3 ms·

Perhaps a dumb question but what does oversubscription entail here?

by junon 4y ago

Sebguer 4y ago
Too many people, not enough bandwidth.
candiddevmike 4y ago
Latency, 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 ago
Starlink 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 ago
  Also, 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 ago
Insufficient density or spectrum to serve all users in an area
walrus01 4y ago
oversubscription 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.

Perhaps a dumb question but what does oversubscription entail here?

by junon 4y ago

Perhaps a dumb question but what does oversubscription entail here?

Sebguer 4y ago

Too many people, not enough bandwidth.

candiddevmike 4y ago

Latency, 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 ago

Starlink 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 ago
Also, 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 ago

Insufficient density or spectrum to serve all users in an area

walrus01 4y ago

oversubscription 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.