I'm very glad to see the SIX getting some attention on HN. I have a lot of respect for how that IXP is operated -- Chris Caputo runs a tight ship. Their one-time fee structure is very friendly to small participants and very unique for an IXP of that size -- that alone should be lauded. SIX governance is very open and transparent. I can't recall the last time they incurred a major unscheduled outage. I wish more large IXPs were run like the SIX.
You made me curious to look up how SIX survives then. Apparently they entirely depend on donations, many of which are not monetary, but essential infrastructure (racks, power, fiber connections etc)
This model works well till some big companies get involved and the bean counters of said companies say "wait, we're spending how many millions of dollars on a donation of security guards and servers to a non-profit? Can't we just donate a bit less and other people will have to cover it?"
I went to that page, see the top item is Starlink, the next link is "Welcome Danga Interactive AS32150". That's kind of a small AS compared to Starlink's 146K, but then I realize that used to be my AS, tummy.com.
Starlink is such a scam all my relatives signed up for the $600 beta and now more than a year later still no way to use the service. All the while they keep promising it's only 1-2 months out.
Admittedly, frontloading the deposit to determine market interest and where to scale with actual dollars is a bit scummy (see: Cybertruck/Model S/3/X/Y/everything Tesla does deposits) but the service IS live in a lot of markets and DOES have real, actual users. Calling it a "scam" implies that those things aren't true.
But I agree that Elon time is absurd and irritating and sure feels like a scam. (I would argue FSD being sold for SIX GODDAMN YEARS on Teslas is _absolutely_ a scam.)
Received mine this week for a service address on the Navajo Nation. I imagine the wait is shorter for less populated rural areas, which should correlate with need. My old isp charged $60 a month for 1.5 Mb/s down and 750kb/s up. This should be a great improvement.
My relatives are in a similar situation -- only satellite available in their area, so ~800ms latency and speeds around 1 MBps, but half a mile away there is literally fiber available, so it's going to be a long time before it gets opened up for them because they aren't considered to be in an underserved area.
My company is currently using a Starlink as the primary internet connection (with vdsl backup) for a new office we’re setting up in australia. It works great, consistent 300mbps with peaks up to 500. Anecdotally, the system is working great for us and is actually more reliable than the vdsl connection we use as the failover.
Only 200k happy customers when it was promised to be "fully live, nationwide, for all customers" next month more than a year ago with repeated similar promises this fall.
And my relatives are not wealthy people -- this was half of their income for a particular month so at this point they'll be damned if they lose their place in line. They have no other choice -- not even DSL options in their area and the other satellite services have been so expensive and unreliable. They are completely at his mercy, and I feel like it's my fault for suggesting it.
You're defining "happy" as "not quite pissed off enough to leave". That's exactly the kind of game which (when compounded) makes fed-up people call things scams.
I know people who have had the service for months, outside the US, and are happy with it. How can it be a scam? Why didn't they ask for a refund? Was the refund denied or slow to arrive?
I suspect the original comment is referring to Starlink taking a (~ 15% deposit) and 'promising' 1-2 months wait time which isn't reducing so they end up still waiting 6 months later, and the expected delivery is still reported as 1-2 months in the Starlink account.
It's possible that the delay is due to lack of legal clearance in the customer country. Starlink needs to get approval to install and operate the ground station satellite links in each country. From the few authoritative statements I've seen those are sometimes delayed due to local country bureaucracy.
I ordered Starlink in the UK in February 2020 and the equipment finally arrived in May 2020. I /think/ the stated delivery estimate at the time was 2-3 months and never reduced until the order confirmation email arrived and I paid the balance, after which the equipment arrived a couple of weeks later.
If you order something online with estimated delivery "in a few weeks" and a year later it still isn't here, it's a scam, regardless of how easy it is to get refunded.
> all their ground stations are along Google fiber paths.
actually most of their earth stations are colocated near long haul dwdm regen huts from older, more traditional big telco players like what is now lumen (former qwest/centurylink), level3, zayo, etc. The fact that they can buy transport circuits from those huts to the nearest major cities to meet google is useful.
by no means does google really own/run/control most of the long haul dark fiber and dwdm networks in north america. or even a good portion of it. the predecessor entities that have now been rolled up into lumen or zayo do.
as somebody who is a DE-CIX "customer" i find that really funny. maybe for small IXes in europe, but big players like LINX and DE-CIX are doing their thing too.
You can see a San Francisco IX's members here, not as gigantic as this one, but you have Indies like monkeybrains right next to Netflix and Google https://www.sfmix.org/participants
Availability is presently limited by density of CPEs in a given geographical area. They don't want to ridiculously oversubscribe it and give people bad ping, packet loss and traffic speeds, because that's exactly what geostationary consumer priced vsat services as known for. If you can't get it shipped to you and are still in the pre-order queue, your area is out of capacity until more satellites are launched or the satellite+terminal firmwares are better improved.
There's a number of places that are not out of capacity and if you put in the "right" street address it'll take you to the immediate full price payment order page.
they are going to oversubscribe it. they're only slow to add users because they can't make terminals, not because they're trying to maintain an unrealistic QoS.
I've heard a lot of people say they're still waiting.
Musk seems to have figured out that he can collect deposits for way more people than he could possibly deliver to, leveraging it as free operating cash. The cybertruck is a great example - millions of people gave him money for something that hasn't left prototype stage and will never be produced because it couldn't possibly meet federal vehicle standards in the US or Europe.
Deposits are refundable at any time. If people are ok with leaving their money in Tesla's hand for years, then they are clearly indicating that they believe Tesla will deliver. If any evidence comes to light that shows otherwise, they can take their money back in a blink.
I dunno. I've got it, it works fine. I really doubt the constraining factors are with network load or regulation, though; if you can source the components for a couple hundred thousand routers and radar dishes, I'm sure the rest of the industry is dying to hear where you're looking.
The wait list is maybe a million people? Enough deposits to pay for 1% of the satellite constellation is worth something but I doubt it's a notable factor in how they operate.
Musk is likable but im personally in no hurry to buy anything any of his especiialy his hyped up robot cars .. here's one almost killing a pedestrian (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lnp0VChf1_k) ... execute one algorithm to avoid car yet oops we forgot to program it executing additional ones in this situation .. let's ship out an update. Progress is going to be a killer!
Starlink seems to be more hype too like his HyperLoop.
That's got nothing to do with "robot cars". That's just a bad driver. Why are you trying to spread FUD?
Even the video description is incorrect.
> Note the driver blows the horn as he enters the intersection. He obviously cannot stop the car. Probable FSD or Autopilot crash.
FSD/Autopilot does not stay on or prevent human interaction. Slamming on the brake turns it off, even assuming was on. This is a "unintended press of the accelerator pedal" type crash. Human error, and actually a good argument for why removing the human from the loop would be a good idea.
> Starlink seems to be more hype too like his HyperLoop.
Starlink is serving over 100,000 customers with good service all paying $100/month. Hardly hype.
If anything Starlink is (along with SpaceX) the least hypey Musk project, it has some minor rough edges but seems to actually be doing a good job of fulfilling its goal. Comparing it to Hyperloop doesn't seem reasonable to me.
Readit News
I went to that page, see the top item is Starlink, the next link is "Welcome Danga Interactive AS32150". That's kind of a small AS compared to Starlink's 146K, but then I realize that used to be my AS, tummy.com.
CAN'T BE HUSHED HERE
CAN'T BE HUSHED HERE
CAN'T BE HUSHED HERE CAN'T BE HUSHED HERE
But I agree that Elon time is absurd and irritating and sure feels like a scam. (I would argue FSD being sold for SIX GODDAMN YEARS on Teslas is _absolutely_ a scam.)
https://www.starlink.com/legal/terms-of-service-preorder#:~:....
Or are they happy to save their place in line?
And my relatives are not wealthy people -- this was half of their income for a particular month so at this point they'll be damned if they lose their place in line. They have no other choice -- not even DSL options in their area and the other satellite services have been so expensive and unreliable. They are completely at his mercy, and I feel like it's my fault for suggesting it.
You're defining "happy" as "not quite pissed off enough to leave". That's exactly the kind of game which (when compounded) makes fed-up people call things scams.
It's possible that the delay is due to lack of legal clearance in the customer country. Starlink needs to get approval to install and operate the ground station satellite links in each country. From the few authoritative statements I've seen those are sometimes delayed due to local country bureaucracy.
I ordered Starlink in the UK in February 2020 and the equipment finally arrived in May 2020. I /think/ the stated delivery estimate at the time was 2-3 months and never reduced until the order confirmation email arrived and I paid the balance, after which the equipment arrived a couple of weeks later.
Or people populate them at will
it's meant to be used by network admins at other ASNs that want to set up peering sessions across IXes and PNIs.
All Starlink customer traffic egresses via Google's network, and all their ground stations are along Google fiber paths.
actually most of their earth stations are colocated near long haul dwdm regen huts from older, more traditional big telco players like what is now lumen (former qwest/centurylink), level3, zayo, etc. The fact that they can buy transport circuits from those huts to the nearest major cities to meet google is useful.
by no means does google really own/run/control most of the long haul dark fiber and dwdm networks in north america. or even a good portion of it. the predecessor entities that have now been rolled up into lumen or zayo do.
You get much better prices if Google can see you already have most of your own infrastructure set up and ready to migrate to with not much effort.
That’s not true. Customers that were getting public IPs without CGNAT were coming from a non-Google ASN.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2ChhZcH2ok (slides: https://archive.nanog.org/sites/default/files/4_Reimer_Seatt...)
There's a number of places that are not out of capacity and if you put in the "right" street address it'll take you to the immediate full price payment order page.
Maybe it’s related to your location. I’m in Vancouver.
Dead Comment
Musk seems to have figured out that he can collect deposits for way more people than he could possibly deliver to, leveraging it as free operating cash. The cybertruck is a great example - millions of people gave him money for something that hasn't left prototype stage and will never be produced because it couldn't possibly meet federal vehicle standards in the US or Europe.
Starlink seems to be more hype too like his HyperLoop.
Even the video description is incorrect.
> Note the driver blows the horn as he enters the intersection. He obviously cannot stop the car. Probable FSD or Autopilot crash.
FSD/Autopilot does not stay on or prevent human interaction. Slamming on the brake turns it off, even assuming was on. This is a "unintended press of the accelerator pedal" type crash. Human error, and actually a good argument for why removing the human from the loop would be a good idea.
> Starlink seems to be more hype too like his HyperLoop.
Starlink is serving over 100,000 customers with good service all paying $100/month. Hardly hype.