Starlink satellite internet

Jessie.slimer

Jessie.slimer

BIT Beta Team
Aug 23, 2019
1,648
4,695
Illinois
Anyone else interested in this? Supposed to have a much lower latency than other satellite broadband due to the lower satellite orbit.

I know a lot of you are out in the country like me. I'm excited at the possibility of getting speeds faster than 12 mbps. If you go to their website, you can sign up to be a beta tester, though I don't know what their timeline is.
 
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I'm very interested. Where I live there is only one viable option, the local telephone company. Very much like your situation I suspect. Now if you'd asked 4-10 years ago, I was ready to drop my internet provider like a hot rock. But after years of complaining about stability problems they finally switched my phone lines to some that weren't faulty and it has been quite good for about 3 years now. I haven't forgotten though. I would happily subscribe to Starlink even though all the snow in my area would likely make it unreliable in winter. It would at least be a backup connection.

A lot remains unknown about Starlink still. Like what speeds they'll be able to offer, at what prices, whether there will be data caps, how the service and pricing may vary by region (and what that could mean for travelers), how badly the antennas will be affected by snow, etc. I'm also very sensitive to latency, jitter, and packet loss on my internet connection, such that issues most people wouldn't even notice will drive me crazy. It takes a lot to satisfy me, and I hope Starlink and similar services are up to the task.
 
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Also, it would really ease future life goals regarding real estate if I didn't have to worry about how to get good internet service. I very much approve of Starlink and competing services and want them to succeed.
 
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Just speculation, but a rep made reference to the cost being in the $80/month neighborhood for unlimited..They said something along the lines of "where are you going to get a service like this under $80", which makes me believe that's where they are putting it. I just hope unlimited to them doesn't mean throttling speeds after your data plan is reached like Hughes Net and others.

AT&T has finally gotten my dsl reliable with new wiring, but damn its slow.
 
I am interested mostly out of curiousity.
 
So I am a member of a different forum that is an RV forum. They discuss the SpaceX/Starlink stuff. Ultimately it is expected to rival 5G cellular. As we RV a lot we only use cellular, currently 4G, for our internet access while camping. So I am really interested in this.

Supposedly they have achieved 610 Mbps in a test, expect a "peak rate" for normal users of about 450 Mbps with a latency of under 20ms. But that will be dependent on the number of users in the cell you are sharing. So in populated areas/cites it should be expected to not be that great, but out in the sticks it should be great. They have not disclosed the expected upload speeds or pricing.
 
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Great news. I will likey be the only user for miles, as our closest town has cable broadband. I doubt anyone will go for satellite when cable is available. I wouldn't.
 
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Jessie.slimer said:
Great news. I will likey be the only user for miles, as our closest town has cable broadband. I doubt anyone will go for satellite when cable is available. I wouldn't.
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I doubt anyone would go for wifi when ethernet cams are available! Haha. Sorry, I had to say it!

We have cable and DSL options here. I'm currently on DSL and it has been alright. I am excited to see what SpaceX internet becomes and hope they succeed. I want to move to somewhere with more land but that usually means worse internet options.

We have DirecTV (wife insists) and it goes out anytime we get a moderate rain or heavy snow. I can live with the TV cutting out but it would be a deal breaker for internet.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
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th182 said:
I doubt anyone would go for wifi when ethernet cams are available! Haha. Sorry, I had to say it!

We have cable and DSL options here. I'm currently on DSL and it has been alright. I am excited to see what SpaceX internet becomes and hope they succeed. I want to move to somewhere with more land but that usually means worse internet options.

We have DirecTV (wife insists) and it goes out anytime we get a moderate rain or heavy snow. I can live with the TV cutting out but it would be a deal breaker for internet.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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I despise directv. Their shady business practices were unreal. I was locked into a 2 year price guarantee. Apparently they didn't understand what a guarantee is, as they tried to raise the price up to full retail every 6 months. I will say that I had good luck with the service though, as I do with Dish now. I think it has a lot to do with getting a good tech who spends the time to align the dish perfectly, and mounts it to a very stable structure. Knock on wood.
 
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Jessie.slimer said:
I despise directv. Their shady business practices were unreal. I was locked into a 2 year price guarantee. Apparently they didn't understand what a guarantee is, as they tried to raise the price up to full retail every 6 months. I will say that I had good luck with the service though, as I do with Dish now. I think it has a lot to do with getting a good tech who spends the time to align the dish perfectly, and mounts it to a very stable structure. Knock on wood.
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You are probably right about the tech needing to align it properly. Last one we had out seemed to want to install it the quickest and easiest way, rather than ensure it was done properly. I want to get rid of DirecTV and just stick to streaming but that idea was vetoed in our house. We'd save $130 if we cut the dish.

I'd also be curious how SpaceX will handle incoming connections and upload speeds. I use my VPN into my home network all the time.


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Directv wasn't great for me. Snow on the dish caused signal issues, although it had to stack up for there to be a problem. Rain and snow in the sky made no difference. I expect Starlink to have a similar problem with that, and as such I will probably always try to keep a low cost service from a different provider as a backup.

More annoying was the very high price of Directv. Most of the time I was paying over $200 per month. All this for tech that was old and slow and often missed recordings, with other recordings simply disappearing without reason until the DVR was rebooted a few times. Old compression methods meant video quality wasn't that great on a lot of channels, despite file sizes of recordings being freakin' huge by modern standards. 4K service never really became more than a tech demo. They couldn't keep NBC for some reason (that channel went off the air for a long time before I canceled service). Now my parents who still use directv don't get "local" channels at all anymore and directv can't or won't assign them any replacements. Ever since I canceled service, they have been calling me on the phone asking why I canceled, what I do now for TV, and asking to get me back. Who knows how many times, because I often don't answer calls from random phone numbers anymore.
 
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Same with me. I get the occasional dropout from a dish full of snow. But the tech who did my first directv install recommended he put the dish below one of the finished attic windows, so the handful times it has happened, I just open the window and can dust it off with a broom. Glad he suggested that. I would not want to go up a ladder in a snow storm. When I switched to dish, they kept it in the same spot.

The things we deal with with to be away from the big city.
 
When we are out on the road we are usually gone for 5-6 weeks at a time. We have Verizon for cell service and have a jet pack in the coach. Even though we have one of their 'unlimited' data plan, there is a data cap that if you exceed it you can get throttled, lowering the data rate to some stupid low rate if 'network congestion' is a problem. It is easy to pop that limit when just about anything you do online has ads that are video or you want to watch short videos like those posted by IPCAMTALK members. So we try and use campground WIFI when possible, use cell phones or iPad connections as they get a separate allotment from the jet pack. But we do not do streaming video like Netflix as it would just eat up our data quickly. So we have Dish TV and am very happy with it, as long as our site is not under a tree.

So Starlink is of interest to those who RV. I have also heard that the sats so far are concentrated around the 53rd parallel and are being filled with each launch to the south. So the northern US and Southern Canada will be the first to see it. It looks like Alaska will be out of luck for quite some time, if ever. They also need to build ground stations and have had a push on to do that. That is how the sats connect to the internet.
 
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Looks like there are some leaked speed tests showing up. While many have much higher speeds, I would love to have these numbers. Latency is not too bad either. They are saying the numbers will only improve as more satellites go into operation.

www.pcmag.com

How Fast Is SpaceX's Satellite Internet? Beta Tests Show it Hitting Up to 60Mbps

Reddit users have been crawling Ookla’s Speedtest website and spotted at least 13 tests registered to Starlink, which show it providing speeds from 11Mbps to 60Mbps.
www.pcmag.com www.pcmag.com
 
FWIW, historically, the satellite Internet providers (Hughes, Wildblue [now Excede?], et al) did not provide a public IP (such as Carrier Grade NAT?) and in some cases, use IPv6...
 
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My own conservative guess was that speeds would measure around 50 Mbps after the service went public. I was expecting early tests like these to reach significantly higher speeds (thinking 200 Mbps ballpark) because there are so few total users. But I'm guessing these tests were all done basically on day one and SpaceX hasn't had any time to tweak the algorithms governing RF usage, packet buffering and routing, etc. It also wouldn't surprise me if a lot of the tests were done over wifi and we all know how shitty that can be. Nonetheless, most rural users are on "aDSL" that maxes out between 1 and 10 Mbps download with 0.1-0.7 Mbps upload, or otherwise are using Hughesnet or Viasat or cell phones for internet access.

I found one idiotic article about the leaked speed tests where the author expected 16 Gbps service and was very disappointed. This author called it gigabytes while using the abbreviation for gigabits, further indicating he has no idea what he's talking about. How do these people get to be tech journalists?
 
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TonyR said:
FWIW, historically, the satellite Internet providers (Hughes, Wildblue [now Excede?], et al) did not provide a public IP (such as Carrier Grade NAT?) and in some cases, use IPv6...
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When my family had Wildblue in approximately 2004-2008, it did provide a public IPv4 and allowed port forwarding. Speed was also < 2 Mbps with upload around < 256 Kbps. I think that company changed to Excede, and are now Viasat. Also, you're right, once when I was helping someone set up an IP cam behind a Hughesnet link (approx 2016), it was using IPv6. I could not get port forwarding to the local BI instance and ended up using hamachi or something and ran a proxy server elsewhere to provide remote access.
 
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