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Most of the time a plane is over farm fields or water. Highest demand for normal starlink is in cities. Not gonna be flying over NYC w this. Kind of a good f

Most of the time a plane is over farm fields or water. Highest demand for normal starlink is in cities. Not gonna be flying over NYC w this. Kind of a good fit I would think in terms of utilization.

jazzyjackson 4y ago
> Highest demand for normal starlink is in cities. ?? cities have fiber, who wants starlink in a city?
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  This is a very US-centric (or at least western-centric) view of the world.
  - gaadd33 4y ago
    I didn't think a lot of the cities can get fiber to the home. I know I can't in NYC and when I was in LA, nor in Ft Lauderdale. Is it easier in most other big cities?
    - Ayesh 4y ago
      Not a big city, but in Colombo, there is an ISP that exclusively provides Fibre lines to apartment buildings. It's a common interest for both building management and the ISP to provide service. If the building signs up with the ISP, any customer from that building can sign up directly at ISP, and they can setup the connection within the same day. Price wise, they are on par with other ISPs, but the Sri Lankan government heavily regulates the prices.
    - SargeDebian 4y ago
      Yes, fiber is common in most Dutch cities for example. It is not at every premise yet, but being rolled out. If not FttH, then ~100Mbps DSL or Docsis up to 1000Mbit down.
    - coev 4y ago
      South Florida here, I've had FTTH for 2 years now and gigabit cable has been an option for longer than that.
    - randallsquared 4y ago
      The last two places I lived in NYC did have fiber to the apartment, so it’s not NYC as a whole that doesn’t have it.
- acover 4y ago
  Let's say cities have 3000 people per square kilometer. Farms have 1 person per square kilometer. Only 1 in 3000 people need to desire starlink for cities to have more demand. Strange situations happen. Not having good service in your neighborhood, hating the one provider available, wanting a backup, liking the idea of internet from space, lower latency over seas and thousands of other reasons I'm not crazy enough to think of.
  - _flux 4y ago
    To use Starlink you need to have a line-of-sight to the satellites, and that basically requires you'll get to install the ceiling of the whole building and even that might not be enough, right? To do that you probably need to get the whole building (or the building manager) to go along with this. So if you have 1/3000 of people wanting this in the city, those same people also need to be in a matching situation to have the possibility to use Starlink, which can significantly reduce the ratio. It's still possible, but the initiative will need to come from Starlink, possibly involving plans for complete buildings. edit: I was of course thinking city centers, but in the nearby regions the demand might be significantly higher, access to roof is easy, population density is OK, and fiber internet still not well available.
    - numpad0 4y ago
      And that's how you get a satellite internet that works like satellite internet, or at best a 3Mbps cable. duh. I think there are misunderstandings in the concept of a "city", that what kind of density it refers to, and how much space - on top of area - is allocated for a resident in such a city. To me, a city is straight up Bladerunner, luxury apartments having such privileges as shared library rooms or balcony railings with sightlines workable for some GEO satellite dishes. To GP a city might be towards houses with single-car garages. That kind of definition mismatch happens both ways, by the way, in forms of city dwellers mistakenly offending other city as rural areas and complicating discussions.
    - lxgr 4y ago
      That‘s true, yet I‘m seeing a lot of TV satellite dishes even in major cities, when cable TV is arguably also readily available. If people want it, at least some of them will find a way with their landlord, if they don‘t already own the entire building (especially in the US, single-family homes are not at all uncommon close to the center of major cities).
- jlund-molfese 4y ago
  Fiber may be available in a city, but not in your building. It’s moderately common for a high rise apartment to only have the option of one ISP, with mediocre internet plans (especially if the building has a special contract with the ISP)
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  I noticed a starlink terminal on the side of a building in SF yesterday near the bay bridge. I really wonder why they are using it. I work at a rural farm with no good internet options and we love our starlink, but I’d really have thought there’d be better options in SF.
  - jonasdegendt 4y ago
    Some sort of redundancy, if I had to guess.
    - usrusr 4y ago
      Doubling as a "we're state of the art" conversation piece if the antenna is sufficiently visible. As long as they are still a somewhat rare novelty, the morale effect alone could be worth the subscription. SpaceX innovation halo effect.
  - Arnt 4y ago
    There are lots of geographically tiny problems in cities. One of the buildings next to where I live can get fiber but this one can't. Various apartments in this building have fine connectivity but now a critical cable duct is full and someone may be told that "you can't get faster than 16Mbps, sorry" even if both neighbours on the same floor have 100Mbps, and that answer makes sense.
- Arnt 4y ago
  A friend lives in a city with a lot of startups, a lot of technology companies and a research university that's been on the internet since before the DNS. He's on the waiting list for Starlink because the fastest residential connection he can get is 3Mbps. There's much fiber there, but also many streets where no fiber is available. AFAICT that kind of spottiness is the most common case and few cities have uniformly good coverage. I do hope 3Mbps is rare though.
  - devoutsalsa 4y ago
    I don't believe this. A city full of startups can't be stuck w/ maximum 3Mbps Internet. Can it?
    - Arnt 4y ago
      The city has much better options in some areas, but not in his street. It's in North Carolina, US, he lives closish to the UNC campus (if UNC has several campuses, then close to the one that was on the internet 40+ years ago).
      - valzam 4y ago
        Getting internet early is often a curse since companies priorities build outs where they have no coverage at all. That being said, 3 MB/s should get you very high on the 'to upgrade ' list...
      - sgerenser 4y ago
        No 5G home internet available? In most cases it’s a better alternative to StarLink if you have good coverage. Also surprised there’s no Spectrum cable, I thought they were available almost everywhere in the Triangle (assuming you mean UNC Chapel Hill).
    - usrusr 4y ago
      Not the full city, just that particular part of the street where gp's friend happens to live. Crazy to use satellites where a last mile of fiber would do the job, or terrestrial beam link, or just a well-placed cell tower, but markets can be weird in edge cases.
- jonasdegendt 4y ago
  Plenty of older cities don't have fiber all over. I'm in Western Europe and they're gradually installing fiber across the country, new developments get fiber by default. So at home I'm on 50 Mbps VDSL. My company's office has fiber but it has a Starlink for fallback.
- reacharavindh 4y ago
  I live in a dense city near Amsterdam. My home does not yet have a fiber for high bandwidth connection. However, I found myself content with the 300 Mbps line supplied by cable. A typical 4K video stream is about 25Mbps of bandwidth. So, for households 300Mbps is plenty for now. What is nicer is reliability of the connections and the latencies. If fiber could bring any benefits there, I'd be happy to pay up. How is Starlink in terms of latency?
  - jonplackett 4y ago
    20ms according to the article
  - xattt 4y ago
    How is DOCSIS in terms of latency (compared to a fibre line)?
    - valzam 4y ago
      At least in Germany it's worse but generally fine, you can achieve <20ms ping for online gaming within or near Germany. Fiber is for sure better through but probably won't make a difference in day2day.
    - lxgr 4y ago
      When not congested, I used to get about 4 ms to servers in my city. But on one provider, with congestion, that would go up to 15 seconds (yes, 15.000 ms) basically every evening during the pandemic… It all depends on how well a network is managed. This is true for ever access technology; fiber just has a lot more headroom to mask bad network management, congestion etc.
    - reacharavindh 4y ago
      I just checked at home, and the latency I get on my Cable connection is about 70 ms on average! If Starling does indeed provide even a lower bandwidth connection at just 20ms, that is a nett win. Cool! I don't know if a fiber to home would achieve lower latencies than 20 ms.... Someone mentioned DOCSIS - don't know much about it. Is that not needed for a fiber connection?
- goodpoint 4y ago
  Most cities in the world do not provide fiber to the home to every person. By far.
impulser_ 4y ago
Why would the highest demand for Starlink be in cities? Who in their right mind would pay for Starlink over fiber? The same cost, but a lot better connection lol.
- walrus01 4y ago
  You might be surprised how many outer suburbs of big cities have absolutely nothing for real broadband availability, there's a number of starlink terminals in far suburbs of Seattle where the only other option is 5Mbps long loop length adsl2+ on degraded copper.
- ncallaway 4y ago
  If 50% of the people in a plane want Starlink cell with a plane want it, vs .1% of the people in NYC want Starlink, then the NYC cell is going to have far more demand.
- mlindner 4y ago
  > Why would the highest demand for Starlink be in cities? Because even if there's very few people who don't have good service (for example some kind of technical issue where fiber can't be routed to a specific building) you quickly reach the capacity for the service. Plus the odd person who wants it for a backup.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  I'm a full time RVer and carry a Starlink because while the campgrounds usually have WiFi, they often are terrible and get bogged down easily. I'm usually parked in or near a large city. I've noticed lately that Starlinks are becoming more and more popular among RVers. Also, I routinely get 100+ Mbps on Starlink, which is better than a lot of connections available across the country.
micromacrofoot 4y ago
there are simply more people to demand any product in cities, so that’s not too surprising you also have the effect of cities sometimes being tied to a single sub-par ISP… many are willing to pay for any alternative
fastball 4y ago
> Highest demand for normal starlink is in cities. This is literally the opposite of true. But both of you combined make a good point: this is the best way to fully utilize bandwidth of the sats, which are not going to be serving terrestrial customers when flying over the oceans, which is a significant portion of the time. Between boats, planes, and rural terrestrial customers the usage of any individual Starlink sat can be efficiently spread out.

Most of the time a plane is over farm fields or water. Highest demand for normal starlink is in cities. Not gonna be flying over NYC w this. Kind of a good fit I would think in terms of utilization.

jazzyjackson 4y ago

> Highest demand for normal starlink is in cities. ?? cities have fiber, who wants starlink in a city?

bpodgursky 4y ago
This is a very US-centric (or at least western-centric) view of the world.
- gaadd33 4y ago
  I didn't think a lot of the cities can get fiber to the home. I know I can't in NYC and when I was in LA, nor in Ft Lauderdale. Is it easier in most other big cities?
  - Ayesh 4y ago
    Not a big city, but in Colombo, there is an ISP that exclusively provides Fibre lines to apartment buildings. It's a common interest for both building management and the ISP to provide service. If the building signs up with the ISP, any customer from that building can sign up directly at ISP, and they can setup the connection within the same day. Price wise, they are on par with other ISPs, but the Sri Lankan government heavily regulates the prices.
  - SargeDebian 4y ago
    Yes, fiber is common in most Dutch cities for example. It is not at every premise yet, but being rolled out. If not FttH, then ~100Mbps DSL or Docsis up to 1000Mbit down.
  - coev 4y ago
    South Florida here, I've had FTTH for 2 years now and gigabit cable has been an option for longer than that.
  - randallsquared 4y ago
    The last two places I lived in NYC did have fiber to the apartment, so it’s not NYC as a whole that doesn’t have it.
acover 4y ago
Let's say cities have 3000 people per square kilometer. Farms have 1 person per square kilometer. Only 1 in 3000 people need to desire starlink for cities to have more demand. Strange situations happen. Not having good service in your neighborhood, hating the one provider available, wanting a backup, liking the idea of internet from space, lower latency over seas and thousands of other reasons I'm not crazy enough to think of.
- _flux 4y ago
  To use Starlink you need to have a line-of-sight to the satellites, and that basically requires you'll get to install the ceiling of the whole building and even that might not be enough, right? To do that you probably need to get the whole building (or the building manager) to go along with this. So if you have 1/3000 of people wanting this in the city, those same people also need to be in a matching situation to have the possibility to use Starlink, which can significantly reduce the ratio. It's still possible, but the initiative will need to come from Starlink, possibly involving plans for complete buildings. edit: I was of course thinking city centers, but in the nearby regions the demand might be significantly higher, access to roof is easy, population density is OK, and fiber internet still not well available.
  - numpad0 4y ago
    And that's how you get a satellite internet that works like satellite internet, or at best a 3Mbps cable. duh. I think there are misunderstandings in the concept of a "city", that what kind of density it refers to, and how much space - on top of area - is allocated for a resident in such a city. To me, a city is straight up Bladerunner, luxury apartments having such privileges as shared library rooms or balcony railings with sightlines workable for some GEO satellite dishes. To GP a city might be towards houses with single-car garages. That kind of definition mismatch happens both ways, by the way, in forms of city dwellers mistakenly offending other city as rural areas and complicating discussions.
  - lxgr 4y ago
    That‘s true, yet I‘m seeing a lot of TV satellite dishes even in major cities, when cable TV is arguably also readily available. If people want it, at least some of them will find a way with their landlord, if they don‘t already own the entire building (especially in the US, single-family homes are not at all uncommon close to the center of major cities).
jlund-molfese 4y ago
Fiber may be available in a city, but not in your building. It’s moderately common for a high rise apartment to only have the option of one ISP, with mediocre internet plans (especially if the building has a special contract with the ISP)
TaylorAlexander 4y ago
I noticed a starlink terminal on the side of a building in SF yesterday near the bay bridge. I really wonder why they are using it. I work at a rural farm with no good internet options and we love our starlink, but I’d really have thought there’d be better options in SF.
- jonasdegendt 4y ago
  Some sort of redundancy, if I had to guess.
  - usrusr 4y ago
    Doubling as a "we're state of the art" conversation piece if the antenna is sufficiently visible. As long as they are still a somewhat rare novelty, the morale effect alone could be worth the subscription. SpaceX innovation halo effect.
- Arnt 4y ago
  There are lots of geographically tiny problems in cities. One of the buildings next to where I live can get fiber but this one can't. Various apartments in this building have fine connectivity but now a critical cable duct is full and someone may be told that "you can't get faster than 16Mbps, sorry" even if both neighbours on the same floor have 100Mbps, and that answer makes sense.
Arnt 4y ago
A friend lives in a city with a lot of startups, a lot of technology companies and a research university that's been on the internet since before the DNS. He's on the waiting list for Starlink because the fastest residential connection he can get is 3Mbps. There's much fiber there, but also many streets where no fiber is available. AFAICT that kind of spottiness is the most common case and few cities have uniformly good coverage. I do hope 3Mbps is rare though.
- devoutsalsa 4y ago
  I don't believe this. A city full of startups can't be stuck w/ maximum 3Mbps Internet. Can it?
  - Arnt 4y ago
    The city has much better options in some areas, but not in his street. It's in North Carolina, US, he lives closish to the UNC campus (if UNC has several campuses, then close to the one that was on the internet 40+ years ago).
    - valzam 4y ago
      Getting internet early is often a curse since companies priorities build outs where they have no coverage at all. That being said, 3 MB/s should get you very high on the 'to upgrade ' list...
    - sgerenser 4y ago
      No 5G home internet available? In most cases it’s a better alternative to StarLink if you have good coverage. Also surprised there’s no Spectrum cable, I thought they were available almost everywhere in the Triangle (assuming you mean UNC Chapel Hill).
  - usrusr 4y ago
    Not the full city, just that particular part of the street where gp's friend happens to live. Crazy to use satellites where a last mile of fiber would do the job, or terrestrial beam link, or just a well-placed cell tower, but markets can be weird in edge cases.
jonasdegendt 4y ago
Plenty of older cities don't have fiber all over. I'm in Western Europe and they're gradually installing fiber across the country, new developments get fiber by default. So at home I'm on 50 Mbps VDSL. My company's office has fiber but it has a Starlink for fallback.
reacharavindh 4y ago
I live in a dense city near Amsterdam. My home does not yet have a fiber for high bandwidth connection. However, I found myself content with the 300 Mbps line supplied by cable. A typical 4K video stream is about 25Mbps of bandwidth. So, for households 300Mbps is plenty for now. What is nicer is reliability of the connections and the latencies. If fiber could bring any benefits there, I'd be happy to pay up. How is Starlink in terms of latency?
- jonplackett 4y ago
  20ms according to the article
- xattt 4y ago
  How is DOCSIS in terms of latency (compared to a fibre line)?
  - valzam 4y ago
    At least in Germany it's worse but generally fine, you can achieve <20ms ping for online gaming within or near Germany. Fiber is for sure better through but probably won't make a difference in day2day.
  - lxgr 4y ago
    When not congested, I used to get about 4 ms to servers in my city. But on one provider, with congestion, that would go up to 15 seconds (yes, 15.000 ms) basically every evening during the pandemic… It all depends on how well a network is managed. This is true for ever access technology; fiber just has a lot more headroom to mask bad network management, congestion etc.
  - reacharavindh 4y ago
    I just checked at home, and the latency I get on my Cable connection is about 70 ms on average! If Starling does indeed provide even a lower bandwidth connection at just 20ms, that is a nett win. Cool! I don't know if a fiber to home would achieve lower latencies than 20 ms.... Someone mentioned DOCSIS - don't know much about it. Is that not needed for a fiber connection?
goodpoint 4y ago
Most cities in the world do not provide fiber to the home to every person. By far.

impulser_ 4y ago

Why would the highest demand for Starlink be in cities? Who in their right mind would pay for Starlink over fiber? The same cost, but a lot better connection lol.

walrus01 4y ago
You might be surprised how many outer suburbs of big cities have absolutely nothing for real broadband availability, there's a number of starlink terminals in far suburbs of Seattle where the only other option is 5Mbps long loop length adsl2+ on degraded copper.
ncallaway 4y ago
If 50% of the people in a plane want Starlink cell with a plane want it, vs .1% of the people in NYC want Starlink, then the NYC cell is going to have far more demand.
mlindner 4y ago
> Why would the highest demand for Starlink be in cities? Because even if there's very few people who don't have good service (for example some kind of technical issue where fiber can't be routed to a specific building) you quickly reach the capacity for the service. Plus the odd person who wants it for a backup.
chrisco255 4y ago
I'm a full time RVer and carry a Starlink because while the campgrounds usually have WiFi, they often are terrible and get bogged down easily. I'm usually parked in or near a large city. I've noticed lately that Starlinks are becoming more and more popular among RVers. Also, I routinely get 100+ Mbps on Starlink, which is better than a lot of connections available across the country.

micromacrofoot 4y ago

there are simply more people to demand any product in cities, so that’s not too surprising you also have the effect of cities sometimes being tied to a single sub-par ISP… many are willing to pay for any alternative

fastball 4y ago

> Highest demand for normal starlink is in cities. This is literally the opposite of true. But both of you combined make a good point: this is the best way to fully utilize bandwidth of the sats, which are not going to be serving terrestrial customers when flying over the oceans, which is a significant portion of the time. Between boats, planes, and rural terrestrial customers the usage of any individual Starlink sat can be efficiently spread out.