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Wow, these analysts are either deceiving through their teeth or completely unaware of how internet utilities operate. No internet service calculates their total

Wow, these analysts are either deceiving through their teeth or completely unaware of how internet utilities operate. No internet service calculates their total expected bandwidth needs by multiplying the number of customers by each customer's total bandwidth allotment, and in fact total bandwidth usage is mostly not a function of the peak speed of a user. Whether your link is 100Mbit or 1Gbit, your HD Netflix content will still use the same amount of bandwidth. For reference, continually filling a 100Mbit connection implies using 33 TB/month of downloads, which is definitely not what SpaceX customers should be doing over a satellite link.

xyzzy21 5y ago
You are right. Especially in space-sourced internet, the provider radically OVERSELLs customers far beyond the actual capacity. HughesNet is the obvious example proving that. When I had it we'd get no better than dial up modem speeds because they would NEVER SAY NO to new accounts.
Linosaurus 5y ago
The article speculates in '3x oversubscription', so they have heard of the concept. Some casual googling suggests that values closer to 100x is realistic though. So they're at least an order of magnitude off.
- bcrl 5y ago
  The upper limit on decent consumer internet is in the 5-10x ratio for oversubscription. 100x is going to be pretty awful, akin to how Xplornet runs there wireless networks (hint: you don't want to be like Xplornet). On my own FTTH network we see somewhere around 3-4 Mbps per subscriber at the 95th percentile currently. 2 years ago it was closer to 2-3 Mbps. COVID made quite a difference when it hit as peak usage ramped up around 10am each day rather than the 5-6pm pre-COVID. The other downside of how Starlink is building their network is that upload capacity is seriously latency limited for bursts. GPON also uses a shared medium for uplink, and you can "feel" the upload latency at 20km since your node has to tell the other end how much data you need to send before you'll get a grant that lets you send your burst. With all the overhead of modern web pages, the 500 km RTT will feel quite a bit worse than a GPON network at 20 km, and GPON already feels worse than a straight 1 Gbps full duplex ethernet connection. Otoh, Starlink will probably work wonderfully for streaming since it's all bulk data that doesn't care about latency.
walrus01 5y ago
I one hundred percent concur with you. Look at how many DIA 1Gbps symmetric customers you can fit in one 10GbE transport circuit around a city, before the daily sine wave traffic chart starts peaking at 7Gbps. Hint: it's a hell of a lot more than ten. People writing this stuff have clearly never actually typed enable into a router or run engineering operations at any ASN.

xyzzy21 5y ago

You are right. Especially in space-sourced internet, the provider radically OVERSELLs customers far beyond the actual capacity. HughesNet is the obvious example proving that. When I had it we'd get no better than dial up modem speeds because they would NEVER SAY NO to new accounts.

Linosaurus 5y ago

The article speculates in '3x oversubscription', so they have heard of the concept. Some casual googling suggests that values closer to 100x is realistic though. So they're at least an order of magnitude off.

bcrl 5y ago
The upper limit on decent consumer internet is in the 5-10x ratio for oversubscription. 100x is going to be pretty awful, akin to how Xplornet runs there wireless networks (hint: you don't want to be like Xplornet). On my own FTTH network we see somewhere around 3-4 Mbps per subscriber at the 95th percentile currently. 2 years ago it was closer to 2-3 Mbps. COVID made quite a difference when it hit as peak usage ramped up around 10am each day rather than the 5-6pm pre-COVID. The other downside of how Starlink is building their network is that upload capacity is seriously latency limited for bursts. GPON also uses a shared medium for uplink, and you can "feel" the upload latency at 20km since your node has to tell the other end how much data you need to send before you'll get a grant that lets you send your burst. With all the overhead of modern web pages, the 500 km RTT will feel quite a bit worse than a GPON network at 20 km, and GPON already feels worse than a straight 1 Gbps full duplex ethernet connection. Otoh, Starlink will probably work wonderfully for streaming since it's all bulk data that doesn't care about latency.

walrus01 5y ago

I one hundred percent concur with you. Look at how many DIA 1Gbps symmetric customers you can fit in one 10GbE transport circuit around a city, before the daily sine wave traffic chart starts peaking at 7Gbps. Hint: it's a hell of a lot more than ten. People writing this stuff have clearly never actually typed enable into a router or run engineering operations at any ASN.