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I live in rural America. The story is quite similar here. My options were (a) cellular hotspot, which is slow and expensive, or (b) satellite internet, which is
by LorenDB 3mo ago
I live in rural America. The story is quite similar here. My options were (a) cellular hotspot, which is slow and expensive, or (b) satellite internet, which is also slow and expensive. Despite government programs, there are no cable/fiber/DSL options in my area. Starlink fills the gap nicely; it's not blazingly fast, but pretty much meets FCC broadband definitions for $55/mo.
- sejje 3mo agoSame, except I had DSL--the local provider 'guarantees' speeds of 10Mbps to my house. So, needless to say, starlink has been amazing.
- JumpCrisscross 3mo agoI live in a rural neighborhood with fiber. Multiple neighbors go with Starlink because it’s cheaper and good enough.
- gonzalohm 3mo agoIs it really $55 a month?
- quantummagic 3mo agoWhy would he give an incorrect figure?
- fhdkweig 3mo agoTypos can happen.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- NamlchakKhandro 3mo agoLies
- colechristensen 3mo agoResidential 100 mbps (which these days actually delivers pretty well) is $55/mo https://starlink.com/service-plans https://starlink.com/service-plans
- whycombinetor 3mo agoStarlink is also satellite internet, right?
- cwillu 3mo agoYes, but the low altitude of the satellites makes a big difference.
- sph 3mo agoStarlink satellites are ~500 km in altitude. Regular satellite internet is in geostationary orbit at ~35,000 km in altitude. The difference in latency is massive. 3ms vs 220ms roundtrip time at the speed of light.
- colechristensen 3mo agoMy parents in rural America had a local ISP that did long distance wireless (highly directional antenna mounted on the house pointed at the top of the grain elevator a few miles away) but it was an unreliable 20 Mbps because the ISP wasn't interested in upgrading their equipment.
- theoreticalmal 3mo agoThis could have been a revolutionary way of accessing the internet before Starlink. Grain elevators are everywhere in the US Midwest. Can’t believe it wasn’t capitalized on
- colechristensen 3mo agoIt is indeed all over the place, they just didn't want to upgrade equipment once it was there.
- inemesitaffia 3mo agoProbably margin issues.
- NetMageSCW 3mo agoYou’d have to run fiber to all the grain elevators and you are back to the same issues.
- jcims 3mo agoIt’s also surprisingly reliable given the physics of it all. I built a house out in the country in 2007 and 10Mbps DSL was all that was available for terrestrial connectivity up until literally yesterday. The DSL would go down for hours a couple of times per month. I got on an early starlink pilot program and had a dish up in early 2021. Aside from momentary blips on the leading edge of a stormfront and occasional network issues a couple of times per year, it’s been rock solid with half the latency and 20x the bandwidth.
- bookofjoe 3mo agoThis reminds me of Steve Wozniak's nightmarish prolonged battle to be allowed to personally pay for broadband to his just purchased house. >Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak: I don't have broadband at home [2012] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/us-news-blog/2012/may/12/apple-steve-wozniak-broadband-home https://www.theguardian.com/technology/us-news-blog/2012/may...
- bookofjoe 3mo agoAddendum: He later remarked that in the future the first thing he'd ask about a prospective home is whether or not it has broadband.
- fluoridation 3mo agoI don't understand. Starlink satellites are just routers to ground stations. Why are there no wired connections available? Do the connections not reach the famous last mile?
- consensus1 3mo agoYes. The last mile problem is legitimately so difficult in rural areas that it is more cost effective to launch a constellation of 10,000+ satellites than it is to run the wires.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3mo agoIf you happen to live within line of site of a cell tower buying a MIMO antenna and beaming internet off of a data plan is also somewhat viable, but Starlink is probably better on bandwidth and packet loss
- fluoridation 3mo agoI wonder about the economics, though. Intuitively it doesn't seem like it can be more efficient to launch constellations of satellites than run kilometers of cables, even if you have to run 20 km for each customer. That's, what, $10k a pop? So around two orders of magnitude cheaper than a satellite? Something isn't adding up for me.
- Panzer04 3mo agoStarling is 10k satellites shared across the entire planet. A satellite will serve thousands of customers, whereas a fixed line only serves one. I think 10k is also severely understating the cost per customer. There's like hundreds of metres between these houses at a minimum, and in some areas possibly Kilometers from house to house.
- fragmede 3mo agoIntuitively, what's the cost to get to orbit? SpaceX's Falcon reusable rocket lowered the cost to get to space by an order of magnitude or so, so you have to factor that in.