3 ms·

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

• 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.