They left out T-Mobile Home Internet from the comparison. It's a more than viable option if you're in the right location. You'll usually see faster speeds (about double) and lower latency (closer to standard broadband) than Starlink based on my analysis of a half-dozen recent reviews. It's also much cheaper, $0 up front and $60/mo vs Starlink's $499 up front and $99 a month. Starlink, of course, covers much more remote areas than T-Mobile Home Internet will.
IIRC, the method of beamforming utilized by their satellites limits ground station density. This is not really an issue at the moment as they are not targeting dense areas.
Once they are 'out of beta', I expect either starlink themselves or a 3rd party to start offering 4g/5g service backed primarily by a ground uplink station. This would allow wireless sharing of one ground station in dense areas. I would imagine that there are many situations where being able to install a cell data station without the need for a physical internet connection would be cheap and effective.
Honestly I'm far more interested on Starlink's impact in the developing / unfree world than in access in rural areas in the US. Not that the latter isn't worth fixing, but it's a more gradual shift there rather than a paradigm shift.
I see speeds of up to 415Mbps down, 65Mbps up, and latency as low as ~16ms. I regularly see 200Mbps down, and I cap the upstream to 20Mbps to help with bufferbloat. Latency is usually around 20-40ms.
I really hope Starlink gets big. I have no attachment to Musk or Starlink itself, but I hope to live more and more remotely as I get older and the prospect of having decent internet makes the dream feel more attainable (I want to be a hermit but still have reasonable amenities like access to information).
There are plenty of 300 Mbps+ speed tests posted on r/Starlink. But that's peak, vs the average that Speedtest is showing.
Starlink's bandwidth and latency are way past good enough at this point. The issue with Starlink currently is reliability. Many people experience dropouts and jitter that make it unsuitable for video conferencing or gaming. This is often caused by people being unable to meet the requirement that the dish have a continuous unobstructed view of most of the sky, unlike a traditional satellite dish that stays pointed at one tiny section of sky. This will improve as more satellites are launched.
Maybe I'm opening a can of worms here, but isn't Elon's Twitter an unreliable source of factual information when it comes to promises about the future capabilities of his companies?
> To no great surprise, Ookla found Starlink beats HughesNet and Viasat handly. The company found that "Starlink was the only satellite internet provider in the United States with fixed-broadband-like latency figures, and median download speeds fast enough to handle most of the needs of modern online life at 97.23 Megabits per second (Mbps) during Q2 2021. HughesNet was a distant second at 19.73 Mbps and Viasat third at 18.13 Mbps."
This is really deceptive. You can actually get really insane speeds on HughesNet/Viasat, the issue at hand is the service profiles available- Both HuguesNet/Viasat have 20Mbps down plans. If starlink goes full release at 100Mbps then sure? But that's highly unlikely unless they implement bandwidth caps or dont sell to the public (or limit subscribers to a tiny percentage?), as satellite bandwidth is extremely constrained (ESPECIALLY for leo constellations).
Where starlink is a clear undisputed winner is latency (not capacity). You'll actually be able to make video calls and play games on a starlink connection.
Also weren't some ISPs caught fudging speedtest.net by specifically making the connection faster when doing a speed test? I remember Comcast doing first x MB bursts which would result in inaccurate fast results.
Viasat also heavily throttles video streams, so as not to allow a user to accidentally reach their monthly data cap in the first day or two.
I currently average 25-30 Mbps on speedtest.net and 700 kbps (not a typo) on fast.com. And still I reach the data cap in two weeks or less. Fortunately (?) it's a soft cap, not a hard one. All it means is no streaming anything in the evening till the month rolls over. (And, perversely, you don't want to do any large downloads until after hitting the cap!)
Hughes and viasat deserve their thrashing by starlink. They turned a technological triumph into rancid consumer exploitation, preying on ignorant satellite TV consumer markets. Source: I used to sell and troubleshoot that crap to people that had no business using anything more technical than a milk carton.
It's interesting to me that they're using Ookla (speedtest.net) data for this analysis. For two reasons:
First, I know my old Comcast cable internet used to vary widely - at 7am, I could get 80 Mbps, but at 7pm, I was lucky to be able to download the whole speedtest.net page at all. I rarely would want to run a test when it was fast, but as people started to sign on and it degraded I think the natural impulse is to do a speed test.
Second, other providers like Google, Netflix, and ISPs offer integrated speed tests, so there's likely some selection bias for people who will still go to speedtest.net.
Note - I rejected my Comcast cable in favor of T-Mobile home internet, it's cheaper and more reliable. Which really says something about Comcast mismanagement of their resource, they've got a coaxial connection to my house but T-Mobile can do better wirelessly...
It sounds like you had a bad install. I had multiple techs come out back when I had Comcast with similar performance issues, and finally one of them took the time to diagnose and fix some wiring issue at the pole. All the flakiness disappeared immediately.
Yea but I’m not sure a Musk company is that much better. Tesla has lots of promises over the years about FSD combined with pricing swings.
I pay Comcast $100 for a Gigabit that’s reliable for voice calls. Looked into Starlink but couldn’t justify the download/upload speeds for the price or the loss of service.
Not sure why a lot of people say it’s for the country. I’m barely outside of a major metro area and was eligible for it a while back.
Have there been total addressable market numbers published for starlink in US / Canada?
Like lets say there are maybe 20% of people in US that starlink could address -- internet service typically services a household, so unclear what the math is there, but maybe 3 people per household, so total addressable market of say 350 M * 0.2 / 3 = 23 million households.. so a quick search on subscriber number for Hughesnet is 1M subs.. so maybe a target for SpaceX would be to get 10M subscribers? 10M of the access terminal things if they cost $500 each would be 5 billion just to pay for those.. $100 / mo for 10M people is 1B per month -- so seems like the target for subscribers world wide must be closer to 100M otherwise the economics don't seem too great...
Any current TAM would be leaving off the amount of people who live in cities and can now exit to live "off-grid" with tesla solar and starlink. I anticipate at least a few "we should live in a commune" groups making good on their longstanding threats.
My starlink connection is averaging about 0.08% packet loss to its terrestrial gateway (first hop of real world ARIN IP on the outside of the cgnat) over a period of 30 hours. I have a tree obstruction in 1/12th of the measurement system it uses.
The DOCSIS3 cable modem connection from the local last mile provider at the same location is doing much worse. Up to 1.5% over 3 hour periods and 1.2 to 3.5% over 30 hour periods.
This is as measured by a fairly rudimentary smokeping installation that's set to 60s intervals, a widely varied set of targets, and 20 'fping' per measurement.
We’re talking about humans here. A human might notice 45ms in a shooter, but not when just surfing the web. Compare that with 500-1000ms latency from older forms of satellite service, or 250ms from old dial–up service.
It's close compared to latencies over traditional sattelite internet where a ping of over 400ms is not uncommon. The article quotes a latency if over 600 or 700ms. At least 45 is in the same order of magnitude of common broadband.
45ms reminds me more of 3G than of any normal internet connection, but that's still much more useful than the latencies the sattelite competition offers.
Who is getting 14ms on their fixed broadband. Last 3 places I can remember, I had cable and fiber to the home. My two cable connections would get 25-35ms at best. The fiber to the home wasn't much different but did go sub 20ms on occasion.
I'd imagine there will still be regional differences. Even with satellite-to-satellite links they're still going to want to route your data to the nearest ground station as fast as possible, so your performance is going to be related to how good your nearest ground station is, and how congested it is.
I'd expect to continue to see regional variability based on density of subscribers, latitude, and quality of nearby ground stations.
Service should become faster in general though based on SpaceX statements, and based on the fact that they'll have a lot more bandwidth available with more satellites in the sky.
[+] [-] JohnTHaller|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ortusdux|4 years ago|reply
Once they are 'out of beta', I expect either starlink themselves or a 3rd party to start offering 4g/5g service backed primarily by a ground uplink station. This would allow wireless sharing of one ground station in dense areas. I would imagine that there are many situations where being able to install a cell data station without the need for a physical internet connection would be cheap and effective.
[+] [-] bpodgursky|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] virtuallynathan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abstractbarista|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] silicon2401|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoshTko|4 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1363763858121256963?lang...
Again on Jun 2021 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1272363466288820224?lang...
[+] [-] modeless|4 years ago|reply
Starlink's bandwidth and latency are way past good enough at this point. The issue with Starlink currently is reliability. Many people experience dropouts and jitter that make it unsuitable for video conferencing or gaming. This is often caused by people being unable to meet the requirement that the dish have a continuous unobstructed view of most of the sky, unlike a traditional satellite dish that stays pointed at one tiny section of sky. This will improve as more satellites are launched.
[+] [-] lytedev|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wrenky|4 years ago|reply
This is really deceptive. You can actually get really insane speeds on HughesNet/Viasat, the issue at hand is the service profiles available- Both HuguesNet/Viasat have 20Mbps down plans. If starlink goes full release at 100Mbps then sure? But that's highly unlikely unless they implement bandwidth caps or dont sell to the public (or limit subscribers to a tiny percentage?), as satellite bandwidth is extremely constrained (ESPECIALLY for leo constellations).
Where starlink is a clear undisputed winner is latency (not capacity). You'll actually be able to make video calls and play games on a starlink connection.
[+] [-] sschueller|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saddlerustle|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m_myers|4 years ago|reply
I currently average 25-30 Mbps on speedtest.net and 700 kbps (not a typo) on fast.com. And still I reach the data cap in two weeks or less. Fortunately (?) it's a soft cap, not a hard one. All it means is no streaming anything in the evening till the month rolls over. (And, perversely, you don't want to do any large downloads until after hitting the cap!)
[+] [-] robbedpeter|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeifCarrotson|4 years ago|reply
First, I know my old Comcast cable internet used to vary widely - at 7am, I could get 80 Mbps, but at 7pm, I was lucky to be able to download the whole speedtest.net page at all. I rarely would want to run a test when it was fast, but as people started to sign on and it degraded I think the natural impulse is to do a speed test.
Second, other providers like Google, Netflix, and ISPs offer integrated speed tests, so there's likely some selection bias for people who will still go to speedtest.net.
Note - I rejected my Comcast cable in favor of T-Mobile home internet, it's cheaper and more reliable. Which really says something about Comcast mismanagement of their resource, they've got a coaxial connection to my house but T-Mobile can do better wirelessly...
[+] [-] mypalmike|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BitwiseFool|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wil421|4 years ago|reply
I pay Comcast $100 for a Gigabit that’s reliable for voice calls. Looked into Starlink but couldn’t justify the download/upload speeds for the price or the loss of service.
Not sure why a lot of people say it’s for the country. I’m barely outside of a major metro area and was eligible for it a while back.
[+] [-] xt00|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ricopags|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walrus01|4 years ago|reply
The DOCSIS3 cable modem connection from the local last mile provider at the same location is doing much worse. Up to 1.5% over 3 hour periods and 1.2 to 3.5% over 30 hour periods.
This is as measured by a fairly rudimentary smokeping installation that's set to 60s intervals, a widely varied set of targets, and 20 'fping' per measurement.
[+] [-] guenthert|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] only_as_i_fall|4 years ago|reply
They're saying it's close compared to starlink's competitors which aren't even the same order of magnitude. In context I think it's a fair assessment.
[+] [-] db48x|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeroenhd|4 years ago|reply
45ms reminds me more of 3G than of any normal internet connection, but that's still much more useful than the latencies the sattelite competition offers.
[+] [-] jjeaff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 11thEarlOfMar|4 years ago|reply
Alabama: 168 Mbps
Indiana: 68 Mbps
Canada: 87 Mbps
France: 140 Mbps
Germany: 108 Mbps
The wide range of service is due to the full constellation not being deployed yet? Once fully deployed, will service become more consistent?
[+] [-] LeoPanthera|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gpm|4 years ago|reply
Service should become faster in general though based on SpaceX statements, and based on the fact that they'll have a lot more bandwidth available with more satellites in the sky.
[+] [-] andrew-dc|4 years ago|reply
But seriously, if I was asked a multiple choice question of where Starlink would fall, this probably would have been my guess.
As others point out, it's really the cost/benefit trade-off that will matter.
[+] [-] fassssst|4 years ago|reply