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Meh. I know a number of folks who moved to rural areas, and not a single one was able to use Starlink due to tree coverage and the extremely narrow band of sky

Meh. I know a number of folks who moved to rural areas, and not a single one was able to use Starlink due to tree coverage and the extremely narrow band of sky their receiver had to be pointed at. I'm glad it worked for you! But the rural places where my friends live have lots of trees, tall ones, and they made Starlink totally unusable.

ghaff 4y ago
The house does have a pretty good view of the sky. I'm not sure what the answer is in general. It's probably not realistic to expect universal wired broadband in very rural areas. Conventional satellite is by all accounts pretty bad. And cellular isn't really an option absent a good 5G signal. But, other than a vacation cottage, lack of usable Internet isn't really an option either if you're going to be working from somewhere.
- thomas_ma 4y ago
  But, why is universal wired broadband in very rural areas of the US an unreasonable expectation? We did the same thing 100 years ago with universal service requirements for telephone. As I understand it, the build out was subsidized by the government along with a universal service fee for all phone lines. Is the infrastructure for low-broadband in low density areas inherently more expensive than POTS infrastructure was 75-100 years ago?
  - willcipriano 4y ago
    We paid for universal broadband too, we just didn't get it or the money back.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    In general, problems are caused by people, policy, or technology. I think you hit on a people+policy misalignment.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Things are of course a lot different than they were 100 years ago. Bringing electricity and phone service to farms and ranches probably seemed pretty important. I'm not sure how a lot of modern coastal urbanites would feel about a very expensive project to bring wired broadband to everyone living on the side of a mountain somewhere today. (Especially given that wireless technologies are an option for a lot of people, if not everyone.) POTS bills also at least used to have a universal service charge line item, in part to subsidize rural service.
    - burnished 4y ago
      As one of those coastal urbanites, fucking great. Didnt we already pay a bunch of money for that anyway? Even aside from that the internet is great, I'm not going to feel bad about helping to pay to bring it to everyone.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        I don't even really disagree. I just see a lot of hostility on here about providing infrastructure for people who aren't in metros. I'm not convinced that in this day and age it all has to be wired. But it's not unreasonable to consider that at least reasonable Internet should be a basic utility service even for very rural locations.
      - rayiner 4y ago
        > Didnt we already pay a bunch of money for that anyway No? The process to transition the USF to covering broadband didn’t even start until the tail end of the Obama administration.
  - beauzero 4y ago
    Some of that is starting to change in the rural South. Georgia changed laws to allow electrical coops and cities to run their own loops. Alabama is also pushing money into local rural fiber builds. An example, in Carroll County, GA I live outside of Carrollton, GA and have 2 fiber options 1) Charter/Spectrum which I use 2) CarrollEMC/Crossbeam which looks like they just dropped fiber on our power pole within the last month. If you look at the FCC map of Highway 5 it correctly shows ATT DSL availability, incorrectly shows Comcast coax availability, and does not show either Charter/Spectrum or CarrollEMC/Crossbeam. There is only a process to challenge availability on the FCC map, like Comcast...that incorrectly shows availability, and no option to add new providers to the map. It is left up to the provider to claim availability.
    - ydlr 4y ago
      Arkansas has also removed some of the barriers for electric coops and municipal broadband, but change has been slow. There are now plenty of rural areas with symmetrical gigabit broadband available, while most cities are stuck with whatever pitiful options Cox or ATT decides to bestow.
      - eppp 4y ago
        Tennessee did as well. There are still limits but coops can serve inside their boundaries but cannot compete against a telephone coop.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    75-100 years ago coincided with the tail end of a massive boom of dirt poor immigrants from Europe. Labor was extremely cheap relative to other things in the economy. It’s vastly more expensive now. It’s the same story as almost all our infrastructure. We couldn’t build the New York subway today either.
- maxsilver 4y ago
  > It's probably not realistic to expect universal wired broadband in very rural areas. I don't know why. It seems incredibly realistic to expect wired broadband in most rural areas. (We were able to provide them with power lines and telephone lines over 60+ years ago, there's no reason fiber would have to be any different)
- ahepp 4y ago
  I’m not sure I understand why broadband should be a problem anywhere there’s electrical infrastructure.
keneda7 4y ago
This is largest hurdle I've seen for Starlink. I know at least 10 people in the foothills of Northern CA that are stuck with 2 choices if they want Starlink. They can either cut down several massive (100ft+) trees or they can pay someone to climb up a tree and mount the dish. The second options comes with a whole other sets of problems and typically still includes cutting some other trees down.
- excitom 4y ago
  Side note: If I lived in the Northern California foothills I would be cutting down big trees close to the house due to extreme fire danger. Side benefit, better Satellite visibility.
  - keneda7 4y ago
    Well they all have defensible space around their homes. It is a requirement for the only fire insurance they can get. Even the defensible space does not clear enough to get uninterrupted Starlink service.
LarryMullins 4y ago
I know some people used to chop down trees to get a line of sight for satellite TV. Starlink is different in that you need more than a single LOS to a specific spot in the sky, but I wouldn't be too surprised if a lot of people ultimately chop down more trees to get access. Alternatively, perhaps the starlink antenna could be mounted on a large pole or modest radio tower. That would be ugly but probably a lot less ugly than chopping down your trees.
- 0xffff2 4y ago
  Yeah, I have a house in a heavily forested area. I put the starlink dish on top of a 12ft pole mounted on my roof. I have a double of line of sight issues, but it's good enough that I don't notice service interruptions.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    For a house in the Adirondacks in upstate NY (heavily wooded), we used a 50' triangular antenna tower with Dishy at the top to clear the tree line. Went from abysmal DSL speeds to ~100Mbps, also added microcells from the largest mobile providers to improve cell coverage on the property (mounted to the antenna structure in water resistant housings). Total cost was sub $5k for everything mentioned. If close to the home doesn't work, depending on siting requirements, you can erect a tower in a clearing or where there is clear line of sight to the sky and then run power and network to the tower from the nearest structure. Don't neglect lightning surge suppression to protect equipment. Similar to this: https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/mk4jfx/starlink_dishy_a_little_closer_to_the_stars_on_a/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/mk4jfx/starlink_d... https://www.rohnnet.com/rohn-g-series-self-supporting-tower https://www.rohnnet.com/rohn-g-series-self-supporting-tower
ultrarunner 4y ago
The Facebook groups I used to be in had most people putting them on poles, or even mounting them to the tops of said tall trees. Seemed to work fine, even with a bit of sway.
sidewndr46 4y ago
if you don't mind putting up a huge pole with a platform on top, you can get around it that way.
smoldesu 4y ago
It's worth noting that most alternatives require a satellite dish of some sort. Before Starlink, I had a roof-mounted HughesNet dish (and before that a custom WISP receiver). Either way, I'd say Starlink is an enormous improvement over every other satellite solution I've tried. The lack of data cap alone puts it head-and-heels above the competition, and the speeds are good enough to coax people off 4G. I have some small complaints about CGNAT and the provided router, but the service itself is more reliable than some cable connections I've tried. Having seen (and tried) a lot of the alternatives, there really aren't any pushbutton services that compare.
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  Starlink doesn't have a data cap? No way that's sustainable.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    They said they were limiting people to 1tb/month this year, but I don't think that's enacted yet. At least, if it is, I haven't noticed it yet...
    - ghaff 4y ago
      That's more than I use. On the other hand, it's mostly just me and I don't do a huge amount of streaming video.
    - xboxnolifes 4y ago
      That's still a pretty generous cap. When I was living with 5 other heavy internet users, our monthly usage didn't exceed 600GB.
    - opamp 4y ago
      It’s still unlimited beyond that, you’re just “deprioritized.” Depending on how rural you are, you might not even notice. It’s much like a cell tower where a geographical area has finite capacity. You use your “priority” data that has speed guarantees, then it slows down, but is still unlimited. Apparently some users were reselling the link & maxing out the upload/download 24/7. (yeah, I get it, but in this case some kind of QoS probably needs to happen to turn a profit) I’ve been a beta user since the first couple months of launch. They’ve had growing pains, but it has overall been light years ahead of our local WISP or Hughesnet/Viasat in terms of speed and reliability. Several of my neighbors have no other option than traditional geostationary satellite providers, and I don’t think any of us every want to go back to 600ms+ latencies! edit: I just wanted to add that for many people, priority speeds for 1TB & having sub-100ms latency is far, far better than the alternatives.
callalex 4y ago
It’s funny, people don’t hesitate to trim and remove trees for roads, power lines, or plumbing. I would consider trimming a tree to access the internet worthwhile.
- hydrometallurgy 4y ago
  Yes, but Starlink needs a really wide/large view of the sky. Often, it's not enough to simply trim a few trees.

ghaff 4y ago

The house does have a pretty good view of the sky. I'm not sure what the answer is in general. It's probably not realistic to expect universal wired broadband in very rural areas. Conventional satellite is by all accounts pretty bad. And cellular isn't really an option absent a good 5G signal. But, other than a vacation cottage, lack of usable Internet isn't really an option either if you're going to be working from somewhere.

thomas_ma 4y ago
But, why is universal wired broadband in very rural areas of the US an unreasonable expectation? We did the same thing 100 years ago with universal service requirements for telephone. As I understand it, the build out was subsidized by the government along with a universal service fee for all phone lines. Is the infrastructure for low-broadband in low density areas inherently more expensive than POTS infrastructure was 75-100 years ago?
- willcipriano 4y ago
  We paid for universal broadband too, we just didn't get it or the money back.
- tomrod 4y ago
  In general, problems are caused by people, policy, or technology. I think you hit on a people+policy misalignment.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Things are of course a lot different than they were 100 years ago. Bringing electricity and phone service to farms and ranches probably seemed pretty important. I'm not sure how a lot of modern coastal urbanites would feel about a very expensive project to bring wired broadband to everyone living on the side of a mountain somewhere today. (Especially given that wireless technologies are an option for a lot of people, if not everyone.) POTS bills also at least used to have a universal service charge line item, in part to subsidize rural service.
  - burnished 4y ago
    As one of those coastal urbanites, fucking great. Didnt we already pay a bunch of money for that anyway? Even aside from that the internet is great, I'm not going to feel bad about helping to pay to bring it to everyone.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      I don't even really disagree. I just see a lot of hostility on here about providing infrastructure for people who aren't in metros. I'm not convinced that in this day and age it all has to be wired. But it's not unreasonable to consider that at least reasonable Internet should be a basic utility service even for very rural locations.
    - rayiner 4y ago
      > Didnt we already pay a bunch of money for that anyway No? The process to transition the USF to covering broadband didn’t even start until the tail end of the Obama administration.
- beauzero 4y ago
  Some of that is starting to change in the rural South. Georgia changed laws to allow electrical coops and cities to run their own loops. Alabama is also pushing money into local rural fiber builds. An example, in Carroll County, GA I live outside of Carrollton, GA and have 2 fiber options 1) Charter/Spectrum which I use 2) CarrollEMC/Crossbeam which looks like they just dropped fiber on our power pole within the last month. If you look at the FCC map of Highway 5 it correctly shows ATT DSL availability, incorrectly shows Comcast coax availability, and does not show either Charter/Spectrum or CarrollEMC/Crossbeam. There is only a process to challenge availability on the FCC map, like Comcast...that incorrectly shows availability, and no option to add new providers to the map. It is left up to the provider to claim availability.
  - ydlr 4y ago
    Arkansas has also removed some of the barriers for electric coops and municipal broadband, but change has been slow. There are now plenty of rural areas with symmetrical gigabit broadband available, while most cities are stuck with whatever pitiful options Cox or ATT decides to bestow.
    - eppp 4y ago
      Tennessee did as well. There are still limits but coops can serve inside their boundaries but cannot compete against a telephone coop.
- rayiner 4y ago
  75-100 years ago coincided with the tail end of a massive boom of dirt poor immigrants from Europe. Labor was extremely cheap relative to other things in the economy. It’s vastly more expensive now. It’s the same story as almost all our infrastructure. We couldn’t build the New York subway today either.
maxsilver 4y ago
> It's probably not realistic to expect universal wired broadband in very rural areas. I don't know why. It seems incredibly realistic to expect wired broadband in most rural areas. (We were able to provide them with power lines and telephone lines over 60+ years ago, there's no reason fiber would have to be any different)
ahepp 4y ago
I’m not sure I understand why broadband should be a problem anywhere there’s electrical infrastructure.

keneda7 4y ago

This is largest hurdle I've seen for Starlink. I know at least 10 people in the foothills of Northern CA that are stuck with 2 choices if they want Starlink. They can either cut down several massive (100ft+) trees or they can pay someone to climb up a tree and mount the dish. The second options comes with a whole other sets of problems and typically still includes cutting some other trees down.

excitom 4y ago
Side note: If I lived in the Northern California foothills I would be cutting down big trees close to the house due to extreme fire danger. Side benefit, better Satellite visibility.
- keneda7 4y ago
  Well they all have defensible space around their homes. It is a requirement for the only fire insurance they can get. Even the defensible space does not clear enough to get uninterrupted Starlink service.

LarryMullins 4y ago

I know some people used to chop down trees to get a line of sight for satellite TV. Starlink is different in that you need more than a single LOS to a specific spot in the sky, but I wouldn't be too surprised if a lot of people ultimately chop down more trees to get access. Alternatively, perhaps the starlink antenna could be mounted on a large pole or modest radio tower. That would be ugly but probably a lot less ugly than chopping down your trees.

0xffff2 4y ago
Yeah, I have a house in a heavily forested area. I put the starlink dish on top of a 12ft pole mounted on my roof. I have a double of line of sight issues, but it's good enough that I don't notice service interruptions.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  For a house in the Adirondacks in upstate NY (heavily wooded), we used a 50' triangular antenna tower with Dishy at the top to clear the tree line. Went from abysmal DSL speeds to ~100Mbps, also added microcells from the largest mobile providers to improve cell coverage on the property (mounted to the antenna structure in water resistant housings). Total cost was sub $5k for everything mentioned. If close to the home doesn't work, depending on siting requirements, you can erect a tower in a clearing or where there is clear line of sight to the sky and then run power and network to the tower from the nearest structure. Don't neglect lightning surge suppression to protect equipment. Similar to this: https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/mk4jfx/starlink_dishy_a_little_closer_to_the_stars_on_a/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/mk4jfx/starlink_d... https://www.rohnnet.com/rohn-g-series-self-supporting-tower https://www.rohnnet.com/rohn-g-series-self-supporting-tower

ultrarunner 4y ago

The Facebook groups I used to be in had most people putting them on poles, or even mounting them to the tops of said tall trees. Seemed to work fine, even with a bit of sway.

sidewndr46 4y ago

if you don't mind putting up a huge pole with a platform on top, you can get around it that way.

smoldesu 4y ago

It's worth noting that most alternatives require a satellite dish of some sort. Before Starlink, I had a roof-mounted HughesNet dish (and before that a custom WISP receiver). Either way, I'd say Starlink is an enormous improvement over every other satellite solution I've tried. The lack of data cap alone puts it head-and-heels above the competition, and the speeds are good enough to coax people off 4G. I have some small complaints about CGNAT and the provided router, but the service itself is more reliable than some cable connections I've tried. Having seen (and tried) a lot of the alternatives, there really aren't any pushbutton services that compare.

idiotsecant 4y ago
Starlink doesn't have a data cap? No way that's sustainable.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  They said they were limiting people to 1tb/month this year, but I don't think that's enacted yet. At least, if it is, I haven't noticed it yet...
  - ghaff 4y ago
    That's more than I use. On the other hand, it's mostly just me and I don't do a huge amount of streaming video.
  - xboxnolifes 4y ago
    That's still a pretty generous cap. When I was living with 5 other heavy internet users, our monthly usage didn't exceed 600GB.
  - opamp 4y ago
    It’s still unlimited beyond that, you’re just “deprioritized.” Depending on how rural you are, you might not even notice. It’s much like a cell tower where a geographical area has finite capacity. You use your “priority” data that has speed guarantees, then it slows down, but is still unlimited. Apparently some users were reselling the link & maxing out the upload/download 24/7. (yeah, I get it, but in this case some kind of QoS probably needs to happen to turn a profit) I’ve been a beta user since the first couple months of launch. They’ve had growing pains, but it has overall been light years ahead of our local WISP or Hughesnet/Viasat in terms of speed and reliability. Several of my neighbors have no other option than traditional geostationary satellite providers, and I don’t think any of us every want to go back to 600ms+ latencies! edit: I just wanted to add that for many people, priority speeds for 1TB & having sub-100ms latency is far, far better than the alternatives.

callalex 4y ago

It’s funny, people don’t hesitate to trim and remove trees for roads, power lines, or plumbing. I would consider trimming a tree to access the internet worthwhile.

hydrometallurgy 4y ago
Yes, but Starlink needs a really wide/large view of the sky. Often, it's not enough to simply trim a few trees.