Back when preorders started, it wasn't obvious how slow Starlink would be to expand, and it also wasn't obvious transfers wouldn't be a supported feature for many months.
Even so, my cousin also signed up in hopes to get Starlink, and 11 months later her date was moved from 'late 2021' to 'late 2022'.
And yes, I've tried many address hacks to see if I could get my dish moved there, none have worked.
They shouldn't have dropped the 'beta' moniker last year if the service is truly so far from its final state (IMO).
Starlink never originally advertised the ability to transfer service or even sell your hardware. It was very clear from the beginning you had to use it for the address you provided, and their communication was very clear to that effect.
You are definitely correct that logically you should be able to sell your kit, transfer service, or just move with it (Elon has said you’ll eventually be able to use it on an RV). But you took that logical end result and set your own expectations based on assumptions that were not aligned with reality.
You are not in the target market, of course you’re going to be frustrated.
Mobile antennas will also require separate FCC approval.
"Requires separate approvals" does not always mean that approval is hard to get. It might require a version of the dish that doesn't do something v1 or v1 and v2 current do however.
Starlink itself cares about positioning to avoid overcrowding and also any satellite tasking/scheduling/whatever.
If you can't sell it, is it really yours?
There is a very, very high probability that if they allowed people to move starlink transceivers/dishes around that a number of areas would end up with higher concentrations than wanted, and starlink would have a lot of angry customers.
SpaceX has a government subsidy to provide high speed internet right across the street from my parents house. But they have no satellite coverage in that area according to their own map. I don't really understand the business plan of SpaceX with respect to starlink.
There is nowhere in the lower 48 where starlink has no satellite coverage, I believe there are still areas where they have not built out ground stations though, and since most of the satellites don't have laser links to talk to other satellites (due to issues with their original lasers not fully burning up on re-entry - now fixed) they need to have a ground station under the same satellite as the customer.
They also have limited bandwidth to any one satellite, so they need to limit the density of their customers. Satellites move up and down lattitudes, but at any one time the density of satellites is higher at higher latitudes, so they should be able to serve more customers there.
For an ISP that uses satellites, ground stations are equivalent to satellite coverage. It doesn't matter how many satellites they have, if there isn't a ground station to connect to you don't have coverage.
Inter-satellite links also don't do anything useful if you don't have enough ground stations. Even if you had a ground station with infinite bandwidth there is no way a single satellite can have the entire network linked through it. It's a really neat thing to have a single voice channel connect through a constellation from somewhere like the southern Indian ocean, but you can't really run 100+ mbps pipes like that.
This is completely different than something like a military communications satellite where both ends of the connection are communicating through the same satellite. The 48 states could be totally in the dark (no power, no comms) and a military communications satellite still functions fine.
The nuance between ground station coverage and satellite coverage is extremely important for understanding spacex's business plan, which is relevant to your comment since you were saying "I don't really understand the business plan of SpaceX with respect tostarlink", with the implication that it doesn't make any sense. The difference between ground station coverage vs satellite coverage is the difference between "we're still building out the infrastructure, but we have the hard bits in place" and "this business model never scales because we need to launch way more satellites just to have basic coverage over the continent". It shouldn't be surprising that they're not done scaling the ground infrastructure, but that's not an impediment to their long term business model, because it's not the expensive bit.
> Even if you had a ground station with infinite bandwidth there is no way a single satellite can have the entire network linked through it.
This is a straw man, no one ever suggested that the entire network would be linked from a single satellite.
Rather the primary purpose of inter-satellite links is that you can expand coverage to areas away from ground stations. You route the traffic to a nearby groundstation (or better, a groundstation close to it's destination) with bandwidth available.
> but you can't really run 100+ mbps pipes like that.
Yes you can, I don't have numbers for starlink's inter-satellite links, but in general that technology is at the ~10gbps / laser link range, each satellite has 4. Light travels through space faster than in fiber, so if routed intelligently this actually lowers ping too.
> This is completely different than something like a military communications satellite where both ends of the connection are communicating through the same satellite.
Ironically, this actually describes how the current system works (as long as you treat the endpoint as a groundstation, and not an IP address somewhere on the internet).
The future system is more robust, even if there is no "other end" to talk to locally, spacex will (with inter-satellite links) be able to route you to an "other end" anywhere around the globe.
Tell us you know nothing about military satcom without telling us you know nothing about military satcom.
Let's see, this system predates even my birth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_Satellite_Communications...
It's still in use as recently as 2009, by pirates however. Newer systems include some form of conditional access to prevent anyone with the gear from using them.
It's a bit like saying "a bicycle is different from an automobile, because automobile frames are made from wood", and then pointing to a Morgan to prove the point.
So coverage at your house is dependent on you and a Starlink ground station being in the ground track of some Starlink satellites. Because of their low altitude it's entirely possible for your house being in the ground track of satellites but the nearest Starlink ground station being outside.
At some point in the future Starlink satellites will have laser communications between each other. Then only one in that group needs to be able to see a Starlink ground station and the others can route customer signals to it.
This will change dramatically once sat-to-sat laser comms are fully online as it will put more base stations “in range”.
Notably, this is only about twice the cost of a high speed "business" internet connection from the cable companies in a high density area. Regular Starlink is priced at about twice a high speed "consumer" internet connection, so the premium seems reasonable for the available-in-austure-areas part.
I do hope they end up coming out with a version for RVers that has the lower throughput but allows arbitrary roaming.. but I do understand putting roaming on a premium plan first, since it plays such havoc with per-cell capacity planning.
There are also 911 implications.
https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.nena.org/resource/collection/1F053...
If you move it, and call 911 - how does the carrier determine the address where the call originated?
The technology would have worked just fine, they just couldn't fill in their E911 entry with anything that would work.
IP would be absolutely trivial to spoof so that's not a proof of anything really.
AFAIK even regular cell sites have GPS for timing purposes.
There is so little tolerance that people are finding the dish only works say, in their driveway because the dish's required location is based off mapping data that puts a certain address at certain coordinates, regardless of where the house is (which might be set back considerably from the road.)
I have synchronous gigabit wireless internet from Sail Internet. It has pretty much all the same issues you mentioned about Starlink except the last one, but I'm not making a video to complain about it.
Engineering involves trade-offs, and it's just a reality.
This seems like a gripe very particular to you and not generally relevant.
FYI: I unsubscribed because of this video (previous to it showing up on HN). It's obviously disingenuous clickbait. Look at the title alone. And it even goes into a pointless discussion about Elon Musk that has nothing to do with Starlink itself. Lots of good technical YouTubers avoid this crap. I was surprised you felt the need to engage in it. I'm not mad, just disappointed :-)
I was genuinely informed by the experience.
Just because they do not have the coverage of other satellite systems does not mean it is still a beta.
We bought a property in a very rural area in mid 2020. One of the hard requirements was verified high speed Internet access.
Our home has good performing Comcast. But I also pay $100/month and have a Dishy on my roof. Fortunately our home is very tall and we're able to get about 95% visibility, since our home is in the middle of a forest.
Why am I paying an extra $100/month? Because our Comcast has outages. It's not surprising since we're at the end of miles and miles of above ground cable that has hundreds of trees pushing up against the wires and poles.
I'm a pretty well off 'tech person' so an additional $100/month to cover a few hours of use makes sense.
(Wireless coverage is terrible around here, so that was never a backup possibility.)
I'm pretty convinced that Starlink is not only going to revolutionize many people's lives, but it's also going to be a cash cow for SpaceX, in large part funding their Mars ambitions.
Internet scores higher than running water for me on prioritization, but I still couldn't bear to waste the resources to have a sat uplink for the 1-2 days a year comcast goes down. Taking a slot from somebody that actually needs it feels off to me too. It would only likely be worth it if your particular area has abnormally bad comcast uptime.
That said, we just purchased a beautiful rural property with a wonderful house, and will rent it out until starlink or fiber( local company is 1-2 years out) hits it. So maybe I'm just sore that people are taking starlink slots when they absolutely don't need it and its 2 years out =P
The comcast outages are far above anything that's 'normal'. And honestly if it was just me, as a decades long 'devops' person, losing network connectivity briefly every few days and for tens of minutes or longer multiple times a month would not be too bad. But my wife does zoom/video professionally all day every day with paying clients, so when comcast goes to crap it's very important for her to be able to reconnect over starlink ASAP.
Have you looked at something like Firewalla and multi-wan setup? https://help.firewalla.com/hc/en-us/articles/360051575473-Fi...
My wife reports that she's able to switch WIFI from Comcast to Starlink in a matter of seconds, which doesn't actually break the video chat session. Not ideal, but not terrible.
When discussing it with some of the sysadmins that I work with, they had a "hmm... interesting" thought with it - the configuration for it compared to the dual wan router setups that they have for their home labs is (from their standpoint) much easier.
The issue isn't so much a "can you do it" but rather a "how much time do you want to invest in designing your own setup?"
With the prior DSL, I couldn't have worked from the house in a meaningful way. (My AT&T wireless is also very marginal.) Now I mostly could.
Also check cellmapper to check for near by antennas and bands. More info in r/tmobileisp
T-Mobile has been managing how many people they sign up in an area. Sometimes T-Mobile's home internet is available in your area, but then they get a certain number of signups and it becomes unavailable in your area until they're able to increase capacity or customers cancel. It's possible that it was available in their area and others signed up for it.
AT&T is only offering service in very limited areas and it seems like they're mostly trying to replace their DSL connections that they don't want to upgrade to fiber.
Verizon's service is currently pretty small scale, but they're looking to grow it. Again, it will be limited areas because no one wants to overwhelm the network.
Even if you have good phone service, there's a big difference between someone using 10GB on mobile and someone using 500GB as a home user. Signing up 10 home users could be like adding 500 new phone users in a small area. That can be a lot of traffic and they don't want to start seeing their mobile users cancel service because home users are clogging up the network. So they want to roll it out a bit slowly, especially as they increase capacity over the next few years with midband 5G.
The Home Internet service is 100% deprioritized compared to postpaid cell phone data, so they really are selling "excess" capacity.
Just looking at a satellite map of Spain, I see La Langa. It seems like it has very few people, but they all live in a small town center. Looking at Uclés, it's the same: tiny place, but everyone is living in the town center.
Let's look at Potomac, MD in the US. The roads are sprawling with giant houses all far apart. That's a lot more distance to run fiber to get it to each house. Potomac is a rich suburb of DC and has fine internet (it's still dense enough for that), but the US keeps sprawling. Look at a satellite view of Pike Township, PA. There's a lot of houses with huge distances in between and no discernible town center.
> If you manage to use electric or telephone posts deploying fiber and getting a carrier is doable
I think this can also be an issue in the US since place might not have easy/cheap access to those utility poles. Title II carriers in the US get cheap, regulated access to utility poles. That's traditionally been your phone company. I believe the FCC tried reclassifying broadband as Title II under the Obama administration, but it might have been reversed under the Trump administration. If you're someone that already has access to the utility poles, you don't want more people getting cheap access to them.
Even if you have access to the utility poles, you can face difficulty. As noted, you aren't wiring up a town center, you can be wiring up places with a huge amount of distance between people. Even if that isn't a problem, property owners might want new cables buried. Even when power lines are above ground, sometimes they're underground from the street to the house. Many houses might be set back from the street by 50 meters so it can be a larger distance. You can have a 300m road with 3 houses on it each with a 50m set back from the street.
That's not to say it isn't possible (and some towns have created coop ISPs), but costs add up. Uclés has 140 people in it, but everyone seems to live within a 250m radius of the city center. That seems pretty easy to wire up. Pike Township, PA has 1,700 people that are incredibly spread out. That seems a lot harder to wire up. It's not impossible, but it seems harder.
In Europe, cities often drop off into farmland very abruptly. You have built-up areas and then very abruptly farmland. In the US, you can have suburbs where there's 1 house on an acre (4,000 square meters) going for a long time. Even 1 house every 2-4 acres (8,000-12,000 square meters) isn't unusual.
If you look at a satellite map between cities in the Netherlands, you can see that there isn't any sprawling houses between Rotterdam and Utrecht. Places like Oudewater exists, but it's dense. It might not be as dense as larger cities, but people don't have enormous plots of land. You can easily walk to neighbors and shops. In the US, a lot of people live in areas where it can be 5 miles to get to shops.
In the US, people often have the issue that the wired internet doesn't go up their street which might be a couple miles with only a handful of houses. In the US, they might face costs getting it from the street to their house because their house is set back a hundred meters from the road. This isn't super typical, but it's typical enough that it effects a lot of people.
I think part of the issue is that there is no real demarcation between the urban area and outside it in the US. I can look at a satellite view of a city in Europe and clearly discern city vs farmland. In the US, a lot of rich people left the city for suburbs where they could set land use policies that kept lower income people (and often minorities they didn't want around) out of their town (and out of their schools and out of their tax base). They still wanted to be able to commute into the city, but often passed laws mandating minimum lot sizes, minimum setbacks from the street for houses, and emphasized local control to prevent housing they deemed undesirable from being made. These places have fine wired internet.
But they kinda slowly melt into progressively more rural places rather than having a clear demarcation. The US's emphasis on cars and a certain cultural idealism around rural life means that there are people that want to live semi-rural while not really having a rural lifestyle or job. They just drive farther and cheap fuel and subsidies make that possible.
The lack of coherent land use policies means that the area where people consider themselves as part of an urban area can keep expanding. Maybe a developer wants to build new housing. The city and suburbs don't want more housing and so the developer picks a piece of land just past the last suburb. It's another 15 minutes from the city by car, but with skyrocketing housing prices, there are probably going to be some people who think it's a reasonable trade-off. What's the difference between an hour commute and an hour and 15 minute commute? Why shouldn't I trade 10 hours of my life every month for a larger house?
A lot of European countries have greenbelts around their cities where you aren't allowed to do a lot of development. It prevents things like the US suburbs which initially were thought of as 5-10 miles outside the city and now often go all the way to the next city creating a giant area that people commute from.
But these suburbs aren't the problem. The thing is that the suburbs then meld into really rural areas - but those really rural areas aren't that far from the suburbs that rich people live in and commute to the city from and those suburbs have big-box stores like Walmart and Target and they have high speed internet. If you live in a rural area that's 5 miles from such a suburb, you think "I'm not in the middle of nowhere! I'm just 5 miles from this place that has a Walmart and high speed internet and a supermarket!" If you're 5 miles outside a city in Europe, you're in farmland - but very often the houses all seem to be on one main road even through that farmland rather than up winding roads that lead nowhere (other than a few people's houses).
In the US, because there's this gradual drop-off in density, there can be this "why not just a little more" mentality. "Why not just a little farther out to get a tiny bit more land? It's working for the suburb next door that's just a tiny bit denser."
And a lot of Americans want to live in a rural area with acres of land, but in a commuting way. US policy often supports this choice - fuel prices, road subsidies, same-price delivery by the postal service, and billions spent trying to give them modern communications choices. That last one is key for this. The US is offering billions for rural internet and Starlink is going after that money.
Starlink is partly happening because the US government put a large amount of money available to anyone creating rural broadband options. The US Postal Service makes sure that rural areas can still get their deliveries.
I think "how far outside the urban area" is a hard question to answer because it's hard to answer where the urban area is in the US. The issue is that there's a lot of people that live in pretty rural areas in the US. Amazon and other deliveries are available. LTE and often even 5G is available, though often not with enough bandwidth at the moment to supply home internet (though companies are looking to change that). A lot of places with low density have fine wired internet. But when there isn't a clear demarcation of urban vs rural, there's still going to be a place where certain things stop, but people are going to wonder about the cut-off: I'm just outside the place that has broadband and it's only 15% less dense here.
I think that's the big thing. You might be 50 or 100 miles outside the city, but the gradual reduction in density while still being surrounded by non-farmers can make you feel like you're still a part of non-rural life while your neighbors and shops get farther and farther apart. Good wired home internet usually extends well away from cities in terms of miles (though often with annoying monopolies), but people really spread themselves out in the US.
Actually I've only seen an Amazon delivery vehicle one or two times...
I was working in the ISP space, and we did some rough back of the envelope calculations which showed that Starlink could only ever service a very low population density, based on the radio spectrum fundamentals.
Now people are realizing the obvious- it's an incremental improvement over other satellite internet options. It's great for people in very rural places, but if you are in or near a town of any size, you likely have a better option available.
Anything that's coming from Musk has a huge hype, for better or worse.
"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."
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-...
Source - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink
It's typical Musk - announcing something that sounds super cool and impossible, because it's impossible. Ad later quietly scale it down to something still pretty cool, but nothing like it was presented initially. And ride the hype as much as you can in the process.
Some of this might be coming from real-world experience with the network and an update on previous incorrect assumptions. Part of it might be simply making bombastic claims.
Right now, Starlink hit around 100,000 customers with 1,700 satellites. With the full 12,000 satellites we'd then expect 700,000 customers. That might change given that the satellites aren't geostationary and they haven't launched in many countries, but to hit a million customers in the US, they'd need to increase the number of customers per satellite significantly. Maybe there are improvements they can make that we don't know about, but it seems like Starlink's advantages are in making cheap rockets and cheap satellites - which is very cool, but they likely don't have radio advantages.
Starlink is also thinking about an additional 20,000 satellites so it's possible that they'll just keep increasing the number of satellites. Still, if they're seeing linear gains, that's still a relatively small number of users even with 32,000 satellites (and even the 12,000 is 4-5 years away).
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210510/08050146767/elon-...
The joke here is that the lucky few percent of people who can get fiber here have two choices, but the rest of us are stuck in the 1990s. And this is a dense area, far more dense than 100 miles W of here in the little towns of population 1k that can also get fiber from their local telco co-op.
Notably these are all of the Starlink customers I know despite living in a region with vast rural areas... I've heard from a couple people I know out in the country that they are stuck on the waitlist. I think Starlink may have prioritized urban areas first for whatever reason (just higher customer count presumably).
Say I'm considering moving to a rural location. One of my barriers to moving is the quality of my internet access. Along comes this fancy new Starlink service and I might be tempted to think "problem solved". But reviews like this allow me to anticipate problems with the service and reconsider moving altogether.
If Starlink is the least bad of your bad options, then this review probably just isn't for you.
I needed to run mostly on LTE tethered connectivity for a couple of months, and 30 GB a month of data was more than enough for my daily development process, and background youtube music mixes (at lower bitrates).
Unless you're rebuilding containers/redownloading dependecies daily, 15 GB of data should be pretty reasonable.
This sounds exceptionally high. What do you do that uses so much?
The worst offenders are social networks like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, especially if you have video auto play enabled. Because almost everyone has an ultra-high-DPI screen these days, they expect high video and image quality, and that's a lot of data.
Next up are media sites: auto-playing videos again, followed by "normal" advertising and actual content. Just for popular papers and media: A single (!) page load of the front page of Germany's respected newspaper Süddeutsche clocks in at 7.7 MB, Spiegel has 6.6 MB, tabloid BILD has 10 MB. US NYT is 9 MB, Fox News is 6MB, CNBC 8.7 MB. Even relatively plain Stackoverflow's front page clocks in at 2 MB.
And then, there are all the updaters (looking at you, Windows Update), the other phone-home telemetry and analytics stuff, even more ads side-loaded by modern "smart TVs"...
Where the fuck have we gone wrong? Is there any chance to get "the old" Internet back without putting everyone in advertising in jail for a decade?
And then there is Zoom.
I think that it is difficult to estimate one's internet usage if you can go somewhere else when you need do to something big. If 15 Gb is your only allocation, for home and work, it doesn't last long.
> The download size of a 140-minute 4K video, for example, would be approximately (14 GB x 2) + (.233 GB x 20) = 33 GB or .233 GB x 140 = 33 GB.
But if your other choice is HughesNet or its competitors, that throttles you after 15 GB (2 days of non-streaming usage for me), or 50 GB, the Starlink "shortcomings" are irrelevant. With Starlink, if you can get it, and if you can site it without blockages, you have "real" internet. Reasonable speeds and no caps/throttling.
The massive over-subscription (presumably by people who have no functional alternative) suggests it serves a need.
Just not a need for people who have a non-DSL wired alternative, like Jeff Geerling.