Does that reflect permanent limitations on Starlink speed? Somehow that's less impressive than it initially seemed...

Wireless will always be worse than proper fiber.

In a perfect world, we would all have active optical fiber from the backbone to our home routers. But 5G and satellite internet is cheaper...

Cheaper, in some situations. E.g. starlink would be horrendously expensive to provide service to everyone in downtown SF.

But yes. For rural less dense deployments. Long range signal through the air is much cheaper.

Cell towers already provide internet to everyone in downtown SF and have for 20 years. Just because you aren't using your PC with it normally doesn't mean it doesn't count.

Wireless is always cheaper than wired for an equivalent coverage area. It just requires less physical infrastructure. But in almost every other way it has inferior performance.

Agreed, problem is with everything SpaceX hard numbers are hard to come buy. So wireless will be cheaper, if satelites are cheaper than 5g and other groind based solutuons is hard to tell.

Could you explain your reasoning? My understanding is that:

fiber=c lasers=c fiber=nonlinear lasers=linear

So in physics terms, starlink will eventually surpass buried fiber in latency for all situations where fiber routing divergence from linear exceeds the ~1000km orbital round trip.

Now compare the noise level in a buried fiber, versus satellite radio transmission.

We've been getting a thunderstorm every evening here, and my Starlink slows down a lot -- not sure if it's ionization, the water content of clouds, or what, but it's definitely noticeable.

And my previous point-to-point wifi would also essentially stop transferring data when it rained, just in case some Starlink hater thinks it's somehow worse than alternatives.

Technically the speed of light in fiber is 2/3c because fiber has a higher index of refraction. Some HFT funds have actually moved away from fiber in some instances because they can pick up a few microseconds by going through the air instead.

Goldman Sachs actually moved to a neutrino beam between London and NYC.

I can't find anything about that online is this a joke or is this actually real

there's nothing about this on Google, and neutrino detectors are definitely not advanced enough for this. was this a joke that went over my head?

Maybe it's a joke about the (anomalous) detection of faster-than-light neutrinos?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano...

Yes. You will likely see a maximum theoretical speed of about 600mbps (like WiFi). In practice it will be much slower, maybe half. It’s noise shooting through atmosphere, so there will be physical limitations.

Starlink will get slower and slower as they get more subscribers.

This is already happening. In many places it is well below half as fast as before. More, and more powerful, birds will help some, but if they need to loft 4000 a year their unit cost will matter.

I expect they will cap subscriptions offered in some areas, particularly parts of Asia and Africa.

> Starlink will get slower and slower as they get more subscribers.

That assumes fixed capacity, which isn't at all the case.

No, it assumes that they will sell as many subscriptions as they can just barely support, because they desperately need the revenue to sustain the business model.

I was excited about Starlink until I learned more about it. Far too many issues. We need wire under ground or 4g. I lived in an area without many services (no cable, water, sewer) and had several satellite services which are more stable than Starlink and still found it inadequate.

What issues? I’ve had less issues than with other wired ISPs and satellite providers, personally. Not to mention any other satellite provider is going to be incredibly latency positive. Starlink has been a godsend. I guess just be careful of andecdata.

True, they aren't upgrading the satellites to the v2 ones that are 10x more powerful in total throughput and number of subscribers. They also aren't launching more satellites (and rockets) every year /s

Oh wait, I was wrong on all of those!

They have launched exactly zero of those "more powerful" satellites. And they are not launching at near the replacement rate for the final constellation.

Higher-bandwidth birds just moves the bottleneck.

It appears you are doubting that they will eventually launch their 2.0 satellites with an order of magnitude more bandwidth. It's not like they haven't delivered in the past...

The constellation is still growing quickly, they just passed 3000 launched Starlink satellites. By the time they go past the 9.000 satellites or so they should have Starship ready and kick their launch volume into overdrive. Have the 30,000 extra satellites (on top of the 12,000 already approved ones) even been approved yet?

> Higher-bandwidth birds just moves the bottleneck.

What does that even mean? There is no reason to believe they can't launch enough powerful satellites to reach faster speeds in those rural areas.

Not getting it? Putting faster routers on the satellites has absolutely no effect on the radio bandwidth available between sat and terminal.

If each new satellite can put down more spot beams, you can cover more cells for longer. With the spectrum they have, they could put 8 beams on a cell with 100% duty cycle, which is probably around 3.2-4Gbps.

They’ve already applied to the FCC for the 2Ghz spectrum. They’re already launching the larger 1.5 satellites that include lasers to limit ground stations. They just had a successful test fire of a starship with the engines mounted this week.

What makes you doubt the company that made reusable rockets that land on boats and reflux 13+ times won’t do this? The ENTIRE industry said it was impossible but it was fully within the realm of physics. They pulled it off because it was possible.

NOBODY said it was impossible.

People doubted they could make it pay, but the US kept handing over money until it did.

Oh Starlink is still losing massive amounts of money. There’s absolutely no feasible way they’re profitable at this stage.

That said. I’m sure the US Department of Defense will effectively write SpaceX a blank check after seeing how quickly they switched to spread spectrum frequency hopping to prevent Russian jamming of comms in Ukraine.

Use narrower beams and you increase the availble bandwidth. Same as using more wireless access points using lower transmission power each.

> They have launched exactly zero of those "more powerful" satellites. And they are not launching at near the replacement rate for the final constellation.

You can't deny that they're going to launch the more powerful satellites while simultaneously relying on those more powerful satellites for your calculations of the size of the final constellation...

They're launching at much faster than the rate needed for replacement for the existing planned constellation for the version 1/1.5 satellites.

Don’t the next gen satellites require the new Starship for deployment, which is still nowhere near ready for launch (they aim for a first test launch by the end of this year, IIRC)?

Nothing about the current situation is permanent. They're launching more and more satellites and it's only in the eastern half of the US that subscriber rates are growing faster than available capacity.