I've been using Starlink as my primary internet provider for the past year. I'm just outside of Eugene, OR and prior to Starlink my only internet options were Viasat or dial-up.
I definitely notice the variability of Starlink. My download speed ranges from ~40mbps to ~200mbps, and my upload speed ranges from ~5mbps to ~50mbps. This doesn't really seem to be connected to time of day or what I would expect to be typical use patterns. My internet is never unusable for Zoom, streaming video, or other average use cases.
A lot of people complain about decreased speeds, my personal experience hasn't really shown this to be true. What I have noticed:
* Over the past year, I've seen a huge improvement in latency and packet loss. I used to have latency in excess of 130ms, and I would typically see a few dropouts lasting ~30 seconds per hour. My latency now is rarely more than 60ms, and I never have dropouts.
* Being behind an IPv4 CGNAT is annoying. I get a lot more captchas and fraud prevention techniques being applied in my browsing.
* Geolocation is way off. I wish SpaceX did a little bit more effort to dedicate IP geodata to specific cells in their network - everything defaults to their Seattle POP for me.
* The adoption of Starlink out here is astonishing. Virtually every house near me has gotten it in the past 2-3 months. It's a huge game-changer for people. It's pretty amazing what the Starlink team has built out in a relatively short amount of time.
Willamette Valley here — it's been nothing less than a game changer.
I checked the speed tests for the first week but until the brief outage yesterday I haven't thought about it. The internet just works, and we're able to stream, download, work, videoconference.
Viasat is like the Stone Age in comparison. Low data caps, very long latency, nearly twice as much money.
People don't realize that even in areas not that far from population centers connectivity can be virtually nonexistent.
Datapoint of one here, but I recently visited a friend in Willamette Valley, and their area had fiber. Is that not an option for most people in your hood?
It's amazing how many companies assume geolocation is perfect, for consequential decisions. I wasn't allowed to book a COVID vaccine by Walgreens because they said I was booking from a different state (I wasn't).
>This allows local devices to use the Starlink lat/long that dishy uses for satellite targeting.
How does this solve the geolocation issue? The parent poster mentioned IP based geolocation, which isn't affected by the starlink terminal providing some sort of local debug api to get the current lon/lat.
> This doesn't really seem to be connected to time of day or what I would expect to be typical use patterns.
I'd expect somewhat typical time of day use patterns on Starlink as a whole [1], but you're probably seeing variable congestion/capacity because the satellites are in motion and you'll have varience in which satellites are in view and how many other users are using the same satellite as you, as well as how many users are connected through the same ground station as you. I'd bet there are some really interesting network graphs.
[1] although I wouldn't be willing to guess if it looks like office, residential
> This doesn't really seem to be connected to time of day or what I would expect to be typical use patterns.
This has been my experience too which I've assumed they are capping speeds. Often I work late so am up in the am's so would have little competition for bandwidth and if I do a speed test it's lower (~60Mb down) than when I first got it and would regularly be 100Mb+ sometimes over 200.
Also recently we've been getting more network dropouts.
All that said, it's been a game changer for me as I was living with 3.5Mb down before starlink and a significant overall improvement.
Is it worth it in your opinion? I had it preordered for almost a year but cancelled it when they raised their prices and never took delivery. I've read the 2nd generation dish is faster with a bit more stability, but I'm not entire sure.
Not OP, but my parents use it in northern california because they live in a spot that the standard ISPs have decided isn't worth running connectivity to - gigabit cable is available if they lived 3 miles closer to town. No utilities other than electricity.
They had HughesNet before, barely ever got more than 1 Mbps. Latency was ~1000ms on average. They paid for the 100 Mbps service for awhile but HughesNet oversubscribes their satellites to a disgusting degree and they rarely saw more than that 1 Mbps.
Even when the bandwidth was ~10 Mb, the latency levels caused basically all of the streaming services to not function.
When they first got it, it was ~100 Mbps on average. Now it's around 50 Mbps. Latency is still holding around 40ms. Still at least an order of magnitude better on all fronts compared to their competition. I was able to play some competitive shooters with decent success ... although CoD had a tendency to occasionally boot me when satellite switches happened. Seems to trip the anticheat, but I can't really blame Starlink for that.
Starlink is seeing heavy use in Ukraine with most stocks in the neighboring countries getting bought up. The reason for that is russian strikes on our infrastructure causing electricity blackouts to the extent of regular internet or 4G being down/highly degraded. As a result, many companies, individuals, offices, etc. are procuring their own sources of energy (diesel/gasoline generators, portable power stations, etc.) and reserve internet connections via Starlink or powerful 4g modems that can reach further cell towers with access to good connection. That with already prevalent use of Starlinks on frontlines (they are very hard to jam and far surpass other satellite offerings).
We do not have access to data but it's not unreasonable to assume that such a spike in use must have eaten into overall network capacity.
Even with the link it makes no sense to route Ukrainian traffic all the way back to the US. All they'll do is route to the nearest downlink. Otherwise the intra-sat connections will become a bottleneck, not to mention the added latency.
It's not powerful enough of a source, different frequency bands and, as with GPS too when it comes to jamming, the signal goes mostly upwards so the missile won't be irradiated by it to respond.
For people who used to be on old satellite systems, Starlink is still the best value by far. The qualitative difference between 105Mbps and 53Mbps is much less than 2x: there's not much you can't do with one that you could with the other.
Not being an apologist, just trying to keep perspective. People who really need Starlink are still getting a great value compared to how it was a couple years ago.
It's probably also more beneficial from a policy standpoint to get twice as many people signed up at 50Mbps. As you note, the jump from 50Mbps to 100Mbps isn't that big, but the jump from 3Mbps DSL to 50Mbps Starlink means that you can suddenly use a lot of the internet that never really worked well before.
It could definitely be annoying to customers who had signed up and are now getting significantly less speed at the same price, but Starlink has a bit of a captive audience since they're mostly serving people without other options.
There's also altitude. Starlink is LEO at 550km, while all the legacy is GEO at 36000 km, ignoring Iridium of course. This is a huge latency difference, allowing normal video calls.
I moved from one room in the house to another room when working remotely, and I experienced a similar drop in my speed due to being farther away from the Wi-Fi access point. And yes, there's not much you can't do with one that you could with the other.
I made this choice voluntarily but tech geeks should visit the homes of non-tech people and see that (a) their speed is limited more by their connection to the Wi-Fi access point than by the ISP, and (b) they aren't bothered by it.
I pay $110 per month for internet at my farm land that I visit two to three days every 60 days. If they can pretend I deserve to pay as much as people who use it as their primary internet service, I should be able to pay a lower amount if they halve the bandwidth on me.
Well, the methodology is flawed, or at least it doesn't actually reflect what it says on the tin.
It's "consumer-initiated", i.e. what they are really measuring is which contracts people are using, not which speeds are available.
Example: I could book a 500/100 line at my house (1000 symmetrical available if I switched providers), but I stick with the cheapest plan, which is 50/12 simply because it's good enough for my personal use. Same for most of my neighbours. Most don't have more than 100/20, though higher speeds are readily available.
With StarLink there's only type of contract: you get what you get and that's that. In Europe for example, there's usually more than one option per ISP and you pay more for higher bandwidth. So if you're fine with the smallest plan (usually around 50mbps), why pay more? So in essence they actually answer a different question.
People were tossing traditional internet satellites from roofs, chopping off the old dried up copper from the side of the house and pushing the wisp tower down.
Starlink made remote living and work truly possible. No more turning off video, pixilating and worrying about data plans. And low enough latency to make up with skill in games.
But just like everything it got too popular, cellular carriers are trying to service that market though and t-mobile might be a last mile internet provider with decent speeds and unlimited data. But, fiber is also getting buried all over rural areas to help with this as well.
Between fiber/cellular and Starlink people are going to get interesting data plans for sure though. Wisp are regional and the market will shrink because the service is just inadequate and poorly maintained. The smart wisp that got federal high speed internet subsidies will survive building out fiber even in some pretty rural areas.
As someone desperately looking for connectivity options in a more rural area (though not that rural, I'm only like 20 minutes from one of the largest cities in the state) I won't hold my breath. My whole neighborhood is on the waitlist for Starlink still.
I've called every provider that could possibly service our area and nobody has any interest. T-Mobile is supposedly offering 5G home internet for people in this kind of situation but they are not available in this neighborhood either.
No idea what to do other than wait for Starlink availability. There is a WISP, but it is truly terrible and very expensive.
Starlink is game-changing for even somewhat rural. My brother's place is just outside of a small, but by the scale of Maine significant city, and Starlink turns it from a previously barely 1 Mbps download to somewhere he can actually work from.
I live 45 miles outside of a major Northeast city, have just one broadband option which is mostly OK but would still seriously consider Starlink as a backup. I barely get cellphone reception at my house without WiFi assist because I'm in the shadow of a hill.
> No idea what to do other than wait for Starlink availability.
Read the contract carefully to make sure it's allowed, start a coop & buy the commercial variant for a group of farms, with point-to-point wifi for local distribution? That should get you to jump the line.
(Though your problem may also be lack of a ground station close enough to you, but that's more rare.)
I'm always curious about details on situations like this. Really nerdy stuff like: what's the average housing lot size; what's the average driveway length; what kind of "largest city in the state" (since 20 minutes won't get you from LA to another part of LA and in most places I've seen 20 minutes won't get you far from a city at all which makes it sound like you're in a state where a top-5 city has 100,000 people and becomes rural fast). One of the problems a lot of the US faces is that the cost of infrastructure is shared by so few people: rural roads that have few homes on them, electric lines that have to travel farther to reach customers, sewer systems that require more feet per customer, etc. In a lot of rural places in Europe, people often live clustered in a town center, but rural America tends to spread out a lot more with a lot of distance to cover to connect people. It doesn't really matter how far you are from a city as much as how easy it is to connect lots of households in your area.
As you note, one of the problems that Starlink is facing is that everyone who wants Starlink generally lives in the same areas. Are there a few hundred households that want Starlink within a 7 mile radius of you (150 square miles)? Then there's likely to be capacity constraints, at least until Starlink can launch a lot more satellites.
All three wireless carriers are offering home internet in situations like yours, but with slightly varying offers. T-Mobile has an unlimited offering in areas where it has excess network capacity. T-Mobile also has a "Lite" offering that is available everywhere T-Mobile has coverage, but it has a data cap and costs $150 for the 300GB plan (https://www.t-mobile.com/support/home-internet/t-mobile-home...). AT&T has a home internet offering for $60 with a 350GB cap (https://www.att.com/internet/fixed-wireless/); overages are $10 per 50GB up to a maximum of $200/mo. I don't know if that's $200 total or $200 in overages + $60. At $200, it's certainly expensive, but Starlink isn't cheap. The average home internet user uses around 300GB of data (data from both T-Mobile and Comcast), but that's probably not people on Hacker News. Still, 1TB would be $170 which isn't that much more if you're desperate and doesn't have as high a startup cost (Starlink's being around $700 while AT&T's is up to $150). Verizon also offers home internet service at cheap costs (either LTE https://www.verizon.com/home/lte-home-internet/ or 5G https://www.verizon.com/5g/home depending on where you are), but availability is limited like T-Mobile's unlimited service.
Have you looked into Starlink's RV service? It's more expensive at $135/mo and you're deprioritized behind standard Starlink customers, but that might be a good option. I hate saying this, but once you're in for $110/mo, what's another $25? Well, $300 per year. But if you're desperate, it might be what you need.
Things will likely get better over the coming years. T-Mobile will be covering half of rural households over the next few months with mid-band 5G and they're also embarking on a huge rural coverage expansion with 10,000 new towers coming to improve coverage. Verizon and AT&T are behind on mid-band coverage, but it's coming. Starlink will be launching more satellites which will give them more capacity.
If you don't mind paying an extra $25/mo, Starlink RV might be the best solution. However, people have reported being annoyed that they haven't been able to switch to regular Starlink (and save $25/mo) when capacity becomes available. Definitely check Verizon and AT&T's offering and see if there's something right for you there (and available). It feels like a long-shot, but I'd rather mention them than not even if there's just a 1% chance it'll help. Over the next few years, we're likely to see AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile gain a lot of capacity in rural areas as they bring online a lot of spectrum and Starlink will launch more satellites. Right now, since you say you're "desperately looking", maybe grab Starlink RV or even AT&T's service.
Keep in mind that it maybe got too popular for an usable service, but it's far from being popular enough to be financially sustainable product. You're still at this point having a service paid by investors money, like cheap Uber rides in 2015.
> You're still at this point having a service paid by investors money, like cheap Uber rides in 2015.
Ouch! It's hard to tell if this is assertion based on some sort of familiarity with SpaceX's finances or just another of a seemingly endless stream of anti-Musk jabs.
Surely you can't put SpaceX and Uber into the same category when it comes to the state of their finances and where that money comes from. Surely a cursory glance at the slew of public, private and government contracts SpaceX already has, plus the ones they have lined up, not to mention the involvement in programs like Artemus, would demonstrate to most people that they are in league far and beyond the likes of Uber with their dubious Vision Fund and questionable private backers.
Or are you saying in this case that SpaceX, with all of its money and potential is basically to Starlink, what Softbank is to Uber?
If it's the former, I'd love to get a better understand of what you mean?
I believe webpass is based on line of sight wireless. And they connect a whole buildings with one shared radio package.
Remote areas often don't have lots of tall buildings with many inhabitants and line of sight above the treeline. I know my semi-rural area is full of trees and hills and line of sight wireless would really only have potential for people with waterfront, and realistically, only for people with waterfront and a view towards the nearby city.
Webpass is really only offered in largeish residential buildings as far as I'm aware (I have webpass service, though my condo building only has 90 units so it's not particularly large, and I suspect most people are with Xfinity anyway...).
I imagine the fixed cost for the microwave unit doesn't make sense otherwise.
If you're talking about microwave point to point to a cell tower that then provides 5g or LTE... Well that's how most cell towers work, I think...
Webpass and similar services work well with line of sight. Even Starlink wants line of sight, but it's generally easier to get that up than across. What happens when a neighbor a mile away has a 3-story home or there's a hill?
With wireless spectrum, lower frequencies effectively travel farther because they don't get disrupted by objects as much. So 600-900MHz frequencies provide lots of coverage that's the backbone of our mobile phone networks, 1700-2100MHz were used to add more capacity in cities and suburbs, and now we're seeing 2.5-4GHz being used to provide new high-speed 5G services (5G+, 5G UC, or 5G UW depending on your carrier). On top of that, there's millimeter wave spectrum. There's a lot of it, but it's also 28-40GHz and going to be blocked by so much. Even if you're near a millimeter wave cell site, your walls might prevent it from working indoors. Lots of things become issues at millimeter wave so it's hard to do it without unobstructed line of sight (including trees and such) or really short distances.
Mobile phone carriers are already beaming internet far distances. They just have limited capacity in a lot of areas and people hate having their home internet connection limited. What we're seeing with 2.5-4GHz spectrum is pretty good capacity with some decent coverage, but we're still just talking a mile or two in a lot of situations. Of course, there are people hacking their T-Mobile Home Internet devices with high-gain directional antennas and really pushing that farther when they have near line of sight. I think we're likely to see this mid-band spectrum become a big factor in rural internet because it has a decent mix of distance and capacity. Millimeter wave spectrum is just hard to do without line of sight and so it often becomes limited to large buildings that an ISP can put a professionally installed antenna on the top of.
It's also that these things take time. If you're one of the big three wireless carriers, you're looking to upgrade 70,000-100,000 cell sites around the country and that doesn't happen overnight. It takes 3-6 years. To really get home internet good in many places, they might need more cell sites to supplement those. Realistically, I think it's a lot more likely that the big three wireless companies will hook up rural areas than Webpass. This is their business. Webpass (and others like Starry and NetBlazr) are somewhat limited because they don't have the spectrum to cover larger areas or even within cities where they don't have a tall building to give them line of sight. They also don't have the money or workforce to deploy as quickly as the wireless carriers (yes Google has money, but they're not going to spend $15B a year when they don't have the spectrum to create a viable rural strategy; the big three are spending that kind of money because they have the spectrum and network and potential to expand into home internet).
Wireless has a lot of promise, but the lower frequency you go the less spectrum there is available and the higher frequency you go the less distance you're going to get and the more you need line of sight. The big three wireless carriers have the lower frequency spectrum and network to start providing more and more home internet in the future. We're just at the first point where the big wireless carriers are starting to see excess network capacity (beyond what their mobile users will eat up) which is why it didn't happen much before.
Most people really don't care about that. They want broadband where they didn't have a reasonable option for broadband before at pretty much any price.
In even slightly rural Australia and Canada Starlink has been life changing. It’s easily the fastest internet available once you are a tiny bit out of a town.
In actually remote Australia it was crazy to see locals go to the pub to use it, having never had access to anything better than dial-up.
In rural and remote places, it’s changing the world, exactly as it was designed to do. If you live in a dense urban environment, Starlink was never really designed for you.
That is exactly what I am doing. The catch is that 4G data is horribly expensive in my area, download two youtube videos and you've blown a months Starlink fees.
In many-to-most cases 4G and especially 5G will simply outperform Starlink. If you have the 4G it may not even be necessary to bother with the Starlink. Unless you want redundancy of a 2nd connection or you can only get a really terrible data plan running both is not likely to make much sense. Starlink also has very onerous North-South field of view requirements that are actually often hard to meet even on completely remote sites (speaking as a Starlink customer with a handful of trees in the yard). Cellular is nowhere near as fussy about placement.
Starlink makes most sense when you have no 4G or 5G reception at all, generally speaking.
This is the opposite of my personal experience. For me, the service has been more reliably performing at higher speeds and since launching more satellites there are fewer drops in connectivity.
Good for you, but not relevant for the topic in the article. The FCC should make decisions based on data, like the data collected by Ookla (if the FCC can't collect its own), not based on anecdotes.
Of course it's relevant. The FCC doesn't make its decisions based on HN comments, so I'm not sure why the aggro response here. I'm stating my personal experience with the network, over the past year. I'm on the network now at peak time in Florida and clocking 80 Mbps.
The FCC is handing out billions of dollars to improve RURAL broadband so for those purposes it doesn't make sense to measure average speeds that include congested URBAN cells.
Are you in an area of relatively low population density?
I would guess that places like rural California and Texas have seen an increase of user density which would cause bandwidth decreases. If you're in a place with relatively slow user growth, you could be getting advantage of increased total bandwidth of the satellite constellation.
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I definitely notice the variability of Starlink. My download speed ranges from ~40mbps to ~200mbps, and my upload speed ranges from ~5mbps to ~50mbps. This doesn't really seem to be connected to time of day or what I would expect to be typical use patterns. My internet is never unusable for Zoom, streaming video, or other average use cases.
A lot of people complain about decreased speeds, my personal experience hasn't really shown this to be true. What I have noticed:
* Over the past year, I've seen a huge improvement in latency and packet loss. I used to have latency in excess of 130ms, and I would typically see a few dropouts lasting ~30 seconds per hour. My latency now is rarely more than 60ms, and I never have dropouts.
* Being behind an IPv4 CGNAT is annoying. I get a lot more captchas and fraud prevention techniques being applied in my browsing.
* Geolocation is way off. I wish SpaceX did a little bit more effort to dedicate IP geodata to specific cells in their network - everything defaults to their Seattle POP for me.
* The adoption of Starlink out here is astonishing. Virtually every house near me has gotten it in the past 2-3 months. It's a huge game-changer for people. It's pretty amazing what the Starlink team has built out in a relatively short amount of time.
I checked the speed tests for the first week but until the brief outage yesterday I haven't thought about it. The internet just works, and we're able to stream, download, work, videoconference.
Viasat is like the Stone Age in comparison. Low data caps, very long latency, nearly twice as much money.
People don't realize that even in areas not that far from population centers connectivity can be virtually nonexistent.
Some might consider this bug a feature :-)
In the Starlink app: Settings > Advanced > Debug Data > Starlink Location > Allow access on local network.
This allows local devices to use the Starlink lat/long that dishy uses for satellite targeting.
How does this solve the geolocation issue? The parent poster mentioned IP based geolocation, which isn't affected by the starlink terminal providing some sort of local debug api to get the current lon/lat.
I'd expect somewhat typical time of day use patterns on Starlink as a whole [1], but you're probably seeing variable congestion/capacity because the satellites are in motion and you'll have varience in which satellites are in view and how many other users are using the same satellite as you, as well as how many users are connected through the same ground station as you. I'd bet there are some really interesting network graphs.
[1] although I wouldn't be willing to guess if it looks like office, residential
This has been my experience too which I've assumed they are capping speeds. Often I work late so am up in the am's so would have little competition for bandwidth and if I do a speed test it's lower (~60Mb down) than when I first got it and would regularly be 100Mb+ sometimes over 200.
Also recently we've been getting more network dropouts.
All that said, it's been a game changer for me as I was living with 3.5Mb down before starlink and a significant overall improvement.
They had HughesNet before, barely ever got more than 1 Mbps. Latency was ~1000ms on average. They paid for the 100 Mbps service for awhile but HughesNet oversubscribes their satellites to a disgusting degree and they rarely saw more than that 1 Mbps.
Even when the bandwidth was ~10 Mb, the latency levels caused basically all of the streaming services to not function.
When they first got it, it was ~100 Mbps on average. Now it's around 50 Mbps. Latency is still holding around 40ms. Still at least an order of magnitude better on all fronts compared to their competition. I was able to play some competitive shooters with decent success ... although CoD had a tendency to occasionally boot me when satellite switches happened. Seems to trip the anticheat, but I can't really blame Starlink for that.
That's definitely better than I expected. Why do you think this handles streaming and video conferencing so poorly?
We do not have access to data but it's not unreasonable to assume that such a spike in use must have eaten into overall network capacity.
Not being an apologist, just trying to keep perspective. People who really need Starlink are still getting a great value compared to how it was a couple years ago.
It could definitely be annoying to customers who had signed up and are now getting significantly less speed at the same price, but Starlink has a bit of a captive audience since they're mostly serving people without other options.
I made this choice voluntarily but tech geeks should visit the homes of non-tech people and see that (a) their speed is limited more by their connection to the Wi-Fi access point than by the ISP, and (b) they aren't bothered by it.
Deleted Comment
“Starlink outperformed fixed broadband average in 16 European countries”
https://www.ookla.com/articles/starlink-hughesnet-viasat-per...
Here are their methods: https://www.ookla.com/articles/how-ookla-ensures-accurate-re...
They do not separate between rural and city speeds.
It's "consumer-initiated", i.e. what they are really measuring is which contracts people are using, not which speeds are available.
Example: I could book a 500/100 line at my house (1000 symmetrical available if I switched providers), but I stick with the cheapest plan, which is 50/12 simply because it's good enough for my personal use. Same for most of my neighbours. Most don't have more than 100/20, though higher speeds are readily available.
With StarLink there's only type of contract: you get what you get and that's that. In Europe for example, there's usually more than one option per ISP and you pay more for higher bandwidth. So if you're fine with the smallest plan (usually around 50mbps), why pay more? So in essence they actually answer a different question.
Starlink made remote living and work truly possible. No more turning off video, pixilating and worrying about data plans. And low enough latency to make up with skill in games.
But just like everything it got too popular, cellular carriers are trying to service that market though and t-mobile might be a last mile internet provider with decent speeds and unlimited data. But, fiber is also getting buried all over rural areas to help with this as well.
Between fiber/cellular and Starlink people are going to get interesting data plans for sure though. Wisp are regional and the market will shrink because the service is just inadequate and poorly maintained. The smart wisp that got federal high speed internet subsidies will survive building out fiber even in some pretty rural areas.
I've called every provider that could possibly service our area and nobody has any interest. T-Mobile is supposedly offering 5G home internet for people in this kind of situation but they are not available in this neighborhood either.
No idea what to do other than wait for Starlink availability. There is a WISP, but it is truly terrible and very expensive.
I live 45 miles outside of a major Northeast city, have just one broadband option which is mostly OK but would still seriously consider Starlink as a backup. I barely get cellphone reception at my house without WiFi assist because I'm in the shadow of a hill.
Read the contract carefully to make sure it's allowed, start a coop & buy the commercial variant for a group of farms, with point-to-point wifi for local distribution? That should get you to jump the line.
(Though your problem may also be lack of a ground station close enough to you, but that's more rare.)
As you note, one of the problems that Starlink is facing is that everyone who wants Starlink generally lives in the same areas. Are there a few hundred households that want Starlink within a 7 mile radius of you (150 square miles)? Then there's likely to be capacity constraints, at least until Starlink can launch a lot more satellites.
All three wireless carriers are offering home internet in situations like yours, but with slightly varying offers. T-Mobile has an unlimited offering in areas where it has excess network capacity. T-Mobile also has a "Lite" offering that is available everywhere T-Mobile has coverage, but it has a data cap and costs $150 for the 300GB plan (https://www.t-mobile.com/support/home-internet/t-mobile-home...). AT&T has a home internet offering for $60 with a 350GB cap (https://www.att.com/internet/fixed-wireless/); overages are $10 per 50GB up to a maximum of $200/mo. I don't know if that's $200 total or $200 in overages + $60. At $200, it's certainly expensive, but Starlink isn't cheap. The average home internet user uses around 300GB of data (data from both T-Mobile and Comcast), but that's probably not people on Hacker News. Still, 1TB would be $170 which isn't that much more if you're desperate and doesn't have as high a startup cost (Starlink's being around $700 while AT&T's is up to $150). Verizon also offers home internet service at cheap costs (either LTE https://www.verizon.com/home/lte-home-internet/ or 5G https://www.verizon.com/5g/home depending on where you are), but availability is limited like T-Mobile's unlimited service.
Have you looked into Starlink's RV service? It's more expensive at $135/mo and you're deprioritized behind standard Starlink customers, but that might be a good option. I hate saying this, but once you're in for $110/mo, what's another $25? Well, $300 per year. But if you're desperate, it might be what you need.
Things will likely get better over the coming years. T-Mobile will be covering half of rural households over the next few months with mid-band 5G and they're also embarking on a huge rural coverage expansion with 10,000 new towers coming to improve coverage. Verizon and AT&T are behind on mid-band coverage, but it's coming. Starlink will be launching more satellites which will give them more capacity.
If you don't mind paying an extra $25/mo, Starlink RV might be the best solution. However, people have reported being annoyed that they haven't been able to switch to regular Starlink (and save $25/mo) when capacity becomes available. Definitely check Verizon and AT&T's offering and see if there's something right for you there (and available). It feels like a long-shot, but I'd rather mention them than not even if there's just a 1% chance it'll help. Over the next few years, we're likely to see AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile gain a lot of capacity in rural areas as they bring online a lot of spectrum and Starlink will launch more satellites. Right now, since you say you're "desperately looking", maybe grab Starlink RV or even AT&T's service.
Keep in mind that it maybe got too popular for an usable service, but it's far from being popular enough to be financially sustainable product. You're still at this point having a service paid by investors money, like cheap Uber rides in 2015.
Ouch! It's hard to tell if this is assertion based on some sort of familiarity with SpaceX's finances or just another of a seemingly endless stream of anti-Musk jabs.
Surely you can't put SpaceX and Uber into the same category when it comes to the state of their finances and where that money comes from. Surely a cursory glance at the slew of public, private and government contracts SpaceX already has, plus the ones they have lined up, not to mention the involvement in programs like Artemus, would demonstrate to most people that they are in league far and beyond the likes of Uber with their dubious Vision Fund and questionable private backers.
Or are you saying in this case that SpaceX, with all of its money and potential is basically to Starlink, what Softbank is to Uber?
If it's the former, I'd love to get a better understand of what you mean?
That feels like it would be true but is there any publically available data to confirm it?
Eventually it did find a sustainable business model though even for its new satellites.
Is there a reason this isn't viable in remote areas?
Can it only beam internet pretty short distances?
Remote areas often don't have lots of tall buildings with many inhabitants and line of sight above the treeline. I know my semi-rural area is full of trees and hills and line of sight wireless would really only have potential for people with waterfront, and realistically, only for people with waterfront and a view towards the nearby city.
I imagine the fixed cost for the microwave unit doesn't make sense otherwise.
If you're talking about microwave point to point to a cell tower that then provides 5g or LTE... Well that's how most cell towers work, I think...
With wireless spectrum, lower frequencies effectively travel farther because they don't get disrupted by objects as much. So 600-900MHz frequencies provide lots of coverage that's the backbone of our mobile phone networks, 1700-2100MHz were used to add more capacity in cities and suburbs, and now we're seeing 2.5-4GHz being used to provide new high-speed 5G services (5G+, 5G UC, or 5G UW depending on your carrier). On top of that, there's millimeter wave spectrum. There's a lot of it, but it's also 28-40GHz and going to be blocked by so much. Even if you're near a millimeter wave cell site, your walls might prevent it from working indoors. Lots of things become issues at millimeter wave so it's hard to do it without unobstructed line of sight (including trees and such) or really short distances.
Mobile phone carriers are already beaming internet far distances. They just have limited capacity in a lot of areas and people hate having their home internet connection limited. What we're seeing with 2.5-4GHz spectrum is pretty good capacity with some decent coverage, but we're still just talking a mile or two in a lot of situations. Of course, there are people hacking their T-Mobile Home Internet devices with high-gain directional antennas and really pushing that farther when they have near line of sight. I think we're likely to see this mid-band spectrum become a big factor in rural internet because it has a decent mix of distance and capacity. Millimeter wave spectrum is just hard to do without line of sight and so it often becomes limited to large buildings that an ISP can put a professionally installed antenna on the top of.
It's also that these things take time. If you're one of the big three wireless carriers, you're looking to upgrade 70,000-100,000 cell sites around the country and that doesn't happen overnight. It takes 3-6 years. To really get home internet good in many places, they might need more cell sites to supplement those. Realistically, I think it's a lot more likely that the big three wireless companies will hook up rural areas than Webpass. This is their business. Webpass (and others like Starry and NetBlazr) are somewhat limited because they don't have the spectrum to cover larger areas or even within cities where they don't have a tall building to give them line of sight. They also don't have the money or workforce to deploy as quickly as the wireless carriers (yes Google has money, but they're not going to spend $15B a year when they don't have the spectrum to create a viable rural strategy; the big three are spending that kind of money because they have the spectrum and network and potential to expand into home internet).
Wireless has a lot of promise, but the lower frequency you go the less spectrum there is available and the higher frequency you go the less distance you're going to get and the more you need line of sight. The big three wireless carriers have the lower frequency spectrum and network to start providing more and more home internet in the future. We're just at the first point where the big wireless carriers are starting to see excess network capacity (beyond what their mobile users will eat up) which is why it didn't happen much before.
No more roaming charges etc.
In actually remote Australia it was crazy to see locals go to the pub to use it, having never had access to anything better than dial-up.
In rural and remote places, it’s changing the world, exactly as it was designed to do. If you live in a dense urban environment, Starlink was never really designed for you.
Run Starlink when you need the throughput and turn off that 100w heater when you don’t.
I’m already looking into a timer to turnoff my modem, gaming console and router at night just to turn off that ~20w load doing nothing.
http://www.tpcdb.com/list.php?page=2&type=12
Starlink makes most sense when you have no 4G or 5G reception at all, generally speaking.
Starlink can handle the customers just fine.
By definition, if the customers could get something better for less money, they would.
Plus SpaceX is launching more satellites. They are at 1/20 of the number of satellites they want to have, so the total bandwidth available will go up.
Starlink shines when it comes to rural/remote environments, not cities where towers and fiber can reach.
Side note, look at HughesNet and Viasat in their data, LOL!
edit: instead of downvoting if someone could find the sampling method?
I would guess that places like rural California and Texas have seen an increase of user density which would cause bandwidth decreases. If you're in a place with relatively slow user growth, you could be getting advantage of increased total bandwidth of the satellite constellation.
Could have lots of variability though.