re: SpaceX Starlink rumor

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Starlink is for people without access to fiber or cable. I pay $115 a month for fixed wireless for 15 down and 2 up. So Starlink is a major upgrade.

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LOL! And I'm talking about the same thing. I don't have access to fiber or cable or dsl.


And I pay $35 less for it. With NO caps

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Prices are HORRIBLE! I pay 35 dollars cheaper with non sat in rural area for 85 down and 30 up.

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Count yourself blessed. I would be very happy to have that, but unfortunately, we have nothing like that available at my location.

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Prices are HORRIBLE! I pay 35 dollars cheaper with non sat in rural area for 85 down and 30 up.

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Don't be an idiot, the pricing is very reasonable compared to the options some people have.

You're gonna have to be more specific about the tech being used. Is it fixed wireless WISP? That is a viable option in a lot of areas, but service can vary a lot by terrain, distance to towers, etc. Some have data caps.

Or is he reselling LTE? Same issue with terrain and towers.

Starlink is NOT expected to compete in areas that have these options, at least not at first. But I seriously doubt that whatever tech your friend is using can reach as many customers as Starlink can (once they get more sats up there, which is happening quickly).

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This compares very favorably to other satellite internet where you might get 20\3 for $100 a month $400 startup cost and a very very low monthly cap. Oh and don't forget the 1 second latency.

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Satellite internet apparently sucks. I've never had to rely on it but one of our employees lives in a shitty town in NELA and it's her only option. She can't even make VOIP calls in Avaya.

When I had an accident a few years back and had to quickly find a job I could do from the couch. I worked briefly as tech support for ViaSat, but it was more of a customer rep than anything. The phone queue would have 25+ calls in queue at all times and 80% of them were for shitty performance and all we could tell them to do was power cycle modem and try again.

The other 20% were bumfrick subscribers that had their services disabled for no payment. The company apparently lied it's arse off about the services it provided but I could easily the plan the agreed to and the service they were receiving. These were 2 clearly different things and we were trained to upsell them to a higher package which would again, severely under-deliver.

Hated those 2 months but being immobile, I didn't have another choice at that time.

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Satellite internet apparently sucks.

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Most of them do, but Starlink is different. Here's why:

"Traditional" satellite internet uses satellites that are in what's called "geostationary orbit". That just means the satellite is always at the same spot in the sky, and that can only happen at an altitude of 22,236 miles. Any lower and it will drift east, any higher and it will drift west. This is not a huge problem as far as bandwidth, and some satellite services even qualify as "broadband" speed.

In real world use, though, latency is just as critical as raw speed, and this is a problem for satellites that are very high up. One "ping" has to go up 22k miles, down 22k miles, then traverse cables on the ground, then back up 22k miles, and finally another 22k miles back down to you. That is a bare minimum of ~90,000 miles, and at that distance the laws of physics are a big problem. Radio waves can only travel 186k miles per second, so your ping time (latency) is nearly 500 milliseconds in the best case, and in reality they are up around a full second or more.

That's not good. Terrestrial broadband latency is usually in the range of 20-30ms in most cases. At >100ms online gaming is almost impossible. At >200ms voip calls are a problem. At >300ms browsing webpages can be frustrating. At >500ms I'd rather just log off.

So rather than one or a handful of geostationary satellites, Starlink will eventually use thousands of satellites in low earth orbit about 350 miles up. These basically streak across the sky, but with so many of them there's always another one right behind it, so your receiver is always pointed close enough toward at least one of them. So instead of having to travel 4 x 22,000 = 88,000 miles, the signal only has to go 4 x 350 = 1,400 miles. Instead of the altitude adding ~475ms to your latency, Starlink only adds ~7.5ms. Quite a difference!

And not only that, but Starlink satellites will be able to bounce signals between one another (if they don't already). Depending on where in the world the machine is that you're trying to reach, the terrestrial cables might not be anything close to a straight line. For this reason, in the future Starlink might even have lower latency than terrestrial broadband in some cases. With many thousands of satellites blanketing the globe, the shortest path between two points on the ground could very well be to take a mostly straight path through space.

Is the service gonna go down every time a cloud passes over my house like it does with satellite TV?

From reddit

not bad, I pay $100/month for 25Mbps through satellite at my camp, and there are not any faster options available.

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I wonder if like DirecTV the signal becomes blank during a rain shower?

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Very early beta testing is showing it does well on the rain.