Starlink $1 pre-trial minimum bandwidth speeds revealed: 35Mbps DOWN and 5Mbps UP

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, Donut417 said:

I know my boss has to use LTE or Satellite in his new house. Said he called every provider in the area, all stop about a half mile from his house.  I guess he's getting Hughsnet installed for his girl so she can work from home. He uses the LTE hotspot for gaming and takes his Xbox over to his buddies house when there is a Call of Duty update. 

Yep.  That’s the way it works.  User has to pay for the last length, but that length may be used by others nearby as well.  That’s how it worked for a long long time for phone.  Some farmers forked over what amounted at the time to several years average salary to have just twisted pair phone run to their house.  The next guy only had to pay the distance between his house and the next though.  Sometimes groups of people would get together to get an major run dug.  If your boss has close neighbors they may all be in the same boat.  He might be able to get a coalition together. 

[Donut417]

4 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Yep.  That’s the way it works.  User has to pay for the last length, but that length may be used by others nearby as well.  That’s how it worked for a long long time for phone.  Some farmers forked over what amounted at the time to several years average salary to have just twisted pair phone run to their house.  The next guy only had to pay the distance between his house and the next though.  Sometimes groups of people would get together to get an major run dug.  If your boss has close neighbors they may all be in the same boat.  He might be able to get a coalition together. 

Naw, he said he has a bit of property, no neighbors really close. 

[Unixsystem]

7 minutes ago, Vitamanic said:

For those arguing about latency, we have no idea where severs are located or where the ground receivers are. You can’t say “that latency sucks” without said information. Those response times are absolutely meaningless without context.

My understanding is that currently SpaceX only has 5 approved ground stations out of the 30+ that they have requested permits for, and that's on top of having less than half of their intended constellation launched. If the latency is this good now, it should be at least slightly faster and probably much more consistent as they get the rest of the network built out. 

 

Spoiler

In addition, the ~1500 satellite number is for their initial constellation. The plan for the "real" constellation is somewhere in the 4000s of sats, and they already have FCC approval for more than 12,000 sats (although that likely includes the planned replacements).

 

Once they have Starship fully operational they can theoretically start launching sats 400 at a time for <$10mil per launch, at which point we'll start to see some serious shit. 

 

[Unixsystem]

5 minutes ago, Caroline said:

will this be worldwide or only for the US/Europe? it'd make no sense as they already have gigabit speeds there so... that's my question written via <1Mbps DSL.

Can't speak for Europe, but outside of major cities the US absolutely does not have gigabit. The vast majority of the physical land in the US is overwhelmingly rural and in those locations you're lucky to have DSL. 

 

I believe that initially they are targeting a relatively narrow latitudinal band that includes North America and Europe, but as they get more and more launches off they can cover further inclinations and therefore more countries. The US military is planning to utilize Starlink for on-deployment internet access and data transfer, so you can bet that it'll cover just about every populated inch of the planet. 

[FakeNSA]

2 hours ago, Vitamanic said:

For those arguing about latency, we have no idea where severs are located or where the ground receivers are. You can’t say “that latency sucks” without said information. Those response times are absolutely meaningless without context.

Yep!

And we do know that latency will be more consistent when more satellites are up (Tweet)

Right now, the trains of satellites have relatively extreme spacing, but this site (you might have to click show at the top left) shows the service area that they hope to obtain with a more complete constellation.

[Bombastinator]

25 minutes ago, Unixsystem said:

Can't speak for Europe, but outside of major cities the US absolutely does not have gigabit. The vast majority of the physical land in the US is overwhelmingly rural and in those locations you're lucky to have DSL. 

 

I believe that initially they are targeting a relatively narrow latitudinal band that includes North America and Europe, but as they get more and more launches off they can cover further inclinations and therefore more countries. The US military is planning to utilize Starlink for on-deployment internet access and data transfer, so you can bet that it'll cover just about every populated inch of the planet. 

There is some question whether it will be available in given areas though.  There may be data about what and how such things might happen.  I believe musk has said he has no interest in antagonizing the ccp though (poking the bear is bad. Even if it’s black and white and cute looking.  The ccp has antisatelite missiles) so it is very unlikely to be a useful method for getting past the great firewall. Depending on how it is done that might apply to other countries as well.  China is not the only nation with segregated internet.

[Unixsystem]

49 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

There is some question whether it will be available in given areas though.  There may be data about what and how such things might happen.  I believe musk has said he has no interest in antagonizing the ccp though (poking the bear is bad. Even if it’s black and white and cute looking.  The ccp has antisatelite missiles) so it is very unlikely to be a useful method for getting past the great firewall. Depending on how it is done that might apply to other countries as well.  China is not the only nation with segregated internet.

Of course its gonna be regulated on a  country by country basis in terms of allowing the ground stations and user terminals. However that's on the local government and I'd imagine that SpaceX is interested in making sure that every man woman and child on the planet is a potential Starlink customer. Those Mars rockets don't pay for themselves. 

[Eaglerino]

Once lived in a place with 10mbps internet for $80 a month (since moved to gigabyte for $100 a month) and this would have been spectacular there, if the full release pricing is any good. Hughe's net or whatever is probably gonna be put out of business. All the crappy dial-up or slow DSL providers should be shaking. I hope Elon delivers, and that the speeds improve. I wouldn't mind living in a wooden hut if I could get decent satellite internet

[bob345]

Not sure why so many people are going on about latency. A satellite link can potentially be significantly lower in latency than fiber as propagation of microwaves. Fiber is two thirds the speed of a radio transmission when it comes to travel time. That and you can often have a much shorter hop with a satellite network.

[Bombastinator]

21 minutes ago, Unixsystem said:

Of course its gonna be regulated on a  country by country basis in terms of allowing the ground stations and user terminals. However that's on the local government and I'd imagine that SpaceX is interested in making sure that every man woman and child on the planet is a potential Starlink customer. Those Mars rockets don't pay for themselves. 

Might be.  I guess I’m repeating about what I heard about intent and that I have heard nothing at all about methodology.

[Bombastinator]

17 minutes ago, Eaglerino said:

Once lived in a place with 10mbps internet for $80 a month (since moved to gigabyte for $100 a month) and this would have been spectacular there, if the full release pricing is any good. Hughe's net or whatever is probably gonna be put out of business. All the crappy dial-up or slow DSL providers should be shaking. I hope Elon delivers, and that the speeds improve. I wouldn't mind living in a wooden hut if I could get decent satellite internet

I concur.  It turns monopolies into dualopolies and dualopolies into competitive markets.  Might do less well in areas where there are all ready competitive markets.  There aren’t many of those in the US though.  It may be a big enough deal to change the way that wired networks are built out in the future.

[justpoet]

I didn't see anything on how to sign up, nor further details on the account, though it is listed as a buck in the title.

I'm fortunate enough to have gig fibre, despite being in the sticks, but for a buck I'd try this with my qa engineer hat on just to have backup service in case something goes down here.

[williamcll]

Mind you, 35Mbps is OK for people who literally live in the middle of nowhere.

[rogerwilco91]

11 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

Just saw this on the OLF Podcast. Solid speeds, which will increase as they continue to add to the network (currently there's what... a few hundred satellites? They plan on launching thousands of them).

 

No this isn't really a replacement to a good ground connection (FTTH or FTTN), but for rural customers that can't get any wired broadband, this could be excellent for them.

Once Elon makes this a reality and we are actually seeing the speeds and latency targets that SpaceX promised, I am moving away from the city. I can't wait to start living the country life and breathing that fresh air and watching those beautiful sunsets!

 

Am I being just too idealistic here? I mean, if you have great internet and can live in the countryside, why wouldn't you move to the countryside?

[mr moose]

Those a very reasonable speeds and latencies given the technology.  I would be more than happy with that if it was no more expensive than my current NBN deal and meant I could literally move anywhere in the country.  Had a gut full of city life.  and one of the few things stopping me from moving to the middle of bum fuck idaho is the lack of internet.

[S w a t s o n]

Given this is effectively an alpha test, quite good results. With spacex churning out 120 of the sats a month they will have this fleshed out soon and hopefully continue to expand as they grow subscriber count.

[Origami Cactus]

13 hours ago, Kisai said:

That is some pretty ridiculous minimum. 4 seconds per page of web browsing? 100ms has been possible for a decade, if anything websites have been getting worse by doing all this responsive html and framework cruft.

 

No, really, if you are playing an action game, 40ms is murder when your opponent has 4ms.

What games are you playing with 4ms latency?

LAN games?

40ms is perfectly fine, I've been playing on 60-70ms for a while and it is also perfectly playable.

[HenrySalayne]

13 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

Starlink satellites orbit at ~350 km. That's ONE HUNDRED TIMES CLOSER. Which in theory could mean up to 100 times less latency.

 

350 km is far, but not that far. There are plenty of land-based servers and data centres that we connect to all the time that are farther away then that.

Someone already mentioned it's 550 km, but that's just on piece of the story. It would be "only" 550 km if the satellite would be perfectly vertical above your location. But most of the time this is not the case. The distance to the satellite would be somewhere between 550 km and 1000 km for an angle of 60° around the vertical axis.In addition, there are not enough ground stations and the signal needs to hop from one satellite to another (depends on the location and is most likely a negative for remote locations) which increases latency. Starlink is probably using time multiplexing (like WiFi or cellular) and data will be send in short bursts with a delay of several dozen milliseconds between each burst.

So latency probably will be all over the place but below 100 ms.

 

[Arika]

10 minutes ago, Origami Cactus said:

What games are you playing with 4ms latency?

LAN games?

40ms is perfectly fine, I've been playing on 60-70ms for a while and it is also perfectly playable.

if i want to play games with any of my US friends, i have to put up with 250ms ping.

[Kisai]

45 minutes ago, Origami Cactus said:

What games are you playing with 4ms latency?

LAN games?

40ms is perfectly fine, I've been playing on 60-70ms for a while and it is also perfectly playable.

10 years ago I was playing a game, where the closer you were to the LA data center, the better you could PvP in the game. That is what happens when Korean and Japanese games get localized to US/CA and the crappy latency isn't addressed at all. Every KR and JP game goes through a phase where people wonder why they're getting their ass kicked in the game and it turns out that if they turn nagle off, their latency goes from 200ms to sub-10ms if they are in the same city with the data center or sub-50ms if they're in the same timezone as the the server. Sucks to be you if you live more than 300 miles east or west of the data center, or outside CA/US, because then you go through all the intermediary backbones that route your packets all over the place.

 

Because American and Canadian internet providers can't grapple with the the speed of light, and these games were designed for countries with sub-10ms latency, the games end up being a completely different, sometimes miserable experience. Heck, one person I was trying to help inside the game for one of these games was in fact using hughesnet satellite internet, and I basically had to tell them "that will never, ever give you good performance on any game."

 

The problem you will run into, is that if a game was not designed explicitly for North America, it will simply suck to play if you don't live in the same city that the game server runs from, no if's-ands-or-buts. If you live in California, and the game is in LA, great news, you might actually be able to play it, but if you're not in a city that has direct peering with the ISP the game is running on, you're SOL forever with that game. 

 

Leave nagle on, and most people don't realize it's on until someone shows them how to turn it off, and then it's like "wow, I can't believe how broken this game is."

 

And yes I absolutely noticed when I switched from Shaw's crappy 80ms to Telus's 4ms latency and the reason I didn't want bonded xDSL and stuck with the 25mbs service.

[Doobeedoo]

Good for very rural areas and middle of nowhere places. Still I only care about fiber to be present everywhere. 

[Bombastinator]

Just now, Doobeedoo said:

Good for very rural areas and middle of nowhere places. Still I only care about fiber to be present everywhere. 

If fiber was present everywhere there would be no purpose for starlink.

[Donut417]

3 minutes ago, Doobeedoo said:

Good for very rural areas and middle of nowhere places. Still I only care about fiber to be present everywhere. 

Never going to happen in many nations. Because Fiber is only economical in areas with a good population density, outside of that its no. 

[Doobeedoo]

11 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

If fiber was present everywhere there would be no purpose for starlink.

I mean.. Mostly I meant it everywhere in cities really. 

7 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

Never going to happen in many nations. Because Fiber is only economical in areas with a good population density, outside of that its no. 

I know they expand them rather fast in very dense areas, sucks how they hold back to spend any extra somewhere whete they may not reap max profit ugh. 

[Bombastinator]

Just now, Doobeedoo said:

I mean.. Mostly I meant it everywhere in cities really. 

I know they expand them rather fast in very dense areas, sucks how they hold back to spend any extra somewhere whete they may not reap max profit ugh. 

Yep.  That’s how capitalism works.  My city has two major wired internet carriers and one minor wireless one.  So actual competition in a few places where the minor one exists.  In those places home values raise dramatically because people want so badly to live in an area with competitive internet.