I have a neighbor who has access to 1gb cable and 1gb fiber from two ISP’s. Both have high data caps. Instead he is rocking the starlink and I can’t for the life of me figure out how he thinks that shit is somehow better than a hard link.
I don’t run starlink, but I run Starry (fixed point wireless) when AT&T and Spectrum are available because:
- I do networking for a living, including wireless (or technically my coworkers do). I know how this thing works and what it’s limitations are
- I live in an area where it almost never rains, so little to no attenuation
- AT&T is on my banlist after shutting down my account for migrating to a 5G phone not on their approved list. Customer service didn’t even let me transfer the sim back to the old 4G phone. The account termination was immediate. I ended up convincing customer service that I needed my phone number for emergency contact, and immediately transferred the number elsewhere upon it being restored.
- Spectrum routing is shit
- Wireless can be as good (or even better) than wired in ideal conditions (see 1), my current 1Gbps plan also only costs $20/month.
We have terrestrial radio and cables. What is the point of this complex space-based trash?
The US taxpayers literally paid TWICE to privatized telecom companies (telco) to run fiber optic to the home, once in the 90s and again that last early “surge” of FTtH(fiber to the home aka “last mile”) when google started competing direct against telcos that would not get the lead out so they all buried a fuckton of (dark)fiber that they then kept artificially turned off and sat on their excess bandwidth instead of releasing that excess supply to the market to do bare standard minimum of using their good taxpayer funded fortune AND their privatized, ridiculously gained profits from the calculable increase of use in the information age YOY to offer it for reasonable prices. We could all be on $25 a month or less no cap 1GBps fiber in many places but again, the market forces at work at this point seem more actively just hostile to the rest of us on ground level here now. It’s a fascinating and also infuriating subject as an ex-IT person that helped build out this infrastructure that only could watch as it all remained dark. I was stuck in rural nowhere where we still had a small local telephone cop-op. They took that money, laid fiber and sat on their asses with it while they charged exorbitant rates for 56k dial up service while Netzero and the such took dome of that broadband at a time when independent local ISPs were cropping up, teaming modems and some fiber to offer a service with a saner price structure and this was all before data caps and bandwidth throttling was evenr a thing because all you needed was single rack in strateic locations , set the equipment up and basically forget it with the only fixed costs was your mainline fiber, equipment, colocation etc and such yet they STILL offered 100% FREE dial-up internet, co caps off those systems(of course subsidized by ad networks).
htps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fibre
We coulda had Local Loop Unbundling all this time.
It’s the only high speed solution if you’re more than 30 miles away from the nearest town and you live completely surrounded by trees or hills. 4g internet is pretty good for home use and that covers most rural areas but that’s not large amounts of data usually. It’s good for a lot of edge cases like open ocean or really remote areas. And crucially it can do that with very low lag unlike any other traditional geosat space internet.
Go to hyperspace, bro. That’s where Jesus and Joseph Smith transcended to. Enlightenment is a process of becoming an independent phenomenon. God is an independent phenomenon; it created itself. The Alpha is the Omega; the restuarant at the end of the universe is the transcendental particle that can be in multiple…stepmoms? Tf you saying God? Yea, I got a big stepmommy fetish, tf is your point of bringing it up now? No I don’t toe? Tf is toe for? I’ll put my big toe in your pussy and be happy to call you about it in the morning so you come to church with me. This is why God made me a Mormon Occultist, because ain’t nothing on this world for me but sin, and I did but didn’t to learn defilement as the Buddhists call the möbiation of entanglement, as I call the phenomena. But space bro? Space doesn’t exist bro. Get over yourself or Jesus’s dad is gunna fuck your ass up.
Hm, many valid points to ponder.
I am valid, that is for sure. At least my parking is. I am quite invalid in certain respects. Retarded, too, and that’s my peoples’ word and I will say it in praise of our lord. You ever smoke a ham sandwich? I don’t recommend it.
America will do anything except lay some fucking cable to provide internet to the ruroids.
It’s crazy how behind US is on that. Americans say “yeah but US is bjg and mostly empty space” so is Asia and the rest of the world yet they are not defeated by a cable. It’s just cable laying - come on, we solved cable laying 50 years ago.
It does seem like that at times. But at least in Minnesota, the ruroids often seem to have better availability of fiber than the suburbanites and exurbanites. Possibly due to state broadband grants.
This is how it was where I grew up in Washington State. We were not rural enough for our neighborhoods to qualify for grants, but not densely populated enough for it to be financially worth it to lay cable. I moved out in 2018, where the best options were still dial up or conventional sattelite.
I did discover that by voiding Cricket Wireless’ TOS you could use your BYOD as a hotspot with unlimited data and you’d just have to change sims/numbers every few months when they caught on. Of course now Starlink and T-Mobile home internet exist instead and hey, maybe they laid cable in the past 8 years, it’s possible.
Didn’t they just drop the startup equipment costs a lot?
“high demand” usually equates to throttling
Will never use his services or products. Until he is dead and his children divest.
Since the article doesnt make it clear
This is for new or re-activating customers in a congested area.
This isnt a random usage fee, this is for areas they claim are too busy, so you gotta pay if you want to gain access.
Its like when you call a contractor and they quote you a stupid high number. Its often because they’re too busy, but if you’ll pay the stupid high number theyll do it.
There was no world where SpaceX could support unlimited customers in a cell region.
This isnt a random usage fee, this is for areas they claim are too busy, so you gotta pay if you want to gain access.
Congestion pricing is the PC way to describe it.
Price gouging is the more honest term.
There was no world where SpaceX could support unlimited customers in a cell region.
You can charge a fixed rate and ration bandwidth during peak use.
Or you can charge a variable rate in order to maximize revenue during peak demand.
One maximizes utility while the other maximizes profit.
Neither of those options would support everyone living in a high density urban area, bandwidth would drop to nothing and no one would want to buy it, and people generally hate inconsistent bandwidth, or random peak hour usage charges on their bill.
Edit: Their overall bandwidth per cell is just too low to be able to support everyone in high density areas like that.
That’s why dense urban communities prefer using ground fiber and big routing stations to cellar satellite, sure.
But now we’re talking about the real bandwidth capacities, not the pricing for connectivity.
I mean don’t get me wrong, it’s 100% pure capitalism to do something like, we can confidently service 1000 people per cell region and maintain our advertised service, but once we reach 950, we’re going to charge super high fees to connect. They don’t have to be doing what they’re doing, but they saw a way to make money.
Edit: And this is all assuming the congestion is even real.
I don’t doubt the congestion is real, as consumption - especially data consumption - rapidly expands to fill its container.
I might suggest that some of the early adopters and insiders are receiving subsidy rates in order to goose Elon’s investor briefs on adoption. And the folks on the back end who are eating the exploding prices exist to pad Musk’s proposed future revenue estimates.
“We added 10,000 people a day for the last 30 days, even as we raised rates from $10/day to $100/day!” tells a very attractive story to investors without tipping your hand and revealing what the next 30 days will look like. But it also becomes a kind-of self-fulfilling prophecy, when it results in banks giving you another hundred billion dollars in low-interest credit to expand your network.
They did exactly that with the new standby mode.
You used to be able to pause your service for free. Then they changed it to $5/m but you got unlimited 256kb/s bandwidth and the dish would always be up to date. Just before the IPO they doubled that to $10/m and removed the ability to use it while in motion.
I’d love to see how many people dropped the service after that 2nd price jump which wouldn’t have been apparent until after the IPO. Both changes happened within a year.
This is why satelite internet is a dead end. The latency and bandwidth are fundamental limitations of physics which are incredibly expensive to scale up compare to cable and cell towers.
Even if we have a complete satellite roll out we’d still have to go back to cell towers for better latency. So why even entertain this detour if not for war machines - one niche where satellites are actually better.
And even then, why the everlasting fuck do you want low watch orbit satellites for this? Why do we need to pollute the shit out of our ecosystem, our LEO, and our night sky (fuck those moving blips) just to have latency low enough to play a game over na internet connection that shouldn’t be used for any of that…
Everything about starlink is maddeningly stupid and it is negatively impacting so many people that want nothing to do with it but hey, it’s Elmo Musk, so just let him do that shit anyway!
Thousands of satellites are immune to anti satellite missile, with only a few dozen geosats one country could blow up those sats and cut a few ocean cables and cut off most of the International transocean internet access. That’s a good thing, because it makes it so that any nation preparing for war isn’t tempted to cut off internet because it wouldn’t work anyway.
Satellite is better for remote people. I know a woman whose Alaskan village (indigenous, not colonizer) got significantly better internet once starlink was rolled out.
Now you could say that nations with meaningful duties to remote peoples should band together and essentially jointly operate (maybe having the UN administer it) such a service for them and use it as the last resort akin to sat phones. And I’d be cool with that. But I so think such people should have internet, and this is probably cheaper than running and maintaining cables all across Alaska and northern Canada.
But it’s not better. It’s just rhe only option. They would very much prefer to be connected with a cable or a cell tower no? Why wouldnt they?
You have permafrost melting so northern tundra areas will be worse to build on going forward. But the context is tiny rural places that don’t have roads and you travel by plane or snowmobile, they’re not getting cable.
they’re not getting cable.
why not?
That’s true, but it’s largely due to a market that doesn’t prioritize remote clients and a regulatory system which has roped off huge parts of the radio spectrum.
Instead of a starlink receiver talking to low orbit, you could have a dish that uses fixed wireless access or point to point connections to access a terrestrial tower. In exceptional situations geostationary satellites make sense, but these low earth constellations are getting out of control.
Give them internet via a geo stationary satellite.
You only need a few in a space where there is a lot of room, and it won’t bug anyone, contrary to the shit show we have with the countless starlink satellites visibly zipping over while working hard to make the Kessler Syndrome a thing.
I’m not even talking about the pollution caused by those rocket launches
Give them internet via a geo stationary satellite.
We have that already. Its comparatively very expensive, and also very very high latency simply because for the speed-of-light. The satellite at GEO sits at 20k kilometers. That by itself introduces 250ms of latency each way. So a 500ms latency is not uncommon for GEO satellite internet. Also, GEO satellites are very expensive because of how much energy (deltaV) it takes to get the satellite out that far and for how long they have to operate to make that money back.
Yeah, my family was forced to get starlink because ATT and other wireless internet sucks in where we live
This is why satelite internet is a dead end.
Idk if I’d call it a dead end so much as a service of last resort. There’s definitely utility in a global network of always-on wireless communication. But because it’s expensive to deploy and saturated quickly, you can’t operate at the volume of a wired network or local wireless system.
So why even entertain this detour if not for war machines - one niche where satellites are actually better.
I think you’ve answered your own question. The incremental value of satellites as part of a weapons system far outstrips normal business applications (nevermind consumer markets).
But you still run into the same constraints at a certain scale. Even if your transmission system is unassailable, it cannot support the volume of traffic of wired connections. So you’re still going to see drone pilots with enormous spools of fiberoptic wire moving along the battlefront.
LOL…from the beginning of this grift, experts said Starlink was not scalable.
From what I see, 99% of the business community thinks all graphs linearly extrapolate.
Spoiler alert: AI learning is not scaling either.
Theyre still improving bandwidth with each launch as the newer hardware goes up, they haven’t approached the flat line of 1 dish comes down for 1 dish going up which would be at the 5 year mark of no improved hardware or launch capabilities.
Once starship is operational, its 20x the bandwidth per launch, and cadence will increase so there’s still tons of room to scale, and its not like those dishes wont improve either.
Who wrote this article?
“A SpaceX support page (which appears to only be available in Swahili, for some erason)”
Don’t get me wrong. Fuck any satellite service, and especially FUCK fElon. This article is trash, though.
Satellite internet is a last resort. People shouldn’t be using it if they have fibre broadband or 5G options that provide the same speeds. It’s a lifesaver if you’re on a boat, or live off grid, or just a few miles from where the broadband ends. But if it’s anywhere with other people then it’s going to max out with horrible contention. At the point the only option is “moar satellites”.
Even the 50k sat max size constellation isn’t anything for dense urban areas. That’s never been the intended market.
First, Musk is a nazi-saluting asshole. Now that we have that established, this article is mostly rage-bait with selective truths on the Starlink service. I’m all for calling out bad behavior a company (and there is a little bit here, but not much regarding the customer billing concerns). This (mostly) rage-bait article is (mostly) distracting focus from the very important problem with Starlink regarding Musk’s influence on the government entities that are supposed to protect us from oligarchs. Not only does this include the FCC, but the SEC that let musk bend and break rules to IPO the SpaceX stock enriching himself at the cost of the American people
The narrative of the article is “Starlink has massive hidden fees! Look $1500 charge! Look $500 charge! Look $1000 charge!”
There’s three different reasonable explanations for the situations all three these.
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$1500 charge - it was a billing software bug, not a policy change, and Starlink reversed the charges costing the subscriber nothing. Yes, I agree customer service could be better and faster.
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$500 charge - Subscriber was trying to skirt the rules to save themselves money by subscribing to the [long term plan] for [short term] use. When a subscriber signs up for [long term plan] the extra charge is clearly shown before the service is subscribed to. Yes, the fee is there, but its not hidden. Yes the fee is high, but the prior version of how subscription works meant that the customer would simply be told “we’re at capacity for your area, no service for you at all”. Instead if service is that important for a user they can choose to pay the fee. Yes, there should be an extra warning when someone is changing their address for [long term plan] but this should be a minor edge case and the poster would not have even run into an issue if they had been subscribing to the appropriate [short term plan].
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$1000 charge notice - See detail from the $500 charge explanation why this particular $1000 charge notice exists. The alternative is a possibly customer would just be told to go away with no recourse when they may desperately need the service even with the high priced fee. The fee was clearly labeled before purchase and the customer chose not to go forward, which is entirely their right if they don’t see the value.
Don’t be distracted by the rage-bait from the important concerns of Musk’s government influence.
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I think they’ll rug pull hard line internet for residents.
It’s all that escaped with a bit of net neutrality.
Cellular and satalitte both allow traffic shaping and that’s the more profitable.
Hell, maybe they can nationalize it and get Elin paid.
You can traffic shape wired traffic as well
I thought that was still legally protected, but I know it’s been a target for a while.
If you can traffic shape cell network data, thats not much different. Everyone has to BGP peer with another network to provide connectivity to other networks. I guess its just where do you prioritize one type of customer traffic over another
Billionaires will kill us all, while millionaires scream and yell. Thousandaires defend them both, while we all suffer in hell.
When do I get charged??
I’ve had Starlink for two years. My monthly bill is $55 a month, and no rental either…
Common dude, don’t support elon
There are no options in rural areas, yet.
For many people, their options are supporting Elon, or not having internet access. I don’t blame anyone for choosing the former.
We don’t all live in overcrowded cities.
