I live in rural America. The story is quite similar here. My options were (a) cellular hotspot, which is slow and expensive, or (b) satellite internet, which is also slow and expensive. Despite government programs, there are no cable/fiber/DSL options in my area. Starlink fills the gap nicely; it's not blazingly fast, but pretty much meets FCC broadband definitions for $55/mo.
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It’s also surprisingly reliable given the physics of it all. I built a house out in the country in 2007 and 10Mbps DSL was all that was available for terrestrial connectivity up until literally yesterday.
The DSL would go down for hours a couple of times per month. I got on an early starlink pilot program and had a dish up in early 2021. Aside from momentary blips on the leading edge of a stormfront and occasional network issues a couple of times per year, it’s been rock solid with half the latency and 20x the bandwidth.
This reminds me of Steve Wozniak's nightmarish prolonged battle to be allowed to personally pay for broadband to his just purchased house.
>Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak: I don't have broadband at home [2012]
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/us-news-blog/2012/may...
Addendum: He later remarked that in the future the first thing he'd ask about a prospective home is whether or not it has broadband.
My parents in rural America had a local ISP that did long distance wireless (highly directional antenna mounted on the house pointed at the top of the grain elevator a few miles away) but it was an unreliable 20 Mbps because the ISP wasn't interested in upgrading their equipment.
This could have been a revolutionary way of accessing the internet before Starlink. Grain elevators are everywhere in the US Midwest. Can’t believe it wasn’t capitalized on
It is indeed all over the place, they just didn't want to upgrade equipment once it was there.
Probably margin issues.
You’d have to run fiber to all
the grain elevators and you are back to the same issues.
I live in a rural neighborhood with fiber. Multiple neighbors go with Starlink because it’s cheaper and good enough.
Same, except I had DSL--the local provider 'guarantees' speeds of 10Mbps to my house.
So, needless to say, starlink has been amazing.
I don't understand. Starlink satellites are just routers to ground stations. Why are there no wired connections available? Do the connections not reach the famous last mile?
>Starlink satellites are just routers to ground stations.
You are very out of date on your knowledge here. When it first launched yes, Starlink sats purely acted as "bent pipes" so you needed a ground station within 300-400 miles or so. But inter-sat optical laser links went online quite awhile ago so now data can go from a terminal through the orbital network to ground across the planet. That of course was required for them to offer air/maritime global service (as well as extremely remote areas like polar), can't put a ground station in the middle of the ocean.
Incidentally that should allow them to beat the latency of standard fiber by quite a bit over a long enough distance, there was speculation it might become quite popular for HFT for example, but I haven't tried it.
Edit: So I went ahead and checked, and interestingly at least via a v1 land based terminal on a basic plan they don't make use of it. So must be a higher end option or something? Picking a random top 50 site in Japan tbs.co.jp (163.45.254.1), a streaming TV site iirc, I got around 186ms ping on a fiber connection in rural New England, and 192ms via Starlink, almost exactly the difference one would expect for adding purely a LEO leg up to the nearest ground station. Maybe they want to charge for that, or maybe they're still fleshing out bandwidth on the intersat network. If anyone has a maritime or portable terminal or something it'd be interesting to see some comparisons. In principle on a great circle the distance for me should be something like 10600km, so maybe 12000ish including sats, 24k rtt, which at the speed of light should be more like 80ms. Even with some routing lag that's a big enough difference seems like it'd be noticeable if it was going via orbital mesh instead of ground and kind of fun to test.
Starlink right now only uses lasers where terrestrial paths aren't available.
I'd have thought they'd sell a different product with lower latency over Ku band by now
Yes. The last mile problem is legitimately so difficult in rural areas that it is more cost effective to launch a constellation of 10,000+ satellites than it is to run the wires.
If you happen to live within line of site of a cell tower buying a MIMO antenna and beaming internet off of a data plan is also somewhat viable, but Starlink is probably better on bandwidth and packet loss
I wonder about the economics, though. Intuitively it doesn't seem like it can be more efficient to launch constellations of satellites than run kilometers of cables, even if you have to run 20 km for each customer. That's, what, $10k a pop? So around two orders of magnitude cheaper than a satellite? Something isn't adding up for me.
> even if you have to run 20 km for each customer. That's, what, $10k a pop?
I don't know if we're still talking Africa or in general, but $10k doesn't get you anywhere near 20 km around me. I got municipal fiber recently, and our agency passes through the costs. On a 7 drop project of about 1 mile, aerial on existing poles, my share was $5k; plus I had to pay my own way to get conduit installed from the pole to my house, that was nearly $7k. Underground utilities are expensive!
Starling is 10k satellites shared across the entire planet.
A satellite will serve thousands of customers, whereas a fixed line only serves one. I think 10k is also severely understating the cost per customer. There's like hundreds of metres between these houses at a minimum, and in some areas possibly Kilometers from house to house.
The pre Starlink and pre AI estimate in the US was $20k per mile excluding terminating equipment and right of way and assuming regular soil.
Now everything costs more and they'd rather build AI DC's
Intuitively, what's the cost to get to orbit? SpaceX's Falcon reusable rocket lowered the cost to get to space by an order of magnitude or so, so you have to factor that in.
I only counted the cost of the satellite itself. I assumed you can get it into orbit for free, so if it costs a cent more than that, it's a further argument against.
Starlink is manufacturing the satellites at scale. They’re likely to cost not much differently from large ground based 5G towers at some point. The antennas are “digital” so no expensive mechanical systems needed.
From the S1 satellites are $600k and launch is under $20 million
There are only 170 ground stations (about 100 in the US).
So for someone living in rural america, it's really "famous last 300 miles".
That can't be right. The satellites can only cover a diameter of 15 miles. Anyone living any further from a ground station is still SOL.
The max steering angles of the phased arrays are much higher, the diameter is at least 10x what you say. And for the last few years, lasercoms can route traffic inside the constellation so a given sat doesn't need to be within sight of a ground station.
>The max steering angles of the phased arrays are much higher
You can't steer the antenna back and forth for every exchange between station and customer. What the steering may get you is increasing the coverage of an area currently underserved by the constellation, and maybe a slight increase in diameter of ground covered due to the geometry, at the cost of lower signal strength.
>And for the last few years, lasercoms can route traffic inside the constellation so a given sat doesn't need to be within sight of a ground station.
Did they finally implement satellite-to-satellite links? Fine, if that actually works, they can indeed extend the range much further. I don't know if I believe it, though.
https://mikepuchol.com/modeling-starlink-capacity-843b2387f5...
You can read this article. The lasers worked before February 2022, but you don't require them to have multiple spot beams.
The parent is correct. Look up have many antennas are on each Starlink sat. There are multiple dedicated antennas for customers and ground stations. There isn’t just one antenna or beam per satellite.
Also, lookup the number of ISLs in orbit. Starlink has been providing coverage for the middle of the ocean for years now. They have provided coverage to Pacific Islands that have lost their undersea cable connections.
> You can't steer the antenna back and forth for every exchange between station and customer.
Even ignoring that they have multiple arrays, they use separate antennas to talk to the base stations on a different frequency band.
Your ignorance is only exceeded by your unwillingness to learn.
“if that actually works”??? It has been working successfully for large parts of the Earth for years.
There's only 7 ground stations (or points of presence, I'm not sure what the difference is but they list them separately) or so in Africa, with Nigeria, Botswana, Mozambique, Rwanda, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa being the ones that are known and confirmed.
Not many people live inside 15 miles of those stations, but Starlink is active in 23 countries.
Ground station is an antenna connected to Fiber. POP is a router/server in a DC (usually) connected to an IX
South Africa has a POP but no ground station.
The individual satellites can cover thousands of miles and use multiple spot beams of 15 miles each.
Starlink is also satellite internet, right?
Starlink satellites are ~500 km in altitude. Regular satellite internet is in geostationary orbit at ~35,000 km in altitude.
The difference in latency is massive. 3ms vs 220ms roundtrip time at the speed of light.
Yes, but the low altitude of the satellites makes a big difference.
Is it really $55 a month?
Residential 100 mbps (which these days actually delivers pretty well) is $55/mo
Why would he give an incorrect figure?
Typos can happen.
Lies