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Is home internet pretty much "fast enough" for anyone else right now? I used satellite internet for almost a full year. I was about 20 minutes drive from 3G.

Is home internet pretty much "fast enough" for anyone else right now? I used satellite internet for almost a full year. I was about 20 minutes drive from 3G. Honestly, it was absolutely fine. Video conferences, online real time games, streaming videos... Right now I'm on a copper line. Granted, it's only us villagers and country folk using it since the local big town moved to fibre. But again, the speed is fine.

ghaff 4y ago
Starlink isn't for people who have decent copper broadband somewhere in the 10s of Mbps down that's reasonably reliable. It's for the people who can't get that and there are a lot of them.
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  Right, did you miss the bit where I had satellite internet and had to drive some distance to access mobile internet?
kiratp 4y ago
Not even close. As an example, waiting for my consoles to update games and losing half my hour of free gaming time is terrible - and I have 10G wired around my house to a 1G Comcast connection.
bobdvb 4y ago
"Fast enough" is a contentious point for many tech people. There are very few consumer use cases that demand super fast broadband. I think basically you can say that you need about 15Mbps per person with 10Mbps overhead/margin. But 50Mbps is basically "fast enough" for the average household (browsing and streaming), it just means that game downloads or OS updates will be slower than you might like. My experience is that 200Mbps is "more than enough for most" and above 500Mbps will barely be used in most normal applications, it just makes the internet /snappier/. Most websites and downloads don't actually support download at 1Gbps, well there's always all those ISO downloads... If you have a house full of nerds then super speed broadband has value, but most people aren't as nerdy as that. That being said, Starlink is showing how over hyped it really was. Sure, they still need to launch more satellites, but it's a continuous obligation on SpaceX to keep replacing the infrastructure. I respect the need for those in rural areas, but suburban/urban folks (who will be affected by congestion the most) need good/affordable fibre. Even many of the rural folks (the less extremely isolated ones) could be supported by good mobile broadband infrastructure.
thatguy0900 4y ago
Same. They actually just upgraded service near me, for 30$ more I can quadruple my internet speeds. I talked to my roommates and even with multiple heavy internet users we really see no need to at all.
deleted 4y ago
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TaylorAlexander 4y ago
I work at a rural farm and live in a big city. The farm had satellite which was okay, but they had a hard monthly data cap of 200GB, at which point they would severely throttle speeds. There was no option to pay for a higher cap. During summer time the owners (many) kids would visit and with all their video streaming we would hit the data caps about two and a half weeks in to the month. Then when the owner needed to do a video call for work, due to the throttling, he had to text everyone and ask them to stop using the network for an hour. It was a pretty fragile system. Now we have starlink and it’s a big improvement! Though the short drop outs (under 2 seconds) sometimes cause issues with video calls. At my place in the city I get symmetric gigabit fiber for $39 a month. This is the first time I’ve ever had fiber. It’s pretty wonderful to upload a 10GB 4K video to YouTube in a few minutes, download a full movie while I make some popcorn, and pull down an OS image in seconds. I don’t “need” gigabit but I absolutely am happy to have it!
noahtallen 4y ago
Not really, no. There are still huge swaths of the US with complete garbage and no other options (e.g. with 3mbps/<1mbps being the most an ISP will ever offer). If you have more than one or two people at home (and in rural settings, bigger families are more normal), it’s practically unusable. Of course most people have ok internet for most use cases. But there are even places in cities where the only option isn’t great. And upload speed is often still abysmal. Comcast, which had a monopoly at my previous rental within Portland, OR city limits, offered very fast download. But upload was only 6mbps with no increase available. For content creation, like uploading videos or photos, that’s a pain in the ass. The real problem is higher speeds allow for a wider variety of use cases, which starts locking out people from bandwidth-intensive activities. Game streaming, for example, or content creation. So in a rural area, that means some careers are harder to get into just because the internet isn’t very good.

ghaff 4y ago

Starlink isn't for people who have decent copper broadband somewhere in the 10s of Mbps down that's reasonably reliable. It's for the people who can't get that and there are a lot of them.

LAC-Tech 4y ago
Right, did you miss the bit where I had satellite internet and had to drive some distance to access mobile internet?

kiratp 4y ago

Not even close. As an example, waiting for my consoles to update games and losing half my hour of free gaming time is terrible - and I have 10G wired around my house to a 1G Comcast connection.

bobdvb 4y ago

"Fast enough" is a contentious point for many tech people. There are very few consumer use cases that demand super fast broadband. I think basically you can say that you need about 15Mbps per person with 10Mbps overhead/margin. But 50Mbps is basically "fast enough" for the average household (browsing and streaming), it just means that game downloads or OS updates will be slower than you might like. My experience is that 200Mbps is "more than enough for most" and above 500Mbps will barely be used in most normal applications, it just makes the internet /snappier/. Most websites and downloads don't actually support download at 1Gbps, well there's always all those ISO downloads... If you have a house full of nerds then super speed broadband has value, but most people aren't as nerdy as that. That being said, Starlink is showing how over hyped it really was. Sure, they still need to launch more satellites, but it's a continuous obligation on SpaceX to keep replacing the infrastructure. I respect the need for those in rural areas, but suburban/urban folks (who will be affected by congestion the most) need good/affordable fibre. Even many of the rural folks (the less extremely isolated ones) could be supported by good mobile broadband infrastructure.

thatguy0900 4y ago

Same. They actually just upgraded service near me, for 30$ more I can quadruple my internet speeds. I talked to my roommates and even with multiple heavy internet users we really see no need to at all.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

TaylorAlexander 4y ago

I work at a rural farm and live in a big city. The farm had satellite which was okay, but they had a hard monthly data cap of 200GB, at which point they would severely throttle speeds. There was no option to pay for a higher cap. During summer time the owners (many) kids would visit and with all their video streaming we would hit the data caps about two and a half weeks in to the month. Then when the owner needed to do a video call for work, due to the throttling, he had to text everyone and ask them to stop using the network for an hour. It was a pretty fragile system. Now we have starlink and it’s a big improvement! Though the short drop outs (under 2 seconds) sometimes cause issues with video calls. At my place in the city I get symmetric gigabit fiber for $39 a month. This is the first time I’ve ever had fiber. It’s pretty wonderful to upload a 10GB 4K video to YouTube in a few minutes, download a full movie while I make some popcorn, and pull down an OS image in seconds. I don’t “need” gigabit but I absolutely am happy to have it!

noahtallen 4y ago

Not really, no. There are still huge swaths of the US with complete garbage and no other options (e.g. with 3mbps/<1mbps being the most an ISP will ever offer). If you have more than one or two people at home (and in rural settings, bigger families are more normal), it’s practically unusable. Of course most people have ok internet for most use cases. But there are even places in cities where the only option isn’t great. And upload speed is often still abysmal. Comcast, which had a monopoly at my previous rental within Portland, OR city limits, offered very fast download. But upload was only 6mbps with no increase available. For content creation, like uploading videos or photos, that’s a pain in the ass. The real problem is higher speeds allow for a wider variety of use cases, which starts locking out people from bandwidth-intensive activities. Game streaming, for example, or content creation. So in a rural area, that means some careers are harder to get into just because the internet isn’t very good.