All these talks about Starlink -> Remember it's a bandaid solution to your governments poor planning and infrastructure rollout of a core utility / service.<p>I say this as an Australian who watched one government plan a national rollout of fibre while another came in justifying most people don't need a connection better than 25/5 (based on usage data at the time) and went ahead and gutted the project.<p>We're now trying to undo the previous government's mess up of the original roll out post COVID world when everyone discovered remote work is a good idea for many.<p>Starlink's issue feels like history repeating itself with any service that becomes popular and goes too quickly into high demand
So Starlink has been so effective and so popular that — utterly unsurprisingly — it is becoming more congested and they're raising rates.<p>This is good news and not bad. It's a strong sign that the model fundamentally works and they will be able to fund continuous improvements to meet strong demand.
I have Starlink in an Airbnb in Puerto Escondido, Mexico.<p>It has been a blessing. It used to be that we had to deal with either cell carrier 4G wifi or wait until the phone company would finally extend service one block away from its current service area.<p>Even if you had access to either, both solutions were pretty bad. They were so unreliable that some coworking spaces had *three* providers: "broadband", 4G, and old-school satellite.<p>Starlink arrived last year in earnest and... really life changing. It even dropped the price some months ago. The internet _just works_.<p>Anything that bypasses local monopolies and government stasis will get my business with true joy.
It went up only 10$ per month in congested areas, and went down by 20$ in uncongested areas. It's still 90$ if you are rural.<p>They are trying to encourage against people using the service in urban congested areas. Starlink, at least right now, is not ideal for urban situations, that's not very surprising, maybe with newer gen sats capacity will raise, but if not, it's not an "unreliable luxury", it's still perfect for rural situations.
> However, since I first began using these low-orbit satellites to power my internet, not only has the price gone up $30 per month, but the speeds and reliability have degraded significantly.<p>I mean, this was always going to happen; this will happen with _any_ cellular internet solution (it'll be particularly bad here as the cells are particularly large, but the principle is the same). I'm a little surprised that people seem so surprised by this; I would have thought that the target market for this (rural, no fixed line available, willing and able to pay over $100/month) would have seen it all before with mobile telcos and WISPs.<p>> For the last two months, I've gone back to T-Mobile Home Internet because I can get T-Mobile for only $50 per month and because speed and reliability are on par with what I'd been getting from Starlink.<p>Again, fairly unsurprising; if you have terrestrial cellular available to you, all else being equal, it's generally going to be a better option than satellite cellular.
> I would love to ask the Starlink support team for more information since I own the equipment, but I can't because there's no email address, phone number, chat, or other way to message support<p>That seals it. Better to buy HughesNet or similar. It may be slower but at least you can get support.
We have a cottage where we are considering getting starlink at. This service still seems like a game changer to me. If 4g is also available, running a router with dual-wan sounds like a great option to mitigate connection dropouts. We will try that. If you’re really serious about living in the back of beyond and your income depends on your ability to be on zoom calls, then it’s a small price to pay.
It's a pity that cooperative broadband is usually ignored, while people and local governments expect venture backed companies to solve their problems. They work for themselves, not for you. Cooperatives tend to have reasonable prices, reasonable speeds, and work by reasonable principles. They might not be the cheapest and fastest, but will be there for you because you're a member/co-owner, not a customer.
For those prices, traditional sat (geostationary) might not be as fast but it is at least reliable connectivity.<p>For anyone in the rual flatlands of america, look seriously at rural wifi bridges. Basic off-the-shelf wifi can bridge links over miles. All those cellphone towers have fiber lines. Setup a rural wifi collective and tap into that fiber. My parents ditched traditional sats a few years ago when a local company setup a local wifi tower, itself bridged to the nearest cell tower. Now they have faster internet then i do in my non-rural appartment.
$65 billion going into rural broadband over the next 5 years. Not finalized, but my read is the feds want fiber. They are wrangling over maps right now.<p><a href="https://www.commerce.gov/news/fact-sheets/2021/11/fact-sheet-department-commerces-use-bipartisan-infrastructure-deal-funding" rel="nofollow">https://www.commerce.gov/news/fact-sheets/2021/11/fact-sheet...</a>
I preordered Starlink in March of 2021, as soon as my first rural isp reneged on 50 megabits and sold me 5. 2 years later in western Virginia I still have no eta for my order and cannot contact anyone about it. I have 12 megabits from that same local ISP and it’s enough to do my job so I cancelled Starlink. I can’t imagine what customer service will be like if I am on preorder for two years and they refuse to give any update other than kicking the can down the road every time the estimated delivery date gets close. When I canceled my estimate was “early 2024”.
Question - the article mentions bandwith capacity being a factor for pricing.<p>Is there a resource online where one can find reported up/down speeds by geolocation ?
Believe it or not but in responding to queries and requests they are even worse than Google. My employer have been trying to contact them for over a year now. We're a fortune 100 company.
I don't think Starlink is commercially viable in the long run <i>unless</i> Starship starts flying regularly. With Starship operational, maintaining a constellation of tens of thousands of satellites should be 'easy'. But with only F9, they have to launch at an insane pace just to keep a few thousand satellites up there. They're presently at 3.5k satellites of their desired 42k.<p>In fact I think this and similar missions are the true raison d'etre of Starship. Mars colonization isn't going to happen, it's a huge joke. Nobody will have Mars colony infrastructure ready to ship for decades at least, SpaceX is barely even pretending to invest in this. Mars colonization customers just don't exist and couldn't justify the money SpaceX is spending to develop Starship. Therefore, Starship exists to launch massive satellite constellations, particularly Starlink. And it wouldn't exist at all if SpaceX thought they could pull it off with just F9. F9 is a stopgap, to buy them time for Starship's development.
The big gotcha with a system like Starlink is that the antenna has to be within line of sight of satellites that are at times quite low to the horizon. If you have obstructions that means that you are going to have dropouts, at least some of the time. Most people have to live with at least some obstructions, unless they want to put up a tower.
They should gear it towards rural only.. If it's profitable at the moment?<p>That's what is frustrating me about T-Mobile 5g home internet. I'm rural, work from home, and maintain 3 ISPs (with the proper load balancing network gear to support all of this) to deal with it. People in town are installing directional antennas, pointing towards my rural tower, and using 5G home internet, affecting my speeds, when they have cable/fiber options in town to choose from.<p>Also, I mean, sure, I'd love fiber ran out this way. Would you like to run fiber about 12 miles to service less than 50 people, with about 20 offshoots to homes off the main road.. increasing the overall distance and trenching by who-knows-how-far?! It's not exactly a thrilling business plan.
The article complains about reliability...<p>But the header photo shows a starlink device with trees that are clearly within the 25 degrees above the horizon 'must-be-clear' zone.<p>I suspect OP's reliability issues are self inflicted by not mounting starlink on a post to avoid trees in the signal path...
Starlink was designed for, and has always been intended for remote people who literally have no other connection option. No cable, no 3G or 4G.<p>If you can get those other options, Starlink is not a product designed for you.<p>Go remote, and Starlink is an absolute game changer without even a remotely close equal.
In areas where it's not oversold it works very nicely: 150-250 down / 10-30 up with 20-55ms ping to 8.8.8.8. Source: me in extremely rural central EU location.
Still makes me a little depressed that instead of evolving Iridium, the best we can do with cheap launches is put up a bazillion bent-pipe satellites. I know all the technical reasons why not, but damn. Seems like a missed opportunity to use low interest rate VC money to build--or just improve--a generationally important system.
> I've talked to others in my area who use Starlink, and since January, we've experienced frequent downtime<p>This is depressing. I thought Starlink would be at least consistently available in the areas that they are providing service. We don't need another unreliable internet option. Especially if it's also overpriced.
Pretty amazing that you can get faster internet in middle of nowhere sounding area with Starlink than in Central London (Zone 1/2) wired/phone line internet
Starlink is a link in Elon's fragile chain of strategies. Elon, evidently, loves interlinked strategies. The first grand linkage was "How do we make reusable rockets valuable?" because, on their own, with non-reusable second stages, they're cool, but not financially impressive. <i>But</i>, with Starlink using almost all reused Falcon 9 capacity, it looks sexy af.<p>Elon, of course, can't stop there: How do you use the redonkulous payload-to-orbit capacity of Starship? You make satellites 5X larger that are no longer a "bent pipe" architecture and you make a "backbone-in-orbit" with laser links between satellites.<p>That <i>might</i> make Starlink make financial sense. But it looks like it is years away from being possible. Meanwhile Starlink "1.5" satellites are a PoC of laser links between satellites, but not anywhere near the scale of the big satellites that need Starship.
I've not had any speed or outage issues beyond the expected (ie storms, I live in tornado alley). I also don't pay $120 / month. And I noticed OP is using the old sat. Wonder if the issue is area/equipment.
According to ITU, more than a third of world population has no (proper) access to the Internet, and that equates to about 2.7 Billion people worldwide [1].<p>Personally I'd really love Starlink to provide Internet access to all people in the rural areas but it probably will not going to happen. By their own estimate, they are only currently deploying around 5% to 10% of their 42K projected Starlink satellites for global coverage. I'm not seeing that going to happen for at least another ten years (2033) provided they get the funding they're requesting and it does not seems to be the case [2].<p>The best alternative for satellite link for rural is the terrestrial based fixed wireless access (FWA). There are mainly 3 segments/types of FWA namely [3]:<p>1) ‘Wireless Fiber’ (100 – 1K Mbps, cost USD50 – 100)<p>2) ‘Build with Precision’ (50 – 200 Mbps, cost USD20 – 60)<p>3) ‘Connect the Unconnected’ (10–100 Mbps, cost USD10 – 20)<p>This last (3rd segment) is characterized by virtually non-existent fixed broadband alternatives, and mobile broadband using smartphones is the dominant way of accessing the Internet. Average revenue per unit (ARPU) cost are very much limited and user expectations of access speed are relatively low. The irony is that the 3rd segment is the "low hanging fruits" in term of technology while being the hardest to achieve in practice due to the very nature of terrestrial wireless signals. Starlink or any LEO based solution, however attractive, cannot possibly fill this gap due to the high cost involved in the satellite business and its astronomical ROI.<p>The author of the OP article is from the first (1st) segment of "elite" users and they're very far in between in the grand scale of rural users, i.e. not a typical rural users most probably 5% maximum. It seems to me that Starlink is focusing on this type of "elite" rural to survive and remain profitable not unlike Tesla did with their initial luxury/premium Tesla EV models strategy. But Tesla success is largely hinged and depended on huge (US) govt support for Tesla early days, and Starlink is also counting in the same strategy [4]. However, the latest bidding for govt money for Starlink is not successful and it's evidence from the stalls number of further starlink satellite deployment [5]. Elon Musk has been mentioning on record that one of the first Starlink priorities is not to go bust as what had happenned to its predecessor Motorola's Iridium but the odd seems to be against them at least for now.<p>I think it's the best for most of the countries that struggling with rural internet access (e.g. all countries US included) is to go for terrestrial fixed wireless access (FWA) for the third (3rd) segment i.e. connecting the unconnected. But if US cannot make satellite based Internet access work what are the chances that other countries might have?<p>Probably the best solution is to be flexible in tackling the Internet access for the 3rd segment with FWA perhaps similar to approach taken by Magma [5]. It's still early days for the rural areas connectivity but the sooner we can tackle this issues is better, as demonstrated during the height of the pandemic where travels are limited and digital divide phenomenon is at its worst.<p>[1] Measuring digital development Facts and Figures 2022:<p><a href="https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/facts-figures-2022/" rel="nofollow">https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/facts-figures-2...</a><p>[2] FCC decides against giving Starlink $1b in rural broadband subsidies:<p><a href="https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/11/fcc_starlink_rural_internet/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/11/fcc_starlink_rural_in...</a><p>[3] Fixed Wireless Access handbook (2023 Edition) by Ericsson:<p><a href="https://www.ericsson.com/en/fixed-wireless-access" rel="nofollow">https://www.ericsson.com/en/fixed-wireless-access</a><p>[4] SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network wins $885M in federal aid for rural broadband:<p><a href="https://www.geekwire.com/2020/spacexs-starlink-satellite-network-wins-885m-federal-subsidies-rural-broadband/" rel="nofollow">https://www.geekwire.com/2020/spacexs-starlink-satellite-net...</a><p>[5] Building Flexible, Low-Cost Wireless Access Networks With Magma (to appear in 20th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation 2023):<p><a href="https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~jrex/papers/magma23.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~jrex/papers/magma23.pdf</a>
I think it probably should be more expensive to live off the beaten path.<p>The per-capita CO2 consumption of people who rely on cars for everything is far higher than for people who can walk places or take public transport, and those environmental costs aren't passed on effectively to consumers.
Am I being unfair, but doesn't this article seem a bit of a selfish whine. I feel sometimes we forget how amazing the things humans are doing to.<p>We had a person and his teams literally build re-usable rockets and then blanket the earth in thousands of satellites, largely on private funding. This seemed unconceivable 10 years ago. This of all the people tat said this was ridiculous and bound to fail financially or technologically when announced.<p>Then a few years later someone is 'my internet in the middle of nowhere is a more expensive, the price changed because its so popular and has dropouts"...like your using internet from a fleet of more satellites put up in a couple of years than humans created in the 50 years before.<p>I think we need to step back and take perspective on this one. Its freaking incredible we have this services. Its fairly new tech and will probably get better and better over coming decades.<p>For me, Starlink has been a game changer living in a rural area that still had copper ADSL. Its more expensive and sometimes (not often) has dropouts but I still marvel at what has been achieved.<p>Less often these days but sometimes I still got to the Starlink maps, spin the globe and feel amazed. Try it: <a href="https://satellitemap.space/" rel="nofollow">https://satellitemap.space/</a>