In cities and suburbs it will often be the case that there is a single cable provider who charges approximately the same as starlink due to being a regional monopoly. At my old place the sole choice was cox who had monopoly on internet because the only other option was at&t dsl that offered 5mbs download for $60+/month. I was seriously considering starlink.

Two blocks over there was google fiber and at&t fiber but might as well have been 100 miles away for all the good that did me. Actually it would have been better because I wouldn't get adds telling me about fiber only to find it wasn't available.

For me it's incredible that it's like that in the US (I assume you're in the US as you mention "google fiber" and "at&t").

You folks have to change that, decouple who lays cables from who can use them, or at least make companies who lay cables let any provider access them, etc... - look at how some european countries deal with it (at least the ones that have the most happy users - details will probably be important) and do the same => no risks.

(Repeating what I wrote in the past ) I'm in Switzerland living nearby Zurich but using a small regional Internet Provider located 50km away (outside the region I'm living in) and my parents are in a different region in a 800-souls village and use a major national provider, and we both ended up getting FTTH, with similar costs and great reliability - cables in both cases initially layed down spontaneously by companies not directly related to the providers, hoping that we would start using them at some point (I waited for 1 year being scared of complications but my parents switched immediately as their old ADSL connection was extremely unreliable) => this is a practical demonstration that this system works & good for everybody (customers & providers & whoever lays down the cables), therefore no reason not to adopt it.

The US is an (unevenly distributed) hellscape for anyone dependent on government regulation for basic quality of life. Regulators are wholly captured for most industries. Air quality, e.g., is not actually enforced by EPA, if the offender is a big and old chemical factory, particularly if people being gassed might be black.

They don't even need to bribe inspectors; the agency itself just rolls over on its own.

LTE or 5G is going to be much more efficient to provision anywhere that's not rural. Starlink cannot work well at even moderate densities, the "cell" is just too large and would have too many customers in it if it were reasonably popular.

I'm in a city center, and my small office network is currently 4G through a Samsung phone because it's faster than anything I can get on the landline.

This is a city where some buildings have up to about 200Mbit/s on either cable or FTTP, but these are not available at all properties. The best landline speed I can get is "up to" 17Mbit/s downlink, which is slower than the phone, the landline uplink is ridiculously slow, and to top off the landline is more than twice the price of unlimited 4G.

I'd like the speed and latency of FTTP, and failing that a good speed of VDSL over FTTP, but since I can't get either and I'm on the top floor of a 4 story building, I've wondered if Starlink would be an improvement over 4G.

The Internet options available in the city can be surprisingly awful. And not just on speed/capacity basis, but on customer service as well. I have lived in many places where what Starlink is offering now is better than any service available for purchase.

For me - backup Internet for a large-scale power outage or other event like an ice storm that knocks down telecommunication lines.

I've worked from home via the Internet since the late 90's, and having a backup has been drilled into me as a hard requirement from hard-won experience. Living in Chicago this came in handy just last year when a box truck took out my primary fiber connection and most of the block for a few days, and I failed over seamlessly to Comcast.

When/if I get approved for Starlink, I'll cancel comcast and be using it as my backup. Hopefully they become mobile soon as well, so I can take it with me on adventures.

You can get the "RV" variant now at starlink.com/rv. It's a little bit more per month but allows roaming and turning it on and off. On the downside, it's explicitly lower priority on the network than the fixed ones.

I use 5G as a backup. It costs me only around 40 USD and includes the modem which I have attached to my router.

If you are in a city there are cheaper back solutions than starlink.

When my local fiber backbone was cut last year, many neighborhoods including mine lost service. Guess what happened to the 5G? I had a hotspot for backup use, and it was useless. Turns out the towers use the same backbone!

Would it make sense to have such an expensive backup system for an event that happens once every few years and is fixed in a day?

Granted I’m rural, but ours took a week and a half to get back online when a forest fire burned a microwave tower. It took out Charter cable to our house & Verizon. I am a fully remote tech worker, and this was bad (I had to work remote-remote during this time).

On another topic, I have had Starlink since early 2021. A lot of the people I see complaining are not the target audience. We live 3 hrs from the nearest airport, and it’s night and day difference for everyone outside our “town” who were either using a local WISP or Hughesnet. There are more of those people out there than you think ;)

IMO Starlink is not going to replace hardwired connection options or local 5G, but that’s okay. At least in the USA, there is a lot lot land not covered by cell service. I carry an Iridium messenger in the car just in case I break down in one of these areas (it has happened to me, and is not fun trying to get a tow truck).

Unfortunately it was a couple weeks, not a day. And it’s pretty cheap, only $110/month for Starlink compared to $50/month for a T-Mobile hotspot that didn’t help at all during the outage.

A day? Maybe not - In most cases I could simply drive somewhere for a day or two and get work done.

For something that spans a week or so like my fiber outage? Worth every penny. As an employee it's my duty to have reliable "transportation" to work - in this case that means Internet access.

I did use a 4G LTE hotspot when I lived in less dense suburbs - it worked quite well. In the city core though, I've found that when there is a widescale outage mobile data slows to a crawl and is unusable for work purposes.

It's expensive, but when I was contracting being unable to take a sev0 on-call escalation would have cost far more in opportunity cost than paying for the backup line for a year.

I don't think I can find 5G modem for 40USD, but I think for 40 or 45€ I could get pre-paid internet good for a year or two from all three operators here.

And at least one of those will likely work. If not, I probably don't have much power anyway.

Maybe Google Fi.

Tethering to my phone is my backup.

Although it's more than a backup, I use it daily when I go sit in a park to work, or work from a cafe or whatever.

I’m in San Jose. My choices are 25Mbps DSL or cable internet through Xfinity. After my previous interactions with Xfinity I will never touch them again.

Starlink is looking pretty good by comparison.

You should also check out recent wireless options like T-Mobile's 5G Home Internet, which reportedly works quite well, and it makes a lot more sense (in my opinion) from an infrastructure standpoint than urban Starlink, unless you just absolutely require an internet connection that can continue working during a city-wide internet disruption. It's also like half the price of Starlink, with no upfront cost at all, IIRC. I've also seen people online get speeds upwards of 700Mbps, which is higher than I've seen anyone report on Starlink, but it is apparently highly variable from location to location based on your local cell network infrastructure.

I think Verizon and AT&T also offer 5G Home Internet options, but T-Mobile's offering seems to be the best from what I've seen online.

(Keep in mind that all of these services provide a specialized box that acts as a cell modem and router, and it should offer much stronger and better connectivity to the carrier's network than a mobile phone.)

I’m in a cell phone dead zone :(

Xfinity works just fine, and you haven't used starlink yet. grass is always greener.

That was not my experience.

People hate the cable company. There are a lot of rich people in cities who would love to burn dollar bills to spite the cable company, they compete with people in a radius of 300 miles or so for bandwidth.

I have one and it’s both a middle finger to the cable company and supporting the development of Starship.

Even without Starlink, you could have convinced me to donate $100 a month . The fact that my donation comes with a pretty amazing piece of tech is a bonus.

You are already donating via federal subsidies. They absolutely do not need your money.

Yes. I have access to Comcast cable, but I happily pay >2x for much slower local-ISP microwave service.

AT&T terminates fiber 1/10 mi from my house, built out under the $0.5B federal broadband subsidy many years back. But FCC did not require them to light it, so AT&T never bothered.

Who is worse, Comcast or AT&T? Each is worse than the other.