3 ms·
> Terrestrial because—well, have you ever tried to use a satellite connection for anything real? Latency is awful, and the systems tend to go down in bad weathe
by sneak 1y ago
> Terrestrial because—well, have you ever tried to use a satellite connection for anything real? Latency is awful, and the systems tend to go down in bad weather.
This isn’t true anymore. Starlink changed the whole game. It’s fast and low latency now, and almost everyone on any service that isn’t Starlink has switched en masse to Starlink because previous satellite internet services were so bad.
- gwbas1c 1y agoYeah, I had to double-check the date when I read that. Cost aside, everything I've heard about Starlink puts them "on par" with cable. (IE, not exactly equivalent, but certainly in the same league.)
- tonyarkles 1y agoYou're right most of the time. I have had a 99% "unnoticeable" experience with Starlink in rural Canada. I definitely still experienced rain fade during heavy rain storms and occasional clear-sky blips for 30s-2min or so. Vastly superior to anything else I've used for Internet access in remote areas for sure, but not perfect. I have also experienced longer-term (30 min or so) service degradations where the connection stayed up but the bandwidth dropped to ~10Mbit/1Mbit. Most of the time no one would notice. For some applications it's definitely something that needs to get designed in.
- gwbas1c 1y agoThat's very similar to my experience with Comcast in downtown Palo Alto in 2010. A 99% "unnoticeable" experience, and then a multi-day outage caused by a massive storm. I still occasionally get blips on Comcast, mostly late at night when I'm one of the few who notices.