I think they are doing OK.<p>Delivering even 30-100Mbps to half a million customers all over the world is no mean feat. Complaining that your speeds dip below 100Mbps on a unmetred low latancy satellite connection is just pathological. Most of the world do not have access to this speed on fixed line networks. You can't get these speeds with even VDSL.. Fttp and cable are the only fixed technologies beating a satellite. Have a think about that.<p>That works out at several terabits of traffic at peak times. I think they should be able to make good improvements with more ground stations and inter satalite links even if they never launch another satellite.
I think their biggest issue is the mechanical engineering of the dishes. They use non-standard mounts, and (despite using bog-standard outdoor/riser-rated cat 5e cable) non-standard ethernet connectors.<p>For people replacing an existing internet connection with starlink, the cost of swapping out the existing (perfectly good) cable and antenna mount dwarfs the retail (and even manufacturing) cost of the dish.<p>Also, they don't document the electrical requirements for the ethernet cable, so people end up guessing, forcing it to turn on the on-board heater, then checking for voltage droop.<p>Even oversubscribed, they're better than most rural ISP options though.<p>I agree that the starlink customer support people are extremely overworked. In my experience, they're also completely incompetent.<p>The "impossible to update out of date firmware" issue is ridiculous, especially since they specifically market the RV service for use cases where you buy the dish and then pause the service for the 11.5 months of the year when you're not using your RV.
Don't quite understand why you would like to use Starlink in a city, especially without roaming support. Damn hipsters. What is awesome about it is to have internet in remote location that have no chance of ever getting a land line.
I'm one of the people who doesn't seem to have any issues with it since beta. I did spend weeks setting the thing up to get a clear view of the sky, and topped some trees. Trees have grown back in, and my sky view is a lot smaller now. But it's still working the same as before. I would think these issues would be a lot more universal. But maybe, despite being in one of the first cells that were opened up, my cell is just not very full...
I think StarLink could stand to build terrestrial "Not-Satellites" in areas that are very densely built, if they could get it past the FCC. Something similar to 5g microcells that users could switch to if they want better bandwidth.<p>I mean, why go to the Satellite network if you are less than 10 miles from a city center. Then you could leave the satellite uplinks to surrounding rural areas and users looking for ultra low latency.
As someone work in the telecommunications/service provider sectors. Capacity management is both an art and science on top of it with tight budget constraint. It always amaze me what we/ISP can accomplish given how lean the engineering team/budget is.
With a good population of Marine customers, even without laser links, they could hopscotch packets down to another terminal, up to another bird, down again, as many times as needed to get to shore.<p>Probably not more than a half-dozen extra hops, <i>usually</i>. And, better than no service at all.<p>But with, what, 4k birds up, and speed below 50Mbps? More birds won't help data rate much if licensed RF bandwidth is saturating.
I don't think this is any surprise... It is entirely expect that when user number in shared area increase they have each less capacity available. And there might not be viable solutions to this when satellites are used.
Peak time speeds are definitely a bit lower than when I was one of the only customers in the area, but it's still very good. Almost always >50Mbps, which is faster than the DSL alternative available.
I think the US created Starlink for military use. It provides world wide coverage and very small latency that helps a lot with UAVs. UAVs that aren't in line of sight need satellite communication. They just allow the public to use part of it, so as to reduce the cost of the system.