Starlink - serious or money relocation?

[stevelup]

£89 and no, it's consistent all the time. I can't remember the last time it dropped below 200Mbps

There are always at least two satellites in view. If you click on the link Kalvin posted and then zoom right in, you can see in real time where all the satellites are.

[madires]

I like the idea of providing satellite based internet access to people without copper/fiber/4G/5G/WMAN, but I have strong doubts that it will be a viable business. And the huge amount of LEO satellites create new challenges for space flight and operation of satellites. It does make things much harder, possibly even too risky. A limited LEO based system would be reasonable and fine. However, there are a few companies competing and we'll have to deal with even more satellites and reserved frequency bands. It's like they are occupying three lanes of a 4-lane highway for their own profit and leaving only half a lane for the public (the other half is for military purposes and three-letter agencies).

BTW: I live in a rural area and can get 1000 Mbps down and 500 Mbps up for 90 bucks a month (FTTH, incl. a VoIP line and a flat rate for national landline calls) which is rather expensive compared to some other European countries.

[Kalvin]

£89 and no, it's consistent all the time. I can't remember the last time it dropped below 200Mbps

There are always at least two satellites in view. If you click on the link Kalvin posted and then zoom right in, you can see in real time where all the satellites are.

£89 (approx. EUR 100) is probably reasonable for that speed in rural area.

Just checked that a 200Mbit/s cable connection in a city costs here typically around EUR 20, and 400Mbit/s connection costs around EUR 30. Internet access in rural areas in Finland are mostly based on the mobile network, and the price range is between EUR 25 (4G, 200Mbit/s) - EUR 35 (5G, 400Mbit/s), depending of the maximum speed advertised. The maximum speed you actually will get may not be what you pay for though, if the distance to the mobile base-station is long, or the base-station is not yet updated etc. etc. Same thing goes with the connection reliability. So, £89 may not be too bad after all, if the alternative is no network at all, or a very slow or unreliable internet connection.

[Fflint]

£89 and no, it's consistent all the time. I can't remember the last time it dropped below 200Mbps

There are always at least two satellites in view. If you click on the link Kalvin posted and then zoom right in, you can see in real time where all the satellites are.

£89 (approx. EUR 100) is probably reasonable for that speed in rural area.

Just checked that a 200Mbit/s cable connection in a city costs here typically around EUR 20, and 400Mbit/s connection costs around EUR 30. Internet access in rural areas in Finland are mostly based on the mobile network, and the price range is between EUR 25 (4G, 200Mbit/s) - EUR 35 (5G, 400Mbit/s), depending of the maximum speed advertised. The maximum speed you actually will get may not be what you pay for though, if the distance to the mobile base-station is long, or the base-station is not yet updated etc. etc. Same thing goes with the connection reliability. So, £89 may not be too bad after all, if the alternative is no network at all, or a very slow or unreliable internet connection.

I'm also in a rural (EU) area on an LTE connection (4G currently) it is 22Mb, but I pay only 19EUR per month. I would definitely pay double that for Starlink (as it runs now), but not 5times as much plus a lot more up front

However, I believe 99% of Europe (and UK)'s population is not Starlink' s target market. The target market is people that absolutely can't get a 5Mb+ service and are stuck on something silly in today's day like dialup speeds.

The million dollar question is, how many of those people are there, and what percentage of them would be willing to pay the price. A trillion dollar market? I seriously doubt that, unless the technology can accommodate higher user density and they offered cheaper options. I bet they would definitely get 10x the users if they dropped the price to $25 (even if the speed was also 4 times slower). Again user density will cause issues.

The numbers for target user density are pretty questionnable.

To get a trillion dollar annually at current prices they would need to have 833mln users. If the target constellation size is 42000 satellites that's over 19.8k users per satellite on average. Even if we very generously assume the users are dispersed evenly (and they will not be) and we need 100Mb available bandwidth per user. This gives us almost 2Tb throughput per satellite. That's a lot of data!

Starlink uses QAM modulation (up to 64QAM) and 240MHz down link bandwidth. This has maximum theoretical throughput of 1.44Gb (really a lot less). So we would need over 1400 down links per satellite to serve 19.8k users 100Mb each. Is that possible with Mimo? I'll believe when I see it.

[antenna]

I get, on average, 140Mbps (occasionally hitting 240Mbps) with absolutely no usage limits. I almost hit a TB of downloading a couple months ago, no issue at all.  If you guys think selling us the equipment to make that happen in the middle of nowhere at a 50% loss to the company and only charging $99 a month is a scam, please suggest to me a better service that can do it cheaper.  There is no fiber even close to here, nearest DSL node is 5 miles away, and I border a total cellular dead zone and am lucky to get dial-up speed on my phone. That said, I've been using starlink since January and, so far, it is the best service I've ever used.  In fact, my friend has gigabit fiber optic and his internet is no faster than my internet because the servers we typically access throttle everyone below what we can utilize.  Anyone who thinks Starlink is a scam either lived within range of high speed internet their entire life and lack an appreciation for what they are doing, or they are butt-hurt because they are on the bottom of the waiting list this chip shortage caused.

To assume everyone will be simultaneously using 240Mbps 100% of the time is foolish, which is the cause of the confusion here.  If you calculate based on average usage (what does streaming pluto tv to 5 tv's take ~ peanuts), the math works out fine. 

[wraper]

The million dollar question is, how many of those people are there, and what percentage of them would be willing to pay the price. A trillion dollar market? I seriously doubt that, unless the technology can accommodate higher user density and they offered cheaper options. I bet they would definitely get 10x the users if they dropped the price to $25 (even if the speed was also 4 times slower). Again user density will cause issues.

The numbers for target user density are pretty questionnable.

To get a trillion dollar annually at current prices they would need to have 833mln users. If the target constellation size is 42000 satellites that's over 19.8k users per satellite on average. Even if we very generously assume the users are dispersed evenly (and they will not be) and we need 100Mb available bandwidth per user. This gives us almost 2Tb throughput per satellite. That's a lot of data!

Starlink uses QAM modulation (up to 64QAM) and 240MHz down link bandwidth. This has maximum theoretical throughput of 1.44Gb (really a lot less). So we would need over 1400 down links per satellite to serve 19.8k users 100Mb each. Is that possible with Mimo? I'll believe when I see it.

Except your numbers are totally useless since Starlink is not targeting receiving a 1 trillion annual revenue to begin with. Their target is $30 billion.
EDIT: and your 100mbps per user assumption is simply stupid. As if everyone uses full bandwidth constantly. If this was true, none of the existing networks could possibly work.

[fourfathom]

I have signed up for Starlink (they say it will be available late 2022).  My neighbor has it running and he is very happy with the speed, latency, and availability.  We are in an area served by DSL and LTE.  I currently have both:  DSL is slow and unreliable, and LTE would be OK except that they have moved from unlimited to a limited usage model (because of the Covid / Zoom / etc. crunch).  If fiber were available I would prefer that, but that's not going to happen for a few years at best.

At another location I have gigabit fiber (and it usually gets close to gigabit speeds), but I also have Dish satellite backup, as our fiber is largely carried on telephone poles which are vulnerable to trees falling, wildfires (this is in northern California), car crashes, etc.  The geosynch Dish service has excessive latency and usage limits so it's definitely a second-best option.  I may eventually replace my Dish satellite link with Starlink.

For both of these locations I want to have a redundant net connection, with different failure modes.  Starlink is a real contender.  However, I don't know how many people who have a fiber connection will want to pay for a backup -- I'm probably not the typical customer.

[Rick Law]

Cap is just that, a cap.  One can always purchase a higher cap.  Just like housing, food, clothing, you get what you can afford and judge how much this is worth to you verses other needs.  Broadband (for now anyway) is for all.  Where there is a market, someone will fill that with or without Starlink.  The customer will judge if they want it or not.  If no one provide a cap high enough, one can always purchase additional accounts/lines.  As many lines as one sees fit to purchase.

Really? Then why rural areas even in US are living without internet or with something that barely works while people are ready to pay insane money? Do you think everyone lives in cities where you can affordably connect people to the cable? In mountainous areas a mobile phone without any internet is a problem.

Really.  Yes, people will decide what they can afford and buy to the extend they feel cost and benefit balanced.  Of course there are some that will buy a car or a house that they have no possibility of affording based on their income.  That is how some behave.

Except the pollution of low orbit, I have no quarrel with Starlink.  If people like them and purchase them, good all around.

... ...
If the governments wants to keep the rural regions inhabited in the future, it would be a good idea to provide compensation for the high network connection fees.

People choose where they live based on what essentials and amenities an area has.  That is why human migrated from Africa to Europe and then the world, at least that is the "standard explanation."

I for one would not support destroying more rural areas.  I would hate to see the whole world turning into suburbs.  I think it is in our psychic that seeing some vast green area, forest or savanna brings comfort - or may be it is just me.

The performance -massively- exceeds that stated in the video. I get between 330 and 380Mbps down and between 22 and 28Mbps up. Latency is consistently below 30ms, and I've had -one- outage since July and that was in the middle of the night and lasted a couple of minutes.

The big question is - how will those numbers be, when the system goes out of beta and lots of people sign up.
We had a sat provided internet service offering (don't remember, like 20 years ago?), with sat downlink and modem(landline) uplink. It worked great at first, but as soon as more people signed up, the speed dropped to below regular modem speed. You can only have that much bandwidth between sat network and base stations, which obviously has to be shared...

You hit the nail on the head there: "The big question is - how will those numbers be, when the system goes out of beta and lots of people sign up."

How many sustained big hits did Mr. Musk achieve thus far?  We all know about the Hyperloop and other Hyper-hype.  So, the other question is, would Starlink even get that far.  Starlink may well be just vast number of chunks of orbiting debris before then.

[SeanB]

One big user is the companies that currently use Iridium, who would love to have a connection that is equal to Iridium in coverage, but is a fixed price, and not limited to 9600 BAUD data. Think also of the rural USA, where you have vast areas with low population, so there is little incentive to provide more than a POTS line out there, and this long line does not support DSL at all, and barely does voice.  Nobody is going to lay a 100km length of fibre for possibly 50 subscribers, and there are plenty of places even 3G, 4G is barely usable, and massively overloaded per cell, with nothing ever going to be done about it.

Outside the USA there are likely to be the 2.5 million subscribers easily, Australia will have it for every farmstead and small settlement inland or outside major metro areas, as they do not have the population to warrant anything else, and same for pretty much the rest of Africa and the Asian continent, plus it will be popular with all the Pacific island states, simply because most of them do not have good connectivity at all, unless they are one of the lucky ones with undersea cables by them. I can easily see the market  being 100 million terminals after a decade, all over the planet, and with massive amounts of data being transferred on it simply because it is cheaper than an alternate connection.

Pity, I love seeing those Iridium flares in the evening sky.

[Rick Law]

...
Think also of the rural USA, where you have vast areas with low population, so there is little incentive to provide more than a POTS line out there, and this long line does not support DSL at all, and barely does voice.  Nobody is going to lay a 100km length of fibre for possibly 50 subscribers, and there are plenty of places even 3G, 4G is barely usable, and massively overloaded per cell, with nothing ever going to be done about it.
...
Pity, I love seeing those Iridium flares in the evening sky.

Besides internet/3G/4G, other inconveniences exist.  I've lived in areas where police, hospitals, fire stations are almost an hour away...  Good that that was for a short time only.  That is what make rural rural.  It may not have much, but it has its charm.

I think Starlink as back-haul for tel-comm may have a market there but a shrinking one.  People are more likely to use phones over laptop these days.  4G tower to Satellite may be a viable connection method.  This, plus some local residence/business with satellite may make a viable market.  But since rural areas are disappearing, shrinking market for sure.

As to satellite interfering the night sky...

Amateur astronomers made a lot of contributions to astronomy.  Many notable discoveries were in fact done by amateurs: Uranus, Hale-Bopp comet, "Cosmic Ghost", and 42 planets.  With a huge number of low orbiting junk creating streaks across photos of the night sky, earth based astronomy will suffer.  Most impacted will be the amateur astronomers with little resource.

See the attached photo from Scientific Americans, the photo was taken November 2019, just a handful of SpaceX/Starlink "dark" satellites.  When they have 42000, the night sky will be near invisible.

Scientific Americans Article September 2020: "SpaceX’s Dark Satellites Are Still Too Bright for Astronomers"
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacexs-dark-satellites-are-still-too-bright-for-astronomers/

"AMAZING WORLD OF TELESCOPES" Article: "Top 5 Space Discoveries Made By Amateur Astronomers"
https://mytelescopio.com/top-5-space-discoveries-made-by-amateur-astronomers/

EDIT: Photo date and article date are different.  Edited the text referencing the photo to make it clearer why that date differs from the reference article date.

[wraper]

Cap is just that, a cap.  One can always purchase a higher cap.  Just like housing, food, clothing, you get what you can afford and judge how much this is worth to you verses other needs.  Broadband (for now anyway) is for all.  Where there is a market, someone will fill that with or without Starlink.  The customer will judge if they want it or not.  If no one provide a cap high enough, one can always purchase additional accounts/lines.  As many lines as one sees fit to purchase.

Really? Then why rural areas even in US are living without internet or with something that barely works while people are ready to pay insane money? Do you think everyone lives in cities where you can affordably connect people to the cable? In mountainous areas a mobile phone without any internet is a problem.

Really.  Yes, people will decide what they can afford and buy to the extend they feel cost and benefit balanced.  Of course there are some that will buy a car or a house that they have no possibility of affording based on their income.  That is how some behave.

Except the pollution of low orbit, I have no quarrel with Starlink.  If people like them and purchase them, good all around.

You cannot buy what isn't there. Maybe if you you are a multimillionaire, maybe then you can organize a broadband internet in the middle of nowhere regardless of how much it will cost, and still it will be very troublesome. Also you are contradicting yourself. It's a game of supply and demand and it works both ways. There is the demand, so Starlink comes to answer that demand.

See the attached photo from Scientific Americans, the photo was taken November 2019, just a handful of SpaceX/Starlink "dark" satellites.   

It's one of only a few photos available. Neither those were dark, as those were some of the earliest satellites launched, nor they reached their target orbit yet  . Those were either v0.9 test satellites or a first launch of v1.0 in November of 2019.

[bdunham7]

If you guys think selling us the equipment to make that happen in the middle of nowhere at a 50% loss to the company and only charging $99 a month is a scam, please suggest to me a better service that can do it cheaper.

The users aren't the victims of the alleged 'scam', the investors are.  Whether that's true or not is another matter.  For those without reasonable alternatives, Starlink is a godsend and not excessively expensive for what you get.  I can remember happily paying hundreds of dollars per month for a T1 connection two decades ago and there are probably still millions of people in the US that don't even have that level of service available at any price.  But IMO it still isn't cheap enough for the developing world even on a shared basis.

[wraper]

...
Think also of the rural USA, where you have vast areas with low population, so there is little incentive to provide more than a POTS line out there, and this long line does not support DSL at all, and barely does voice.  Nobody is going to lay a 100km length of fibre for possibly 50 subscribers, and there are plenty of places even 3G, 4G is barely usable, and massively overloaded per cell, with nothing ever going to be done about it.
...
Pity, I love seeing those Iridium flares in the evening sky.

Besides internet/3G/4G, other inconveniences exist.  I've lived in areas where police, hospitals, fire stations are almost an hour away...  Good that that was for a short time only.  That is what make rural rural.  It may not have much, but it has its charm.

I think Starlink as back-haul for tel-comm may have a market there but a shrinking one.  People are more likely to use phones over laptop these days.  4G tower to Satellite may be a viable connection method.  This, plus some local residence/business with satellite may make a viable market.  But since rural areas are disappearing, shrinking market for sure.

By your narrow-minded thinking you completely miss that Starlink can reverse that. You can have many benefits of a town, yet live in a rural area. You can run your internet based business from a middle of nowhere and be successful at that. Many people live in cities and towns because they need it, not because they like it. And COVID restrictions remove those remaining benefits of living in urban area.
4G tower for 50 people, or Starlink dish for each household, what is more affordable and works better?

[David Hess]

Cap is just that, a cap.  One can always purchase a higher cap.

You can, but it is incredibly expensive.  The most often quoted landline and cellular numbers are for incredibly limited service no matter what they claim for bandwidth.

Typical cell phone plans are just a few gigabytes, and landline plans may be 100s of megabytes to a terabyte or two.  1 terabyte per month works out to 3 megabits/second, and that includes traffic in both directions and all unsolicited traffic.  Telecommunication companies are sure not advertising speeds that include the cap.

I currently have uncapped service but not for long.

[Fflint]

Except your numbers are totally useless since Starlink is not targeting receiving a 1 trillion annual revenue to begin with. Their target is $30 billion.
EDIT: and your 100mbps per user assumption is simply stupid. As if everyone uses full bandwidth constantly. If this was true, none of the existing networks could possibly work.

Is 100Mb full speed? No, it isn't. People report full speeds of uo to 380Mb so I used less than a third. Also, I said clearly users will not be dispersed evenly between satellites and in my calculations I assume they are. One satellite may have 5 users another may attempt to serve 100k. How big are starlink target coverage "cells" going to be(not user geofencing, actual area served by one satellite) ? A 100km by 100km(again optimistically) ? That's 10000sq km. 10 users per sq km is not that far fetched. So averaging this to slightly under 20k users and 100Mb is not stupid. However, they can, and probably will limit the number of users per area if they start getting too many. They will also throttle traffic etc. In time Starlink will be the same as any other "broadband" provider. Use it while you can if it works well for you.

[PlainName]

However, they can, and probably will limit the number of users per area if they start getting too many.

It's worth remembering that if/when that happens it is not a bad thing. Sure, it would be for the users, robbed of choice and a decent connection. Very unfair that your neighbour can have this but you can't for love nor money. But we are looking at this from Starlink's point of view and if they max out an area that's actually very good indeed. If only they could do that everywhere! Plus, it becomes more desirable the harder it is to acquire - recall some products (Google products, OnePlus phones) that were initially only sold by invitation and practically world+dog beat a path to their door(s).

[ve7xen]

Except your numbers are totally useless since Starlink is not targeting receiving a 1 trillion annual revenue to begin with. Their target is $30 billion.
EDIT: and your 100mbps per user assumption is simply stupid. As if everyone uses full bandwidth constantly. If this was true, none of the existing networks could possibly work.

Is 100Mb full speed? No, it isn't. People report full speeds of uo to 380Mb so I used less than a third. Also, I said clearly users will not be dispersed evenly between satellites and in my calculations I assume they are. One satellite may have 5 users another may attempt to serve 100k. How big are starlink target coverage "cells" going to be(not user geofencing, actual area served by one satellite) ? A 100km by 100km(again optimistically) ? That's 10000sq km. 10 users per sq km is not that far fetched. So averaging this to slightly under 20k users and 100Mb is not stupid. However, they can, and probably will limit the number of users per area if they start getting too many. They will also throttle traffic etc. In time Starlink will be the same as any other "broadband" provider. Use it while you can if it works well for you.

Typical wireline broadband oversubscription (port rate vs. subscribed rate) ratios are 1:32 to 1:64, depending on technology. The actual average bandwidth used by a single subscriber is in single-digit Mbps, and this is what they will plan the network around, in fact the ratio tends to get higher the closer you get to the core of the network. You can serve a lot more than 1000 1Gbps subscribers over a 100Gbps link (which is what your 100mbps would suggest) - by a couple orders of magnitude. For network planning it's also important to notice that increasing maximum subscriber speed virtually doesn't affect the average rate; users are still behaving the same, their usage just becomes a bit peakier. So yeah, using 100mbps as an average per-subscriber rate for planning purposes is totally absurd.

That said, I don't see any way that Starlink is able to serve even suburban density areas, there are just far too many subscribers even at a high oversubscription ratio. I don't believe they've published their ground station -> satellite link speeds, but I'd guess it's in the single-digit Gbps, so they can probably serve a couple thousand users per satellite at 100mbps-ish speeds. Per cell, it'd be further constrained by what rate the user terminals are capable of. A typical suburb is maybe 800 people per km^2, and I believe they've said something on the order of 20km x 20km for the minimum cell size. So you're talking about 100,000s of people and 10,000s of potential subscribers per cell. With napkin math, it seems quite viable rural areas, but not viable at all in anything bigger/denser than a small suburb. But that's fine, because those areas can be efficiently served with FTTH anyway.

[Fflint]

Except your numbers are totally useless since Starlink is not targeting receiving a 1 trillion annual revenue to begin with. Their target is $30 billion.
EDIT: and your 100mbps per user assumption is simply stupid. As if everyone uses full bandwidth constantly. If this was true, none of the existing networks could possibly work.

Is 100Mb full speed? No, it isn't. People report full speeds of uo to 380Mb so I used less than a third. Also, I said clearly users will not be dispersed evenly between satellites and in my calculations I assume they are. One satellite may have 5 users another may attempt to serve 100k. How big are starlink target coverage "cells" going to be(not user geofencing, actual area served by one satellite) ? A 100km by 100km(again optimistically) ? That's 10000sq km. 10 users per sq km is not that far fetched. So averaging this to slightly under 20k users and 100Mb is not stupid. However, they can, and probably will limit the number of users per area if they start getting too many. They will also throttle traffic etc. In time Starlink will be the same as any other "broadband" provider. Use it while you can if it works well for you.

Typical wireline broadband oversubscription (port rate vs. subscribed rate) ratios are 1:32 to 1:64, depending on technology. The actual average bandwidth used by a single subscriber is in single-digit Mbps, and this is what they will plan the network around, in fact the ratio tends to get higher the closer you get to the core of the network. You can serve a lot more than 1000 1Gbps subscribers over a 100Gbps link (which is what your 100mbps would suggest) - by a couple orders of magnitude. For network planning it's also important to notice that increasing maximum subscriber speed virtually doesn't affect the average rate; users are still behaving the same, their usage just becomes a bit peakier. So yeah, using 100mbps as an average per-subscriber rate for planning purposes is totally absurd.

That said, I don't see any way that Starlink is able to serve even suburban density areas, there are just far too many subscribers even at a high oversubscription ratio. I don't believe they've published their ground station -> satellite link speeds, but I'd guess it's in the single-digit Gbps, so they can probably serve a couple thousand users per satellite at 100mbps-ish speeds. Per cell, it'd be further constrained by what rate the user terminals are capable of. A typical suburb is maybe 800 people per km^2, and I believe they've said something on the order of 20km x 20km for the minimum cell size. So you're talking about 100,000s of people and 10,000s of potential subscribers per cell. With napkin math, it seems quite viable rural areas, but not viable at all in anything bigger/denser than a small suburb. But that's fine, because those areas can be efficiently served with FTTH anyway.

Fine, I realise your typical wired broadband runs a 1:20~1:50 contention ratio and probably average user usage is in single digit MB (less than 10). However, isn't that what we call a pretty bad service? Whenever I had typical suburban(or small town) DSL in the past I wasn't happy with it (in UK) until I got Virgin cable service. That run really great. This was in the days of pre-HD YouTube and Netflix was a new thing. I can only imagine how bad your typical 1:50 (or as you say 1:64) contented DSL runs now.

I'm quite lucky to be located in a rural area with pretty good LTE and very low population density so there is probably a handful of LTE users beside me on my cell. My service now is pretty good. If lots of people move in I fully expect it to get a lot worse (but then it will hopefully make sense to run fiber). I use Netflix in HD and YouTube (also in HD on multiple devices) a lot.

Regarding Starlink the biggest thing I'm curious about is how they accomplish the routing and ground station uplinks. It seems they talk a lot about intersatellite laser links, but most of traffic will go from users to terrestrial Internet, not between users. The satellites that happen to pass over ground stations will have to handle a lot of backbone traffic. Then that traffic will have to be handed over to the other satellite when the first one goes out of range etc. We all know how shitty LTE is when one is on a fast train and cell handovers happen very frequently. This is the same problem, but with a lot more difficulty.

I hope it is not going to be like with the robo taxis and one day Elon will tweet "sorry it runs like shit, we didn't realise how difficult it is to run a massive satellite mesh network nearing its design capacity".

[PlainName]

Regarding Starlink the biggest thing I'm curious about is how they accomplish the routing and ground station uplinks. It seems they talk a lot about intersatellite laser links, but most of traffic will go from users to terrestrial Internet, not between users.

Maybe the satellites are the backbone. Users uplink to whatever passing satellite and the constellation routes to the appropriate downlink for the service connected to. Vice-versa for the uplink. So ground stations would be close to sources to minimise ground links.

But note I have no idea - I've not looked at it. Seems a reasonably proposition, though, if the laser links can handle it (and why wouldn't they). Lose an undersea cable and they probably wouldn't notice.

[ve7xen]

Fine, I realise your typical wired broadband runs a 1:20~1:50 contention ratio and probably average user usage is in single digit MB (less than 10). However, isn't that what we call a pretty bad service? Whenever I had typical suburban(or small town) DSL in the past I wasn't happy with it (in UK) until I got Virgin cable service. That run really great. This was in the days of pre-HD YouTube and Netflix was a new thing. I can only imagine how bad your typical 1:50 (or as you say 1:64) contented DSL runs now.

With these (the typical) numbers, users hitting congestion will be very rare, at least at this part of the network. The vast majority of the time you'll be able to reach your contracted rate because there will be plenty of idle capacity. Consider GPON, where up to 128 users can share 2.4Gbps of bandwidth. A typical provider might sell 100mbps or 200mbps service on such a technology (or even 1Gbps, but this is riskier) with a 1:64 split. Let's say these customers baseline at 10mbps each (high), consuming 640mbps, leaving 1.8Gbps for bursts. Since each customer can only burst to 200mbps, it means 10 of only 64 customers will all need to demand their full bandwidth at the same time for there to be any problem. This is statistically very unlikely.

DSL doesn't even have oversubscription in the last mile, your bandwidth to the DSLAM is dedicated. Of course the DSLAM has 'limited' backhaul capacity, but with modern FTTC deployments, oversubscription will likely be even lower than with PON because the range of the DSLAM is so short it doesn't serve many subscribers and the rates are lower.

If you're experiencing performance problems, especially at peak times, it's much more likely to be on your ISP's peering/transit links than in the last mile, these days. With the exception of Cable, where node splits are difficult and very expensive, so providers very often oversubscribe a lot more than the 1:32-64 typical of PON, so last mile congestion is a lot more common there.

Regarding Starlink the biggest thing I'm curious about is how they accomplish the routing and ground station uplinks. It seems they talk a lot about intersatellite laser links, but most of traffic will go from users to terrestrial Internet, not between users. The satellites that happen to pass over ground stations will have to handle a lot of backbone traffic. Then that traffic will have to be handed over to the other satellite when the first one goes out of range etc. We all know how shitty LTE is when one is on a fast train and cell handovers happen very frequently. This is the same problem, but with a lot more difficulty.

My understanding is that the FSO links are to reduce the number of ground stations required / increase the coverage area of the ground stations, not increase capacity, enabling them to cover areas with few subscribers or poor backhaul infrastructure where it wouldn't be economical to build a ground station. Currently, the satellite must talk to the subscriber and a ground station at the same time, so both must be within view, so each ground station has a limited coverage area. With the FSO system, the ground station can be further away. Presumably if bandwidth increased to the point where this started to create congestion, they would build more ground stations in that area.

Because Starlink is doing CGNAT, I'm pretty sure it's not part of the design, or likely even possible, for customer-customer traffic to use the FSO links directly. That traffic would have to hit a ground station and go back up, I believe.

[Rick Law]

...
By your narrow-minded thinking you completely miss that Starlink can reverse that. You can have many benefits of a town, yet live in a rural area. You can run your internet based business from a middle of nowhere and be successful at that. Many people live in cities and towns because they need it, not because they like it. And COVID restrictions remove those remaining benefits of living in urban area.
4G tower for 50 people, or Starlink dish for each household, what is more affordable and works better?

I will take it as a compliment.  Thanks for the nice words.

Being narrow, it affords me depth.  With depth comes a keen view.  Yes, Starlink is a solution for the short term, and may even be cheaper and/or better than other available solutions for now.  For the long term, the numbers just doesn't appear to add up.  As subscribers increase, both their variable cost and fix cost balloons while performance drop.  So, it does not look promising as a long term solution.

I see Starlink current presence as being there to absorb government aid as long as governments are willing.  Once government aids era is over, with investers likely disappeared as well, Starlink will be gone except the junk that will orbit our planet for years to come.  Whole satellites may eventually de-orbit by themselves even without the ground controlling facilities, but debris from those failed before de-orbiting and those failing automatic de-orbit satellites will be left in orbits.  Collisions will take them to different orbits, some ends up in higher and longer lasting orbits.  They will be endangering near-earth space for eons to come.

This is not like other short-term adventures that looks great for customers and we can use it while it is there, say good-bye when it is gone all without further negative impact.  Orbiting junk will be left behind leaving danger for decades or centuries.   This is more like a unshielded nuclear plant, cheap to build so it provides cheap power -- for the short term, then company fails and left the radioactive material for others to clean up for eons to come.

Therefore my view is: sooner Starlink is gone, the better.

[madires]

Regarding Starlink the biggest thing I'm curious about is how they accomplish the routing and ground station uplinks. It seems they talk a lot about intersatellite laser links, but most of traffic will go from users to terrestrial Internet, not between users.

Maybe the satellites are the backbone. Users uplink to whatever passing satellite and the constellation routes to the appropriate downlink for the service connected to. Vice-versa for the uplink. So ground stations would be close to sources to minimise ground links.

The links between satellites are only good for a local distribution network, the data throughput isn't sufficient for a backbone. Starlink has asked the FCC to approve 32 ground stations in the US.

[Ed.Kloonk]

As an asset class we can prolly consider this less of a tech stock and more of a infrastructure/transport stock.

A lot of numbers get thrown around. But at the end of the day once the investment is finally established, the headroom, bandwidth, capacity etc gets gobbled up pretty quickly.

As I say, regard it like a toll road/highway if you really want to invest your hard earned.

Will anyone argue with me that as soon as more bandwidth is made available, the video streamers always up the bandwidth and resolution to saturation?