It's sort of mentioned, but not emphasized in this review that connection dropouts happen every few minutes for a few seconds. That makes starlink fine for any kind of asynchronous content like web browsing, torrenting or video streaming, but unusable for video calls, stream hosting, voip, or online gaming. It's implied that this is due to the trees obstructing a full view of the sky, but I have actually heard these connection dropouts are just about universal due to the constellation not having enough infill. Just a warning that for most of us we are still several hundred satellites short and some connection handoff updates away from this being a useful internet connection.
I have a property where Starlink would be perfect and I would pay triple the price to be able to do zoom calls over the connection.
Honestly when I first got the dish, and had it in an open field, that was the case—but now the momentary dropouts between satellites are less than 1-2 seconds.
They had 1000 or so satellites when I first started testing, and there are now something like 1600 or so. Most of the time, I don't even notice when it switches satellites.
If you were doing some more real-time work or extremely latency-sensitive operations, then yes, you need to stick to a different type of connection. But it's really seamless now, compared to even a few months ago.
Most of the software I used either showed no sign of the dropout, or at worst would freeze a frame or show a loading indicator for a brief moment before getting back to normal.
Online multiplayer gaming and/or streaming are the main areas where I'd have to not recommend Starlink for now.
I'm thinking of using this for a backup connection if FIOS fails... we'd switch our office over to starlink... currently we switch to comcast and it's basicaly unsable... so wonder if starlink would be good for ssh connections etc...
I have five different Wi-Fi APs on my property. The handoff between them results in roughly 40-60ms dropout. That still interrupts audio calls. 1-2 seconds is huge.
I’m a multiplayer developer and I’m waiting to get a Starlink to test on (I have tested a few times on my moms). I want to makes games tolerate of the latency and instability of Starlink. Mobile networks deal with similar issues so I think it’s possible to make games with Starlink in mind.
> They had 1000 or so satellites when I first started testing, and there are now something like 1600 or so. Most of the time, I don't even notice when it switches satellites.
Enjoy the early adopter moment. Even if they keep increasing the numbers, they will probably move those new satellites in a much wider net to cover more subscribers the second they must show a profit.
>but not emphasized in this review that connection dropouts happen every few minutes for a few seconds
I don't see this at all. I have constant uptime monitoring, and connection drops are now a minute or two per week. We use it for VoIP, there is no cellular coverage at all where I have it deployed.
Edit: Also, I mentioned this in my fuller main comment but this is around the 45th parallel in New England, and around 1500' (500m) above sea level. This location is also within approximately 50-70 miles ground level of two separate Starlink ground station installations. The nature of Starlink is that there is much more of a geographic component than most people are used to in a WAN link, so it's probably important when talking experience to specify rough area of the world one is in. Once the network is completely built up that may not matter much anymore, but at this point there are definite coverage density differences, and with the current bent-pipe usage ground stations matter too more. Anyone interested in getting an idea of current planetary station and sat deployments might find this site interesting:
As a user of Starlink for more than 4 months - the quality has improved. While you say it is unusable for video calls, i think that is way overstated and it completely depends on where you are trying to connect.
Compared to the other options which were atrocious (10 MB down max, 3 MB Up max, weather changes everything) - the hiccup you get maybe every 10 minutes for 10 seconds - is annoying but not a deal breaker for VOIP calls. If you are doing client side calls maybe a deal breaker - team calls manageable but annoying. Also I do calls with our Australian team (and were North America based) and they are on cable internet and they get hiccuped in the same amount. So actually I would say that Starlink is on par if not better than their connection.
If you are comparing the internet to city quality cable then yeah not comparable - but thats not what they are targeting. They are bringing remote areas online.
To be honest, one-on-one Facetime calls and Zoom are almost perfect now, with few bits where it would pause and come back. Group calls were even less of a problem, because we're all used to one or two people having connection issues, and it's easy to work around that.
Yeah, different call quality requirements I think. I am mostly on client calls and I have a ready alternative to be on fiber. If I head out to my place in the country and have crappy call quality as a result, that does not go over so well.
That was the feeling a few months ago. But in the last 2 months, we have used zoom and other applications with very little drop outs. I have various TV stations running for hours at a time at high resolutions, and at the most there is a freeze frame for a split second once or twice every few hours.
Frankly, I have had more issues with all the other internet connections we still maintain, than with Starlink. (Zoom was always dropping out with the others.)
For example we have: (Slow) high speed DSL, (slow) high speed lte.
In all those the internet download speeds are very variable, start fast (5-12) dropping to 0.5-1 and going up and down over time.
Starlink maintains over 20 down, going up sometimes to over 30.
We are in the countryside in Canada, so true high speed doesn't exist. For now, Starlink is the most dependable high speed option. (What will happen when more subscribers will join all on the one satellite?)
Zoom handles intermittent dropouts better than anything else I have seen and I don't quite understand the whole mechanism.
When you lose a connection for a few seconds, maybe even 10 seconds, the video will pause, but when your connection reconnects, it continues where it paused. So you don't miss anything. I believe at some point when the speaker stops talking, like waiting for a response, it will jump cut their video to a more live feed again. So that you don't get too far behind.
I'm curious if anyone here knows about how this works and if it is common practice in live video chat?
As Geerling points out, he has substantial obstructions. I have no obstructions, and see a few seconds of downtime per day. My wife and I regularly have multi-hour zoom calls with no problems.
Obstructions are a problem, but users with no alternative are much more motivated to locate the dish appropriately.
Starlink is not for people who have gigabit wired connections. For those of us who were lucky to get a hotspot to work long enough to use our 15Gb cap, it is a godsend.
My mom has been using Starlink in Albany, OR for 2 months. It started spotty, but now works better than her other Comcast connection. The only issue is that every day at 7ish they lose connection for about 5 minutes. She’s said it’s not been a huge issue and plans to cancel her Comcast at the end of her contract. She works remote and Starlink has been great for video calls and video streaming. She’s getting 30-40 down and 20-30 ms latency; Comcast is 20 down and 25 ms latency.
I use it for zoom daily. Yesterday was the first day in awhile where I had difficulty completing a call. The handoffs now last only about a second or two. Previously they’d be 15 or so seconds but that hasn’t happened for over a month. It is my daily driver though I do have back up DSL just in case.
> It's implied that this is due to the trees obstructing a full view of the sky, but I have actually heard these connection dropouts are just about universal due to the constellation not having enough infill.
If you go to https://satellitemap.space/# and enter in your GPS location in the settings (45, -90 for a rural northern Wisconsin as an example), and you can see the satellites that that location has visibility of.
And there are times when there's nothing in that area of the sky.
> "It's sort of mentioned, but not emphasized in this review that connection dropouts happen every few minutes for a few seconds."
He mentions that this is due to the Starlink dish's view of the sky being partially obscured by trees.
This will presumably improve as the number of Starlink satellites grows, as it will be more likely that there will be an unobstructed satellite in view at any moment, and less frequent switching between satellites.
And he also mentions that if this were his only Internet, he would trim the tree branches to get a better view of the sky. That's not what I'd do though; I'd put the satellite dish on a radio mast. Anyone who's ever done any kind of radio work knows that antenna height is everything, and in his specific case it's important for a different reason: avoiding line-of-sight obstructions.
Yeah holy shit. The dude has obstructions and then writes a review about it? It's like putting bad gas in your car, then writing a review about how bad it was... Admittedly getting rid of the obstructions was a TON of work. It took me a few weeks of moving my dish around, and fiddling around with different mounts and options. I even topped a tree. But once I got rid of the obstructions, the service improved dramatically. Now with the launches that we have had of new satellites and other updates, I don't see hardly any drops at all. The most common annoyance with mine right now is the router/dish crashing. This happens maybe once every two weeks. Not much worse than the shitty Comcast-supplied modem. My next step is to use my own router and I think that'll take care of a lot of it.
Dunno, I did a ~20min FaceTime call that was essentially flawless. That call ended with me being very impressed by the stability and bandwidth of the connection. Far better than the satellite service at the location previously. Maybe it was just pure luck? Not sure, but the consistent 90-100mbit downstream and 2-digit ping is pretty impressive.
> It's sort of mentioned, but not emphasized in this review that connection dropouts happen every few minutes for a few seconds. That makes starlink fine for any kind of asynchronous content like web browsing, torrenting or video streaming, but unusable for video calls, stream hosting, voip, or online gaming
Yep, been our experience as well. We've got a few of us who wanted to trade from our cottages and its just unusable if you need a continuous signal for more than 10 minutes at a time.
That doesn't mean its useless, just that its not usable if you want to do voip, trading, video calls etc.
Hopefully they'll figure out what causes drop ever few minutes at some point. But currently given how expensive it and the hardware are its a very disappointing product.
I guess we're just spoiled now a days with the 1Gbps wired internet that most city homes have access to.
If you’re getting drops every few minutes your view is obstructed. That’s about the time it takes an LEO sat to cross the sky so your dish probably can’t see a critical region in the orbit.
I think it's important to remember that "connections" in networking aren't actually connections. Everything is sent one packet at a time over networks that aren't presumed to be stable.
That means the entire system is resilient. A 2-second pause in connectivity usually won't mean the app dies. It means the application presumes it dropped a few packets, which it did.
Now, if you're playing a very fast-paced multi-player game, a 2-second lag at the wrong moment can spell disaster. But most video call programs can easily handle a 2-second blip in connectivity, annoying though it is for participants- I see those all the time on my non-Satellite based internet.
That's because he has huge sections of his sky blocked.
> It's implied that this is due to the trees obstructing a full view of the sky
It's not implied, it's explicitly the reason...
> but I have actually heard these connection dropouts are just about universal due to the constellation not having enough infill.
That used to be the problem. Most users now report (you can see them talking about it on the starlink subreddit all the time) that they're now going days to weeks without a single drop.
Obviously latency is important in synchronous use cases like video calls, however I wonder if a delay for slower one on one discussions would be all that jarring for users
For the remote areas this is intended for, it is already a 10x or more improvement. Great internet service is better than perfectly reliable slow internet.
It may be that anyone who is willing and able to do so has already thought of it, but on Linux you could multiplex the connection with LTE/3G/dialup and probably get pretty good results.
The outages have been getting better recently. They are supposed to go away entirely once the first constellation is fully complete. If you don't have obstructions, that is.
It certainly can be on a mast; I put mine on a (short) steel tube mast, and it's been a great improvement on service that was already a vast improvement over Hughesnet-provided satellite.
> That makes starlink fine for any kind of asynchronous content like web browsing
This sounds terrible for web browsing. Last thing I want is to know is to submit a form and then have my connection drop out in the middle. Imagine being in the middle of filling out an application or opening an account or verifying your identity or something like that.
If the connection drops for less than 5-10 seconds (this happens even on my Cable Internet sometimes), it's no problem. Most timeouts and TCP connections are okay with complete dropouts for 30 or 60 seconds (sometimes longer), as long as your local LAN doesn't drop your network connection.
I've had Starlink for about 6 months and it is a massive improvement on upload speed at 10-25 Mb. Download speed is a mixed bag wildly oscillating from 5 to 100 Mb and back. It's okay for downloading things but it's terrible for any sort of video conferencing. There are brief dropouts on average every 6 minutes or so and my obstruction map is better than the author's. My neighbor up the street got slightly better service by mounting his dishy on a 20-ft antenna pole above his house.
Local ground service is 20 Mb download and 2 Mb upload. And that's just barely sufficient for watching streaming video and video conferencing. Gigabit service is but a mile and a half away but no one is going to pay to lay the fiber into our neighborhood. So the last mile and a half is copper from 20 years ago. I think that's going to require political will to fix and I don't think that political will exists right now nor will it in the near future. We could have paid $5,000 per house to lay it ourself but our own neighborhood couldn't come to consensus on that. Now imagine that at a national level.
So if they just deliver 100/100 within a year or two, this is an epic win IMO and I will cancel ground service. And if they don't someone else will so I'm not worried. But it took Teslas to spark the electric vehicle industry. Now there's a lot of choice. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens here.
> Gigabit service is but a mile and a half away but no one is going to pay to lay the fiber into our neighborhood. So the last mile and a half is copper from 20 years ago. I think that's going to require political will to fix
I imagine once Starlink is an actual choice, the telecoms will install wireless at the end of the fiber and offer you faster, more reliable service than Starlink.
They don't do it now because they get your money without having to do anything at all.
Starlink isn't driving the telecoms to install wireless. The telecoms were already planning this before Starlink.
T-Mobile Home Internet is already available to 30M households in the US (out of around 130M households so around 20-25% of US households). T-Mobile is looking to have 7-8M subscribers within the next 5 years which would make them the 4th largest ISP (behind Xfinity, Spectrum, and AT&T). Verizon is looking to cover 50M households by the end of 2024 which is years away, but shows that 5G home internet is coming.
Wired home internet companies aren't avoiding installing a wireless link at the end of their fiber out of spite. It's a combination of who has wireless spectrum and the technology/capacity available. If you're talking about Xfinity or Spectrum, they don't have the wireless spectrum to offer that. If you're talking about Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile, they're working on it, but it takes time for the technology and spectrum to be there to provide the capacity people expect for a home internet connection. The recently concluded C-Band auction means that wireless carriers are going to have more spectrum available to provide more capacity (and they spent nearly $100B getting it). 5G NR provides more speed and capacity.
If it was just out of spite, Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile would have been offering wireless home internet for years in areas where they had no wired network. They weren't getting the money in places where they didn't own the local telco (which for T-Mobile is everywhere and for Verizon/AT&T is most places). Even when they owned the local telco, most people would be buying cable internet.
The problem is that home internet isn't easy. A wireless customer probably uses 10GB of data on average. Streaming HD Netflix is 2-3GB per hour. Home internet usage is usually an order of magnitude higher (and can be even higher than that). Basically, you need to increase your network capacity by at least 10x if you're going to be signing up home internet customers. With new technologies and spectrum, that's what wireless carriers are doing over the next 1-5 years.
I think that terrestrial wireless will be big in the future, but it's not because of Starlink putting pressure on telecoms. It's because their networks are going to be seeing massive capacity upgrades over the next few years that will enable it. Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile would have loved to offer wireless home internet years ago, but the technology and capacity simply wasn't there. I mean, they did offer home internet years ago, but it often cost hundreds of dollars a month and was only available in really rural areas (not just places that might hate 20Mbps service). But new tech and capacity gains are allowing them to offer new service. T-Mobile is first out of the gate because it got new spectrum earlier, but Verizon and AT&T will be following in the coming years.
I imagine the more immediate threat is 5G internet. But currently the reception in this neighborhood is terrible for T-Mobile (despite their coverage map insisting otherwise) yet one of my neighbors claims he can get 50 Mb download with an AT&T hotspot. I have approximately zero faith in our current ground-based providers. They are the PG&E of broadband IMO.
Upgrading to my first 5G phone recently made voice service work at my house but did nothing for data.
> And if they don't someone else will so I'm not worried... I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens here.
I'm a little worried about it. Other than Amazon's Project Kuiper, I don't really see who else can compete.
Unlike EVs there's not an existing industry that's doing _mostly_ the same thing, that just needs to start offering a new line. Running a LEO megaconstellation is extremely different than putting up a handful of massive geostationary satellites. I just don't see the existing satellite internet players being able to compete.
Frankly, it's a massive investment of resources to get started (which is true for auto manufacturers as well), but doing it economically requires launch costs that only SpaceX is currently able to provide.
Nobody else wants to build a competitor to Starlink by paying SpaceX. Which is why I think Amazon's Kuiper is the best shot to compete—but it requires Blue Origin's New Glenn to come online to really get the economics working. I know Amazon has tapped ULA as a launch provider in the interim, so they'll be able to start getting satellites up and running soon, but the economics seem...painful if they're going to use expendable rockets for the bulk of the constellation.
It's definitely possible that we see a flourishing of offerings, but I could also see a world where in 5 years time there's really only still Starlink.
>Nobody else wants to build a competitor to Starlink by paying SpaceX
I'm not sure what you mean here. Outside of, say, military usage, every single telecom company is a competitor to Starlink. Internet is internet.
This commercial product is turning out to be what the "naysayers" thought it would be; brilliant if you're in a place with terrible internet, but noncompetitive in any kind of urban environment.
Again, imho, the huge thing here is the ability to get a quick internet set up anywhere in the world that can't easily be taken down (...military).
A bit of a tangent, but is there any information about how many constellations are physically possible? Obviously there's a lot of space in LEO, but it's still limited. Given that each provider would need their own very dense constellation of satellites in different orbits, things would eventually start getting crowded.
I don't think we'll get there any time soon (or ever), but kind of an interesting thought experiment.
HughesNet and ViaSat have both been around for a while but their rates and their service are terrible. But unlike Starlink, their service is reliably and predictably crappy so there's that I guess. There's nothing stopping them from improving their own services.
> But it took Teslas to spark the electric vehicle industry. Now there's a lot of choice. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens here.
I really hope not. There are enough satellites out there, there are already too many, space pollution is real. Maybe we can find a better solution to this particular problem.
I think these LEO constellations are actually the least concerning part of space pollution.
There are many more LEO satellites, true, but their orbital placement is such that the satellite's orbit naturally decays in a few years. Which means if a satellite becomes uncontrollable (or is destroyed in some way), the debris will clear in a relatively short period of time.
I'm actually much more concerned about the much smaller number of satellites in medium and geostationary orbits, where the decay time is decades or centuries.
Failed satellites or debris in these orbits will take a very long time to clear, and strikes me as a much larger concern than the larger number of LEO sats
> So if they just deliver 100/100 within a year or two, this is an epic win
It's unlikely that they (Starlink or someone else) will offer symmetrical speeds. It's not that they're looking to be mean to you. It's that uplink is harder and people use a lot more downlink.
Even if they dedicated as much wireless spectrum to downlink and uplink, uplink would likely be slower. We see this on traditional cell networks. They dedicate as much spectrum to uplink as downlink, but their cell tower is able to better transmit than your equipment and so the downlink becomes faster. Even with so many more users downloading than uploading (and causing congestion), the downlink is usually faster.
Newer wireless networks aren't going to dedicate equal spectrum to downlink and uplink (using time-division instead of frequency division to separate downlink and uplink). Again, this isn't to be mean to you. It's just a reality that people use a lot more downlink bandwidth than uplink. Starlink isn't immune from that reality.
Elon Musk has already said that they should be able to hit 500,000 customers, but that scaling to millions of customers will be difficult. They're going to have to cap how many people get service in an area and/or put in network management to make sure that some users don't use up all the bandwidth from others nearby.
They're also going to need to focus on downlink capacity to serve what users need. That doesn't mean unusable uplink. As you noted, 10-25Mbps uplink is an important improvement. But wireless internet options (including Starlink) will need to balance that with the downlink capacity users need.
> We could have paid $5,000 per house to lay it ourself but our own neighborhood couldn't come to consensus on that
Over 10 years, that's $42/mo. Over 20 years, $21/mo. That's non-trivial if the solution to your internet woes might just be a couple years away. It's probably one of the big reasons why wired companies won't want to be spending money expanding networks in suburban/rural areas. Let's say that you invest in a network expansion and you expect to make it back over the next 20 years. Then 3 years into your investment, Starlink, T-Mobile, and Verizon are all offering home internet service to your customers. Sure, your fiber network might be "better", but that will only attract some users. Others might get a package deal from their wireless carrier giving them a better price. Now you go from having 90% of households to 50% of households and the investment that you made probably won't work out. For most people, 100Mbps is plenty. Sure, some people love the low-ping times of fiber and love gigabit speeds. People like us here on HN. For most people, they want to be able to use Netflix/YouTube/Facebook/etc. and there's going to be a lot of competition for that market.
> Now imagine that at a national level
Realistically, this already exists on the national level in that we spend billions subsidizing rural connections. Starlink is receiving lots of government money to provide rural internet. I think a big question is whether Starlink is looking to grow well beyond what the government will subsidize and whether government subsidies will flow to other companies more. I'm sure that AT&T/T-Mobile/Verizon are all looking at what rural internet subsidies might come their way as they launch rural home internet.
We do have some political will to fix the situation, but it's a very expensive situation to fix for a lot of rural areas in a wired way. Should people in cities subsidize suburban/rural lifestyles? As a country, we pour money into roads, low fuel prices (even as climate change ravages the planet), rural telecommunications, etc. If every home in your area is on 2 acres of land, it's going to cost more to wire up the place, it's going to cost more to get roads everywhere, it's going to use more fuel to get from place to place.
We do spend a lot making rural internet happen. It's just an expensive proposition. Heck, Starlink is very expensive at a $550 startup cost + $100/mo. That isn't cheap competition to wired internet - and that's after large government subsidies that might end up being $2,000 per user. Starlink has received $900M in federal money and Elon Musk is hoping to serve 500,000 users so that would be $1,800 per user from the government. That's not the $5,000 your service provider wanted to extend fiber, but it's still a lot of money. Plus, Starlink is likely to be getting more federal money in the future (and they might end up serving a couple million users).
There is political will and we've spent incredible amounts of money over many decades and continue to spend even more. It's just hard to serve many rural areas. If one is in an area with 5 people per square mile, that's a lot of wire for very few users. Wireless/satellite might make the most sense since installing one thing could serve hundreds or thousands of users. Even 20-50 people per square mile can be a lot of work to wire up.
While wireless home internet is in its infancy right now, I'd expect it to get a lot better over the next 5 years. As you noted, your neighbor installed a 20-foot mount to get better reception. T-Mobile Home Internet customers are rigging up directional antennas mounted on the outside of their homes to get better speeds. Given that people install satellite dishes for TV, it seems very reasonable that we'll see wireless antennas installed to offer internet service. Again, when something is in its infancy, there are less options and it's less fully realized. But that will change over time.
I think the next 5 years will be an exciting time for home internet. I don't think that Starlink is going to be doing most of the exciting stuff and I don't think we'll see symmetrical connections, but I think we'll see great stuff that will bring better connections to people who need it and will bring competition to the marketplace to prevent monopoly providers from taking advantage of their customers.
My new neighbors are increasingly tech TLAs as the former generation sells their homes off for 2-3x what they paid 20+ years ago. Median house price in my neighborhood is ~$1.1M ATM.
I think it is difficult to overestimate how much other rural internet providers have over-promised for their federal $$. I know that in my area (northwestern Montana), a variety of ISP's have received rural internet funds, and it seems like a fair bit of money has been spent on very little additional high-speed coverage. There are many towns from 350 - 2000 population that are under-served, even with a lot of federal subsidy (I'm told the local telco removed internet capacity from our town of 400 to provide it to a nearby school system. I know that if I pay $5K to get a telephone wire to my house, I can have dial-tone, but not internet, not because of distance, but because of capacity limits.) Perhaps when those ISP's applied for their grants, they simply underestimated the costs.
Regardless, we do have Starlink, and it is transformative.
> So the last mile and a half is copper from 20 years ago
In the UK, BTs 'fibre' rollout is almost exclusively FTTC and then copper phone lines after that. My parents have a phone line from 35 years ago, and the cabinet is maybe half a mile away, but they can get 50 Mbit down (I can't remember upload, maybe around 15 Mbit). The provider rolled this out a lot quicker than ADSL (we never got ADSL2), so I assume it's technically not that complicated.
The New Zealand government invested ~ £750 million into fibre to the premises infrastructure, in partnership with other companies. About 80% of NZ homes have access, with say half of those actually using it, but percentage is growing. Usable plans are about £40 per month. In my city you can’t sign up to a cable connection, even if the house is already wired up for it. I belive you even have trouble signing up for copper, because the infrastructure companies just don’t want to support it. The main competitor left is mobile, although I would love to see StarLink be available here.
About 15% of that Openreach rollout is Fibre to the Premises. Overall about a quarter of UK homes can get FTTP/FTTH either from Openreach or another provider. A lot more in Northern Ireland, somewhat less in Scotland.
However actual usage is quite different. If your Internet seems fine, why would you buy a more expensive service that claims to be "faster"? In my city Toob are trying to aggressively acquire customers for FTTP with a price they're presumably losing money on, but I don't expect that to last.
The technology for a setup like your parents is either VDSL or G.fast. Near to their old (perhaps slightly battered) green BT cabinet is a newer one, the newer one has fibre to it, and a DSLAM, the DSLAM ties to the old cabinet with copper, and so only that "maybe half a mile away" distance is covered by the DSL technology, from there it's fibre.
I think nearly 100% chance we'll get at least ~1T in infra spending on the 'hard' stuff which includes broadband. But that cost makes me wonder is it worth it when we could instead support efforts like Starlink?
Or build a government run version. though while lots of good reasons to - e.g. low rates, free access for kids etc - letting Gov own even more of our internet is probably not great.
I'm typing this message from Starlink. For me it's absolutely transformative; 10x the bandwidth I can get from any other source and very reliable.
Except for outages related to obstructions. That's a real problem and the author's situation is not good. There's ways to work around it on your property; a taller mount, a tree install, cutting some trees. But ultimately Dishy needs a clear view to the north and there's no getting around it.
I have some smaller obstructions for my install and it was a little annoying but fine. But in the past week or two it's gotten way better: my packet loss went from 2% to 0.6%. Details here: https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2021/07/20/starlink-improve...
huh. perhaps I'm exhibiting my total ignorance here, but why do they have to point North?
I know that our Satellite TV dish when I was a kid had to point to a specific angle southwards, to match the geostationary position, but I'd not expect that with Starlink, unless you were in the Falklands or Antarctica, or something?
It's a purposeful choice to avoid interfering with radio bandwidth allocations to existing geostationary satellites. As I understand it, Starlink dishes aren't allowed to send signals to a portion of the sky around the equator where the geostationary satellites are located.
Starlink would probably work even better if they didn't have to deal with this restriction, but Starlink might not have been allowed to exist if they didn't design it to work this way.
First to clarify; Starlink points north in the northern hemisphere.
Your satellite TV dish is talking to something 36,000km up in geosynchronous orbit, around the equator. That's to the south of you.
Starlink are in 550km orbits moving very fast around the planet in a fairly inclined orbit. As another commenter has said, the apparent effect is the cluster tends to "hang out" in the north. It's complicated, a good visualization should help explain it. I don't have one at my fingertips.
> But ultimately Dishy needs a clear view to the north and there's no getting around it.
I don't know much about radio or Starlink's signals, but is this a situation where a strategically-placed radio reflector would help? Assuming those are a thing. So like, a reflector mounted on both sides of a large tree. Are the signal beams too narrow for this to matter?
My Starlink experience has gotten a lot better recently. In the past few months.
I'm in rural Arkansas, near the southern edge of the rollout still I believe. I have maintained 3 ISPs this whole time. I have an EM160R LTE modem that will do 5x carrier aggregation and pulls around 240-250 mbit from my local AT&T tower. I also have T-Mobile's 4g home internet (5g works here on my phone, but they won't give me the home internet for whatever reason) which pulls 100-115 mbit. Starlink itself is somewhere between 180 and 240 down, but only 15 up. On the ATT line I can get 40-60 mbit upload, and that's one of the main reasons I keep things set up this way.
I'm about to try disabling the wan port for T-Mobile to see what it's like without that ISP. I don't do any connection bonding - straight up round robin load balancing with no stickyness, and with the amount of servers and services that use multiple TCP streams I can see 300+mbit downloads often. Pings range from 30 (when using Starlink) to 90. (when using one of the LTE connections)
I no longer game enough to comment on it. My kids play Roblox and PS4 online games and don't whine about it, so I think it's sufficient.
I don't really do Zoom meetings. MS Teams is what we use. I don't use the camera very often, but the calls will pause and drop and the people I work with have coined this as, "being Starlinked". Usually a few seconds and rarely does it take an actual redial to reconnect anymore. Just a dead period.
I'm in Ontario, Canada, 46.5 degrees latitude and typing this on Starlink.
Even with the occasional dropouts Starlink is 10-100x better than any other option that we have here (the only options are LTE, or other satellites, like xplornet).
Even though we're only a few minutes drive from a municipality of 160,000 people and on a major highway, there, is no wired connection, and doesn't really seem likely that a wired connection will ever happen. Since moving here 7 years ago the pricing/data rates for the LTE data packages available have doubled in price. Literally doubled.
With Covid we had two adults working from home, and two kids home schooling, on a slow LTE connection with a total bandwidth of 100GB up/down. Even things like windows updates required planning and rationing of the internet.
The state of connectivity in Canada is so abysmal. At this point I hope Starlink matures enough to add a voice service.
This adds some color perhaps to the argument that this is for underserviced regions -- they don't mean third-world or impoverished even though it sounds like that, at least when I heard people defending Starlink.
It's a little less than a modern efficient fridge (2-3 kWh/day). I used to have 100W light bulbs in the house, so it's not a crazy amount of power, but it's most significant to anyone planning on using Starlink 'off-grid', since it's a lot more than just a little 4G or 5G hotspot, or a standard DSL or Cable modem and router.
Anyone know if Starlink is happy turning off and on again throughout the day?
I know we are all used to 24 hour internet, but if I were energy-conscious or off-grid, I might want to turn it on for 3-4 half-hour sessions during the day.
I tested it a few times (putting in stow mode, turning off while I was rebuilding network rack, etc.), and it always picked back up within 2-4 minutes.
I know a few people who have Starlink on an outlet timer or WiFi switched outlet, and only have it run during the day. It seems to be okay with that.
Yes, 2.4kw in a day is a lot. I was hoping to switch to it from tethered cell service for my off-grid cabin. (I need 24/7 for security cameras), but it looks like I won't be able to without a substantial solar and battery addition.
Is this power requirement just because the hardware hasn't had a chance for years of iteration or is it a "hard" requirement that no amount of product iteration can fix?
In other words is it 100W all the time because of physics or is it just "sub optimal" hardware that in theory can be mitigated through smarter protocols and fancier hardware?
The "all the time"-part is of course something that can be worked on even without changing the hardware. A simple switch on the outlet to turn it off during the night or if everybody is at work/school and thus doesn't need it would reduce power consumption a lot already.
"Fancier hardware" could also mean a timer for the outlet switch or a "smart home"-solution. This could mitigate connection time by turning the router back on before you arrive at home/wake-up.
There's a lot of potential for not having to use 100W all the time without hardware changes.
Presuming that a large part of those 100 W go to the power amps for uplink transmissions, it seems that it should be possible to make at least that part scale with how much outgoing data the terminal is actually sending. But that may require new hardware, and it may conflict with the ambition of reducing cost per unit.
Talking to a satellite in space through the atmosphere has a lot of attenuation. That's for the physics.
For comparison, wifi is 0.03W for 100 meters, mobile phones are 2W for 35km range. A satellite using 100W is not out of the ordinary.
There's a balance to decide on, power vs bandwidth, noting that doubling power has little effect on signal (log2). They could probably half the power for little difference in operation, but a notable difference on the bill.
It's exactly the sort of thing that should be adjustable, there could be a setting to adjust power/bandwidth/quality. Both for customers and for support.
edit: the video mentions up to 300 Mbps and up to 200W power consumption during snow (extra power to melt the snow). They have a lot of margin to reduce power while still being able to watch YouTube 4k.
It would cost me about £11/month to run. For context, I currently pay ~£80/month for electricity (UK average is ~£60[1]). Not prohibitive, but it's a pretty sizeable increase. When you consider I can get 4G connectivity[2] for £22/month, with significantly less power consumption,, it doesn't seem that attractive unless you have no other options.
100W is a couple of light bulbs. It's not nothing, but it's not all that much. It'd be challenging off-grid, but not a concern anywhere with electrical infrastructure.
A more durable reference comparison: 100W is similar to a human. An adult human, not exercising heavily, but not asleep, maybe reading a book, or talking to a friend, something in that ballpark.
Also, if you aren't off-grid, you're apparently not so far from civilisation that previous utility suppliers couldn't be bothered to provide service to you. Maybe if this generation's utility suppliers got their act together you wouldn't need Starlink anyway.
To be clear, electrical rates are much different in different parts of the country. At my house in the suburbs outside St. Louis, MO, the cost is about $9/month. Not nothing, but not too significant compared to the total cost of the service.
It totally can make sense in third world improved regions, just not in homes (and/or possibly not on all the time). You could pretty easily run a small business off of 100 mb down, 50 up, and in that setting, you can probably power it with a small solar panel and just turn it off at night.
A "small" solar panel? A 100W solar panel is 2 x 3 ft (.60m x .90m). You'd need multiple panels even if you run it only during the day, because fixed solar doesn't just go from 0% to 100% once the sun rises.
My office has 5kW of panel hung, 10kWh of battery, and my Starlink terminal is on the house system (grid tied) because an extra 2.4kWh/day isn't workable with my system in the winter, short of a LOT of generator time - I'm severely power limited during inversions, and the Starlink dish more than doubles my office's "idle power draw" (it's the property network hub, one of our internet connections, inverter idle, sleeping computers, etc).
Yesterday, the 15.9kWh system on the house produced 78kWh for a "sun factor" of about 4.9, so a 400W panel would produce about 2 kWh. Whoops. That's not 2.4.
In the dead of winter, the same system can produce 2.5 kWh - yes, 2.5 kWh on a 15.9kW nameplate system. A 400W panel won't even power on the charge controller in those conditions.
To reliably power a 100W load, 24/7, in most areas, requires probably 1500-2000W of panel and 20+kWh of battery - or someone willing to light a generator, which is the far cheaper option. But "a 400W panel and batteries" (implied as a trivial thing to set up) definitely won't. It won't even run it 24/7 in peak sun most of the year.
... and that's before it tries to melt the snow off. From the blog post:
> During the heavy snowfall, Dishy quickly spiked up to 125W, peaking at 175W towards the end of the snowstorm.
Solar panels don't produce much covered in snow, either.
Gotta remember the double whammy here. Starlink is mostly rolled out at higher latitudes where solar power is less effective. Still, solar is cheaper than utility power most of the time. Might need 1.5 of those panels. Maybe I'm crazy, but I wouldn't consider off-grid unless I had like a 5KWh array at a minimum. Probably with wood burning stove as primary heating source if I really couldn't expand that solar for electric heating due to cost.
With heat inverter pump tech. taking over fridges, water heaters, AC, etc. and making them so much more efficient, it can give a lot of headroom on energy requirements.
Only if you live in the Sahara. Panels are rated for power they produce at 1,000W/m2 irradiance, in UK average is 100W, that panel will produce 40W on average.
That's interesting to see with knowing that just a fraction of the planned constellation is there. That's a lot of dots already. I'm guessing that the few visible string of dots are more recent launches that haven't quite reached their final positions yet. That's also interesting to see how long it takes the train to not be a train any longer, while at the same time showing how frequently new launches have been occurring.
I believe the constellation is about 90-95% complete now. The first shell at least. There's plans for more shells but that's for redundancy, not coverage.
At least for the short lines, they're launched in batches from one point, so they take some time to spread out to their final orbits. These are neat to view after a launch.
Some of the comments here are kind of ridiculous. They are complaining (or just pointing out) issues that are EXPECTED at this stage of the beta.
Starlink has like 1700 of the planned 42,000 satellites in orbit now. Of course there are going to be temporarily blips in service plus the random longer dropouts during system upgrades.
Even with the current issues, the service is revolutionary in the remote areas that it's intended to service. Why Geerling thinks it's appropriate to compare beta starlink to his home cable/fiber service is beyond me. It's totally fair to review the current state of starlink, but to then conclude that "I don't love it" because it's not as good as his cable service is just plain dumb.
Why did you even begin the review with the expectation that it could be better than your land service in it's current beta form? You're not even supposed to be on the starlink service if you have great landline bandwidth and starlink should block you from their service as you're stealing bandwidth from people who don't have access to high speed internet.
One person even said "I hope they can figure out why it drops occasionally" as if some of the smartest people on the earth don't know exactly why it drops out. It drops because the satellite mesh network is only 4% complete!
I mean, Starlink is available as a closed beta commercial product. There's nothing wrong with comparing it in its current form to cable service in its current form, especially if you're going to pay $$$ for it.
The point is for the reader to figure out if they should try Starlink right now (if eligible) or if they should wait for some of these issues to be resolved.
To put it another way: would you complain that reviewers were judging Google Glass unfairly, because Google had grandiose plans for it in the future (that ultimately never happened)? Or would you recognize that Google made the decision to sell Google Glass in its current form, and thus accepted that it would be judged against its competitors?
It's totally fair to review the current state of a beta service. It could be informative for people who are unsure if they want to try the beta-service.
But to compare it as an equal, in it's beta form, against a service that it's not even built to compete against is just plain dumb. If you already have access to high speed internet, starlink it not intended for you.
His final comment about "Liking, but not loving starlink" implies that he's comparing starlink to cable internet as equal competitors. They are not and they are not intended to be and that's even considering the fact that starlink is in beta.
This guy should not even be allowed on starlink (in the long run) because he already has access to high speed internet.
This whole comment section is full of stupidity like:
"isn't 100watts a lot of power?" <-- typed from gaming computer with a 1000watt power supply
"what about space garbage, isn't space garbage bad" <-- as if LEO garbage won't just decay back to earth
"will starlink be like FSD and maybe never get delivered" <-- as if they are related issues, they are not
"I don't like Elon" <- because reasons, but also irrelevant
"starlink bad because worky less good when obstructed" <-- too dumb for words
"i'm worried about the starlink monopoly" <-- you should be banned from the internet
> Starlink has like 1700 of the planned 42,000 satellites in orbit now.
I'm not sure if anyone believes that 42k number. They are launching ~60 satellites at a time - that would mean ~700 launches. There is no way that will be economical for the relative handful of people (500k? 1-2M?) who could realistically be interested in this.
Not to mention, the lifespan of these satellites in orbit is tiny, just a few years. They would have to be constantly launching new satellites to keep up.
The current state is probably more or less the best Starlink will ever offer - as more people will join the network, coming closer to Musk's 500k number, bandwidth will significantly diminish, even if the number of satellites is maybe doubled.
And if federal funds dry up, I expect the whole venture will quickly go bankrupt, or remain alive with a handful of satellites and a huge price spike.
Hold onto your hat then: in the US alone there are at least 20M people without high-speed internet access [1]. Around 45% of the entire world's population [2] still doesn't have internet access - at all, not just broadband.
They've said starship, when operational, will be able to deliver 400 starlink satellites to orbit at a time. The plan doesn't sound far fetched.
The current approved proposal is 11k satellites, the 42k satellites still doesn’t have approval if I remember correctly.
Likely from next year they will be able to send 400 satellites with a single launch using starship, that will make the 42k constellation perfectly feasible.
Yeah, they will never get to 42k, it's just marketing hype. Once they have one shell with sufficient coverage, adding new shells just tanks the economics of the constellation because of the uneven distribution of demand.
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I have a property where Starlink would be perfect and I would pay triple the price to be able to do zoom calls over the connection.
They had 1000 or so satellites when I first started testing, and there are now something like 1600 or so. Most of the time, I don't even notice when it switches satellites.
If you were doing some more real-time work or extremely latency-sensitive operations, then yes, you need to stick to a different type of connection. But it's really seamless now, compared to even a few months ago.
Most of the software I used either showed no sign of the dropout, or at worst would freeze a frame or show a loading indicator for a brief moment before getting back to normal.
Online multiplayer gaming and/or streaming are the main areas where I'd have to not recommend Starlink for now.
Enjoy the early adopter moment. Even if they keep increasing the numbers, they will probably move those new satellites in a much wider net to cover more subscribers the second they must show a profit.
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I don't see this at all. I have constant uptime monitoring, and connection drops are now a minute or two per week. We use it for VoIP, there is no cellular coverage at all where I have it deployed.
Edit: Also, I mentioned this in my fuller main comment but this is around the 45th parallel in New England, and around 1500' (500m) above sea level. This location is also within approximately 50-70 miles ground level of two separate Starlink ground station installations. The nature of Starlink is that there is much more of a geographic component than most people are used to in a WAN link, so it's probably important when talking experience to specify rough area of the world one is in. Once the network is completely built up that may not matter much anymore, but at this point there are definite coverage density differences, and with the current bent-pipe usage ground stations matter too more. Anyone interested in getting an idea of current planetary station and sat deployments might find this site interesting:
https://satellitemap.space/
Compared to the other options which were atrocious (10 MB down max, 3 MB Up max, weather changes everything) - the hiccup you get maybe every 10 minutes for 10 seconds - is annoying but not a deal breaker for VOIP calls. If you are doing client side calls maybe a deal breaker - team calls manageable but annoying. Also I do calls with our Australian team (and were North America based) and they are on cable internet and they get hiccuped in the same amount. So actually I would say that Starlink is on par if not better than their connection.
If you are comparing the internet to city quality cable then yeah not comparable - but thats not what they are targeting. They are bringing remote areas online.
When you lose a connection for a few seconds, maybe even 10 seconds, the video will pause, but when your connection reconnects, it continues where it paused. So you don't miss anything. I believe at some point when the speaker stops talking, like waiting for a response, it will jump cut their video to a more live feed again. So that you don't get too far behind.
I'm curious if anyone here knows about how this works and if it is common practice in live video chat?
https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/PQS_2016/abstracts/19.ht...
Obstructions are a problem, but users with no alternative are much more motivated to locate the dish appropriately.
Starlink is not for people who have gigabit wired connections. For those of us who were lucky to get a hotspot to work long enough to use our 15Gb cap, it is a godsend.
Occasional blips occur, but the call isn’t dropped (and this is with some tree obstruction).
So it’s worth just getting it if that’s what you want it for. It’s probably 10x better than your existing connection.
If you go to https://satellitemap.space/# and enter in your GPS location in the settings (45, -90 for a rural northern Wisconsin as an example), and you can see the satellites that that location has visibility of.
And there are times when there's nothing in that area of the sky.
He mentions that this is due to the Starlink dish's view of the sky being partially obscured by trees.
This will presumably improve as the number of Starlink satellites grows, as it will be more likely that there will be an unobstructed satellite in view at any moment, and less frequent switching between satellites.
Yep, been our experience as well. We've got a few of us who wanted to trade from our cottages and its just unusable if you need a continuous signal for more than 10 minutes at a time.
That doesn't mean its useless, just that its not usable if you want to do voip, trading, video calls etc.
Hopefully they'll figure out what causes drop ever few minutes at some point. But currently given how expensive it and the hardware are its a very disappointing product.
I guess we're just spoiled now a days with the 1Gbps wired internet that most city homes have access to.
That means the entire system is resilient. A 2-second pause in connectivity usually won't mean the app dies. It means the application presumes it dropped a few packets, which it did.
Now, if you're playing a very fast-paced multi-player game, a 2-second lag at the wrong moment can spell disaster. But most video call programs can easily handle a 2-second blip in connectivity, annoying though it is for participants- I see those all the time on my non-Satellite based internet.
> It's implied that this is due to the trees obstructing a full view of the sky
It's not implied, it's explicitly the reason...
> but I have actually heard these connection dropouts are just about universal due to the constellation not having enough infill.
That used to be the problem. Most users now report (you can see them talking about it on the starlink subreddit all the time) that they're now going days to weeks without a single drop.
Why is the antenna on the ground and not up on a tall mast?
Here's his YouTube video of the installation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynsCVOz7jv4
This sounds terrible for web browsing. Last thing I want is to know is to submit a form and then have my connection drop out in the middle. Imagine being in the middle of filling out an application or opening an account or verifying your identity or something like that.
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Local ground service is 20 Mb download and 2 Mb upload. And that's just barely sufficient for watching streaming video and video conferencing. Gigabit service is but a mile and a half away but no one is going to pay to lay the fiber into our neighborhood. So the last mile and a half is copper from 20 years ago. I think that's going to require political will to fix and I don't think that political will exists right now nor will it in the near future. We could have paid $5,000 per house to lay it ourself but our own neighborhood couldn't come to consensus on that. Now imagine that at a national level.
So if they just deliver 100/100 within a year or two, this is an epic win IMO and I will cancel ground service. And if they don't someone else will so I'm not worried. But it took Teslas to spark the electric vehicle industry. Now there's a lot of choice. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens here.
I imagine once Starlink is an actual choice, the telecoms will install wireless at the end of the fiber and offer you faster, more reliable service than Starlink.
They don't do it now because they get your money without having to do anything at all.
T-Mobile Home Internet is already available to 30M households in the US (out of around 130M households so around 20-25% of US households). T-Mobile is looking to have 7-8M subscribers within the next 5 years which would make them the 4th largest ISP (behind Xfinity, Spectrum, and AT&T). Verizon is looking to cover 50M households by the end of 2024 which is years away, but shows that 5G home internet is coming.
Wired home internet companies aren't avoiding installing a wireless link at the end of their fiber out of spite. It's a combination of who has wireless spectrum and the technology/capacity available. If you're talking about Xfinity or Spectrum, they don't have the wireless spectrum to offer that. If you're talking about Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile, they're working on it, but it takes time for the technology and spectrum to be there to provide the capacity people expect for a home internet connection. The recently concluded C-Band auction means that wireless carriers are going to have more spectrum available to provide more capacity (and they spent nearly $100B getting it). 5G NR provides more speed and capacity.
If it was just out of spite, Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile would have been offering wireless home internet for years in areas where they had no wired network. They weren't getting the money in places where they didn't own the local telco (which for T-Mobile is everywhere and for Verizon/AT&T is most places). Even when they owned the local telco, most people would be buying cable internet.
The problem is that home internet isn't easy. A wireless customer probably uses 10GB of data on average. Streaming HD Netflix is 2-3GB per hour. Home internet usage is usually an order of magnitude higher (and can be even higher than that). Basically, you need to increase your network capacity by at least 10x if you're going to be signing up home internet customers. With new technologies and spectrum, that's what wireless carriers are doing over the next 1-5 years.
I think that terrestrial wireless will be big in the future, but it's not because of Starlink putting pressure on telecoms. It's because their networks are going to be seeing massive capacity upgrades over the next few years that will enable it. Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile would have loved to offer wireless home internet years ago, but the technology and capacity simply wasn't there. I mean, they did offer home internet years ago, but it often cost hundreds of dollars a month and was only available in really rural areas (not just places that might hate 20Mbps service). But new tech and capacity gains are allowing them to offer new service. T-Mobile is first out of the gate because it got new spectrum earlier, but Verizon and AT&T will be following in the coming years.
Upgrading to my first 5G phone recently made voice service work at my house but did nothing for data.
I'm a little worried about it. Other than Amazon's Project Kuiper, I don't really see who else can compete.
Unlike EVs there's not an existing industry that's doing _mostly_ the same thing, that just needs to start offering a new line. Running a LEO megaconstellation is extremely different than putting up a handful of massive geostationary satellites. I just don't see the existing satellite internet players being able to compete.
Frankly, it's a massive investment of resources to get started (which is true for auto manufacturers as well), but doing it economically requires launch costs that only SpaceX is currently able to provide.
Nobody else wants to build a competitor to Starlink by paying SpaceX. Which is why I think Amazon's Kuiper is the best shot to compete—but it requires Blue Origin's New Glenn to come online to really get the economics working. I know Amazon has tapped ULA as a launch provider in the interim, so they'll be able to start getting satellites up and running soon, but the economics seem...painful if they're going to use expendable rockets for the bulk of the constellation.
It's definitely possible that we see a flourishing of offerings, but I could also see a world where in 5 years time there's really only still Starlink.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Outside of, say, military usage, every single telecom company is a competitor to Starlink. Internet is internet.
This commercial product is turning out to be what the "naysayers" thought it would be; brilliant if you're in a place with terrible internet, but noncompetitive in any kind of urban environment.
Again, imho, the huge thing here is the ability to get a quick internet set up anywhere in the world that can't easily be taken down (...military).
I don't think we'll get there any time soon (or ever), but kind of an interesting thought experiment.
I really hope not. There are enough satellites out there, there are already too many, space pollution is real. Maybe we can find a better solution to this particular problem.
There are many more LEO satellites, true, but their orbital placement is such that the satellite's orbit naturally decays in a few years. Which means if a satellite becomes uncontrollable (or is destroyed in some way), the debris will clear in a relatively short period of time.
I'm actually much more concerned about the much smaller number of satellites in medium and geostationary orbits, where the decay time is decades or centuries.
Failed satellites or debris in these orbits will take a very long time to clear, and strikes me as a much larger concern than the larger number of LEO sats
It's unlikely that they (Starlink or someone else) will offer symmetrical speeds. It's not that they're looking to be mean to you. It's that uplink is harder and people use a lot more downlink.
Even if they dedicated as much wireless spectrum to downlink and uplink, uplink would likely be slower. We see this on traditional cell networks. They dedicate as much spectrum to uplink as downlink, but their cell tower is able to better transmit than your equipment and so the downlink becomes faster. Even with so many more users downloading than uploading (and causing congestion), the downlink is usually faster.
Newer wireless networks aren't going to dedicate equal spectrum to downlink and uplink (using time-division instead of frequency division to separate downlink and uplink). Again, this isn't to be mean to you. It's just a reality that people use a lot more downlink bandwidth than uplink. Starlink isn't immune from that reality.
Elon Musk has already said that they should be able to hit 500,000 customers, but that scaling to millions of customers will be difficult. They're going to have to cap how many people get service in an area and/or put in network management to make sure that some users don't use up all the bandwidth from others nearby.
They're also going to need to focus on downlink capacity to serve what users need. That doesn't mean unusable uplink. As you noted, 10-25Mbps uplink is an important improvement. But wireless internet options (including Starlink) will need to balance that with the downlink capacity users need.
> We could have paid $5,000 per house to lay it ourself but our own neighborhood couldn't come to consensus on that
Over 10 years, that's $42/mo. Over 20 years, $21/mo. That's non-trivial if the solution to your internet woes might just be a couple years away. It's probably one of the big reasons why wired companies won't want to be spending money expanding networks in suburban/rural areas. Let's say that you invest in a network expansion and you expect to make it back over the next 20 years. Then 3 years into your investment, Starlink, T-Mobile, and Verizon are all offering home internet service to your customers. Sure, your fiber network might be "better", but that will only attract some users. Others might get a package deal from their wireless carrier giving them a better price. Now you go from having 90% of households to 50% of households and the investment that you made probably won't work out. For most people, 100Mbps is plenty. Sure, some people love the low-ping times of fiber and love gigabit speeds. People like us here on HN. For most people, they want to be able to use Netflix/YouTube/Facebook/etc. and there's going to be a lot of competition for that market.
> Now imagine that at a national level
Realistically, this already exists on the national level in that we spend billions subsidizing rural connections. Starlink is receiving lots of government money to provide rural internet. I think a big question is whether Starlink is looking to grow well beyond what the government will subsidize and whether government subsidies will flow to other companies more. I'm sure that AT&T/T-Mobile/Verizon are all looking at what rural internet subsidies might come their way as they launch rural home internet.
We do have some political will to fix the situation, but it's a very expensive situation to fix for a lot of rural areas in a wired way. Should people in cities subsidize suburban/rural lifestyles? As a country, we pour money into roads, low fuel prices (even as climate change ravages the planet), rural telecommunications, etc. If every home in your area is on 2 acres of land, it's going to cost more to wire up the place, it's going to cost more to get roads everywhere, it's going to use more fuel to get from place to place.
We do spend a lot making rural internet happen. It's just an expensive proposition. Heck, Starlink is very expensive at a $550 startup cost + $100/mo. That isn't cheap competition to wired internet - and that's after large government subsidies that might end up being $2,000 per user. Starlink has received $900M in federal money and Elon Musk is hoping to serve 500,000 users so that would be $1,800 per user from the government. That's not the $5,000 your service provider wanted to extend fiber, but it's still a lot of money. Plus, Starlink is likely to be getting more federal money in the future (and they might end up serving a couple million users).
There is political will and we've spent incredible amounts of money over many decades and continue to spend even more. It's just hard to serve many rural areas. If one is in an area with 5 people per square mile, that's a lot of wire for very few users. Wireless/satellite might make the most sense since installing one thing could serve hundreds or thousands of users. Even 20-50 people per square mile can be a lot of work to wire up.
While wireless home internet is in its infancy right now, I'd expect it to get a lot better over the next 5 years. As you noted, your neighbor installed a 20-foot mount to get better reception. T-Mobile Home Internet customers are rigging up directional antennas mounted on the outside of their homes to get better speeds. Given that people install satellite dishes for TV, it seems very reasonable that we'll see wireless antennas installed to offer internet service. Again, when something is in its infancy, there are less options and it's less fully realized. But that will change over time.
I think the next 5 years will be an exciting time for home internet. I don't think that Starlink is going to be doing most of the exciting stuff and I don't think we'll see symmetrical connections, but I think we'll see great stuff that will bring better connections to people who need it and will bring competition to the marketplace to prevent monopoly providers from taking advantage of their customers.
Except... The value of each house would probably increase by $10K-$15K or so:
"Controlling for speed, homes in CBGs where fiber is available have a price that is about 1.3 percent more than similar homes without fiber."
https://realtorparty.realtor/community-outreach/rural-outrea...
My new neighbors are increasingly tech TLAs as the former generation sells their homes off for 2-3x what they paid 20+ years ago. Median house price in my neighborhood is ~$1.1M ATM.
Regardless, we do have Starlink, and it is transformative.
In the UK, BTs 'fibre' rollout is almost exclusively FTTC and then copper phone lines after that. My parents have a phone line from 35 years ago, and the cabinet is maybe half a mile away, but they can get 50 Mbit down (I can't remember upload, maybe around 15 Mbit). The provider rolled this out a lot quicker than ADSL (we never got ADSL2), so I assume it's technically not that complicated.
The New Zealand government invested ~ £750 million into fibre to the premises infrastructure, in partnership with other companies. About 80% of NZ homes have access, with say half of those actually using it, but percentage is growing. Usable plans are about £40 per month. In my city you can’t sign up to a cable connection, even if the house is already wired up for it. I belive you even have trouble signing up for copper, because the infrastructure companies just don’t want to support it. The main competitor left is mobile, although I would love to see StarLink be available here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-Fast_Broadband
However actual usage is quite different. If your Internet seems fine, why would you buy a more expensive service that claims to be "faster"? In my city Toob are trying to aggressively acquire customers for FTTP with a price they're presumably losing money on, but I don't expect that to last.
The technology for a setup like your parents is either VDSL or G.fast. Near to their old (perhaps slightly battered) green BT cabinet is a newer one, the newer one has fibre to it, and a DSLAM, the DSLAM ties to the old cabinet with copper, and so only that "maybe half a mile away" distance is covered by the DSL technology, from there it's fibre.
Or build a government run version. though while lots of good reasons to - e.g. low rates, free access for kids etc - letting Gov own even more of our internet is probably not great.
Except for outages related to obstructions. That's a real problem and the author's situation is not good. There's ways to work around it on your property; a taller mount, a tree install, cutting some trees. But ultimately Dishy needs a clear view to the north and there's no getting around it.
I have some smaller obstructions for my install and it was a little annoying but fine. But in the past week or two it's gotten way better: my packet loss went from 2% to 0.6%. Details here: https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2021/07/20/starlink-improve...
I know that our Satellite TV dish when I was a kid had to point to a specific angle southwards, to match the geostationary position, but I'd not expect that with Starlink, unless you were in the Falklands or Antarctica, or something?
Starlink would probably work even better if they didn't have to deal with this restriction, but Starlink might not have been allowed to exist if they didn't design it to work this way.
Your satellite TV dish is talking to something 36,000km up in geosynchronous orbit, around the equator. That's to the south of you.
Starlink are in 550km orbits moving very fast around the planet in a fairly inclined orbit. As another commenter has said, the apparent effect is the cluster tends to "hang out" in the north. It's complicated, a good visualization should help explain it. I don't have one at my fingertips.
I don't know much about radio or Starlink's signals, but is this a situation where a strategically-placed radio reflector would help? Assuming those are a thing. So like, a reflector mounted on both sides of a large tree. Are the signal beams too narrow for this to matter?
I'm in rural Arkansas, near the southern edge of the rollout still I believe. I have maintained 3 ISPs this whole time. I have an EM160R LTE modem that will do 5x carrier aggregation and pulls around 240-250 mbit from my local AT&T tower. I also have T-Mobile's 4g home internet (5g works here on my phone, but they won't give me the home internet for whatever reason) which pulls 100-115 mbit. Starlink itself is somewhere between 180 and 240 down, but only 15 up. On the ATT line I can get 40-60 mbit upload, and that's one of the main reasons I keep things set up this way.
I'm about to try disabling the wan port for T-Mobile to see what it's like without that ISP. I don't do any connection bonding - straight up round robin load balancing with no stickyness, and with the amount of servers and services that use multiple TCP streams I can see 300+mbit downloads often. Pings range from 30 (when using Starlink) to 90. (when using one of the LTE connections)
I no longer game enough to comment on it. My kids play Roblox and PS4 online games and don't whine about it, so I think it's sufficient.
I don't really do Zoom meetings. MS Teams is what we use. I don't use the camera very often, but the calls will pause and drop and the people I work with have coined this as, "being Starlinked". Usually a few seconds and rarely does it take an actual redial to reconnect anymore. Just a dead period.
Even with the occasional dropouts Starlink is 10-100x better than any other option that we have here (the only options are LTE, or other satellites, like xplornet).
Even though we're only a few minutes drive from a municipality of 160,000 people and on a major highway, there, is no wired connection, and doesn't really seem likely that a wired connection will ever happen. Since moving here 7 years ago the pricing/data rates for the LTE data packages available have doubled in price. Literally doubled.
With Covid we had two adults working from home, and two kids home schooling, on a slow LTE connection with a total bandwidth of 100GB up/down. Even things like windows updates required planning and rationing of the internet.
The state of connectivity in Canada is so abysmal. At this point I hope Starlink matures enough to add a voice service.
This adds some color perhaps to the argument that this is for underserviced regions -- they don't mean third-world or impoverished even though it sounds like that, at least when I heard people defending Starlink.
Three random examples:
https://www.appliancesdirect.co.uk/p/kge36awca/bosch-kge36aw...
https://www.appliancesdirect.co.uk/p/ffu3dx1/hotpoint-ffu3dx...
https://www.appliancesdirect.co.uk/p/htf-540dp7/haier-htf540...
I know we are all used to 24 hour internet, but if I were energy-conscious or off-grid, I might want to turn it on for 3-4 half-hour sessions during the day.
I know a few people who have Starlink on an outlet timer or WiFi switched outlet, and only have it run during the day. It seems to be okay with that.
In other words is it 100W all the time because of physics or is it just "sub optimal" hardware that in theory can be mitigated through smarter protocols and fancier hardware?
The "all the time"-part is of course something that can be worked on even without changing the hardware. A simple switch on the outlet to turn it off during the night or if everybody is at work/school and thus doesn't need it would reduce power consumption a lot already.
"Fancier hardware" could also mean a timer for the outlet switch or a "smart home"-solution. This could mitigate connection time by turning the router back on before you arrive at home/wake-up.
There's a lot of potential for not having to use 100W all the time without hardware changes.
Talking to a satellite in space through the atmosphere has a lot of attenuation. That's for the physics.
For comparison, wifi is 0.03W for 100 meters, mobile phones are 2W for 35km range. A satellite using 100W is not out of the ordinary.
There's a balance to decide on, power vs bandwidth, noting that doubling power has little effect on signal (log2). They could probably half the power for little difference in operation, but a notable difference on the bill.
It's exactly the sort of thing that should be adjustable, there could be a setting to adjust power/bandwidth/quality. Both for customers and for support.
edit: the video mentions up to 300 Mbps and up to 200W power consumption during snow (extra power to melt the snow). They have a lot of margin to reduce power while still being able to watch YouTube 4k.
[1] Table 2.2.1 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/annual-d...
[2] Claiming typical down speeds of 50Mbps-100Mbps
Also, if you aren't off-grid, you're apparently not so far from civilisation that previous utility suppliers couldn't be bothered to provide service to you. Maybe if this generation's utility suppliers got their act together you wouldn't need Starlink anyway.
People who are off grid might grumble at having to provision more solar, battery and inverter capacity.
But for people who have other Internet options, $18/month might influence their decision.
1. https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/
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My office has 5kW of panel hung, 10kWh of battery, and my Starlink terminal is on the house system (grid tied) because an extra 2.4kWh/day isn't workable with my system in the winter, short of a LOT of generator time - I'm severely power limited during inversions, and the Starlink dish more than doubles my office's "idle power draw" (it's the property network hub, one of our internet connections, inverter idle, sleeping computers, etc).
Yesterday, the 15.9kWh system on the house produced 78kWh for a "sun factor" of about 4.9, so a 400W panel would produce about 2 kWh. Whoops. That's not 2.4.
In the dead of winter, the same system can produce 2.5 kWh - yes, 2.5 kWh on a 15.9kW nameplate system. A 400W panel won't even power on the charge controller in those conditions.
To reliably power a 100W load, 24/7, in most areas, requires probably 1500-2000W of panel and 20+kWh of battery - or someone willing to light a generator, which is the far cheaper option. But "a 400W panel and batteries" (implied as a trivial thing to set up) definitely won't. It won't even run it 24/7 in peak sun most of the year.
... and that's before it tries to melt the snow off. From the blog post:
> During the heavy snowfall, Dishy quickly spiked up to 125W, peaking at 175W towards the end of the snowstorm.
Solar panels don't produce much covered in snow, either.
With heat inverter pump tech. taking over fridges, water heaters, AC, etc. and making them so much more efficient, it can give a lot of headroom on energy requirements.
https://satellitemap.space/
Starlink has like 1700 of the planned 42,000 satellites in orbit now. Of course there are going to be temporarily blips in service plus the random longer dropouts during system upgrades.
Even with the current issues, the service is revolutionary in the remote areas that it's intended to service. Why Geerling thinks it's appropriate to compare beta starlink to his home cable/fiber service is beyond me. It's totally fair to review the current state of starlink, but to then conclude that "I don't love it" because it's not as good as his cable service is just plain dumb.
Why did you even begin the review with the expectation that it could be better than your land service in it's current beta form? You're not even supposed to be on the starlink service if you have great landline bandwidth and starlink should block you from their service as you're stealing bandwidth from people who don't have access to high speed internet.
One person even said "I hope they can figure out why it drops occasionally" as if some of the smartest people on the earth don't know exactly why it drops out. It drops because the satellite mesh network is only 4% complete!
The point is for the reader to figure out if they should try Starlink right now (if eligible) or if they should wait for some of these issues to be resolved.
To put it another way: would you complain that reviewers were judging Google Glass unfairly, because Google had grandiose plans for it in the future (that ultimately never happened)? Or would you recognize that Google made the decision to sell Google Glass in its current form, and thus accepted that it would be judged against its competitors?
But to compare it as an equal, in it's beta form, against a service that it's not even built to compete against is just plain dumb. If you already have access to high speed internet, starlink it not intended for you.
His final comment about "Liking, but not loving starlink" implies that he's comparing starlink to cable internet as equal competitors. They are not and they are not intended to be and that's even considering the fact that starlink is in beta.
This guy should not even be allowed on starlink (in the long run) because he already has access to high speed internet.
This whole comment section is full of stupidity like:
"isn't 100watts a lot of power?" <-- typed from gaming computer with a 1000watt power supply "what about space garbage, isn't space garbage bad" <-- as if LEO garbage won't just decay back to earth "will starlink be like FSD and maybe never get delivered" <-- as if they are related issues, they are not "I don't like Elon" <- because reasons, but also irrelevant "starlink bad because worky less good when obstructed" <-- too dumb for words "i'm worried about the starlink monopoly" <-- you should be banned from the internet
I'm not sure if anyone believes that 42k number. They are launching ~60 satellites at a time - that would mean ~700 launches. There is no way that will be economical for the relative handful of people (500k? 1-2M?) who could realistically be interested in this.
Not to mention, the lifespan of these satellites in orbit is tiny, just a few years. They would have to be constantly launching new satellites to keep up.
The current state is probably more or less the best Starlink will ever offer - as more people will join the network, coming closer to Musk's 500k number, bandwidth will significantly diminish, even if the number of satellites is maybe doubled.
And if federal funds dry up, I expect the whole venture will quickly go bankrupt, or remain alive with a handful of satellites and a huge price spike.
They've said starship, when operational, will be able to deliver 400 starlink satellites to orbit at a time. The plan doesn't sound far fetched.
[1] https://archive.is/do3Qp
[2] https://en.unesco.org/news/new-report-global-broadband-acces...