Elon Musk has admitted this himself, and the problem gets worse over time (bandwidth requirements grow every year, but satellites capacity is fixed), so the 20gbps they have now will seem even more limited in 3-5 years when the satellites are becoming EoL.
This is not to say that Starlink is fundamentally flawed, it has great potential for rural access.
I'm currently on an 5Mb down 1Mb up LTE connection with a total data limit of 250Gb/Month for the low price of 100 bucks a month. I do have very low latency < 20ms, but last month my friends kid was over and managed to burn through 95 gigs playing and updating some game called PubG that ended up putting me over my limit and I got to pay an extra 50 bucks for the next tier of usage.
If I get the opportunity to try out Starlink I will be more than happy to do so as it's very frustrating being forced to use an ISP monopoly provider, especially when there is fiber available to properties less than 5 miles away from mine.
$25 per month if you join a party, which takes about 5 minutes after searching for "Visible Party".
Stadia can easily burn through tens of GB per hour in bandwidth, and needs low latency, so it’s a good test of my 5G mobile connection. Good thing I have unlimited data!
When I dropped cable TV and phone 4 months ago, I also dropped my internet speed from the 600 I had, figuring I’d start low and then raise it to what I need.
Options were 25, 100, 200, 300, 600, 1000, or 2000, for 50, 55, 70, 80, 90, 100, or 300 $/month.
I went with 100...and am still there 4 months later. The only times I notice it’s slower than my old 600 is OS and sometimes large app updates. (And for mobile devices, the difference is even less because my WiFi was a lot closer to 100 than 600).
It hasn’t affected working from home at all (I’ve been WFH for a couple years now so have plenty of prior experience with that at 600). I do occasionally need large downloads from work, but I’ve never gotten more than 20 Mbps out of our servers hosted at AWS.
I was worried a bit about upload. Nominally it was 15 for the 600 plan and is 5 for the 100 plan. Comcast over-performs in my area, so actual is about 19 for 600 and 7 for 100. (Download for those two is actually about 620-640 and 124). But the only large uploads I do aren’t very large. They are just large enough that on the old plan I would overlap them with other work rather than wait...so now I just get more other work done during the upload and still don’t really notice the wait. I get the same total work accomplished in the same time as before, just sequenced slightly different.
I thought I might be going to 300 if it turned out that streaming TV ran me into Comcast’s data cap and I needed to go unlimited. That would have been an extra $50/month, so 100 unlimited would be $105/month. But they also had an option where you could get unlimited for much less but only if you rented their modem. Total was $25/month, but it was only available on 300 or faster plans. A 300 plan with the modem/unlimited bundle would be $105/month, same as the 100 plan with my own modem and added unlimited. Still wouldn’t need 300, but if it is the same price as 100 why not?
But it turns out that even in my bingiest COVID lockdown month I only hit about 300 GB. Also, Comcast has since raised the cap from 1000 GB to 1229 GB, and dropped unlimited to $30/month, so I now anticipate staying at 100 indefinitely.
6Mbps/768kbps DSL
make sure you have some decent AQM (qos) like cake or fq_codel. isp-gear probably has not. IQRouter was one of the first but there are others https://www.stoplagging.com/
I pay $75/month for 30/30. So that sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
But you're not going to have just one satellite per city. Consider that Starlink already has approval for 12,000 satellites. And has applied for 30,000 more! At 20 Gbps each, that’s a lot of bandwidth.
When fully built out, any given point on the ground should have coverage from dozens (hundreds?) of satellites at any given time, spreading the load in regions of heavy demand.
I think they'll just make it more expensive than internet in cities. That way it's still the best option for rural areas without attracting too many customers in cities.
There may be niche customers in cities (data redundancy/resiliency etc), but in general, the biggest advantage will be for rural/remote customers who currently pay above the odds for substandard service.
Can this be upgraded in future versions of the sats? Is it a major undertaking requiring new ground station hardware, or something relatively easy that will increase with each "new" version of the sats?
I think I saw a photo of a 5 Tbps Netflix POP recently.
How many beams per sat? What's the minimum angle/distance between them?
The math just doesn't add up. It's a similar problem to why 4G/5G isn't a viable replacement for home internet service (yet) in many areas, apart from its much worse as it's easier to add new 5G base stations to densely cover cities than add new satellites.
That doesn't sound right. A satellite doesn't have to be directly overhead to be reachable. The coverage map below suggests that each satellite can cover a region 800-1000km in diameter, so with a fully deployed constellation of 12,000 to 42,000 satellites, there should easily be 50+ sats visible from any metro area. Perhaps even more than that.
This means satellites are going to cover a very large area. There might be 50 sats to cover the area from Boston down to Washington DC. That's 1tbit/sec of bandwidth to cover 100m potential customers.
Considering beta service afiak is using 600-1200 sats I imagine sat penetration will be significantly less. Considering cell towers between 4G and 5G can offer 20gbps _per tower_ these days I can't see 20gbps working across an entire state. Especially when it has been hyped as better than terrestrial internet. Even with a small number of users it will degrade rapidly at peak times when you get 1-3k users watching netflix.
> Despite that, the SpaceX CEO argued that Starlink won't be a major threat to telcos because the satellite service won't be good enough for high-population areas and will mostly be used by rural customers without access to fast broadband.
> The amount of bandwidth available will be enough to support typical Internet usage, at least in rural areas, Musk said.
> So will Starlink be a good option for anyone in the United States? Not necessarily. Musk said there will be plenty of bandwidth in areas with low population densities and that there will be some customers in big cities. But he cautioned against expecting that everyone in a big city would be able to use Starlink.
1: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-...
In many ways those of us in this scenario get the worst of both world because infrastructure spending / subsidies for rural Internet improvement gets used in real remote places, while most people don't realize that if you drive one street over from the suburbs, out into the farmland, you're unlikely to even be able to get low quality DSL. It's simply not available to me. When the sprawl finally brings the bulldozers in to build McMansions around me, I guess that's when the fiber lines will come in...
No, because there won't be any urban users on Starlink. It doesn't make any sense for them (ignoring a small number of vocal fanboys).
At least initially, this is going to primarily be a rural and/or mobile warrior type of service.
And I don’t believe those latency figures at all until I see them working in the wild. It will be significantly better than geosynchronous satellite service, but the question is by how much.
The most optimal market is not somewhere like a northern suburb of Seattle with a well-developed Comcast network that also has CenturyLink GPON 1Gbps available, but more rural and fringe areas.
But the mobile network almost never goes down. If something happens to a given cell tower/base station, the connection will seamlessly switch over to another. Performance might degrade a bit but you probably won't notice. There is built in resiliency/redundancy with less single points of failure. I imagine a network like Starlink will be the same.
If they plug a 1gig network into an old 802.11g wireless router or an old 100/10 network card with cat4 cables, you are not getting what you pay for at all.
Rock on over to my parents house. They were paying for 40 and had it plugged into a wireless usb dongle that could maybe manage 2.5 on a good day. That came from the ISP. Bought them a better one and they were getting near the rate they were paying for.
“As confirmed by the company, Starlink will be able to provide speeds of up to a gigabit per second with latencies ranging from 25 milliseconds to 35 milliseconds. Elon Musk has previously stated that it has been designed to run real-time, competitive video games.”
It will be plenty good to replace anything else available out there for home internet.