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I get it. If you already have internet, then Starlink is not for you. There are lots of questionable design choices (particularly in version 2), it's picky ab

I get it. If you already have internet, then Starlink is not for you. There are lots of questionable design choices (particularly in version 2), it's picky about placement, etc. etc. But if your other choice is HughesNet or its competitors, that throttles you after 15 GB (2 days of non-streaming usage for me), or 50 GB, the Starlink "shortcomings" are irrelevant. With Starlink, if you can get it, and if you can site it without blockages, you have "real" internet. Reasonable speeds and no caps/throttling. The massive over-subscription (presumably by people who have no functional alternative) suggests it serves a need. Just not a need for people who have a non-DSL wired alternative, like Jeff Geerling.

ghaff 5y ago
Starlink is a game changer if you don't have decent wired broadband. We had about 1 Mbps download and were the last house on the road who could get it. Then we didn't even have that. Verizon hotspot was "ok" but data was expensive so you had to watch your usage. Starlink isn't perfect--had a couple of days downtime over Christmas--but basically it works fine with 20+ Mbps bandwidth. With the prior DSL, I couldn't have worked from the house in a meaningful way. (My AT&T wireless is also very marginal.) Now I mostly could.
- clvx 5y ago
  Similar situation but I switched to T-Mobile. I have a Starlink order but it got delayed 6 months. At this point, I'll just cancel it because T-Mobile Home Internet is a game changer.
  - alexktz 5y ago
    How "unlimited" is the T-Mobile Home Internet package?
    - AshleyGrant 5y ago
      In my experience it's been totally unlimited. I try not to abuse it, but when I re-image my desktop, Backblaze will end up uploading multiple terabytes (even though I've inherited the backup state and the drive/directory structure is identical). I've never had a single issue. The Home Internet service is 100% deprioritized compared to postpaid cell phone data, so they really are selling "excess" capacity.
  - cagey 5y ago
    I did exactly this. Started using T-Mobile Home Internet (5G "trashcan" modem) back in 21.02 (same month I ordered Starlink); TMHI service has gotten progressively better since that time. 21.12 I received my Starlink ultimatum ("if you don't cancel in 14(?) days we're sending your HW and billing you $100's more") and I decided TMHI @ $50/month (yes, completely unlimited) was sufficient. Also Verizon now has competing 5G and LTE offerings, so I figure worst case I (who have NO wired ISP option) at least have a strong backup plan. As another redundancy: everyone in my household has migrated to Visible cell phone service, which provides unlimited (but throttled at 5-10 Mbps) hotspot which we use maybe 2-3 times per month when TMHI service gets sluggish.
  - the_only_law 5y ago
    I thought about switching to one of those mobile internet providers, but it wasn’t available in my area, which I don’t quite understand. My providers network is certainly available, as I use it on my phone daily. Maybe it’s using some different band?
    - cagey 5y ago
      I suspect availability of 5G or LTE "home internet" service is gated by not only signal strength but also by the vendor's assessment of their (tower, backhaul?) capacity in the locale.
      - mdasen 5y ago
        It's definitely not just about coverage, but also about how much capacity they have in an area. They don't want to overload the network given that home internet users will use a lot more data than mobile users. Likewise, they don't want to sign up people for them to have a bad experience, cancel service, and spread bad word of mouth. T-Mobile has been managing how many people they sign up in an area. Sometimes T-Mobile's home internet is available in your area, but then they get a certain number of signups and it becomes unavailable in your area until they're able to increase capacity or customers cancel. It's possible that it was available in their area and others signed up for it. AT&T is only offering service in very limited areas and it seems like they're mostly trying to replace their DSL connections that they don't want to upgrade to fiber. Verizon's service is currently pretty small scale, but they're looking to grow it. Again, it will be limited areas because no one wants to overwhelm the network. Even if you have good phone service, there's a big difference between someone using 10GB on mobile and someone using 500GB as a home user. Signing up 10 home users could be like adding 500 new phone users in a small area. That can be a lot of traffic and they don't want to start seeing their mobile users cancel service because home users are clogging up the network. So they want to roll it out a bit slowly, especially as they increase capacity over the next few years with midband 5G.
    - clvx 5y ago
      My location “didn’t have coverage” as I live at the edge of my town followed by Murdoch’s ranch next to me. I talked to the rep to the point of just let me try it as there’s nothing to lose. They already provide full refund on the product for the first 30 days. At the beginning the signal and speeds were shit(using trashcan). I installed a couple of MIMO antennas. Now, I have 30Mbs up/down consistently. I believe 5G is gonna be a game changer for rural areas. It’s just easy: plug it, turn it on, use it. No technicians, no wiring (if you don’t use antennas), no fixed place in your house. Also check cellmapper to check for near by antennas and bands. More info in r/tmobileisp
- spaniard89277 5y ago
  What about a small coop ISP? If you manage to use electric or telephone posts deploying fiber and getting a carrier is doable, at least here in Spain.
  - mdasen 5y ago
    Some towns in the US have done this, but it isn't without difficulties. Just looking at a satellite map of Spain, I see La Langa. It seems like it has very few people, but they all live in a small town center. Looking at Uclés, it's the same: tiny place, but everyone is living in the town center. Let's look at Potomac, MD in the US. The roads are sprawling with giant houses all far apart. That's a lot more distance to run fiber to get it to each house. Potomac is a rich suburb of DC and has fine internet (it's still dense enough for that), but the US keeps sprawling. Look at a satellite view of Pike Township, PA. There's a lot of houses with huge distances in between and no discernible town center. > If you manage to use electric or telephone posts deploying fiber and getting a carrier is doable I think this can also be an issue in the US since place might not have easy/cheap access to those utility poles. Title II carriers in the US get cheap, regulated access to utility poles. That's traditionally been your phone company. I believe the FCC tried reclassifying broadband as Title II under the Obama administration, but it might have been reversed under the Trump administration. If you're someone that already has access to the utility poles, you don't want more people getting cheap access to them. Even if you have access to the utility poles, you can face difficulty. As noted, you aren't wiring up a town center, you can be wiring up places with a huge amount of distance between people. Even if that isn't a problem, property owners might want new cables buried. Even when power lines are above ground, sometimes they're underground from the street to the house. Many houses might be set back from the street by 50 meters so it can be a larger distance. You can have a 300m road with 3 houses on it each with a 50m set back from the street. That's not to say it isn't possible (and some towns have created coop ISPs), but costs add up. Uclés has 140 people in it, but everyone seems to live within a 250m radius of the city center. That seems pretty easy to wire up. Pike Township, PA has 1,700 people that are incredibly spread out. That seems a lot harder to wire up. It's not impossible, but it seems harder.
- swah 5y ago
  For those of us outside US, how far from the urban area you have to be to not have good LTE and/or fiber internet? (Also, does Amazon deliver in those places?)
  - BenjiWiebe 5y ago
    No Amazon doesn't deliver in rural areas (central Kansas, USA, anyways), if you mean Amazon trucks/drivers. However we can still get Amazon packages just fine via UPS, FedEx, or the US postal service. Actually I've only seen an Amazon delivery vehicle one or two times...
  - mdasen 5y ago
    It's hard to answer something like this. Even for Europe, it's hard to answer something like this. There's a big difference between Inverness in Scotland (47,000 people in the city and 63,000 in the urban area) and London. Are you measuring from the city center or from where things drop off to farmland? In Europe, cities often drop off into farmland very abruptly. You have built-up areas and then very abruptly farmland. In the US, you can have suburbs where there's 1 house on an acre (4,000 square meters) going for a long time. Even 1 house every 2-4 acres (8,000-12,000 square meters) isn't unusual. If you look at a satellite map between cities in the Netherlands, you can see that there isn't any sprawling houses between Rotterdam and Utrecht. Places like Oudewater exists, but it's dense. It might not be as dense as larger cities, but people don't have enormous plots of land. You can easily walk to neighbors and shops. In the US, a lot of people live in areas where it can be 5 miles to get to shops. In the US, people often have the issue that the wired internet doesn't go up their street which might be a couple miles with only a handful of houses. In the US, they might face costs getting it from the street to their house because their house is set back a hundred meters from the road. This isn't super typical, but it's typical enough that it effects a lot of people. I think part of the issue is that there is no real demarcation between the urban area and outside it in the US. I can look at a satellite view of a city in Europe and clearly discern city vs farmland. In the US, a lot of rich people left the city for suburbs where they could set land use policies that kept lower income people (and often minorities they didn't want around) out of their town (and out of their schools and out of their tax base). They still wanted to be able to commute into the city, but often passed laws mandating minimum lot sizes, minimum setbacks from the street for houses, and emphasized local control to prevent housing they deemed undesirable from being made. These places have fine wired internet. But they kinda slowly melt into progressively more rural places rather than having a clear demarcation. The US's emphasis on cars and a certain cultural idealism around rural life means that there are people that want to live semi-rural while not really having a rural lifestyle or job. They just drive farther and cheap fuel and subsidies make that possible. The lack of coherent land use policies means that the area where people consider themselves as part of an urban area can keep expanding. Maybe a developer wants to build new housing. The city and suburbs don't want more housing and so the developer picks a piece of land just past the last suburb. It's another 15 minutes from the city by car, but with skyrocketing housing prices, there are probably going to be some people who think it's a reasonable trade-off. What's the difference between an hour commute and an hour and 15 minute commute? Why shouldn't I trade 10 hours of my life every month for a larger house? A lot of European countries have greenbelts around their cities where you aren't allowed to do a lot of development. It prevents things like the US suburbs which initially were thought of as 5-10 miles outside the city and now often go all the way to the next city creating a giant area that people commute from. But these suburbs aren't the problem. The thing is that the suburbs then meld into really rural areas - but those really rural areas aren't that far from the suburbs that rich people live in and commute to the city from and those suburbs have big-box stores like Walmart and Target and they have high speed internet. If you live in a rural area that's 5 miles from such a suburb, you think "I'm not in the middle of nowhere! I'm just 5 miles from this place that has a Walmart and high speed internet and a supermarket!" If you're 5 miles outside a city in Europe, you're in farmland - but very often the houses all seem to be on one main road even through that farmland rather than up winding roads that lead nowhere (other than a few people's houses). In the US, because there's this gradual drop-off in density, there can be this "why not just a little more" mentality. "Why not just a little farther out to get a tiny bit more land? It's working for the suburb next door that's just a tiny bit denser." And a lot of Americans want to live in a rural area with acres of land, but in a commuting way. US policy often supports this choice - fuel prices, road subsidies, same-price delivery by the postal service, and billions spent trying to give them modern communications choices. That last one is key for this. The US is offering billions for rural internet and Starlink is going after that money. Starlink is partly happening because the US government put a large amount of money available to anyone creating rural broadband options. The US Postal Service makes sure that rural areas can still get their deliveries. I think "how far outside the urban area" is a hard question to answer because it's hard to answer where the urban area is in the US. The issue is that there's a lot of people that live in pretty rural areas in the US. Amazon and other deliveries are available. LTE and often even 5G is available, though often not with enough bandwidth at the moment to supply home internet (though companies are looking to change that). A lot of places with low density have fine wired internet. But when there isn't a clear demarcation of urban vs rural, there's still going to be a place where certain things stop, but people are going to wonder about the cut-off: I'm just outside the place that has broadband and it's only 15% less dense here. I think that's the big thing. You might be 50 or 100 miles outside the city, but the gradual reduction in density while still being surrounded by non-farmers can make you feel like you're still a part of non-rural life while your neighbors and shops get farther and farther apart. Good wired home internet usually extends well away from cities in terms of miles (though often with annoying monopolies), but people really spread themselves out in the US.
geerlingguy 5y ago
My biggest gripe is the fact I can't transfer it to my cousin, who lives on a farm with 300 Kbps DSL, 70 miles away. Back when preorders started, it wasn't obvious how slow Starlink would be to expand, and it also wasn't obvious transfers wouldn't be a supported feature for many months. Even so, my cousin also signed up in hopes to get Starlink, and 11 months later her date was moved from 'late 2021' to 'late 2022'. And yes, I've tried many address hacks to see if I could get my dish moved there, none have worked. They shouldn't have dropped the 'beta' moniker last year if the service is truly so far from its final state (IMO).
- csours 5y ago
  What happens if you just take it there and plug it in?
  - causi 5y ago
    Yeah, that was my first thought. After reports of success from people mounting it to the roof of their RVs I thought you could move it anywhere you wanted.
    - Diederich 5y ago
      Each Dishy is assigned to a specific ground station, so you can freely move it around as long as it's 'close enough' to that ground station. (I don't know the distance by memory..) There's a way to ask Starlink to switch your ground station, which is what people with the RVs are doing.
    - AshleyGrant 5y ago
      You can physically move it wherever you want, but you have to hope that there is an opening available in the "cell" at the new location, otherwise, you've got a paperweight.
  - reportingsjr 5y ago
    The dish won't work since it knows where it is via GPS and where it is supposed to be. There is a little bit of tolerance in where the dish can be moved, but certainly not 70 miles of leeway.
Diederich 5y ago
> If you already have internet, then Starlink is not for you. We bought a property in a very rural area in mid 2020. One of the hard requirements was verified high speed Internet access. Our home has good performing Comcast. But I also pay $100/month and have a Dishy on my roof. Fortunately our home is very tall and we're able to get about 95% visibility, since our home is in the middle of a forest. Why am I paying an extra $100/month? Because our Comcast has outages. It's not surprising since we're at the end of miles and miles of above ground cable that has hundreds of trees pushing up against the wires and poles. I'm a pretty well off 'tech person' so an additional $100/month to cover a few hours of use makes sense. (Wireless coverage is terrible around here, so that was never a backup possibility.) I'm pretty convinced that Starlink is not only going to revolutionize many people's lives, but it's also going to be a cash cow for SpaceX, in large part funding their Mars ambitions.
- deeviant 5y ago
  It would be no surprise to hear, I think, that a lot of us on this forum are well off 'tech persons'. Internet scores higher than running water for me on prioritization, but I still couldn't bear to waste the resources to have a sat uplink for the 1-2 days a year comcast goes down. Taking a slot from somebody that actually needs it feels off to me too. It would only likely be worth it if your particular area has abnormally bad comcast uptime. That said, we just purchased a beautiful rural property with a wonderful house, and will rent it out until starlink or fiber( local company is 1-2 years out) hits it. So maybe I'm just sore that people are taking starlink slots when they absolutely don't need it and its 2 years out =P
  - Diederich 5y ago
    All fair points, thank you. And congrats on your property! The comcast outages are far above anything that's 'normal'. And honestly if it was just me, as a decades long 'devops' person, losing network connectivity briefly every few days and for tens of minutes or longer multiple times a month would not be too bad. But my wife does zoom/video professionally all day every day with paying clients, so when comcast goes to crap it's very important for her to be able to reconnect over starlink ASAP.
woah 5y ago
The hype a couple of years ago was at a fever pitch. Starlink was going to replace all forms of internet with space-ey goodness. Millions of people getting 100mbps for $50/m on cable who just didn't like the cable company's call center reps were clamoring for Elon to save them from their predicament. I was working in the ISP space, and we did some rough back of the envelope calculations which showed that Starlink could only ever service a very low population density, based on the radio spectrum fundamentals. Now people are realizing the obvious- it's an incremental improvement over other satellite internet options. It's great for people in very rural places, but if you are in or near a town of any size, you likely have a better option available.
- humanlion87 5y ago
  I don't think the general hype was that Starlink would replace existing ISPs everywhere. It was always understood that this product was for rural/remote areas that don't have direct lines for internet connection.
  - StillBored 5y ago
    Well, at least in my case there was some hope that it would set a floor for internet service in larger towns where the local cable/telco monopoly just milks the customers for $100+ a month for really subpar internet service (I pay about that for 20Mbit upload from the cable co, the DSL provider can barely do 2 up 40 mbits down for roughly the same price). Where as a couple miles away the DSL provider strung fiber to compete with google and the price is less than they would charge me for said crummy internet. The joke here is that the lucky few percent of people who can get fiber here have two choices, but the rest of us are stuck in the 1990s. And this is a dense area, far more dense than 100 miles W of here in the little towns of population 1k that can also get fiber from their local telco co-op.
    - woah 5y ago
      That density means there is no way that Starlink will be able to service more than a couple percent of your town any time soon.
mhitza 5y ago
> 15 GB (2 days of non-streaming usage for me) I needed to run mostly on LTE tethered connectivity for a couple of months, and 30 GB a month of data was more than enough for my daily development process, and background youtube music mixes (at lower bitrates). Unless you're rebuilding containers/redownloading dependecies daily, 15 GB of data should be pretty reasonable.
CivBase 5y ago
The same could be said of critical reviews of HughesNet. Its value is usually in being the least bad of a limited, very bad options. That doesn't make the critisism any less valuable. Say I'm considering moving to a rural location. One of my barriers to moving is the quality of my internet access. Along comes this fancy new Starlink service and I might be tempted to think "problem solved". But reviews like this allow me to anticipate problems with the service and reconsider moving altogether. If Starlink is the least bad of your bad options, then this review probably just isn't for you.
BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
> 15 GB (2 days of non-streaming usage for me) This sounds exceptionally high. What do you do that uses so much?
- swah 5y ago
  Probably 4k video content ? > The download size of a 140-minute 4K video, for example, would be approximately (14 GB x 2) + (.233 GB x 20) = 33 GB or .233 GB x 140 = 33 GB.
  - sleepybrett 5y ago
    he said non streaming.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  There are a lot of data guzzlers in a modern household... seriously, the proliferation of high-speed broadband internet has had massive consequences for everyone not enjoying that luxury. The worst offenders are social networks like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, especially if you have video auto play enabled. Because almost everyone has an ultra-high-DPI screen these days, they expect high video and image quality, and that's a lot of data. Next up are media sites: auto-playing videos again, followed by "normal" advertising and actual content. Just for popular papers and media: A single (!) page load of the front page of Germany's respected newspaper Süddeutsche clocks in at 7.7 MB, Spiegel has 6.6 MB, tabloid BILD has 10 MB. US NYT is 9 MB, Fox News is 6MB, CNBC 8.7 MB. Even relatively plain Stackoverflow's front page clocks in at 2 MB. And then, there are all the updaters (looking at you, Windows Update), the other phone-home telemetry and analytics stuff, even more ads side-loaded by modern "smart TVs"... Where the fuck have we gone wrong? Is there any chance to get "the old" Internet back without putting everyone in advertising in jail for a decade?
- fastaguy88 5y ago
  Perhaps I over estimated. I know that my 15 Gb hotspot allocation only lasted a few weeks (days was perhaps too strong). I used two carriers to get 30 Gb. But one MacOS upgrade (on one computer) and the allocation is gone. And then there is Zoom. I think that it is difficult to estimate one's internet usage if you can go somewhere else when you need do to something big. If 15 Gb is your only allocation, for home and work, it doesn't last long.
onemoresoop 5y ago
What if you move, do you have to buy another kit??

ghaff 5y ago

Starlink is a game changer if you don't have decent wired broadband. We had about 1 Mbps download and were the last house on the road who could get it. Then we didn't even have that. Verizon hotspot was "ok" but data was expensive so you had to watch your usage. Starlink isn't perfect--had a couple of days downtime over Christmas--but basically it works fine with 20+ Mbps bandwidth. With the prior DSL, I couldn't have worked from the house in a meaningful way. (My AT&T wireless is also very marginal.) Now I mostly could.

clvx 5y ago
Similar situation but I switched to T-Mobile. I have a Starlink order but it got delayed 6 months. At this point, I'll just cancel it because T-Mobile Home Internet is a game changer.
- alexktz 5y ago
  How "unlimited" is the T-Mobile Home Internet package?
  - AshleyGrant 5y ago
    In my experience it's been totally unlimited. I try not to abuse it, but when I re-image my desktop, Backblaze will end up uploading multiple terabytes (even though I've inherited the backup state and the drive/directory structure is identical). I've never had a single issue. The Home Internet service is 100% deprioritized compared to postpaid cell phone data, so they really are selling "excess" capacity.
- cagey 5y ago
  I did exactly this. Started using T-Mobile Home Internet (5G "trashcan" modem) back in 21.02 (same month I ordered Starlink); TMHI service has gotten progressively better since that time. 21.12 I received my Starlink ultimatum ("if you don't cancel in 14(?) days we're sending your HW and billing you $100's more") and I decided TMHI @ $50/month (yes, completely unlimited) was sufficient. Also Verizon now has competing 5G and LTE offerings, so I figure worst case I (who have NO wired ISP option) at least have a strong backup plan. As another redundancy: everyone in my household has migrated to Visible cell phone service, which provides unlimited (but throttled at 5-10 Mbps) hotspot which we use maybe 2-3 times per month when TMHI service gets sluggish.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  I thought about switching to one of those mobile internet providers, but it wasn’t available in my area, which I don’t quite understand. My providers network is certainly available, as I use it on my phone daily. Maybe it’s using some different band?
  - cagey 5y ago
    I suspect availability of 5G or LTE "home internet" service is gated by not only signal strength but also by the vendor's assessment of their (tower, backhaul?) capacity in the locale.
    - mdasen 5y ago
      It's definitely not just about coverage, but also about how much capacity they have in an area. They don't want to overload the network given that home internet users will use a lot more data than mobile users. Likewise, they don't want to sign up people for them to have a bad experience, cancel service, and spread bad word of mouth. T-Mobile has been managing how many people they sign up in an area. Sometimes T-Mobile's home internet is available in your area, but then they get a certain number of signups and it becomes unavailable in your area until they're able to increase capacity or customers cancel. It's possible that it was available in their area and others signed up for it. AT&T is only offering service in very limited areas and it seems like they're mostly trying to replace their DSL connections that they don't want to upgrade to fiber. Verizon's service is currently pretty small scale, but they're looking to grow it. Again, it will be limited areas because no one wants to overwhelm the network. Even if you have good phone service, there's a big difference between someone using 10GB on mobile and someone using 500GB as a home user. Signing up 10 home users could be like adding 500 new phone users in a small area. That can be a lot of traffic and they don't want to start seeing their mobile users cancel service because home users are clogging up the network. So they want to roll it out a bit slowly, especially as they increase capacity over the next few years with midband 5G.
  - clvx 5y ago
    My location “didn’t have coverage” as I live at the edge of my town followed by Murdoch’s ranch next to me. I talked to the rep to the point of just let me try it as there’s nothing to lose. They already provide full refund on the product for the first 30 days. At the beginning the signal and speeds were shit(using trashcan). I installed a couple of MIMO antennas. Now, I have 30Mbs up/down consistently. I believe 5G is gonna be a game changer for rural areas. It’s just easy: plug it, turn it on, use it. No technicians, no wiring (if you don’t use antennas), no fixed place in your house. Also check cellmapper to check for near by antennas and bands. More info in r/tmobileisp
spaniard89277 5y ago
What about a small coop ISP? If you manage to use electric or telephone posts deploying fiber and getting a carrier is doable, at least here in Spain.
- mdasen 5y ago
  Some towns in the US have done this, but it isn't without difficulties. Just looking at a satellite map of Spain, I see La Langa. It seems like it has very few people, but they all live in a small town center. Looking at Uclés, it's the same: tiny place, but everyone is living in the town center. Let's look at Potomac, MD in the US. The roads are sprawling with giant houses all far apart. That's a lot more distance to run fiber to get it to each house. Potomac is a rich suburb of DC and has fine internet (it's still dense enough for that), but the US keeps sprawling. Look at a satellite view of Pike Township, PA. There's a lot of houses with huge distances in between and no discernible town center. > If you manage to use electric or telephone posts deploying fiber and getting a carrier is doable I think this can also be an issue in the US since place might not have easy/cheap access to those utility poles. Title II carriers in the US get cheap, regulated access to utility poles. That's traditionally been your phone company. I believe the FCC tried reclassifying broadband as Title II under the Obama administration, but it might have been reversed under the Trump administration. If you're someone that already has access to the utility poles, you don't want more people getting cheap access to them. Even if you have access to the utility poles, you can face difficulty. As noted, you aren't wiring up a town center, you can be wiring up places with a huge amount of distance between people. Even if that isn't a problem, property owners might want new cables buried. Even when power lines are above ground, sometimes they're underground from the street to the house. Many houses might be set back from the street by 50 meters so it can be a larger distance. You can have a 300m road with 3 houses on it each with a 50m set back from the street. That's not to say it isn't possible (and some towns have created coop ISPs), but costs add up. Uclés has 140 people in it, but everyone seems to live within a 250m radius of the city center. That seems pretty easy to wire up. Pike Township, PA has 1,700 people that are incredibly spread out. That seems a lot harder to wire up. It's not impossible, but it seems harder.
swah 5y ago
For those of us outside US, how far from the urban area you have to be to not have good LTE and/or fiber internet? (Also, does Amazon deliver in those places?)
- BenjiWiebe 5y ago
  No Amazon doesn't deliver in rural areas (central Kansas, USA, anyways), if you mean Amazon trucks/drivers. However we can still get Amazon packages just fine via UPS, FedEx, or the US postal service. Actually I've only seen an Amazon delivery vehicle one or two times...
- mdasen 5y ago
  It's hard to answer something like this. Even for Europe, it's hard to answer something like this. There's a big difference between Inverness in Scotland (47,000 people in the city and 63,000 in the urban area) and London. Are you measuring from the city center or from where things drop off to farmland? In Europe, cities often drop off into farmland very abruptly. You have built-up areas and then very abruptly farmland. In the US, you can have suburbs where there's 1 house on an acre (4,000 square meters) going for a long time. Even 1 house every 2-4 acres (8,000-12,000 square meters) isn't unusual. If you look at a satellite map between cities in the Netherlands, you can see that there isn't any sprawling houses between Rotterdam and Utrecht. Places like Oudewater exists, but it's dense. It might not be as dense as larger cities, but people don't have enormous plots of land. You can easily walk to neighbors and shops. In the US, a lot of people live in areas where it can be 5 miles to get to shops. In the US, people often have the issue that the wired internet doesn't go up their street which might be a couple miles with only a handful of houses. In the US, they might face costs getting it from the street to their house because their house is set back a hundred meters from the road. This isn't super typical, but it's typical enough that it effects a lot of people. I think part of the issue is that there is no real demarcation between the urban area and outside it in the US. I can look at a satellite view of a city in Europe and clearly discern city vs farmland. In the US, a lot of rich people left the city for suburbs where they could set land use policies that kept lower income people (and often minorities they didn't want around) out of their town (and out of their schools and out of their tax base). They still wanted to be able to commute into the city, but often passed laws mandating minimum lot sizes, minimum setbacks from the street for houses, and emphasized local control to prevent housing they deemed undesirable from being made. These places have fine wired internet. But they kinda slowly melt into progressively more rural places rather than having a clear demarcation. The US's emphasis on cars and a certain cultural idealism around rural life means that there are people that want to live semi-rural while not really having a rural lifestyle or job. They just drive farther and cheap fuel and subsidies make that possible. The lack of coherent land use policies means that the area where people consider themselves as part of an urban area can keep expanding. Maybe a developer wants to build new housing. The city and suburbs don't want more housing and so the developer picks a piece of land just past the last suburb. It's another 15 minutes from the city by car, but with skyrocketing housing prices, there are probably going to be some people who think it's a reasonable trade-off. What's the difference between an hour commute and an hour and 15 minute commute? Why shouldn't I trade 10 hours of my life every month for a larger house? A lot of European countries have greenbelts around their cities where you aren't allowed to do a lot of development. It prevents things like the US suburbs which initially were thought of as 5-10 miles outside the city and now often go all the way to the next city creating a giant area that people commute from. But these suburbs aren't the problem. The thing is that the suburbs then meld into really rural areas - but those really rural areas aren't that far from the suburbs that rich people live in and commute to the city from and those suburbs have big-box stores like Walmart and Target and they have high speed internet. If you live in a rural area that's 5 miles from such a suburb, you think "I'm not in the middle of nowhere! I'm just 5 miles from this place that has a Walmart and high speed internet and a supermarket!" If you're 5 miles outside a city in Europe, you're in farmland - but very often the houses all seem to be on one main road even through that farmland rather than up winding roads that lead nowhere (other than a few people's houses). In the US, because there's this gradual drop-off in density, there can be this "why not just a little more" mentality. "Why not just a little farther out to get a tiny bit more land? It's working for the suburb next door that's just a tiny bit denser." And a lot of Americans want to live in a rural area with acres of land, but in a commuting way. US policy often supports this choice - fuel prices, road subsidies, same-price delivery by the postal service, and billions spent trying to give them modern communications choices. That last one is key for this. The US is offering billions for rural internet and Starlink is going after that money. Starlink is partly happening because the US government put a large amount of money available to anyone creating rural broadband options. The US Postal Service makes sure that rural areas can still get their deliveries. I think "how far outside the urban area" is a hard question to answer because it's hard to answer where the urban area is in the US. The issue is that there's a lot of people that live in pretty rural areas in the US. Amazon and other deliveries are available. LTE and often even 5G is available, though often not with enough bandwidth at the moment to supply home internet (though companies are looking to change that). A lot of places with low density have fine wired internet. But when there isn't a clear demarcation of urban vs rural, there's still going to be a place where certain things stop, but people are going to wonder about the cut-off: I'm just outside the place that has broadband and it's only 15% less dense here. I think that's the big thing. You might be 50 or 100 miles outside the city, but the gradual reduction in density while still being surrounded by non-farmers can make you feel like you're still a part of non-rural life while your neighbors and shops get farther and farther apart. Good wired home internet usually extends well away from cities in terms of miles (though often with annoying monopolies), but people really spread themselves out in the US.

geerlingguy 5y ago

My biggest gripe is the fact I can't transfer it to my cousin, who lives on a farm with 300 Kbps DSL, 70 miles away. Back when preorders started, it wasn't obvious how slow Starlink would be to expand, and it also wasn't obvious transfers wouldn't be a supported feature for many months. Even so, my cousin also signed up in hopes to get Starlink, and 11 months later her date was moved from 'late 2021' to 'late 2022'. And yes, I've tried many address hacks to see if I could get my dish moved there, none have worked. They shouldn't have dropped the 'beta' moniker last year if the service is truly so far from its final state (IMO).

csours 5y ago
What happens if you just take it there and plug it in?
- causi 5y ago
  Yeah, that was my first thought. After reports of success from people mounting it to the roof of their RVs I thought you could move it anywhere you wanted.
  - Diederich 5y ago
    Each Dishy is assigned to a specific ground station, so you can freely move it around as long as it's 'close enough' to that ground station. (I don't know the distance by memory..) There's a way to ask Starlink to switch your ground station, which is what people with the RVs are doing.
  - AshleyGrant 5y ago
    You can physically move it wherever you want, but you have to hope that there is an opening available in the "cell" at the new location, otherwise, you've got a paperweight.
- reportingsjr 5y ago
  The dish won't work since it knows where it is via GPS and where it is supposed to be. There is a little bit of tolerance in where the dish can be moved, but certainly not 70 miles of leeway.

Diederich 5y ago

> If you already have internet, then Starlink is not for you. We bought a property in a very rural area in mid 2020. One of the hard requirements was verified high speed Internet access. Our home has good performing Comcast. But I also pay $100/month and have a Dishy on my roof. Fortunately our home is very tall and we're able to get about 95% visibility, since our home is in the middle of a forest. Why am I paying an extra $100/month? Because our Comcast has outages. It's not surprising since we're at the end of miles and miles of above ground cable that has hundreds of trees pushing up against the wires and poles. I'm a pretty well off 'tech person' so an additional $100/month to cover a few hours of use makes sense. (Wireless coverage is terrible around here, so that was never a backup possibility.) I'm pretty convinced that Starlink is not only going to revolutionize many people's lives, but it's also going to be a cash cow for SpaceX, in large part funding their Mars ambitions.

deeviant 5y ago
It would be no surprise to hear, I think, that a lot of us on this forum are well off 'tech persons'. Internet scores higher than running water for me on prioritization, but I still couldn't bear to waste the resources to have a sat uplink for the 1-2 days a year comcast goes down. Taking a slot from somebody that actually needs it feels off to me too. It would only likely be worth it if your particular area has abnormally bad comcast uptime. That said, we just purchased a beautiful rural property with a wonderful house, and will rent it out until starlink or fiber( local company is 1-2 years out) hits it. So maybe I'm just sore that people are taking starlink slots when they absolutely don't need it and its 2 years out =P
- Diederich 5y ago
  All fair points, thank you. And congrats on your property! The comcast outages are far above anything that's 'normal'. And honestly if it was just me, as a decades long 'devops' person, losing network connectivity briefly every few days and for tens of minutes or longer multiple times a month would not be too bad. But my wife does zoom/video professionally all day every day with paying clients, so when comcast goes to crap it's very important for her to be able to reconnect over starlink ASAP.

woah 5y ago

The hype a couple of years ago was at a fever pitch. Starlink was going to replace all forms of internet with space-ey goodness. Millions of people getting 100mbps for $50/m on cable who just didn't like the cable company's call center reps were clamoring for Elon to save them from their predicament. I was working in the ISP space, and we did some rough back of the envelope calculations which showed that Starlink could only ever service a very low population density, based on the radio spectrum fundamentals. Now people are realizing the obvious- it's an incremental improvement over other satellite internet options. It's great for people in very rural places, but if you are in or near a town of any size, you likely have a better option available.

humanlion87 5y ago
I don't think the general hype was that Starlink would replace existing ISPs everywhere. It was always understood that this product was for rural/remote areas that don't have direct lines for internet connection.
- StillBored 5y ago
  Well, at least in my case there was some hope that it would set a floor for internet service in larger towns where the local cable/telco monopoly just milks the customers for $100+ a month for really subpar internet service (I pay about that for 20Mbit upload from the cable co, the DSL provider can barely do 2 up 40 mbits down for roughly the same price). Where as a couple miles away the DSL provider strung fiber to compete with google and the price is less than they would charge me for said crummy internet. The joke here is that the lucky few percent of people who can get fiber here have two choices, but the rest of us are stuck in the 1990s. And this is a dense area, far more dense than 100 miles W of here in the little towns of population 1k that can also get fiber from their local telco co-op.
  - woah 5y ago
    That density means there is no way that Starlink will be able to service more than a couple percent of your town any time soon.

mhitza 5y ago

> 15 GB (2 days of non-streaming usage for me) I needed to run mostly on LTE tethered connectivity for a couple of months, and 30 GB a month of data was more than enough for my daily development process, and background youtube music mixes (at lower bitrates). Unless you're rebuilding containers/redownloading dependecies daily, 15 GB of data should be pretty reasonable.

CivBase 5y ago

The same could be said of critical reviews of HughesNet. Its value is usually in being the least bad of a limited, very bad options. That doesn't make the critisism any less valuable. Say I'm considering moving to a rural location. One of my barriers to moving is the quality of my internet access. Along comes this fancy new Starlink service and I might be tempted to think "problem solved". But reviews like this allow me to anticipate problems with the service and reconsider moving altogether. If Starlink is the least bad of your bad options, then this review probably just isn't for you.

BugsJustFindMe 5y ago

> 15 GB (2 days of non-streaming usage for me) This sounds exceptionally high. What do you do that uses so much?

swah 5y ago
Probably 4k video content ? > The download size of a 140-minute 4K video, for example, would be approximately (14 GB x 2) + (.233 GB x 20) = 33 GB or .233 GB x 140 = 33 GB.
- sleepybrett 5y ago
  he said non streaming.
mschuster91 5y ago
There are a lot of data guzzlers in a modern household... seriously, the proliferation of high-speed broadband internet has had massive consequences for everyone not enjoying that luxury. The worst offenders are social networks like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, especially if you have video auto play enabled. Because almost everyone has an ultra-high-DPI screen these days, they expect high video and image quality, and that's a lot of data. Next up are media sites: auto-playing videos again, followed by "normal" advertising and actual content. Just for popular papers and media: A single (!) page load of the front page of Germany's respected newspaper Süddeutsche clocks in at 7.7 MB, Spiegel has 6.6 MB, tabloid BILD has 10 MB. US NYT is 9 MB, Fox News is 6MB, CNBC 8.7 MB. Even relatively plain Stackoverflow's front page clocks in at 2 MB. And then, there are all the updaters (looking at you, Windows Update), the other phone-home telemetry and analytics stuff, even more ads side-loaded by modern "smart TVs"... Where the fuck have we gone wrong? Is there any chance to get "the old" Internet back without putting everyone in advertising in jail for a decade?
fastaguy88 5y ago
Perhaps I over estimated. I know that my 15 Gb hotspot allocation only lasted a few weeks (days was perhaps too strong). I used two carriers to get 30 Gb. But one MacOS upgrade (on one computer) and the allocation is gone. And then there is Zoom. I think that it is difficult to estimate one's internet usage if you can go somewhere else when you need do to something big. If 15 Gb is your only allocation, for home and work, it doesn't last long.

onemoresoop 5y ago

What if you move, do you have to buy another kit??