number of satellites in medium and geostationary orbits, where the decay time is decades or centuries. Failed satellites or debris in these orbits will take a very long time to clear, and strikes me as a much larger concern than the larger number of LEO sats

bluepanda928752 5y ago

Technology is pretty solid (no comparison to FSD), order of magnitude better than previous iterations of satellite internet. The solution is still getting our collective heads out of our asses and running fiber everywhere though

verytrivial 5y ago

100W 24x7? That's quite a lot, right? This adds some color perhaps to the argument that this is for underserviced regions -- they don't mean third-world or impoverished even though it sounds like that, at least when I heard people defending Starlink.

flyingfences 5y ago
100W is a couple of light bulbs. It's not nothing, but it's not all that much. It'd be challenging off-grid, but not a concern anywhere with electrical infrastructure.
- humanistbot 5y ago
  100W is a lot. It is a couple of very old incandescent bulbs or ten 60W equivalent LED bulbs.
  - ls612 5y ago
    It is a lot but it’s also outside so it won’t heat up your house and in most places it only adds up to about $10 a month or less on your power bill
  - katbyte 5y ago
    perspective i guess - i used to use 2 100watt bulbs to light a single room.
    - user5994461 5y ago
      For perspective, these will cost around $0.3 a day in electricity, when in the room you spend most of your time in. And yes, that's easily over a hundred dollar a year.
  - tigershark 5y ago
    No, it’s ONE incandescent bulb. And much less than the bulbs that were needed to light a fairly large room. We used to have a lot of 100W lights until not many years ago, honestly I don’t see the problem in spending that amount of energy if you have no other means to access a fast internet connection.

xoa 5y ago

I've had Starlink deployed for a client since mid-January or so up around the 45th parallel (near the US/Canadian border). Installed it in a brisk -20 windchill too, good times. That was kind of a best place replacement scenario even early beta, as their previous solution was a 10/2 connection that cost >$200/month, so Starlink didn't have to be stellar to beat the competition there. I was able to place it with zero obstructions. This was never used with the native router which just stayed unopened in the box, it was right into a OPNsense gateway. We left the old landline connection up for a few months with Starlink as primary and the old one as a failover. For the first month and a half or so, there were regular dropouts every day, though only for a minute or two. That noticeably dropped over the course of March, and we dumped the previous service by mid-April. Overall experience has been excellent for wireless, as good as a high quality WISP despite the much greater technical challenges. And it's continued to improve: as well as latency and uptime, bandwidth u/d has increased from around 100-130/10-30 to nearly always 220-250/30-45. At no extra price. Tell me the last time you got that from an ISP ;). Overall experience is similar to this review, a few observations following along the review: >Hard cable This is annoying, but my perspective is coming from someone who does a lot of network termination and has thousands of dollars in fluke testing gear, rolls of cat8 cable and certified jacks and so on which is obviously absolutely not the norm. I needed it to go farther, but I ended up just plugging the 802.3bt injector it comes with into fiber optic anyway which thus also gave me guaranteed isolation from the rest of the network without having to worry about grounding. I suspect once it's in full service and they start to branch out they'll do a "Business Class" version or something aimed at more advanced deployments. >Your own router This does work fine. In order to get statistics though you'll need to static route 192.168.100.1. It's not needed for it to operate, but probably still a good idea. Lots of instructions around on the net for that. When I first set it up, IPv6 was still wonky whether you had your own router or not. Easily worked around with a permanent WireGuard tunnel for a VLAN to a cheap VPS with a static IP. Anything that needs a static IP can just get put there. >Power consumption Real, but as the article said in the context of rural internet pricing it's frankly fairly meaningless. Effectively means it's $105-115/month which is still so much frigging better than most options available at the speed that it's plenty competitive. If we had fiber we'd use it, but we don't. >Latency Where that will REALLY get interesting is once intersat optical links go live constellation-wide (can't remember the timeline on that, v0.9 for polar went up last year, I think they're now on new ones going forward). Most latency tests are local hops only, which is relevant of course and Starlink will always be at a disadvantage for. But once you start cross continents or oceans, Starlink definitely has the potential to easily beat many people's fiber connections (particularly rural ones its aimed at). CDNs are a lot, but not everything. It'll be cool to see how that affects the market. >it's potential to increase the risk of the Kessler syndrome This is a meme, not reality. I wish it would stop coming up. Starlink sats are in quite Low Earth Orbit (LEO), and the majority of the constellation yet to be launched will be V-band ones in V(ery)LEO. At those altitudes, natural orbital decay will eliminate debris or sats even if they fail, and if they don't they deorbit themselves. SpaceX has thought this through, part of the delay on optics was specifically figuring out how to make sure they'd all burn up. Other planned megaconstellations higher up do indeed represent more concern, but Starlink does not. SpaceX is leveraging its overwhelming and soon to grow more-so advantage in launch capability and economics in a host of self-reinforcing ways, and this is one of them. They get to lean on higher numbers and faster replacement to get more performance and stop Kessler risk. >Astronomy They've been working on shading them to reduce apparent magnitude, but that only fully works when sats are fully deployed and the trains going up are there. Even reduced magnitude will still affect some instruments and observations. I'm afraid though astronomy is just going to have to deal with that for a decade, looking forward to major development of cheap space based industry allowing lunar/space telescopes like never before eventually supplanting ground-based entirely. Cold comfort to a few who really will be messed up at a point in their careers that will be awkward for that, but this is frankly more important. >Other This will be MIND BLOWING FOR MARINE/AEROSPACE. If you think your rural connection is bad go look at merchant marine pricing. Aircraft too obviously, but one area I think many people haven't thought about yet is the potential for other satellites themselves. SpaceX is really setting themselves up as a major space infrastructure company.

blakesterz 5y ago

I just wanted to say thanks, that review was super interesting. And thanks for all your many ansible roles! I use the heck out of several :-)

only_as_i_fall 5y ago

I dislike Elon Musk as much as anyone but I think it's becoming clear that starlink could turn out to be a very good idea. What I haven't seen anyone do and something I'd be very interested to see is a comparison of the relative environmental costs of so many starlink launches in contrast to the building and upkeep of last mile connections to the backbone.

runarberg 5y ago
idk. It could turn out to be a very bad idea (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome). And it still hasn’t proven it self to be better then traditional infrastructure. The last mile connection problem can much easier be solved with a 5G tower then a constellation of satellites.
- hungryforcodes 5y ago
  Additionally, I'm not sure how great it will be for air quality if we have thousands and thousands of satellites burning up in the atmosphere over the next few decades. I certainly don't want to be breathing in vaporized satellite ash. Your point about 5G is well made.
  - anchpop 5y ago
    It's probably not zero, but I imagine the effect on air quality is completely miniscule compared to things like millions of ICE cars driving around or the wildfires on the west coast. Additionally I think they burn up in the upper atmosphere, which makes it less likely for the particles to end up in your breathing air (compared to cars which emit their waste at ankle level right outside your doorstep)
    - only_as_i_fall 5y ago
      Also the rocket used to launch each satellite has ejected more than 20x the mass of its payload as burnt rocket fuel by the time it reaches orbit.

soheil 5y ago

> Starlink uses CGNAT Just curious what is the security implications of using carrier grade NAT? If I start DDoS'ing a bunch of websites and get blocked, does that mean effectively I also block all my neighbors sharing the same IP4? This seems like a lot of power over their internet usage.

bityard 5y ago
Yes, it has all of the pitfalls of other kinds of NAT. However, in 2021, blocking all traffic from entire subnets or NATted IPs is an extremely blunt defense and doesn't even work for certain kinds of attacks like UDP floods. "Websites" do not typically do their own traffic filtering or attack mitigation for this reason and many others. They leave that up to their upstream provider. And any provider worth their salt is paying big bucks for a system that can recognize and mitigate attacks based on traffic patterns and deep packet inspection while letting most of the "good" traffic through. Source: I work for a company that makes these products.
- soheil 5y ago
  You're basically saying it's magic and trust me because I work on this stuff. That's fair, but how can you tell if I send you 1MM curl commands to download large_ugly_cow{i}.bmp from your server or if it's my neighbor doing that if we both share the same IP address?
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    > your server or if it's my neighbor doing that if we both share the same IP address? It depends on how sloppy you are running your attack. Most of the time the attacker will be sloppy and hit the system using the same useragent with the same cookies. Or maybe they'll go the other way and every single request will have some random BS for a useragent and random cookies. Plus they will only hit that exact single URL and won't bother loading the rest of the page. So if you look at your logs, you'll see a million requests for "large_ugly_cow.bmp" coming from the same IP with a useragent that doesn't bother loading anything else. In short, to a human such an attack usually stands out like a sore thumb. Writing the filter rules to block them... that is a different beast. With the right tools and a smart tech, it is totally possible though.

NelsonMinar 5y ago

I'm typing this message from Starlink. For me it's absolutely transformative; 10x the bandwidth I can get from any other source and very reliable. Except for outages related to obstructions. That's a real problem and the author's situation is not good. There's ways to work around it on your property; a taller mount, a tree install, cutting some trees. But ultimately Dishy needs a clear view to the north and there's no getting around it. I have some smaller obstructions for my install and it was a little annoying but fine. But in the past week or two it's gotten way better: my packet loss went from 2% to 0.6%. Details here: https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2021/07/20/starlink-improvements/ https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2021/07/20/starlink-improve...

detritus 5y ago
huh. perhaps I'm exhibiting my total ignorance here, but why do they have to point North? I know that our Satellite TV dish when I was a kid had to point to a specific angle southwards, to match the geostationary position, but I'd not expect that with Starlink, unless you were in the Falklands or Antarctica, or something?
- coder543 5y ago
  It's a purposeful choice to avoid interfering with radio bandwidth allocations to existing geostationary satellites. As I understand it, Starlink dishes aren't allowed to send signals to a portion of the sky around the equator where the geostationary satellites are located. Starlink would probably work even better if they didn't have to deal with this restriction, but Starlink might not have been allowed to exist if they didn't design it to work this way.
  - detritus 5y ago
    Huh. I had no idea, but makes a lot of sense, thinking about it. Thanks!
- mzkply 5y ago
  North is where all the satellites cluster as they reach the peak latitude of their orbit period: https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/190208-starlink.png https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/190208-s...

jgrodziski 5y ago

I'm one of the few client here in France for a few days. I moved from Paris to a quite isolated area (Vercors mountains) with only ADSL (no mobile coverage), and it's night and day, I now get between 100 Mbps and 200 mbps with 30/40 ms latency... I don't have a lot of time with the service to give an exhaustive feedback, but for the moment I'm able to do video conferencing and call perfectly. And the setup experience is great!

soheil 5y ago

> Most well-known apps like Netflix, FaceTime, and Zoom, handled things well without any incident. It was really the apps and services that are obviously outsourced. Not sure why he threw in outsourced there, but ok. I know this could be as simple as using the right library for your video chat app, but at a low level how is something like this achieved? If I establish a tcp connection with a handshake and everything and my internet connection drops or IP is changed the tcp connection gets terminated. Other than using udp is there a way to keep the tcp connection going when the IP address changes without having to establish a new connection, which takes non-trivial amount of time?

geerlingguy 5y ago
The reason I threw that in is because I've personally worked on a few of these apps, and also some of the backing APIs the apps consumed. I know first-hand that many of the ones that suffer from weird and annoying quirks would be a thousand times better if they had any reliable QA process (most don't), and were run by teams that were invested in the company's success. Outsourced doesn't only mean 'to other countries', but in many cases to consultancies, since for some strange reason many media companies don't see their apps as being a core competency, so they farm it out, and the results are always 2nd-tier at best.

clvx 5y ago

I’m in a rural area in Montana and luckily I have access to a 5G tower. My impression is if you are close to one, it’s better and cheaper than going with Starlink even if you have to pay extra money to set up an external MIMO antenna to improve your signal. I think Starlink is useful in many areas and industries, but 5G home internet is reliable for many cases at least in the US. Starlink will do great in the South hemisphere where providers struggle even in metropolitan areas. I see that as a huge win for many as long as the prices go down as the current prices could be a barrier for not so wealthy countries.

adkadskhj 5y ago
I don't know much about Starlink, but isn't one point of Starlink that eventually it could even beat wired connections for distance latency? Ie it's a shorter and more direct trip to use Starlink to get from US West to US East, for example. Though this is quite a ways out i imagine. Best of all this idea works in current tech, and can get even better with future tech when Starlink starts going Satellite <-> Satellite, avoiding unnecessary land hops. I'm interested in Starlink for all use cases, once they get more satellites up.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  My understanding is that in addition to distance latency there is some non-trival amount of latency due to the use of TDMA. Unlike CDMA where everybody piles on the same spectrum at the same time, TDMA gives a timeslot to every station and you gotta wait your turn before TX/RX (this is a gross oversimplification of course). While it doesn't add that much latency it is more than CDMA.
  - syncsynchalt 5y ago
    Not just TDMA - lasers in vacuum travel at the speed of light, but signals in optical fiber and coax copper are both 2/3 of that. This means that if (and that's still an if, not yet a when) starlink does laser between satellites it can beat terrestrial speeds. I could see the end result being that we still do bent-pipe signaling over land and only laser interlinks for crossing oceans and for customers that pay for low ping to financial markets.

rootusrootus 5y ago

I'm waiting for my turn (I had a beta offer last year but declined to proceed at the time, now I get to wait like everyone else). Hoping that real soon it gets opened up for mobile use. I have a campsite about 50 miles away that I'd spend a lot more time at if I could work from there. Trees would be a little bit of an issue, but not a deal killer for me.

0x0000000 5y ago

> Starlink uses CGNAT This is why I'm cancelling my subscription (though I have the privilege of multiple terrestrial providers in my area). For what Starlink charges, they shouldn't be using CGNAT. It's not an Internet connection if I can't get anything inbound.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago

My email Feb 24: "Starlink now available to order" So I put an order in right away. It's now July 22nd, and I haven't heard anything, despite the original email saying "mid-2021" for order shipment. So I go to check: "Starlink is currently at capacity in your area through 2021, your order might not be fulfilled until late 2022." Despite having taken my money for deposit they never sent an email at any point to let me know this. I think that's a rather dubious customer service practice.

HWR_14 5y ago
Elon Musk, famous for Tesla, is willing to take your money and not deliver a product for several years. I am shocked.

robscallsign 5y ago

I'm in Ontario, Canada, 46.5 degrees latitude and typing this on Starlink. Even with the occasional dropouts Starlink is 10-100x better than any other option that we have here (the only options are LTE, or other satellites, like xplornet). Even though we're only a few minutes drive from a municipality of 160,000 people and on a major highway, there, is no wired connection, and doesn't really seem likely that a wired connection will ever happen. Since moving here 7 years ago the pricing/data rates for the LTE data packages available have doubled in price. Literally doubled. With Covid we had two adults working from home, and two kids home schooling, on a slow LTE connection with a total bandwidth of 100GB up/down. Even things like windows updates required planning and rationing of the internet. The state of connectivity in Canada is so abysmal. At this point I hope Starlink matures enough to add a voice service.

cblconfederate 5y ago

how much available bandwidth can starlink support? I thought the primary users would be remote users, or mobile users or sailboats but apparently people here are considering it an alternative to cables

sudhirj 5y ago
Each satellite supports 20GBPS, from what I've read. So if you have an exclusive lock on one satellite, and that has a direct/exclusive route to a ground station, that's probably a theoretical max.

skellington 5y ago

Some of the comments here are kind of ridiculous. They are complaining (or just pointing out) issues that are EXPECTED at this stage of the beta. Starlink has like 1700 of the planned 42,000 satellites in orbit now. Of course there are going to be temporarily blips in service plus the random longer dropouts during system upgrades. Even with the current issues, the service is revolutionary in the remote areas that it's intended to service. Why Geerling thinks it's appropriate to compare beta starlink to his home cable/fiber service is beyond me. It's totally fair to review the current state of starlink, but to then conclude that "I don't love it" because it's not as good as his cable service is just plain dumb. Why did you even begin the review with the expectation that it could be better than your land service in it's current beta form? You're not even supposed to be on the starlink service if you have great landline bandwidth and starlink should block you from their service as you're stealing bandwidth from people who don't have access to high speed internet. One person even said "I hope they can figure out why it drops occasionally" as if some of the smartest people on the earth don't know exactly why it drops out. It drops because the satellite mesh network is only 4% complete!

nexuist 5y ago
I mean, Starlink is available as a closed beta commercial product. There's nothing wrong with comparing it in its current form to cable service in its current form, especially if you're going to pay $$$ for it. The point is for the reader to figure out if they should try Starlink right now (if eligible) or if they should wait for some of these issues to be resolved. To put it another way: would you complain that reviewers were judging Google Glass unfairly, because Google had grandiose plans for it in the future (that ultimately never happened)? Or would you recognize that Google made the decision to sell Google Glass in its current form, and thus accepted that it would be judged against its competitors?
- skellington 5y ago
  It's totally fair to review the current state of a beta service. It could be informative for people who are unsure if they want to try the beta-service. But to compare it as an equal, in it's beta form, against a service that it's not even built to compete against is just plain dumb. If you already have access to high speed internet, starlink it not intended for you. His final comment about "Liking, but not loving starlink" implies that he's comparing starlink to cable internet as equal competitors. They are not and they are not intended to be and that's even considering the fact that starlink is in beta. This guy should not even be allowed on starlink (in the long run) because he already has access to high speed internet. This whole comment section is full of stupidity like: "isn't 100watts a lot of power?" <-- typed from gaming computer with a 1000watt power supply "what about space garbage, isn't space garbage bad" <-- as if LEO garbage won't just decay back to earth "will starlink be like FSD and maybe never get delivered" <-- as if they are related issues, they are not "I don't like Elon" <- because reasons, but also irrelevant "starlink bad because worky less good when obstructed" <-- too dumb for words "i'm worried about the starlink monopoly" <-- you should be banned from the internet

lmilcin 5y ago

Starlink is supposed to operate 30k satellites, and it currently has something around 1,5k (correct me if I am wrong). What this means is we can expect that in future obstructions will be much less of a problem, because there will be much better chance that at any point in time there will be a satellite on visible part of the sky. Also, I think, main reason of Starlink is to have access anywhere, even in extremely remote areas. I think some inconvenience is expected and fair. I don't expect Starlink is going to replace a traditional broadband -- for that it will never have the bandwidth necessary.

tsimionescu 5y ago
That 30k / 42k number is mostly Musk lies. It's very unlikely to ever happen given the size of the market, the cost of launches, and the short lifetime of satellites in LEO. Basically, they would have to constantly launch significantly more satellites than they do today to ever maintain a 30-40k satellite network in LEO. And even Musk estimates like 500k customers - this would basically mean 1 satellite for every 10-20 customers, once every few years. There is no way for that to make economic sense. My prediction is that they will stop somewhere around the current number of satellites, in fact. At the very most, they might triple the current number.

parksy 5y ago

One thing that caught me as interesting about the article was the obstruction map and what could be achieved with that kind of data if it was gathered and correlated with millions of other users. I am no expert but it seems that traditional observation from space has always been limited by the resolution from up on high. Flip the problem and have ground-based observers in densely populated areas track shadows in a rotating grid of point sources in the sky, and you can build a 3d map outwards instead, the only problem being how to increase the density, consistency, and spread of the ground-based sensor array.

markandrewj 5y ago

I am not sure if this is a helpful comment, or possible, you might want to try attaching the dish to the top of tallest tree if you can though. I have had to do this with satellite dishes in the past while working in remote locations. When I say remote, I am talking surrounded by mountains, deep inside the boreal forests of British Columbia.

linsomniac 5y ago

@geerlingguy: Consider checking out some global latency comparisons between StarLink and cable. I believe their long-term plan is to have the satellites route traffic between themselves using space lasers rather than hit a ground station and traverse undersea cables and the like. Not sure if they have that fully implemented yet, but might be interesting looking at the path and latency traffic to .au or Asia or Africa takes on Starlink vs cable. A couple factors may come into play: "as the crow flies" and light speed in vacuum vs glass. I know Evi Nemeth (RIP) talking on the CAIDA project showed some nice graphs of the "speed of light cone" re: latencies vs. geography. See about halfway down on this: https://web.archive.org/web/20160103034640/http://www.isoc.org/inet2000/cdproceedings/8e/8e_3.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20160103034640/http://www.isoc.o...

tsimionescu 5y ago
The lasers are more a nice idea than a plan. It's entirely possible they are not doable with realistic technology, given the speeds and other constraints of space, even in LEO. They are certainly not going to be there in the near future, anyway.
- relativ575 5y ago
  Not just an idea anymore. They've started experimenting with it since last year. Gwynne Shotwell said in April that third generation, yes third generation, of laser intersatellite links would be launched in "the next few months": https://spacenews.com/spacex-adds-to-latest-funding-round/ https://spacenews.com/spacex-adds-to-latest-funding-round/
  - matmatmatmat 5y ago
    Yeap, and full self-driving is coming at the end of this year.
  - shaklee3 5y ago
    It's an idea. They have not been demonstrated successfully.

NDizzle 5y ago

My Starlink experience has gotten a lot better recently. In the past few months. I'm in rural Arkansas, near the southern edge of the rollout still I believe. I have maintained 3 ISPs this whole time. I have an EM160R LTE modem that will do 5x carrier aggregation and pulls around 240-250 mbit from my local AT&T tower. I also have T-Mobile's 4g home internet (5g works here on my phone, but they won't give me the home internet for whatever reason) which pulls 100-115 mbit. Starlink itself is somewhere between 180 and 240 down, but only 15 up. On the ATT line I can get 40-60 mbit upload, and that's one of the main reasons I keep things set up this way. I'm about to try disabling the wan port for T-Mobile to see what it's like without that ISP. I don't do any connection bonding - straight up round robin load balancing with no stickyness, and with the amount of servers and services that use multiple TCP streams I can see 300+mbit downloads often. Pings range from 30 (when using Starlink) to 90. (when using one of the LTE connections) I no longer game enough to comment on it. My kids play Roblox and PS4 online games and don't whine about it, so I think it's sufficient. I don't really do Zoom meetings. MS Teams is what we use. I don't use the camera very often, but the calls will pause and drop and the people I work with have coined this as, "being Starlinked". Usually a few seconds and rarely does it take an actual redial to reconnect anymore. Just a dead period.

driverdan 5y ago
If you get 250Mb from AT&T why bother with the others?
- NDizzle 5y ago
  Reliability. I’m also trying to not use too much data on each provider. Afraid of getting kicked off.
- dboreham 5y ago
  Cell service is metered, even if they say it isn't.

_wldu 5y ago

It's my understanding that the Starlink signal is almost straight up, so if that is true, the trees would have to be rather close to the house. Does anyone know if this is true?

geerlingguy 5y ago
Starlink currently wants a 100° view of the sky (pretty broad), and you can actually download the Starlink App on your phone (even without service) and use the obstruction finder to view specifically how much of the sky it needs. But in my case, that tree is pretty close to the back of my house (and there are 75-100' trees pretty much everywhere on my property).

rdca 5y ago

Amazing how starlink reviewers never bother to mention if it is possible to run a publicly available web server - at least over IPv6.

bahmboo 5y ago

100 watt power draw makes off grid solar much more challenging.

mariojv 5y ago

I am so excited for this to become available to more people. Especially during the pandemic, a lot of people realized how crucial fast internet is to modern life. One relative didn't have internet the entire time - would have cost thousands to install - and had to break quarantine in order to use internet that he needed to work.

joelm 5y ago

Shameless plug - if you're using Starlink and want to fix the dropouts, plus get a static public IPv4 address that works over any ISP, get our SD-WAN service: https://www.bigleaf.net/ https://www.bigleaf.net/. With a 2nd internet connection, our platform will auto-ID your sensitive traffic and route it over the best performing connection (e.g. aware of jitter, dropouts, etc), plus your bulk data traffic (e.g. Netflix) will route over your highest-throughput connection. 30-day money-back guarantee, so no risk to try. As a former wireless ISP architect/engineer, it's wonderful to see the leadership that Starlink is providing in LEO satellite connectivity (due to the low latency compared to geostationary). I hope the "block the sky with satellites" visual/astronomy concerns won't play out as an actual issue, because this seems like a great platform to address connectivity needs in harder-to-reach areas.

mdesq 5y ago

I have Starlink at my home located in a rural area where the only alternative is DSL at ~1.0MBPS average downlink. Using Starlink made it possible to actually do interactive work from the house without tethering to my spotty LTE service or traveling to a better location. My own experience is that the service has been quite reliable (often 12 hour stretches without an outage), but I do have unobstructed views of the sky. I do find that streaming audio/video can be glitchy and I usually have some kind of audio issues.

nixpulvis 5y ago

cool, so they put lame memes in the router's ssh connection, gimp https://*.*.*.1 https://*.*.*.1 and force an app to configure instead. > ... and also happy you can use your own if you want. You shouldn't be happy, you should be expecting this ability. Anything else would be worth being very upset about.

sunstone 5y ago

A lot of talk about drops and latentcy here. It may be that once/if they get the optical links between satellites working, along with just more satellites, most these issues may fade into the paat. Say two to five years.

peter_d_sherman 5y ago

If Dishy can do beamforming to have a radio signal hit a fast moving satellite several hundred kilometers away, in space -- then couldn't two or more Dishies be repurposed/reprogrammed -- to create point-to-point line-of-sight terrestrial Internet links -- a wireless mesh network -- on the ground -- covering long distances? You know, if there's ever a Zombie Apocalypse -- and Starlink for whatever reason, becomes unavailable... Of course, we hope it never happens... but it seems like two or more repurposed Dishies -- would make a great Internet bridge (or wireless mesh segment) over long line-of-sight distances -- on the ground... Also, multiple dishies in space, at different distances from the Earth, acting as repeaters -- might make a great future way to get Internet (and other space-related communications) to the Moon or Mars or beyond...

telesilla 5y ago

From a friend, a few days after he installed it (in a remote area, non-US): "So delighted!!! I went from 3mb download to just under 300mb download. Not consistently, but the first time I've had decent internet!!!"