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This is completely wrong though, I've seen 220 down/40 up out of it. They've apparently been trying to stay right around their commitment level while building o

by xoa 4y ago

This is completely wrong though, I've seen 220 down/40 up out of it. They've apparently been trying to stay right around their commitment level while building out as quickly as possible, and let it slip a bit under on a third party speed test. But that can be relatively easily remedied by reducing subscriber growth vs new satellite launches. And literally just today we saw another significant step towards Starship launching with the first static fire of Raptor 2 on a full Super Heavy booster. That'll bring far more launches of the much more powerful Starlink v2.0 satellites. It's brand new cutting edge technology bringing service right now to people abandoned to dialup or ludicrously expensive lines or HEO sat for decades. It's already been a life changer. Their plans for further scaling are solid and in progress. The tech is obviously and objectively capable. The lobbying against it has been intense for completely befuddling reasons though, but even so this is a really disappointing decision.

carbocation 4y ago
I agree with all of the aspirational statements you have made here, but I still think this was the right choice. A threshold was set. The threshold was not met. Sounds like they can reapply, and if they provide the necessary service level at that time, then they can get the $.
- btilly 4y ago
  I would agree if the same standard was being applied to the existing telecoms. But it isn't. In the last several decades, telecoms have routinely been paid billions for projects that didn't produce, and then won money in the next round as well. Indeed the fight isn't usually about whether to continue this, but who should win this round (established telecoms, municipal broadband, etc). It was a surprise when Starlink won in the first place. But it is no surprise that it is being held to a higher standard than, say, Charter.
  - stephen_greet 4y ago
    What do you mean by "applied to the existing telecoms"? For this RDOF subsidy, no major telecoms have been given any money. It's totally fair to criticize subsidies that have been historically given major telecom companies when they failed to deliver (and they have). But, I don't think it's fair to say "historically the US government has given subsidies to telecoms that have failed to deliver, so you should keep doing that".
    - btilly 4y ago
      There have been a series of "give broadband to rural areas" bills starting with the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Generally great sums of money are given, and generally only limited customers get broadband. And then a few years later there is a new bill with similar results. Given this history, I am inclined to believe that actually not giving money to Starlink for a fairly small performance miss is motivated by something other than just applying the rules. If in a few years it is clear that policies have changed, and telecoms no longer get the gravy train either, then I'll change my opinion. Ending this corruption would be a welcome change.
      - bobthepanda 4y ago
        Perhaps the reason Starlink is being held to this scrutiny is because of those previous attempts being failures and to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The solution to “the old people weren’t being vetted enough” is not “the new players should also not be vetted enough.”
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        That was the one where AT&T took a half $B of taxed money to build out fiber, but never lit it. Because nothing said they had to.
- xoa 4y ago
  Government has given hundreds of billions in broadband funding to the giant telecoms and cable for ages for absolute nada [EDIT, 1]. The clients I put in Starlink for last year had a 10 meg connection for which they were charged hundreds of dollars per month and were fortunate since a mile away it was 56k modem of HughesNet or nothing. It's really good tech. I've been hearing promises and aspirations about fiber for like 17 fucking years. I can completely believe that in designing and putting into being a brand new network like that SpaceX has misjudged cell density vs satellite density and capabilities in areas and let the average speeds fall. But given what they're doing and the (non)alternatives I'd be a lot happier if there was some leeway to bring that back up and see how v2 comes out. Funding very promising technology that is aggressively trying to ramp hard and has a clear 1-3 year horizon is precisely the sort of thing government should do after all their failures up until now. And there are others less well off within a hundred miles who were hoping to get Starlink if the monthly cost could be brought down by this program. And Starlink aren't assholes like the incumbent players either. No datacaps, zero billing crap with surprise charges or fees, no port blocking, no bullshit in general. Of course more speed would be better, but that should be worth something too vs theoretically faster connections that then punish or restrict. Bottom line: I don't think these $886 million now going elsewhere are going to benefit even a single person up here near the Canadian border in the next few years. Fiber is still not going to appear here. The border is over 3000 miles long. In contrast Starlink can do something now (if you look at the Starlink map [0], there are very few filled cells in northern New England or northern Midwest/Pacific West up near Canada), and has the real promise of doing better. Now that will be harder, and I do not believe anything better is going to come of it for any of us in that time frame. If fiber comes in 2028 wonderful, Starlink could be cancelled then. That's a long time though to still be on 56k/HEOsat. To sibling comments talking crap like "do you work for SpaceX" if you wish to volunteer and come up to lay fiber for us right fucking now by all means. ---- 0: https://www.starlink.com/map https://www.starlink.com/map 1: I'm editing in response to tyrfing below because I suspect I'll hit the HN reply speed cap sometime shortly. This got tons of coverage in the 00s in particular but has fallen away over time as these things tend to. I had a bunch bookmarked at one point from old /. stories and the like and actual paper books but all the sites now seem to be dead. Here's a more recent one though that seems to cover the gist and could be a place to start for more: "The Book Of Broken Promises: $400 Billion Broadband Scandal" https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5839394 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...
orangepanda 4y ago
If you average AWS snowmobile out, it does about 1 Tbps. Has some latency though.
pclmulqdq 4y ago
I am hearing that lots of people are now getting under 50/15 out of it, and nobody I know with starlink has gotten better than 100 down. That is not really broadband. Those people may be in regions that are oversubscribed, but that is also partly a problem related to the price being too low. Of course, if they raise the price, then it might not be considered cheap enough for these subsidies either.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hedora 4y ago
  I get more than that on the RV plan in an oversubscribed area (jumped the queue). I’d be lucky to get 5/1.5 from frontier, and their DSL service in the area goes down every few weeks. This seems like a case of lobbyist-induced double standards.
  - swatcoder 4y ago
    You think Starlink doesn’t have lobbysists? If they failed their qualifying metrics and did win the subsidies anyway, wouldn’t mirror universe hedora be here complaining about that double standard? To me at least, this seems less obviously suspect than that would have.
    - hedora 4y ago
      Of course they do. I’m just wondering when the last two decades of RBOF funding (which had no apparent effect) is going to be returned to the federal government.
- jcims 4y ago
  I’ve had it in central Ohio since February 2021. I would say i average ~120M down, ~20M up. There’ve been a few outages, but I’ve never seen a prolonged period of less than 80M down. The fastest thing I can get otherwise is a 10M down, 768K up DSL link. I had been working remote on that since 2008.
- 4y ago
emkoemko 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mccorrinall 4y ago
> The lobbying against it has been intense for completely befuddling reasons though Citation needed. I don’t see why anyone would lobby against starlink or LTD here. Neither won. They money from the fund is not distributed. They can reapply. What the hell are you talking about? If there is lobbying, it’s certainly not against Starlink or LTD getting the funds as subsidiaries. The goals were set, starlink didn’t meet them, they don’t get subsidized. Simple as that.
jeroenhd 4y ago
> I've seen 220 down/40 up out of it. Sounds great. However, I've seen ↓31/↑4 and ↓20/↑10 out of it. Anecdata doesn't prove much. The network is improving, the tech is capable, but the real life performance is not up to snuff. Starlink, much like any company Musk seems to get himself involved with, is promising more than it can deliver, and that hurts when it comes to subsidies. They can have their billions when their network does what it promised to do.
- gibolt 4y ago
  Is anyone else delivering anything even close? Aiming 10-100x better than competitors and missing by a small percentage is considered failure apparently. Hughesnet was one of the best options prior to Starlink.
  - garciasn 4y ago
    No, but they didn't apply for this either; because, they knew they couldn't meet the expectations set by the FCC.
- xoa 4y ago
  >Sounds great. However, I've seen ↓31/↑4 and ↓20/↑10 out of it. Anecdata doesn't prove much. Anecdotes cannot prove population statistics, you need an unbiased random sample for that. But anecdotes absolute can prove limits though. Remember, this is what I was responding to, emphasis added: >Starlink isn't CAPABLE of meeting its performance commitments That's what I took issue with and think is important. Starlink is absolutely capable of those speeds; I've seen them. So the problem isn't the technology, the problem is balancing serving the most people (which is a public good too) with maintaining enough performance on average for each one, all while scaling and evolving the technology fast. I'm assuming SpaceX could have submitted private data showing the public results by ookla were off in some way that would have been sufficient and that the FCC didn't ignore that out of lobbying/politics, so I'm taking it as a given that they did fall behind there. But it's not like Starlink is "done", they're continuing to increase sat numbers, build more ground stations, they're prepping to bring online intersat optical links and have no given a firm date for that (it's required for their marine service to get away from coastal waters), they've got much better sats and a solid process on the rocket to launch them. If we didn't need someone to take on some more risk and help accelerate things, this entire program would be meaningless and there would be no need for government in this space at all! I guess it feels like they're being punished for trying to move faster when that's exactly what lots of Americans need. We needed something better then the crap we've had 10 years ago let alone now. Of course, this may be 100% the correct legal decision depending on the exact language, administration and so on of the program. I could easily see the FCC not doing well on that but that doesn't mean they aren't required to stick to it by law. But that's not what I see most people criticizing it on, they're talking technical and societal angles instead. And on those grounds, I can be disappointed if the program didn't have some leeway. "Needs to be ready by 2028" isn't good enough!
ortusdux 4y ago
I've done speed tests on 4 separate dishes within a 25mi radius of my house, and I consistently got around 90 down/10 up. The fastest test to date I've seen in my area is ~130 down / 60 up.
- oceanplexian 4y ago
  Earlier this year I was pulling 250/40 in Utah. Now during the day I hover around 120/15, with speeds back in the 200’s late at night. Of course YMMV, but it’s more than sufficient for my needs of remote work with several zoom calls per day, as well as streaming 4K content. It is a drag for things like large Steam downloads but I honestly can’t complain.
spmurrayzzz 4y ago
I'm not sure we can really say if their tech is "obviously and objectively capable" at scale. We don't really know enough about the PHY layer modulation or even the mac layer modulation they're using. My guess has always been that they use some flavor of OFDM, but this is a detail thats unrevealed currently. These are incredibly important details for the oversubscription calculus in the access network itself. RDOF aims to hold providers to a much higher standard for rural broadband, and part of that commitment is whether you can deliver speeds across the whole network at scale, not just relying on theoretical top line speeds. The evidence so far per Ookla demonstrates they don't meet muster currently, and since the tech is so new and (mostly) unvetted, it makes sense for the FCC to play it safe here on behalf of the consumer.
- wmf 4y ago
  That information is out there but it's scattered and hard to find. The real bottleneck right now seems to be that the number of beams per satellite is higher than the number of cells per satellite.
  - spmurrayzzz 4y ago
    I haven't seen anything official nor convincing about the aspects I commented on. I've seen the write up on the individual who was able to spin up an SDR to receive beacons from their satellites, but that doesn't really tell you anything about how the signal is modulated.
- zamadatix 4y ago
  The cells are 22km and the traffic path strictly client<->satellite<->ground station at the moment. There isn't really any reasonable scaling concern until you start talking about serving densely populated areas but that's not Starlink's market nor what the RDOF targets/measures anyways and the inability to service a user in a city as well as a rural user shouldn't be reasoning to not provide funding to service those rural users. That said I don't have a problem with the funding being held until the conditions are demonstrably met instead of as funding to meet them. The latter has failed too many times with providers just pocketing money to then stop executing once they have it.
wnevets 4y ago
> This is completely wrong though are you accusing the FCC of lying or just being too incompetent to measure network speeds?
enragedcacti 4y ago
> They've apparently been trying to stay right around their commitment level while building out as quickly as possible, and let it slip a bit under on a third party speed test. They've actually been below their commitment for all of 2021 and 2022 so far: they started 2021Q1 with a 16.29 average and 2022Q1 had dropped to 9.33 average. That's a pretty worrying trend and I don't think its the FCC's job to evaluate literal rocket science to decide whether or not they believe SpaceX will meet their obligations. SpaceX chose what speeds to pitch in their bid, how many satellites and ground stations to deploy, and how many customers to let onto their network. While I agree that Starlink has a bright future I can't help but see this as SpaceX clutching defeat from the jaws of victory. We've been far too lenient with ISPs in the past with broadband funding, and this is what keeping them to their word looks like. https://www.ookla.com/articles/starlink-hughesnet-viasat-performance-q1-2022 https://www.ookla.com/articles/starlink-hughesnet-viasat-per...
NelsonMinar 4y ago
It's not just "a bit under". I regularly dip down to 10Mbps download in evenings; last night I couldn't even watch a single TV show reliably. This collection of speed test data shows the US average has been 66/9 for the last month. At 50ms they're also nowhere near their latency requirement. https://starlinktrack.com/speedtests/region/us https://starlinktrack.com/speedtests/region/us

by xoa 4y ago

carbocation 4y ago

I agree with all of the aspirational statements you have made here, but I still think this was the right choice. A threshold was set. The threshold was not met. Sounds like they can reapply, and if they provide the necessary service level at that time, then they can get the $.

btilly 4y ago
I would agree if the same standard was being applied to the existing telecoms. But it isn't. In the last several decades, telecoms have routinely been paid billions for projects that didn't produce, and then won money in the next round as well. Indeed the fight isn't usually about whether to continue this, but who should win this round (established telecoms, municipal broadband, etc). It was a surprise when Starlink won in the first place. But it is no surprise that it is being held to a higher standard than, say, Charter.
- stephen_greet 4y ago
  What do you mean by "applied to the existing telecoms"? For this RDOF subsidy, no major telecoms have been given any money. It's totally fair to criticize subsidies that have been historically given major telecom companies when they failed to deliver (and they have). But, I don't think it's fair to say "historically the US government has given subsidies to telecoms that have failed to deliver, so you should keep doing that".
  - btilly 4y ago
    There have been a series of "give broadband to rural areas" bills starting with the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Generally great sums of money are given, and generally only limited customers get broadband. And then a few years later there is a new bill with similar results. Given this history, I am inclined to believe that actually not giving money to Starlink for a fairly small performance miss is motivated by something other than just applying the rules. If in a few years it is clear that policies have changed, and telecoms no longer get the gravy train either, then I'll change my opinion. Ending this corruption would be a welcome change.
    - bobthepanda 4y ago
      Perhaps the reason Starlink is being held to this scrutiny is because of those previous attempts being failures and to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The solution to “the old people weren’t being vetted enough” is not “the new players should also not be vetted enough.”
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      That was the one where AT&T took a half $B of taxed money to build out fiber, but never lit it. Because nothing said they had to.
xoa 4y ago
Government has given hundreds of billions in broadband funding to the giant telecoms and cable for ages for absolute nada [EDIT, 1]. The clients I put in Starlink for last year had a 10 meg connection for which they were charged hundreds of dollars per month and were fortunate since a mile away it was 56k modem of HughesNet or nothing. It's really good tech. I've been hearing promises and aspirations about fiber for like 17 fucking years. I can completely believe that in designing and putting into being a brand new network like that SpaceX has misjudged cell density vs satellite density and capabilities in areas and let the average speeds fall. But given what they're doing and the (non)alternatives I'd be a lot happier if there was some leeway to bring that back up and see how v2 comes out. Funding very promising technology that is aggressively trying to ramp hard and has a clear 1-3 year horizon is precisely the sort of thing government should do after all their failures up until now. And there are others less well off within a hundred miles who were hoping to get Starlink if the monthly cost could be brought down by this program. And Starlink aren't assholes like the incumbent players either. No datacaps, zero billing crap with surprise charges or fees, no port blocking, no bullshit in general. Of course more speed would be better, but that should be worth something too vs theoretically faster connections that then punish or restrict. Bottom line: I don't think these $886 million now going elsewhere are going to benefit even a single person up here near the Canadian border in the next few years. Fiber is still not going to appear here. The border is over 3000 miles long. In contrast Starlink can do something now (if you look at the Starlink map [0], there are very few filled cells in northern New England or northern Midwest/Pacific West up near Canada), and has the real promise of doing better. Now that will be harder, and I do not believe anything better is going to come of it for any of us in that time frame. If fiber comes in 2028 wonderful, Starlink could be cancelled then. That's a long time though to still be on 56k/HEOsat. To sibling comments talking crap like "do you work for SpaceX" if you wish to volunteer and come up to lay fiber for us right fucking now by all means. ---- 0: https://www.starlink.com/map https://www.starlink.com/map 1: I'm editing in response to tyrfing below because I suspect I'll hit the HN reply speed cap sometime shortly. This got tons of coverage in the 00s in particular but has fallen away over time as these things tend to. I had a bunch bookmarked at one point from old /. stories and the like and actual paper books but all the sites now seem to be dead. Here's a more recent one though that seems to cover the gist and could be a place to start for more: "The Book Of Broken Promises: $400 Billion Broadband Scandal" https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5839394 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...

orangepanda 4y ago

If you average AWS snowmobile out, it does about 1 Tbps. Has some latency though.

pclmulqdq 4y ago

I am hearing that lots of people are now getting under 50/15 out of it, and nobody I know with starlink has gotten better than 100 down. That is not really broadband. Those people may be in regions that are oversubscribed, but that is also partly a problem related to the price being too low. Of course, if they raise the price, then it might not be considered cheap enough for these subsidies either.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hedora 4y ago
I get more than that on the RV plan in an oversubscribed area (jumped the queue). I’d be lucky to get 5/1.5 from frontier, and their DSL service in the area goes down every few weeks. This seems like a case of lobbyist-induced double standards.
- swatcoder 4y ago
  You think Starlink doesn’t have lobbysists? If they failed their qualifying metrics and did win the subsidies anyway, wouldn’t mirror universe hedora be here complaining about that double standard? To me at least, this seems less obviously suspect than that would have.
  - hedora 4y ago
    Of course they do. I’m just wondering when the last two decades of RBOF funding (which had no apparent effect) is going to be returned to the federal government.
jcims 4y ago
I’ve had it in central Ohio since February 2021. I would say i average ~120M down, ~20M up. There’ve been a few outages, but I’ve never seen a prolonged period of less than 80M down. The fastest thing I can get otherwise is a 10M down, 768K up DSL link. I had been working remote on that since 2008.
4y ago

emkoemko 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mccorrinall 4y ago

> The lobbying against it has been intense for completely befuddling reasons though Citation needed. I don’t see why anyone would lobby against starlink or LTD here. Neither won. They money from the fund is not distributed. They can reapply. What the hell are you talking about? If there is lobbying, it’s certainly not against Starlink or LTD getting the funds as subsidiaries. The goals were set, starlink didn’t meet them, they don’t get subsidized. Simple as that.

jeroenhd 4y ago

> I've seen 220 down/40 up out of it. Sounds great. However, I've seen ↓31/↑4 and ↓20/↑10 out of it. Anecdata doesn't prove much. The network is improving, the tech is capable, but the real life performance is not up to snuff. Starlink, much like any company Musk seems to get himself involved with, is promising more than it can deliver, and that hurts when it comes to subsidies. They can have their billions when their network does what it promised to do.

gibolt 4y ago
Is anyone else delivering anything even close? Aiming 10-100x better than competitors and missing by a small percentage is considered failure apparently. Hughesnet was one of the best options prior to Starlink.
- garciasn 4y ago
  No, but they didn't apply for this either; because, they knew they couldn't meet the expectations set by the FCC.
xoa 4y ago
>Sounds great. However, I've seen ↓31/↑4 and ↓20/↑10 out of it. Anecdata doesn't prove much. Anecdotes cannot prove population statistics, you need an unbiased random sample for that. But anecdotes absolute can prove limits though. Remember, this is what I was responding to, emphasis added: >Starlink isn't CAPABLE of meeting its performance commitments That's what I took issue with and think is important. Starlink is absolutely capable of those speeds; I've seen them. So the problem isn't the technology, the problem is balancing serving the most people (which is a public good too) with maintaining enough performance on average for each one, all while scaling and evolving the technology fast. I'm assuming SpaceX could have submitted private data showing the public results by ookla were off in some way that would have been sufficient and that the FCC didn't ignore that out of lobbying/politics, so I'm taking it as a given that they did fall behind there. But it's not like Starlink is "done", they're continuing to increase sat numbers, build more ground stations, they're prepping to bring online intersat optical links and have no given a firm date for that (it's required for their marine service to get away from coastal waters), they've got much better sats and a solid process on the rocket to launch them. If we didn't need someone to take on some more risk and help accelerate things, this entire program would be meaningless and there would be no need for government in this space at all! I guess it feels like they're being punished for trying to move faster when that's exactly what lots of Americans need. We needed something better then the crap we've had 10 years ago let alone now. Of course, this may be 100% the correct legal decision depending on the exact language, administration and so on of the program. I could easily see the FCC not doing well on that but that doesn't mean they aren't required to stick to it by law. But that's not what I see most people criticizing it on, they're talking technical and societal angles instead. And on those grounds, I can be disappointed if the program didn't have some leeway. "Needs to be ready by 2028" isn't good enough!

ortusdux 4y ago

I've done speed tests on 4 separate dishes within a 25mi radius of my house, and I consistently got around 90 down/10 up. The fastest test to date I've seen in my area is ~130 down / 60 up.

oceanplexian 4y ago
Earlier this year I was pulling 250/40 in Utah. Now during the day I hover around 120/15, with speeds back in the 200’s late at night. Of course YMMV, but it’s more than sufficient for my needs of remote work with several zoom calls per day, as well as streaming 4K content. It is a drag for things like large Steam downloads but I honestly can’t complain.

spmurrayzzz 4y ago

I'm not sure we can really say if their tech is "obviously and objectively capable" at scale. We don't really know enough about the PHY layer modulation or even the mac layer modulation they're using. My guess has always been that they use some flavor of OFDM, but this is a detail thats unrevealed currently. These are incredibly important details for the oversubscription calculus in the access network itself. RDOF aims to hold providers to a much higher standard for rural broadband, and part of that commitment is whether you can deliver speeds across the whole network at scale, not just relying on theoretical top line speeds. The evidence so far per Ookla demonstrates they don't meet muster currently, and since the tech is so new and (mostly) unvetted, it makes sense for the FCC to play it safe here on behalf of the consumer.

wmf 4y ago
That information is out there but it's scattered and hard to find. The real bottleneck right now seems to be that the number of beams per satellite is higher than the number of cells per satellite.
- spmurrayzzz 4y ago
  I haven't seen anything official nor convincing about the aspects I commented on. I've seen the write up on the individual who was able to spin up an SDR to receive beacons from their satellites, but that doesn't really tell you anything about how the signal is modulated.
zamadatix 4y ago
The cells are 22km and the traffic path strictly client<->satellite<->ground station at the moment. There isn't really any reasonable scaling concern until you start talking about serving densely populated areas but that's not Starlink's market nor what the RDOF targets/measures anyways and the inability to service a user in a city as well as a rural user shouldn't be reasoning to not provide funding to service those rural users. That said I don't have a problem with the funding being held until the conditions are demonstrably met instead of as funding to meet them. The latter has failed too many times with providers just pocketing money to then stop executing once they have it.

wnevets 4y ago

> This is completely wrong though are you accusing the FCC of lying or just being too incompetent to measure network speeds?

enragedcacti 4y ago

> They've apparently been trying to stay right around their commitment level while building out as quickly as possible, and let it slip a bit under on a third party speed test. They've actually been below their commitment for all of 2021 and 2022 so far: they started 2021Q1 with a 16.29 average and 2022Q1 had dropped to 9.33 average. That's a pretty worrying trend and I don't think its the FCC's job to evaluate literal rocket science to decide whether or not they believe SpaceX will meet their obligations. SpaceX chose what speeds to pitch in their bid, how many satellites and ground stations to deploy, and how many customers to let onto their network. While I agree that Starlink has a bright future I can't help but see this as SpaceX clutching defeat from the jaws of victory. We've been far too lenient with ISPs in the past with broadband funding, and this is what keeping them to their word looks like. https://www.ookla.com/articles/starlink-hughesnet-viasat-performance-q1-2022 https://www.ookla.com/articles/starlink-hughesnet-viasat-per...

NelsonMinar 4y ago

It's not just "a bit under". I regularly dip down to 10Mbps download in evenings; last night I couldn't even watch a single TV show reliably. This collection of speed test data shows the US average has been 66/9 for the last month. At 50ms they're also nowhere near their latency requirement. https://starlinktrack.com/speedtests/region/us https://starlinktrack.com/speedtests/region/us