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IMO, I'm unsure starlink can stick the landing. I think they'll end up facing challenging oversubscription issues, which is why they're slowing the roll out.
by candiddevmike 4y ago
IMO, I'm unsure starlink can stick the landing. I think they'll end up facing challenging oversubscription issues, which is why they're slowing the roll out. 5G could easily expand to fill in the service gaps and deliver better, more reliable service. I think the key differentiator that everyone assumed was going to be included ASAP was a global mesh network, with the ground based repeater setup it's not that novel of a solution.
- junon 4y agoPerhaps a dumb question but what does oversubscription entail here?
- Sebguer 4y agoToo many people, not enough bandwidth.
- candiddevmike 4y agoLatency, timeouts, general slowness. There are a lot of layers that starlink needs to optimize/scale, they're effectively trying to operate as a global cell provider.
- whatshisface 4y agoStarlink announces that they will make service available at a certain quality for $X/month, but more people want that than they can sell it to. Basic economic theory says they should raise the price to find equilibrium, but consumers hate that kind of thing, tying (in some cases) the company's hands. I don't really think that Starlink's hands are tied with respect to price increases, though. I doubt over-subscription is all that possible, unless they overestimated their own capacity when signing existing contracts.
- out_of_protocol 4y agoAlso, they can sell a set of one dish plus some wifi/wimax repeaters for the whole village or something. Could be really nice solution for both sides
- dmw_ng 4y agoInsufficient density or spectrum to serve all users in an area
- walrus01 4y agooversubscription is a necessity in the economics of last-mile consumer grade ISP services no matter what the tech: ptmp wireless last mile, docsis3 cablemodem on coax, gpon/10Gpon fiber last mile, dsl, active ethernet fiber last mile, geostationary consumer grade ku and ka-band vsat, starlink, etc. if you look at the traffic usage charts from 50 houses on residential last mile gigabit connections the average customer really doesn't move that much data. you'll get the occasional outlier such as a person who is really enthusiastic about torrenting 75GB 2160p movies but when averaged out over a group of dozens or more customers it's generally a non issue. the danger is in oversubscribing your network to the point at an unreasonable ratio that the ordinary end user starts to see bad packet loss, jitter, latency, slow speeds, etc.
- dbspin 4y agoDon't assume that the US is representative here. Currently living in Germany, and in most neighbourhoods (even here in Berlin) fibre to the home is unavailable and the best connections available are DSL. Starlink would be an enormous upgrade, and there's a huge untapped market. And that's in the middle of the developed world. Presumably lots of other markets are in a similar position, and there are many increasingly populous places where weather, remoteness, elevation and other issues make other connections unavailable for the foreseeable future. Starlink should have no problem greatly increasing their customer base.
- candiddevmike 4y agoI don't doubt that starlink can find customers, I don't think they'll be able to keep them long enough to make a profit.
- justapassenger 4y agoStarlink doesn’t work for anything else than very sparsely populated areas. Population density in most of Europe is beyond of what they can support.
- rlt 4y agoStarlink works fine in densely populated areas, they just have a fixed number of users per square mile they can serve regardless of the density. There also tends to be more competition in densely populated areas (but perhaps more people looking for backup internet)
- Reason077 4y ago> "fibre to the home is unavailable and the best connections available are DSL. Starlink would be an enormous upgrade" 5G is also an enormous upgrade from DSL, and better suited for dense urban areas. Here in the UK it's at least 4X faster than Starlink and 1/4 the cost. I haven't had any fixed-line internet connection at all in the past 2 years since cheap 5G became available. Starlink is great for rural areas, which often have poor DSL and neither fibre nor good mobile coverage.
- 4y ago
- jazzyjackson 4y agoIs there a long range and a short range version of 5G ? I was under the impression it was higher freq and less ranger, meant for dense cities. I live about 10 minutes from a small city and still don't get 3G signal, hardly enough to hold a phone conversation. Is 5G really competing for rural users like me?
- MrRadar 4y ago5G can be deployed on the same spectrum as LTE, including the low frequency bands that support long range. For those deployments you do get faster speeds compared to LTE but not significantly (I've read it's about 25% faster for the same spectrum). All 3 major cellular providers in the US have 5G deployed on their low-band spectrum (T-Mobile on band 71 (600 MHz) and AT&T and Verizon on band 5 (800 MHz)).
- Reason077 4y ago> "(I've read it's about 25% faster for the same spectrum)" I get 200-400 Mbps on 5G, on a UK network with 40 Mhz of TDD 3.6 Ghz 5G spectrum. On 4G LTE I rarely see more than 50 Mbps or so (Typically 20+20 Mhz FDD LTE at 2.1 or 2.6 Ghz).
- jazzyjackson 4y agonice, thanks for the info
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- elif 4y agothey have already addressed throughput in v2 satellites. the only route to failure is if starship cant reach orbit and return.
- senectus1 4y agothink outside the big city box. 5G is only good for high population density.