20 thoughts on “Starlink”

  1. It only seems pricey if you have an urban/suburban alternative. That’s why it’s called “Better Than Nothing.” Before DSL came down the road a couple of years ago, my only choice was HughesNet. This is cheaper and faster. The price point is set to make sure no one with an alternative buys in yet, because Musk doesn’t want his embryonic system overwhelmed. At the same time, it does bring in a hundred million dollars a month per million customers, and a one-time fee of a half billion dollars per million new customers. Which shows what’s going to happen over the next five years. If I were even 20 years younger, I’d be making my emigration plans.

    1. I think one of Musk’s intentions with Starlink is to bring Twitter and Facebook access to every corner of the globe, so that more people will want to flee to Mars.

      1. Mars, at a first guess. A few years ago I designed a mars Homestead at a reasonable level of detail (pieces, parts, and vendors). If I were 20 years younger, with the resources and connections I had when I was 50, I’d round up some engineers I know to bring it to a fine level of design maturity and manufacturability, then start manufacturing and selling Mars Homesteads. You can fit four Homesteads in a single cargo Starship (as currently spec’d out), so each homesteader would need to buy a Homestead (around $5mln for the base model) plus shipping and handling, and including delivery to the surface of Mars (around $12.5mln if Musk’s original guesstimate holds). First flight would be two cargo ships, including one Homestead and all the company’s Mars-side equipment (around $200mln, including shipping and handling). There’s no need for passengers ships, as the homesteaders ride to Mars in their neatly folded Homsteads.

        My other pipedream requires coming up with $10-15bln and involves building a solar-electric NautilusX and spending the rest of my life prospecting the NEO and on out to the Jovian Trojans. It’d be cool to be born on Earth and die on Hektor…

    3. I have finally settled on this year’s Halloween costume.

      In 2016, it was Hillary Clinton’s server that was revealed to be kept in a bathroom closet somewhere in Colorado. The piece of the costume that went over one’s torso was white and in the shape of a toilet tank. There was a flush handle on it labeled “Delete key.”

      This year, the costume is the New York Post. I cannot show it to you because it is invisible online.

  2. I’m too far out to have access to DSL, though I do have cable as an option, and went with it. Supposedly it’s 30mbps, but in practice, far less – though plenty for my needs. It costs $50 a month.

    Starlink though – if it has 100mbps, and I had a use for that kind of speed, I’d try it. I’d be more inclined to try it if the ground station was truly portable, so I could use it on road trips. That’s be handy, especially for hotels and such. (I don’t use a smartphone, so I have to haul my laptop into a McDonalds or similar to do nightly hotel searches, etc). I also imagine that Starlink will prove very popular RVrs and boaters.

    1. Indeed. I went on a month long road trip from Canada into the northern USA in 2017 to go see the solar eclipse with a RV trailer. I needed to stay in touch and do remote support for a client, so bought a Straight-Talk hot-spot & data plan from Walmart. It worked reasonably well but had large geographical gaps where there was either no coverage or older cell technology limiting the bandwidth. Something like StarLink would be a god-send.

      1. I too went on a road trip to see the eclipse; saw it in far west Nebraska. I’ve always known they are spectacular, but it was far moreso than I’d even thought – it’s something pictures and video do no justice to.

        There’s no cell coverage at all in a lot of the places I go (I’m very fond of remote mountainous areas). Heck, there’s not even any cell coverage at my house. A mobile version of Starlink would be, amongst other things, a great emergency communications option when I’m out in the wilderness.

    2. I’m too far out for cable or DSL, but one of my neighbors petitioned the local telco to run a digital line out 12 miles to our road. What did it was collecting 700 signaturrs of people who said they’d buy DSL if offered.

  3. That is quite affordable after buying the equipment but a lot of people already buy their own modems, routers, and access points anyway, so buying ewuipment isn’t likely to be that big an impediment.

  7. My sister (living in rural Georgia) would sign up for this in a heartbeat. She’s stuck on HughesNet, which makes dialup look attractive. (She can’t *get* dialup. No landline service there. Cable? Don’t make me laugh. Tethering? Only from her driveway, not in the house.)

  8. This is actually competitive with rural ISPs, and far, far cheaper than existing MEO or GEO internet service. And that’s before you consider the bandwidth (claimed at 50-150mbps for the beta) and latency (20-40ms, with a few outages as they nail things down).

    My only real concern is the use of the Ku band, which can be jammed by heavy rainfall.

  9. It’s too late in the year for me to attempt an installation now but maybe next spring/summer. We’ll see. As a former Hughes Satellite customer this will be nothing like what I had in that I would expect even better performance. But one similarity is it’s resilience during a power failure. In bad weather these can be frequent enough where I live to cause trouble when working from home where Internet connectivity is a must have. At $99/mo I might become a seasonal customer. But if it gets good enough I might just switch.

  10. I had an APC power supply with a lithium-ion battery that would power my HughesNet Internet for about 5 hours (or 10 hours, once I went to DSL), but when I needed to replace the battery it turned out they’d stopped making them. I wonder why, because there’s nothing else like it (kind of a PowerWall the size of a deck of cards).

    1. For me the issue isn’t power on my end since I have both UPS and a backup generator but rather the ISP side. On THEIR end its only a UPS which gives me only 20 additional minutes of Internet service before my cable goes dark.

      1. One of the few advantages of DSL over cable is the telcos tend to have good backup power, so the landlines are usually the last thing to go in a natural disaster. Big ice storms here take out everything once a decade. Plus, my junction box gets eaten by rodents once in a while (glories of country living).

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