6 ms·

Once space-based broadband Internet becomes widely available, I predict shortsighted ISPs will join the ranks of Kodak and Blockbuster.

alwayslikethis 2y ago
Is the total possible bandwidth available on these even comparable to optical fibers?
- badgersnake 2y ago
  Pretty obviously not, theoretically you could have tens of terrabits per fibre core. The limiting factor is the electronics at either end.
- YetAnotherNick 2y ago
  The bigger concern is the latency. Even if some technical progress increases the bandwidth, latency is bounded by speed of light and couldn't be as low as cable.
  - larkost 2y ago
    The low-earth orbit generally means that this is not as big of an issue as in older satellite technologies. Currently if you are in an area where the satellite does not need to bounce your data through one or more other satellites before hitting a ground station they are in the tens of milliseconds of latency (20-60). Comcast is generally in the 20-30 neighborhood, unless you are using their gigabit service, then it is more like 10-15 milliseconds. So it is higher, but not debilitatingly so (unless your application is very sensitive to latency). I would imagine there is a lot more jitter in Starlink, but that is more a feel than real numbers. Mainly on a terrestrial system you wind up bouncing through more substations on the way to the general Internet, whereas with Starlink you are generally bouncing straight from your dish to the satellite to the base station. So less bounces, but farther to go. The physics favors the wire, but not as much as it used to.
- 0xcde4c3db 2y ago
  SpaceX apparently doesn't like to give definitive numbers (perhaps there are too many configurable tradeoffs and/or dynamic adjustments to variable environmental conditions for that to make sense), but the downlink throughput of a Starlink V1 satellite is reportedly about 20 Gbps over an area of several square miles. Putting that on a single fiber wavelength is mature enough to be firmly in SOHO/homelab territory these days (e.g. QNAP and Mikrotik both have 25Gbps switches that are about $1000). It looks like commodity CWDM mux/demux boxes can cram 16 of those into a single fiber. It's safe to assume that the big guys like Comcast and CenturyLink/Lumen can get equipment capable of far more than that.
cj 2y ago
If that happens, wouldn't it be potentially worse than the current situation? Surely your local neighborhood isn't going to deploy its own dedicated satellite constellation. If/when satelite broadband becomes widespread, it will likely be consolidated and provided by 1 provider (maybe 2?) which might end up resulting in higher costs for everyone all around.
- jtbayly 2y ago
  It is very hard for me to imagine space-based internet ever being able to be competitive financially with an earth-based option outside of special circumstances.
  - toast0 2y ago
    Running an LEO satellite constellation is very expensive. But installing and maintaining a wire to everyone's house is also very expensive. IMHO, it's a question of capacity and acceptable service levels. Starlink monthly pricing is higher than my DSL and nearby cable as well as my local muni fiber. But it's not so much higher as to rule it out. And the install fee is a lot lower than muni fiber. It's going to take a long time to get ROI on my installation cost for the muni fiber if I compare monthly cost to Starlink. Muni fiber service level should be much better, but Starlink service would probably have been good enough.
    - deepsquirrelnet 2y ago
      Security in LEO will eclipse the cost of everything else. Right now it’s free. When it becomes critical infrastructure, it has to be protected.
      - toast0 2y ago
        Security in outside plant isn't free either. We're a long way away from widespread outages because someone thought they could get high with the proceeds of a stolen satellite, but there are lots of disruptions when people take down pole mounted fiber because they thought it would be worth something.
hotpotatoe 2y ago
So? We trade a terrestrial based monopoly for a space based one?
- lxgr 2y ago
  We'd also trade the fragments of resilience we have left against a single point of failure (both organizationally and infrastructurally). Space-based internet makes total sense for very remote areas or as a bridge technology, as well as a technology to compete with incumbent terrestrial monopolies, but I'd hate to see fiber and terrestrial 5G rollouts stopping entirely in favor of it.
  - orwin 2y ago
    > We'd also trade the fragments of resilience we have left against a single point of failure It's the characteristic of the 21th century, trading resiliency and robustness for performance. As long as the world is stable, it's nice.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  but this one is owned by twitter guy I like! /s
a_vanderbilt 2y ago
It might come even sooner as mobile internet becomes faster and gets lower in latency. I used to have Cox, and the service availability was so bad it was nigh unusable. Switched to TMobile home 5g and in some cases, it's actually faster. That shouldn't be a thing but here we are. I don't play twitchy games so latency isn't really a concern for me. By the time 6g or whatever it's going to be called is well established, I think we'll see the incumbents get blockbuster'd.
jvanderbot 2y ago
This has a "Bitcoin will solve finance" feel to it. Not to be super dismissive, but there's just as much likelihood it will help as it won't. But in your corner: It's true that right now space-based deployment of broadband will provide broadband in locations where it's not currently available - perhaps spurring competition. It's also probably true that space-based broadband will be able to compete directly with urban / dense areas where Comcast & company have an effective monopoly - also a good thing! But there's no reason to think it will put comcast/company out of business at all. Has cell-tower based intenet service at all displaced comcast? Verizon and T-Mobile canvas my neighborhood claiming to offer the best internet, but as far as I can tell, everyone still uses Xfinity, even if Centurylink is much, much better.
- sabbaticaldev 2y ago
  TV made radio irrelevant, the internet made TV irrelevant. Both still exists but as money-losing mass manipulation tools
  - jvanderbot 2y ago
    But those are new kinds. Not new providers. There's no phone company that made all other phone companies irrelevant. There's no tv channel that made all other tv channels irrelevant. And there's no radio station that .. you get it. And so it's hard for me to concolude that there's some ISP that will make all other ISPs irrelevant. Honestly most people will probably have about a 50/50 split between home wifi and phone internet. And that home wifi might have significant intrusion from space-based ISP, but not completely. (I realize spacex is also hoping to provide some phone service from satellites, but I digress)
  - badgersnake 2y ago
    TV certainly didn't make radio irrelevant, radio is very relevant in situations where you can't look at a screen, or would prefer not to. It's also much lower bandwidth, takes up a lot less space, uses a lot less power on the receiver (even compared to say a modern mobile device) and audio only content is much cheaper to produce. I've heard it argued that podcasts make radio obsolete. That is more plausible.
MyFirstSass 2y ago
Im extremely jealous of this techno optimism perspective. In my view at no point has there been a decrease in monopolisation or increase in democratisation since the hopeful cybernetic 90's, so i just don't see this as good, more like some Tyrell or state owned corporate almost fascist dystopia where everything is owned and censored by the few, and just because it's "awesome and space based" only adds to the exclusivity. It's already leaked Musk is working for the US military, so it isn't some benevolent, utilitarian or even broad scaled project it's a project for world domination and enslavement.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dboreham 2y ago
Shannon says no.
MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
Starlink has insufficient capacity for metropolitan areas. I don't think this is easily solvable, given the shared medium and the bandwidth constraints.
- tzs 2y ago
  Let's try some back of the envelope calculation for providing broadband to the US via LEO satellites. Initially assume everyone is spread out uniformly, and that we need a broadband connection for every three people, and that 100 Mbps counts as broadband. If all connected were in use at the same time downloading at 100 Mbps we need an aggregate bandwidth of 11000 Tbps. Actual usage would be more bursty, so let's assume we can oversell by a factor of 100. That reduced the aggregate bandwidth need to 110 Tbps. Wikipedia tells me the satellite with the most bandwidth currently are those in the ViaSat-3 constellation of geosynchronous satellites, each with a bandwidth of 1 Tbps. Let's assume we can get LEO satellites with that bandwidth. We would need 110 to get the required aggregate bandwidth. However, since each satellite only spends roughly 1/8 of its time over the US we need to multiply the number of satellites by 8. That brings is to 880 satellites, but remember, we were assuming a uniformly spread out population. We need to take into account the non-uniformity of the actual population. To do that we need to know the ground area that a satellite can serve simultaneously. That depends on the height of the satellite. Google is telling me Starlink's around around 350 miles up, so let's assume that is what we use too. A naive distance to horizon calculation says that a satellite at that height would have an horizon around 2500 miles away. I'm not sure if that means it could actually broadcast to people 2500 miles away from whatever its spot is over or if there would be problems due to the shallow angle the signal would have to travel to the receiver. If each satellite can effectively broadcast to such a large circle then most of the 110 visible at a given time from the US would be visible over a wide enough area that how the population is distributed might not matter much. This is assuming that the satellites do not interfere with each other. My guess is that there would be interference and they would have to operate more like cellular networks operate, with each satellite having a limited ground area that it broadcasts into using some kind of spot beam. Feasibility now depends on the size of those spot beams and how accurately they can be aimed. If they can adjust the beams to cover large areas when they are serving a rural area and small areas when serving a dense area, and if they can aim that spot anywhere in that 2000+ mile radius circle where the satellite is visible then 880 satellites may be enough. If, on the other hand, their beams are pretty much fixed in size and direction, then we would probably need a lot more satellites. Given the area of the US, for everyplace to have coverage the 110 satellites that would be over the US on average would have to each be responsible for a circle of around 200 miles in diameter, and could handle the needs of 3 million people. If you've got more than 3 million people in a 200 mile circle you'll need more satellites over that circle. Suppose we have an area that needs several satellites. It might be possible to arrange orbits so particular places always have a lot of satellites so that you could cover that area without having to simply make your constellation bigger. I have no idea if that is possible. If not you may have to increase you constellation size so that you every place has the number of satellites that your highest density 200 mile diameter circle needs. I don't think that there is any 200 mile diameter circle in the US that would need more that 20 satellites, which would mean we'd need 17600 satellites in the constellation. Note that this is quite dependent on the circle size so could be way off from reality. Also I've not considered communications from the ground to the satellite which might also impose constraints. Conclusion: it doesn't seem obviously impossible to provide 100 Mbps broadband via satellite to everyone in the US. A more detailed analysis is needed.
conradev 2y ago
Or maybe, if we’re lucky, they’ll have to compete on quality as well as price. When Verizon laid down fiber optic cable in my (former) neighborhood, it was so much better than Xfinity’s service, and everyone I knew switched. Not to say that the type of physical cable matters as much, DOCSIS 4.0 is in the cards, but latency and bandwidth will always be better on a (good) wired connection. One quirk worth mentioning, though, is that WWAN did leap-frog WLAN with 5G and especially with ultra-wideband (which isn’t everywhere). Until I installed 6GHz Wi-Fi, the fastest wireless speeds I saw were on ultra-wideband connections to my phone.
- vel0city 2y ago
  > WWAN did leap-frog WLAN with 5G and especially with ultra-wideband > Until I installed 6GHz Wi-Fi So after you upgraded your WLAN it was faster than your WAN until you bothered upgrading your WLAN. That's a personal deployment decision not necessarily a matter of what was or wasn't' available at the time. >1G WiFi existed years before ultra-wideband was a thing.
  - conradev 2y ago
    The first phone to ship with ultra-wideband was the iPhone 11 in 2019, and the first phone to ship with 6GHz was the Galaxy S21 Ultra in 2021. The Intel AX210 was the first wireless card to ship with 6GHz at the end of 2020 and the first laptop to include it from MSI shipped in 2021. Calling WiFi 6 >1G is a pretty far stretch. I don't think I've seen a real world test that breaks that barrier in favorable conditions, even with today's routers: https://evanmccann.net/blog/2022/5/u6-pro-and-u6-mesh-review https://evanmccann.net/blog/2022/5/u6-pro-and-u6-mesh-review https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-wi-fi-router/#how-we-tested-plus-the-results https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-wi-fi-router... Whereas ultra-wideband was capable of pulling 2Gbps in 2020, something I have not even seen Wi-Fi 7 able to do. Ultra-wideband still has quite an edge: https://www.reddit.com/r/ATT/comments/gbr335/this_might_be_a_reddit_record_2gbps_on_5g_mmwave/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ATT/comments/gbr335/this_might_be_a...
    - vel0city 2y ago
gosub100 2y ago
I hope so but I don't think any constellation can handle even a medium sized town without significant throttling.
paxys 2y ago
It takes 5 minutes of back of the envelope calculations to realize that this is a pipe dream. Starlink isn't a substitute for fiber internet, it's a substitute for no internet.
- bombcar 2y ago
  The missing piece is "buckets of Internet" where you pay a provider to have a connection, and they deal with whether it comes over 5G or fiber or Starlink or whatever. Nobody cares about HOW the connection is delivered, just the speed, latency, and reliability.
pmb 2y ago
No. Satellite (except when they use lasers, but nobody is proposing space lasers) is a broadcast medium and wire is point to point. Wires will almost always be cheaper and more reliable and faster on a per-customer basis and have less interference.
ravenstine 2y ago
We don't even need space based broadband for this. Terrestrial radio (5G and LTE) already will gradually drink the milkshake of most cable and fiber based ISPs.
- wintermutestwin 2y ago
  Maybe if you have an antenna on top of your house? As it is, I regularly lose internet connectivity (2 bars or LTE or 1 bar of 5g) on my phone when I step into many buildings that are within .25km of highway 80 in a large CA city.
PittleyDunkin 2y ago
? What does "space-based broadband" offer that's so attractive?
- lokar 2y ago
  Musk
wintermutestwin 2y ago
AFAIK, latency sensitive games like CoD and Fortnite suffer badly on Starlink. Don't you think that would have a massive impact on adoption in areas where you can get "wired" internet?

alwayslikethis 2y ago

Is the total possible bandwidth available on these even comparable to optical fibers?

badgersnake 2y ago
Pretty obviously not, theoretically you could have tens of terrabits per fibre core. The limiting factor is the electronics at either end.
YetAnotherNick 2y ago
The bigger concern is the latency. Even if some technical progress increases the bandwidth, latency is bounded by speed of light and couldn't be as low as cable.
- larkost 2y ago
  The low-earth orbit generally means that this is not as big of an issue as in older satellite technologies. Currently if you are in an area where the satellite does not need to bounce your data through one or more other satellites before hitting a ground station they are in the tens of milliseconds of latency (20-60). Comcast is generally in the 20-30 neighborhood, unless you are using their gigabit service, then it is more like 10-15 milliseconds. So it is higher, but not debilitatingly so (unless your application is very sensitive to latency). I would imagine there is a lot more jitter in Starlink, but that is more a feel than real numbers. Mainly on a terrestrial system you wind up bouncing through more substations on the way to the general Internet, whereas with Starlink you are generally bouncing straight from your dish to the satellite to the base station. So less bounces, but farther to go. The physics favors the wire, but not as much as it used to.
0xcde4c3db 2y ago
SpaceX apparently doesn't like to give definitive numbers (perhaps there are too many configurable tradeoffs and/or dynamic adjustments to variable environmental conditions for that to make sense), but the downlink throughput of a Starlink V1 satellite is reportedly about 20 Gbps over an area of several square miles. Putting that on a single fiber wavelength is mature enough to be firmly in SOHO/homelab territory these days (e.g. QNAP and Mikrotik both have 25Gbps switches that are about $1000). It looks like commodity CWDM mux/demux boxes can cram 16 of those into a single fiber. It's safe to assume that the big guys like Comcast and CenturyLink/Lumen can get equipment capable of far more than that.

cj 2y ago

If that happens, wouldn't it be potentially worse than the current situation? Surely your local neighborhood isn't going to deploy its own dedicated satellite constellation. If/when satelite broadband becomes widespread, it will likely be consolidated and provided by 1 provider (maybe 2?) which might end up resulting in higher costs for everyone all around.

jtbayly 2y ago
It is very hard for me to imagine space-based internet ever being able to be competitive financially with an earth-based option outside of special circumstances.
- toast0 2y ago
  Running an LEO satellite constellation is very expensive. But installing and maintaining a wire to everyone's house is also very expensive. IMHO, it's a question of capacity and acceptable service levels. Starlink monthly pricing is higher than my DSL and nearby cable as well as my local muni fiber. But it's not so much higher as to rule it out. And the install fee is a lot lower than muni fiber. It's going to take a long time to get ROI on my installation cost for the muni fiber if I compare monthly cost to Starlink. Muni fiber service level should be much better, but Starlink service would probably have been good enough.
  - deepsquirrelnet 2y ago
    Security in LEO will eclipse the cost of everything else. Right now it’s free. When it becomes critical infrastructure, it has to be protected.
    - toast0 2y ago
      Security in outside plant isn't free either. We're a long way away from widespread outages because someone thought they could get high with the proceeds of a stolen satellite, but there are lots of disruptions when people take down pole mounted fiber because they thought it would be worth something.

hotpotatoe 2y ago

So? We trade a terrestrial based monopoly for a space based one?

lxgr 2y ago
We'd also trade the fragments of resilience we have left against a single point of failure (both organizationally and infrastructurally). Space-based internet makes total sense for very remote areas or as a bridge technology, as well as a technology to compete with incumbent terrestrial monopolies, but I'd hate to see fiber and terrestrial 5G rollouts stopping entirely in favor of it.
- orwin 2y ago
  > We'd also trade the fragments of resilience we have left against a single point of failure It's the characteristic of the 21th century, trading resiliency and robustness for performance. As long as the world is stable, it's nice.
llamaimperative 2y ago
but this one is owned by twitter guy I like! /s

a_vanderbilt 2y ago

It might come even sooner as mobile internet becomes faster and gets lower in latency. I used to have Cox, and the service availability was so bad it was nigh unusable. Switched to TMobile home 5g and in some cases, it's actually faster. That shouldn't be a thing but here we are. I don't play twitchy games so latency isn't really a concern for me. By the time 6g or whatever it's going to be called is well established, I think we'll see the incumbents get blockbuster'd.

jvanderbot 2y ago

This has a "Bitcoin will solve finance" feel to it. Not to be super dismissive, but there's just as much likelihood it will help as it won't. But in your corner: It's true that right now space-based deployment of broadband will provide broadband in locations where it's not currently available - perhaps spurring competition. It's also probably true that space-based broadband will be able to compete directly with urban / dense areas where Comcast & company have an effective monopoly - also a good thing! But there's no reason to think it will put comcast/company out of business at all. Has cell-tower based intenet service at all displaced comcast? Verizon and T-Mobile canvas my neighborhood claiming to offer the best internet, but as far as I can tell, everyone still uses Xfinity, even if Centurylink is much, much better.

sabbaticaldev 2y ago
TV made radio irrelevant, the internet made TV irrelevant. Both still exists but as money-losing mass manipulation tools
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  But those are new kinds. Not new providers. There's no phone company that made all other phone companies irrelevant. There's no tv channel that made all other tv channels irrelevant. And there's no radio station that .. you get it. And so it's hard for me to concolude that there's some ISP that will make all other ISPs irrelevant. Honestly most people will probably have about a 50/50 split between home wifi and phone internet. And that home wifi might have significant intrusion from space-based ISP, but not completely. (I realize spacex is also hoping to provide some phone service from satellites, but I digress)
- badgersnake 2y ago
  TV certainly didn't make radio irrelevant, radio is very relevant in situations where you can't look at a screen, or would prefer not to. It's also much lower bandwidth, takes up a lot less space, uses a lot less power on the receiver (even compared to say a modern mobile device) and audio only content is much cheaper to produce. I've heard it argued that podcasts make radio obsolete. That is more plausible.

MyFirstSass 2y ago

Im extremely jealous of this techno optimism perspective. In my view at no point has there been a decrease in monopolisation or increase in democratisation since the hopeful cybernetic 90's, so i just don't see this as good, more like some Tyrell or state owned corporate almost fascist dystopia where everything is owned and censored by the few, and just because it's "awesome and space based" only adds to the exclusivity. It's already leaked Musk is working for the US military, so it isn't some benevolent, utilitarian or even broad scaled project it's a project for world domination and enslavement.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

dboreham 2y ago

Shannon says no.

MrBuddyCasino 2y ago

Starlink has insufficient capacity for metropolitan areas. I don't think this is easily solvable, given the shared medium and the bandwidth constraints.

tzs 2y ago
Let's try some back of the envelope calculation for providing broadband to the US via LEO satellites. Initially assume everyone is spread out uniformly, and that we need a broadband connection for every three people, and that 100 Mbps counts as broadband. If all connected were in use at the same time downloading at 100 Mbps we need an aggregate bandwidth of 11000 Tbps. Actual usage would be more bursty, so let's assume we can oversell by a factor of 100. That reduced the aggregate bandwidth need to 110 Tbps. Wikipedia tells me the satellite with the most bandwidth currently are those in the ViaSat-3 constellation of geosynchronous satellites, each with a bandwidth of 1 Tbps. Let's assume we can get LEO satellites with that bandwidth. We would need 110 to get the required aggregate bandwidth. However, since each satellite only spends roughly 1/8 of its time over the US we need to multiply the number of satellites by 8. That brings is to 880 satellites, but remember, we were assuming a uniformly spread out population. We need to take into account the non-uniformity of the actual population. To do that we need to know the ground area that a satellite can serve simultaneously. That depends on the height of the satellite. Google is telling me Starlink's around around 350 miles up, so let's assume that is what we use too. A naive distance to horizon calculation says that a satellite at that height would have an horizon around 2500 miles away. I'm not sure if that means it could actually broadcast to people 2500 miles away from whatever its spot is over or if there would be problems due to the shallow angle the signal would have to travel to the receiver. If each satellite can effectively broadcast to such a large circle then most of the 110 visible at a given time from the US would be visible over a wide enough area that how the population is distributed might not matter much. This is assuming that the satellites do not interfere with each other. My guess is that there would be interference and they would have to operate more like cellular networks operate, with each satellite having a limited ground area that it broadcasts into using some kind of spot beam. Feasibility now depends on the size of those spot beams and how accurately they can be aimed. If they can adjust the beams to cover large areas when they are serving a rural area and small areas when serving a dense area, and if they can aim that spot anywhere in that 2000+ mile radius circle where the satellite is visible then 880 satellites may be enough. If, on the other hand, their beams are pretty much fixed in size and direction, then we would probably need a lot more satellites. Given the area of the US, for everyplace to have coverage the 110 satellites that would be over the US on average would have to each be responsible for a circle of around 200 miles in diameter, and could handle the needs of 3 million people. If you've got more than 3 million people in a 200 mile circle you'll need more satellites over that circle. Suppose we have an area that needs several satellites. It might be possible to arrange orbits so particular places always have a lot of satellites so that you could cover that area without having to simply make your constellation bigger. I have no idea if that is possible. If not you may have to increase you constellation size so that you every place has the number of satellites that your highest density 200 mile diameter circle needs. I don't think that there is any 200 mile diameter circle in the US that would need more that 20 satellites, which would mean we'd need 17600 satellites in the constellation. Note that this is quite dependent on the circle size so could be way off from reality. Also I've not considered communications from the ground to the satellite which might also impose constraints. Conclusion: it doesn't seem obviously impossible to provide 100 Mbps broadband via satellite to everyone in the US. A more detailed analysis is needed.

conradev 2y ago

Or maybe, if we’re lucky, they’ll have to compete on quality as well as price. When Verizon laid down fiber optic cable in my (former) neighborhood, it was so much better than Xfinity’s service, and everyone I knew switched. Not to say that the type of physical cable matters as much, DOCSIS 4.0 is in the cards, but latency and bandwidth will always be better on a (good) wired connection. One quirk worth mentioning, though, is that WWAN did leap-frog WLAN with 5G and especially with ultra-wideband (which isn’t everywhere). Until I installed 6GHz Wi-Fi, the fastest wireless speeds I saw were on ultra-wideband connections to my phone.

vel0city 2y ago
> WWAN did leap-frog WLAN with 5G and especially with ultra-wideband > Until I installed 6GHz Wi-Fi So after you upgraded your WLAN it was faster than your WAN until you bothered upgrading your WLAN. That's a personal deployment decision not necessarily a matter of what was or wasn't' available at the time. >1G WiFi existed years before ultra-wideband was a thing.
- conradev 2y ago
  The first phone to ship with ultra-wideband was the iPhone 11 in 2019, and the first phone to ship with 6GHz was the Galaxy S21 Ultra in 2021. The Intel AX210 was the first wireless card to ship with 6GHz at the end of 2020 and the first laptop to include it from MSI shipped in 2021. Calling WiFi 6 >1G is a pretty far stretch. I don't think I've seen a real world test that breaks that barrier in favorable conditions, even with today's routers: https://evanmccann.net/blog/2022/5/u6-pro-and-u6-mesh-review https://evanmccann.net/blog/2022/5/u6-pro-and-u6-mesh-review https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-wi-fi-router/#how-we-tested-plus-the-results https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-wi-fi-router... Whereas ultra-wideband was capable of pulling 2Gbps in 2020, something I have not even seen Wi-Fi 7 able to do. Ultra-wideband still has quite an edge: https://www.reddit.com/r/ATT/comments/gbr335/this_might_be_a_reddit_record_2gbps_on_5g_mmwave/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ATT/comments/gbr335/this_might_be_a...
  - vel0city 2y ago

gosub100 2y ago

I hope so but I don't think any constellation can handle even a medium sized town without significant throttling.

paxys 2y ago

It takes 5 minutes of back of the envelope calculations to realize that this is a pipe dream. Starlink isn't a substitute for fiber internet, it's a substitute for no internet.

bombcar 2y ago
The missing piece is "buckets of Internet" where you pay a provider to have a connection, and they deal with whether it comes over 5G or fiber or Starlink or whatever. Nobody cares about HOW the connection is delivered, just the speed, latency, and reliability.

pmb 2y ago

No. Satellite (except when they use lasers, but nobody is proposing space lasers) is a broadcast medium and wire is point to point. Wires will almost always be cheaper and more reliable and faster on a per-customer basis and have less interference.

ravenstine 2y ago

We don't even need space based broadband for this. Terrestrial radio (5G and LTE) already will gradually drink the milkshake of most cable and fiber based ISPs.

wintermutestwin 2y ago
Maybe if you have an antenna on top of your house? As it is, I regularly lose internet connectivity (2 bars or LTE or 1 bar of 5g) on my phone when I step into many buildings that are within .25km of highway 80 in a large CA city.

PittleyDunkin 2y ago

? What does "space-based broadband" offer that's so attractive?

lokar 2y ago
Musk

wintermutestwin 2y ago

AFAIK, latency sensitive games like CoD and Fortnite suffer badly on Starlink. Don't you think that would have a massive impact on adoption in areas where you can get "wired" internet?