>Even with that boost, the service still only delivered downstream rates of 90.55 Mbps, leaving it well short of the 144.2 Mbps median posted by the industry as a whole.
>All of this data begs the question: What happens if Starlink can’t meet the 100/20 Mbps speed obligations attached to its Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) projects?
Am I the only one who raise my eyebrows? What's the median for wireless internet delivery? What does that has to do with RDOF's completion requirement (by 2028)? How is StarLink doing at this point comparing to the other RDOF winners in terms of deployment?
From the actual Ookla article-
>while Starlink download speeds were slower than fixed broadband for all providers combined in the U.S. (144.22 Mbps) and Canada (106.86 Mbps).
Oh 144.22 Mbps is the industry median of _wired_ broadband. Well no shi* wireless is slower. Starlink can always deploy more satellites to service the demand. Is this a hit piece on Starlink?
SpaceX chose to target the 100/20 benchmark, and bid on that, and because of that, their success is measured against that.
The part that is a bit hit-piecey is this quote from Viasat:
“even if SpaceX were to deploy a full, 4,408-satellite Starlink system, that system would fall short in satisfying SpaceX’s RDOF commitments.”
The full Starlink satellite system doesn't have 4,408 sats. That's just the Gen 1 constellation. They have committed to completing the Gen 2 constellation, with an additional 7,518 sats, which each provide many times more bandwidth than the Gen 1 sats, by 2027, well in time for the RDOF.
They're beaming almost 100mbps from the space to surface of the earth, to us, mere consumers, and they're the worst because they're slower than some wired solutions?
I'm seriously worried about the pollution they create for astronomers, but that's seriously absurd.
Do I need to repeat? They're beaming this from space, to your home.
And not just to your home. I'm very strongly considering ponying up the money for Starlink to be able to work while camped out in the middle of nowhere.
I do this. Anywhere I can drag my trailer. I have a favorite location up in the mountains that gets no signal of any kind, but now that I have Starlink I can get perfect Internet there. So instead of going up for a weekend to relax, I go up for a week at a time, work during the day, and come home on the weekend to top up supplies.
Yep, that's exactly the sort of routine I have in mind.
Longer-term, I'm hoping for that favorite location to be a piece of land I actually own, in which case my goal is to setup a semi-permanent "base" with solar, Starlink, and a yurt or somesuch.
"fits in a backpack", with the implication that it will consume the internal volume of said backpack. That does not make it a solution for parent's "backpacking trip", unless you wish to sleep on the ground in the clothes you wore. And you ate before your left. The "heavy battery" was just icing on the cake. You know some backpackers saw the handles of their toothbrush to impress other backpackers^W^W^Wsave weight, right? :-)
That's not to say Starlink or a competitor can't get there eventually. I already have pocketable/backpackable device that can shove data up and down a satellite link (Garmin InReach), it's just dog-slow, and that's likely down to the antenna and transmitter power if I were to guess. Someone with more RF smarts than I can probably cook up a foldable antenna, perhaps boost the power a bit, I dunno. But the PoC is there, it just needs iteration.
This is more of a physics problem than an engineering problem.
Garmin InReach uses an omnidirectional antenna on the Iridium network. With an omni antenna your S/N ratio is simply too low to send bits fast. If you made the device powerful enough to roast birds in flight it might work for faster uplink but then it would be dangerous to you too and the FCC would never let you use it anyway. And even this wouldn't improve your downlink speed.
The only way to improve the speed in both directions is to use a directional antenna, which points most of the uplink energy toward the satellite and concentrates the satellite's incoming energy to get the S/N ratio high in both directions. That's exactly what Starlink does.
This is made even more difficult because we're talking about LEO satellites and LEO satellites move. So the antenna has to track the satellite. Again this is what Starlink is doing.
(You can also use GEO satellites which don't move, but then latency becomes terrible. That's how the older satellite internet systems work.)
It's certainly possible to build a portable, directional, tracking LEO satellite antenna. That's exactly what the Starlink RV solution is. But it's never going to be as small as your Garmin unit.
Starlink chose the 100mbps threshold over trying to satisfy the lower speed threshold because the higher threshold makes their business plan viable (it lets them get $$$ government funding for providing high-speed rural connectivity).
They don't get kudos for failing to meet the standard they're required to meet as a condition of the government program they need to make their business work.
> The full Starlink satellite system doesn't have 4,408 sats. That's just the Gen 1 constellation. They have committed to completing the Gen 2 constellation, with an additional 7,518 sats, which each provide many times more bandwidth than the Gen 1 sats, by 2027, well in time for the RDOF.
It's not only the pollution. The world is "unwillingly" giving up space spots to a company that can use those satellites as technological weapons. What happens when a Chinese/India/Russia(Insert any non-Anglo "bad" country) decides to emulate them , I would happily bet my left kidney the _commentariat_ here would not be so happy.
Would they provide a usable broadband alternative to the broomstick-up-butt treatment I get from the telcos?
Hell yes I'd take them. Oh they'd steal my data? Well, so does everyone on this site and the telco I have now.
Consider this, Mr Geopolitical power. Do you want the US with this weapon, or sit on our ass and let China deploy one now that SpaceX has shown how powerful it is?
This is the single greatest Western soft power weapon since the iPhone. And you're begrudging it? Come on.
I am latin-American Mr "I think Anglo is the world default", in our region the US has been a much more pernicious force in history than China,by several orders of magnitude. I understand we are just simple apes that love to think tribally (the logical part of our brain is shut off) but I would expect one is aware enough to understand there are other "tribes", specially when worldwide one's group does not reach double digits as % of population.
It is correct that Starlink is not motivated to act for your benefit, any more than for this individual. Your interlocutor has long experience with such things. So do we, really; are Starlink's incentives aligned any different from AT&T's?
A few years back, AT&T took a half $billion from US taxpayers to build out fiber to rural neighborhoods. One comes to within 1/10 mi of my house. But they were not obliged to light any of it. They did not. That fiber sits dark, more than a decade on.
This is not the US. This is a privately held corporation answerable to nobody. Whose benefit do you imagine they will exercise their power on behalf of? Yours? US voters'?
> This is not the US. This is a privately held corporation
Just like all other ISPs. As well as tech companies.
What's your point? That Starlink is bad because it isn't a government-owned entity? Or are you opposed to the idea that a non-government entity can provide a strategic advantage/soft power to the US government?
Asking because neither of those two points seem to be able to withstand much scrutiny.
My point is simply that anyone expecting Starlink will treat you better than AT&T does, and to act on behalf of the US, is very unfamiliar with both history and Elon Musk.
A hell of a lot of Tesla customers paid $thousands for self-driving, since, what, 2016? Tesla just laid off its whole self-driving department. What are the odds they will now issue refunds? Care to bet?
> My point is simply that anyone expecting Starlink will treat you better than AT&T does
The situations are totally different. AT&T made money from LOCAL infrastructure that they had a natural and enforced monopoly on.
Starlink infrastructure is inherently global, their main goal is with minimal effort and cost to connect as my people as possible to distribute the global fixed cost. SpaceX has little intensive to involve itself as deeply in local politics. On a global scale some politics will go in their direction, others away, spending lots of money in each government is not really a very practical strategy.
The US government can force companies to do things sure, and if you have extreme security consideration that goes beyond having a VPN go threw Starlink then Starlink is not for you.
Starlink will not have a monopoly on anything, they have an essentially global outlook and they are trying to offer a uniform standard service from Stockholm to Santiago. So I do actually think its a fair assumption that costumer experience has a chance to be better.
> Tesla just laid off its whole self-driving department
Those other constellations do not, in fact, exist. Until they do, for most rural subscribers Starlink is the only game in town: a de facto monopoly even by strict legal definition, whether or not so governed administratively yet.
> Tesla just laid off its whole self-driving department.
I had to check since I hadn't heard of this. All the sources I checked were about 200 low-level employees who were mostly doing manual annotation of images to help improve the algorithm. Not developers themselves. Definitely nothing about laying off "the whole self-driving department".
"Most of the workers were in moderately low-skilled, low-wage jobs, such as Autopilot data labeling, which involves determining if Tesla’s algorithm identified an object well or poorly, according to one source."
They are closing the entire San Mateo unit. If I were among the "self-driving" staff remaining, I would be updating my résumé.
Curiously, all those dumped were "terminated for underperforming", which will make finding work elsewhere hard, unless other companies see it as a cynical ploy to dodge regulations on normal layoffs.
I don't understand the significance of the San Mateo city in this context. I don't work in this industry. Were there higher level programmers included as well, instead of work akin to Amazon Mechanical Turk?
Do you have a source for the underperforming thing? That'd be next level incompetence for them to lay off 200 people for that reason all at once. (not saying it's impossible obviously!)
> A hell of a lot of Tesla customers paid $thousands for self-driving, since, what, 2016? Tesla just laid off its whole self-driving department. What are the odds they will now issue refunds? Care to bet?
Refunds for what? Every feature I bought the car with is still there. Even got the FSD beta access last month after being on the waitlist for a while. Updates still keep getting pushed, fixes and adjustments still get deployed on a regular basis. The self-driving program isn't ending, the development is still ongoing and alive, so I am not sure why I should be expecting a refund for that.
Also, get your news right. The people they recently laid off were mostly working on labeling data, they were not actual self-driving engineers. Labeling data is a pretty common and manual type of a task. I am actually surprised they've been doing it in-house for so long, as opposed to contracting it out. Not trying to justify that layoff, but claiming that it indicates the end of their self-driving program is ridiculous at best (and disingenuous at worst).
> anyone expecting Starlink will treat you better than AT&T does, and to act on behalf of the US, is very unfamiliar with both history and Elon Musk
You can make that statement about literally any company, and it is always a fool's errand to guess instead of evaluating that specific thing in question. You can say the same about Google, but I've been a happy Google Fiber/Webpass customer for the past few years. I can say nothing but good things about it, after many years of terrible experience with Comcast/Xfinity, and a few much better (but still worse than Google Fiber/Webpass) years with WaveG (WA area fiber provider).
In this specific case with Starlink, you don't need to guess either. If you live in an area where they provide service, you can sign up and compare it to any currently existing internet solutions for areas with no high-speed internet (rural and far-from-major-cities areas), which is the primary use case that Starlink was designed for.
Back to the original point about "private tech company as a soft power for the US government is a ridiculous idea." In the present day, we got Ukrainian Vice PM tweeting[0] his expression of gratitude towards the US government and Starlink for providing connectivity during their current crisis. What is this if not a proof of that soft power US can exhibit through private tech companies?
Either you paid extra for FSD, or you didn't. If you didn't, you won't get it. Everyone who did still doesn't have it, despite public statements ("next year, for sure") every year since 2016.
A mass layoff sends a message. Everyone left, there, certainly got it, and are updating their CVs. (I wonder what they will say they have been up to.)
You do get self-crashing, anyway: You can watch those frame by frame on YT.
And, yes, the same is true of any big corporation. But many people have announced in public that they do expect different, and need the correction. Comcast, the "Most Hated Corporation in America", is a curious choice to have substituted in for AT&T.
Anyone who imagines that Starlink did not get back way more than full value for that Ukr gesture knows nothing of PR.
US corporations are significantly controlled by US laws. These laws can do things like stopping them serving enemy countries. (The recent Russia sanctions are an example)
I think I see your point, here: that, being a US company, the US can give it directions regardless of what the company would have chosen to do; and even in places the company is not compelled by law, it may be in their interest to stay on good terms with the feds where for a company based elsewhere it might not.
It seems like they're keeping a ~10 km buffer zone around each satellite which does add up. Between Starlink, OneWeb, and Kuiper a bunch of shells have already been taken.
The regional speed differences are due to Starlink current reliance on ground stations and terrestrial backhaul. If they can get sat-sat links working and transition their backhaul onto those links that will no only eliminate the regional performance differences but likely also be faster than any terrestrial options over long distances.
I'm pretty sure you have it backwards; the current configuration of going through one satellite is always going to be faster [edit: higher throughput] than going through multiple satellite hops.
It's possible for it to be faster over long distances because light travels faster in vacuum than in glass fibre and likely less hops in space vs terrestrially where transit would need to go via several carriers to reach far destinations.
That is putting aside ground stations located in areas which themselves have poor transit which is the main problem with regional variability of performance I would imagine, though could also be congestion if they are oversubscribing in those regions. i.e too much density of terminals.
Lower latency is very, very far from the same thing as more bandwidth. Certain customers can benefit from the difference in latency. Not you, though.
Starlink will make those who would benefit (hedge funds, mainly) pay through the nose to get it. And, pay even more to keep somebody else from getting it. Probably they will charge a huge premium for 1ms faster than fiber, and 100x more for each ms better than that.
You may be certain they will not use that extra income to provide you better value.
Their stated plan is to enable the inter-satellite links for all customers. This will allow them to reach many more customers with lower operational costs. This would probably allow for more profit than just charging a few customers a premium for lower latency service.
Enabling the inter-satellite links for all customers doesn't guarantee they'll use much more expensive cold-potato routing though. It makes no sense to cross the ocean on 20 Gbps space lasers when you could use a 20 Tbps fiber cable.
Right. Any traffic that can be dumped to the downlink will. But it anyway costs nothing but RAM to stall your packets just enough to satisfy your service level agreement, keeping the channel clear for actual paying traffic.
Sending early is of course always OK. Those paying for that millisecond need it reliably every time, so not much of your traffic would need to be stalled. Maybe 10%. And maybe only while markets are open.
Sat-sat links only save them some landline bandwidth cost, allow them to serve airliners over oceans and deserted areas, and enable lower trans-continental latency for select super-high-paying customers (i.e. hedge funds and maybe military). They do not improve bandwidth overall.
Limiting bandwidth is the downlink to terminals. Probably the birds will have edge service contracts to proxy content, saving on uplink from hubs.
They might even be equipped to broadcast identical real-time content (e.g. world cup) once for all terminals following. (Anyway I would make that work, in their place.)
Well, the article makes the point that Starlink is definitely not under anything close to what it’s expected “peak load” will be, and even so, it’s not currently meeting speed requirements.
But mostly, I agree — the article seems a little over-worried.
I didn't know why people are getting bad speeds, because I'm regularly exceeding these speeds on my dish. Starlink requires self-installation and I'm willing to bet that a lot of people don't understand how to set it up properly. I will say it took me over 2 weeks to really get a good location, top some trees and set up a proper mount above the house. People post pictures of their dishes just sitting on the ground, and a lot of people don't have patience or time to get the connection working well.
Check out the section "Technology-Neutral Service Tiers"
https://www.fcc.gov/auction/904/factsheet
SpaceX bid for "above baseline".
They still seem to be doing much better than other auction winners though.
Ookla's speed test shows the entire network, not RDOF subscribers alone. It should be easy enough for Starlink to give RDOF subscribers the slated speeds. So yeah I think the article is click bait. Especially since Ookla showed improvement year on year for Starlink.
Setting aside the high cost of growing the constellation, I'm not sure they can just add more satellites even in theory. As I understand it Starlink has performance tradeoffs wrt to density of ground stations. Others on HN would probably know more though.
Honestly, I'm surprised that managed 90Mbps. Beaming internet from satellites iis not really a great idea because you are essentially doubling the wireless bandwidth required for a given level of service. Wireless cell service has the big advantage of only needing to use bandwidth for the link from the tower to the client while satellites require a link to the client and a link back to the ground station. There's also the fact that putting a bunch of compute into a satellite is going to be way more expensive due to weight, power and cooling in space not to mention increased cosmic ray interference.
No. A separate wire has its own transceiver. They still have to share the transceiver among all subscribers. Beam forming saves on transmitter power and receiver S/N stats. If it were all just for you, that could improve your bandwidth. But it is not.
Lots of people would like you to think otherwise. Now you know better.
Beamforming phased array MIMO antennae certainly can transmit to and receive from multiple stations via spatially distinct beams in parallel at the same time. I don't know if Starlink satellites do so, but it is technically possible.
No need for a bridge, I have signal processing products with my name on them, thanks. I'm familiar enough with the field to know how such things work.
An active multi-peer beamformer uses a single transciever complex using mathematical signal processing to transcieve multiple data channels to peers in parallel.
Some types of phased array antenna offer multiple focus points at the same time, but the electrical signals must pass through a transceiver complex for the different components to be combined and separated mathematically. In simplified terms, matrix multiplication is used to transform between parallel data channels and parellel antenna components; then the antenna geometry focuses them approximately into parallel beams.
It's not a transceiver per peer, but it behaves a bit like one for the set of focused peers at each time slot. Spatial separation by this method increases aggregate bandwidth, and therefore increases individual peer bandwidth when there is congestion.
In principle you could say each array element has its own transceiver. But the computational load goes up with the number of distinct beams, and tight enough beams to address each subscriber individually would anyway need an array orders of magnitude bigger than the actual satellite. So instead we have binning by solid angle and frequency, and also TDM and software-level addressing. Some of that must be what makes uplink data rate so much lower than downlink.
Point is just that practical limits make things rather worse than what a subscriber might naïvely hope for.
I'm on T-Mobile's home internet. With just the modem chilling in my room, i can get about 200/20. I've bought an external antenna that I'm going to be hooking up to the modem and mounting on top of my house soon. Testing it in my front yard I was able to get 350/25. Latency/Jitter was also significantly better with that antenna.
I'm not super rural, but we have literally no other internet options, are on septic/well water, and are about 10 minutes from the nearest store by car.
I'm in a similar situation. Have TMobile and Starlink RV. Right now, I think TMobile hits faster at its best, but the normal experience is much worse. Sucks, as it is much much cheaper.
Not really, they are being subsidized by US tax payers to provide a service and they are not meeting the terms of the contract/agreement. None of Elon's empires would be successful without US tax payers so I think the article is merely trying to hold them accountable.
It's not anger but I think the article (while probably written by a competitor or lobby) is reminding the public that Musk often makes empty promises and we should not let him continue to be subsidized by the US tax payer for an inability to deliver on time and on budget. I now see Musk also complaining about 5G interfering with Starlink. It's all a game, which is fine, but I dont want to pay for billionaires entertainment.
This is a hollow argument since none of their competitors that also are faring any better either. SpaceX is delivering close to their promise now years before they have to. It's an alarmist piece by teleco like the clock is close to timing out and things are heading south. Over time they will improve the hardware to have higher bandwidth capability, such as with their v2 satellites, with further improvements to the hardware likely later on.
> dont want to pay for billionaires entertainment
It's not "entertainment". It's actually delivering value to underserved customers, there's no need to inject politics or personal vendettas into this.
>This is a hollow argument since none of their competitors that also are faring any better either. SpaceX is delivering close to their promise now years before they have to. It's an alarmist piece by teleco like the clock is close to timing out and things are heading south. Over time they will improve the hardware to have higher bandwidth capability, such as with their v2 satellites, with further improvements to the hardware likely later on.
I hope they improve it, but Musk has a strong history of over promising and under delivering. Time will tell, I do not think this was a alarmist of fluff piece. Merely a reminder of their promises and current results.
> It's not "entertainment". It's actually delivering value to underserved customers, there's no need to inject politics or personal vendettas into this.
This is arguable. Musk depends on tax payer funding to keep SpaceX afloat to get to Mars. Nothing about politics or vendettas, but this is a billionaires joy ride. The US government also has a history of spending money to help the under served which has historically never panned out either.
I'm not a fan of Musk overall, but Starlink is pure gold for us in rural America. Before this, my best option was 25Mbps for $125/mo.
I installed mine about 5 months ago. You really need to put it in a location that has no obstructions for the antenna's oval of coverage. The speed varies a lot but overnight and mornings I get downloads of 90 to 180Mbps. Afternoon and evening the range is 60 to 110Mbps. I measure these speeds myself from actual transfers of large files over the course of about one hour. Now and then I check to see what Ookla - SpeedTest - or Cloudflare report. They never agree with each other, even when running concurrently.
The FCC is not going to use Ookla data. The antennas are self installed. Many will be slowed down by obstructions, bad cabling etc. As mentioned above, many people only test when they have trouble. Once the trouble is fixed the new speeds are not added to the Ookla database.
Viasat is in a sad position. I don't see how they have a future at all. I think they only have two satellites that were launched by cheap Proton rockets. With Russia gone, they would have to pay much more for any future launches. The one thing they can do is spread fear to keep their business afloat a little longer.
It's pure gold for people in rural Australia as well. Our country is extremely vast with most of us concentrated on the cost in major cities. Our fixed internet speeds are not that great at all in major cities, let alone in the country.
Starlink provides fantastic speeds that no other solution can currently provide in the country. It's also not bureaucratically tied with another company that needs to provide the infrastructure. Which means you don't need to go through the hassle of an ISP, then the ISP liasing with the company that actually owns the infrastructure.
100%. My brother and I ordered it for my parents. We had an absolute max of 20 down previously. Dad was able to set it up by himself and we’re north of 200 most of the time. Absolute game changer
I built my own WISP which I have run for 20+ years, to get myself connectivity. Now I'm seriously considering dismantling it because Starlink is almost as fast and way cheaper and less maintenance.
Proton was very unreliable and while the rocket was cheap insurance was incredibly expensive. Proton got destroyed in the market and virtual all new contracts went to SpaceX. Proton has been removed from commercial service and is now only flying for Russia.
Russia is now basically out of the global launch business, there is no coming back after the shanked OneWeb (they will launch on Falcon 9 now).
Even beyond that, Viasat and other will have huge issues. Amazon literally just bought up essentially the whole market of heavy lift for a long time. They essentially bought all available Ariane 6, Vulcan and New Glenn launch.
There literally can not be a series competitor to Starlink outside of Amazon because there literally is not enough global launch capacity (outside of China).
OneWeb Generation 2 sats are contracted to fly on Relativity Space, they have not even made it to orbit with their first rocket and OneWeb already bought flights on their second rocket.
Any other competitors will need to make equally shaky deals with unproven companies, that are promising rockets around 2025 but those will likely be late and even once they fly scaling their operation will take many years after that.
Expect existing companies to announce agreements to fly on RocketLab Neutron and Firefly Beta in the next 2 years. Because otherwise you are not getting a huge constellation into the sky. Except with SpaceX and then you are just funding your competitor.
> Viasat argued in the aforementioned filing that “even if SpaceX were to deploy a full, 4,408-satellite Starlink system, that system would fall short in satisfying SpaceX’s RDOF commitments.”
Well, if their direct competitor says so, case closed!
Is Ookla an official data source for the RDOF evaluation? How does Ookla know what the average speed is? It only knows the average speed of users that do a speed test and most people only do it when they are suspicious of a problem or testing a new setup that is likely not yet fully configured. Typically I use it when I am installing new hardware and I might get 10 bad results and then 1 good result. Once I get the good result I stop. 100 days go by that I don't need to check it at all until I have a slow connection and then I do a speed check and see that it is slow. Seems like it would be highly biased towards testing under the poorest conditions.
There isn't an "official data source" for RDOF evaluation. ISPs are required to carry out measurements in the markets where they've accepted funds. Measurements are carried out on a sampled subset of their customers, and a large set of frequent measurements has to be produced from each customer. Measurements have to be conducted to servers in specific locations (you can't just test to a server two miles down the road inside the ISP's network). The requirements are pretty rigorous and not straightforward to meet (e.g. if a customer switches their router off for a day, then that can disqualify their measurements entirely - you need a sample every hour, every day for at least a week in the quarter). They need to submit these measurements to USAC at the end of the quarter, to demonstrate that at least X% of measurements met the target of Y (it varies by metric).
Generally speaking, crowdsourced measurements (whereby you have loads of users but each running very few tests) aren't well suited to these requirements.
No, in b2b setting, checking internet speed happens on regular bases in order to monitor network performance or to confirm compliance with the SLA. Have you ever wondered how they do their money when the browser test is free?
What a joke, Starlink is the best remote service for broadband, and there are no others. Please don't say "HughesNet" or some geosync service with a straight face.
Of course the FCC and its zombie representatives from legacy telco will be assholes to Starlink, but nothing else will actually get you service from a warzone, fire zone, a distant mountain range, central Africa, etc.
If legacy telco was in charge of starlink, the FCC would make the standards whatever they wanted.
The other telcos take years and years of rural broadband funding from Congress and just BRAZENLY pocket it and tell the American people: "Fuck you, see how much we own the government? THIS MUCH".
Starlink provides a paradigm-changing useful service and you get crap headlines straight from the lobbyist/astroturfer's mouth. Why can't we have nice things? This.
Starlink could double or triple their price and they would probably have all their subscribers filled.
Think about what Starlink means to Africa, central asia, interior australia, remote south africa. The economic/information access to those areas without tens of thousands of 5G towers and laying thousands of miles of fiber.
The amount of humans this brings silicon valley's big companies into contact with probably increased a by a billion or more. They should be sending billions of dollars to SpaceX to get the flotilla deployed ASAP.
Nowhere does the article claim that the Starlink service is poor, or that other services come close.
The RDOF auction had specific criteria, and as noted in the article, participants could bid at four tiers: 25/3, 50/5, 100/20 and 1000/500 Mbps. Simply put, Starlink bid at 100/20, and they have an obligation to meet that in order to qualify for the fund.
There's plenty of evidence that they can do just that, albeit with some open questions about how things will go as they continue to roll out the network and take on more subscribers.
I don't understand the anger throughout the rest of this comment. Geos that qualify for RDOF funding are just a subset of Starlink's market, and arguably any Internet provider bidding for those funds should be held to the standard set when bidding for those funds.
It's fine (and justified, IMO) to be angry about how crappy telcos have been for years, and their misuse of funding is certainly upsetting, but are you suggesting that Starlink should somehow be absolved of their responsibilities because of past transgressions by legacy telcos?
> Why can't we have nice things? This.
What is the nice thing here that we cannot have? Why?
> Think about what Starlink means to Africa, central asia, interior australia, remote south africa.
I think the value of Starlink is tremendous hard to estimate, especially in these traditionally underserved regions. But how does the RDOF funding conversation have anything to do with that?
Most of Africa and central Asia cannot afford a terminal. Australian outback is too sparsely populated to matter, economically.
You seem to imagine Starlink will be motivated to behave better than other telecomm companies. I have no clue why you imagine this. I expect the more power they amass, the more they will use. On their own behalf, not yours.
You think subscriber agreements will permit using it as the uplink for a local ISP? Do they now?
Seems like that would cost rather more. You could imagine customer ... sparse ... areas might get a discount, but you could also imagine not. Anyway they will need to maximize revenue to pay for lofting new satellites, what, 4000/y? 6000/y? as those age out.
1) hell yes starlinks will be shared by entire remote villages, it happened in the volcano eruption in Tonga.
2) starlink would love the positive press of third world connectivity enablement
3) remember, starlink is a low-flying satellite flotilla. So the satellites over remote expansive areas aren't being used as much, and so revenue from central africa can be priced differently to get whatever you can out of the geographic areas the satellites fly over.
Revenue is revenue, even if it's only 10% of your US revenue. As you say, the goal will be to get revenue for the time the satellite is aloft. If you get a million/day while it passes over the US, then 100,000/day as it passes over South America, well, that's still money.
Africa is 1.2 billion people, South America is 422 million, the satellites fly over regardless. 1.6 billion people is a lot of potential revenue, even if third world.
Starlink is limited in how much attention they can devote to such customization, and even by how complicated their billing and payment systems would get. So picking up those subscribers, even where substantial money is in principle on the table, will necessarily lag far behind.
Its really not that complicated. Sure its some software you have to make, but lets not pretend this is some incredibly complex thing.
And they don't have to pick all subscribes now, they just need to continually grow subscribers over the next couple of years and add 1 country after the other. Exactly as they have been doing so far.
> You think subscriber agreements will permit using it as the uplink for a local ISP?
I think in the richer countries those will be special agreements, but in many places it will just be done and SpaceX will likely not spend much resources to prevent it.
> lofting new satellites, what, 4000/y? 6000/y? as those age out.
Yes, but their cost curves of all the major pieces of the puzzle get cheaper with each generation as volume goes up. Starship will make a huge difference, ground antennas will go closer and closer to being consumer electronics and they are working on sat mass manufacture.
People in the developing world don't care about those agreements. Ultimately there's probably a way to make the numbers work, like charging 5x the price for 20 customers sharing one dish.
It mean pretty much nothing. SpaceX has 10 years (2028) to get things up and running. If Starship isn't running in a year or two SpaceX has more trouble than just the RDOF competition. 2.0 Starlink sats are theoretically a 10x capacity improvement and it NEEDS Starship for launch. Falcon can't lift it.
Pretty sure this is just a hit piece directly or indirectly influenced by Viasat. Ookla results mean nothing to RDOF, nor do any results today mean anything for a 2028 goal.
If anything, it's a great sign that v1 of a new service (which is only ~15% deployed) is even close to the RDOF commitments. V2 satellites and p2p laser will be inlay before 2028, along with far more terrestrial POPs, which will all improve service.
Totally agree this is a hit piece; pretty much everyone who has taken federal money to deliver rural broadband has done far worse than Starlink. That being said...
> V2 satellites and p2p laser will be inlay before 2028, along with far more terrestrial POPs, which will all improve service.
Is this something that there is more evidence for than just "Musk says so" since he is notorious for promising results on unrealistic timelines.
"The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has granted SpaceX permission to fly 12,000 Starlink satellites" [1]
"As of early January 2022, SpaceX had launched more than 1,900 Starlink satellites overall."[ibid]
They've launched only 15% of the satellites that they are authorized to launch and they are launching more at a pretty rapid pace. I doubt they are too worried about meeting their bandwidth requirements.
The more subscribers they add, the less bandwidth is available for each. Adding more birds does not increase overall bandwidth, it just decreases the number of subscribers using each bird. But only a tiny fraction of birds are in range of any subscribers, at any time, so all the subscribers are piled onto those few, and most of them on even fewer.
To be a viable business, able to pay for and launch new birds at the rate they age out and burn up, they need to grow the number of subscribers way, way faster than they can add birds, until bandwidth available per subscriber gets very low.
Money available to pay for buying and launching birds is only a fraction of income, because they also need to pay for trunk bandwidth, add hub stations, and subsidize terminals, which cost way more than the entry price. Trunk bandwidth cost increases with subscriber count.
Most potential subscribers who could afford the service have better terrestrial service already. So it is far from clear, even if they could supply the bandwidth for as many subscribers as they will need, that they can get that many. They could get more by cutting prices, but then take in too little to keep their constellation filled out.
Government subsidies could paper over the difference, but most subscribers will be in countries other than the few writing checks.
> The more subscribers they add, the less bandwidth is available for each. Adding more birds does not increase overall bandwidth, it just decreases the number of subscribers using each bird. But only a small fraction of birds are in range of any subscribers, at any time, so all the subscribers are piled onto those few.
"SpaceX's initial application to the Federal Communications Commission stated that each Starlink satellite would have the capacity for 17 to 23 Gbps" [1]
a) More satellites means fewer subscribers on each satellite to share the 17-23Gbps bandwidth per satellite. If (when) they get the satellite-to-satellite communications going, that will offload a lot of relay traffic from the satellite-earth links freeing up that bandwidth to be used by subscribers as well.
b) StarLink is already limiting subscriptions based on service area and satellite coverage. When The Man comes measuring, they should be OK.
At issue is whether it is viable without subsidy from non-subscribing taxpayers. Betting not. Betting he is relying on subscribers having enough political muscle to make that happen indefinitely.
Musk has said that the current version of Satellite V1 is "financially weak", that V2 is necessary to achieve their bandwidth goals.
> The consequences for SpaceX if we can not get enough reliable Raptors made is that we then can’t fly Starship, which means we then can’t fly Starlink Satellite V2 (Falcon has neither the volume nor the mass to orbit needed for satellite V2). Satellite V1, by itself, is financially weak, while V2 is strong.
> In addition, we are spooling up terminal production to several million units per year, which will consume massive capital, assuming that satellite V2 will be on orbit to handle the bandwidth demand. These terminals will be useless otherwise.
In other words, he agrees with my assessment. I conclude that he is counting on those subsidies continuing indefinitely. He might strong-arm other governments to pony up so their politically better-served citizens or subjects can use it, at the expense of non-subscribers.
I am still confused about ground station density. As I understand it, the ground stations and satellites both use beam-forming to direct their signals. Early on I heard conjecture that this would limit the number of ground stations that could be deployed in a given area. At best, this would have required splitting up bandwidth between ground stations in dense areas. Could this account for the lower than expected speeds?
I had actually gone so far as to assume that the early semi-randomness of their beta testing was partly explained by this limitation after hearing countless complaints of "my neighbor got theirs, where is mine?". I also assumed that they were going to make hybridized 5G ground stations for deployment in dense areas.
Those assumptions were dashed when I stayed at a VRBO with a starlink connection, and noticed that both the houses on either side also had their own dishes. I chatted with a neighbor, and we both ran a speed test at the same time, yielding ~90/15.
I tried to do a few months ago some back of the envelope math about Starlink.
They are aiming for 12 000 satellites. A given satellite at the altitude Starlink uses should be visible at any average time from about 3% of the surface of the Earth. That would on average be 360 satellites visible from a given spot if they were all spread out uniformly throughout the sky. But the orbits are such that they don't go far north or south. There will be more visible in the areas they can serve and few to none visible outside those areas. I don't know how big the concentration into the service area is, so I'm just going to guess and say 1 000 visible to a given customer at a given time.
Their next generation satellites are specced at having 80 Gbps bandwidth to the ground, which is enough for 800 simultaneous downloads at the full advertised speed.
But most users do not go all out downloading all the time. I've read that most Comcast users only reach about 1/4 of Comcast's monthly data cap, which corresponds to an average use of 1 Mbps, which is 1/100th of the advertised Starlink speed.
Assuming Starlink users also use an average over time of just 1% of their advertised maximum, we get one satellite could support 80 000 users. Taking into account 1 000 satellites visible at any one time from any one average user location, and the area covered by those satellites, I got that Starlink could handle on average 11 users per square mile or 4.4 users per square kilometer.
Note that this doesn't mean that there can't be spots with higher user density. Just that the average density over the service area would need to not exceed that. Islands of density in a sea of very sparsely populated land would be OK.
My calculations assumes that any user could use any visible satellite. I think they are more constrained than that which probably means my allowable density estimates are a little high.
Whilst I agree with most of what you wrote, you need to adjust your thinking on this bit:
> ... most Comcast users only reach about 1/4 of Comcast's monthly data cap, which corresponds to an average use of 1 Mbps ...
Household internet consumption, on average, varies greatly during the day. Most bandwidth usage is from streaming video, and that is mostly done when people are awake, and for a lot of people only in the evenings.
Your 1% calculation is made with the assumption that usage is constant, and is spread evenly across every minute of the day/month. In reality it is mostly all happening in a six hour period (that's an educated guess). Starlink would have to service this peaky traffic, your numbers are 4x out.
They publish a different number of satellites in every single place I have read. Some places they say 19000, some even more.
Guessing that in places where the cost of keeping the constellation filled out is considered, they quote smaller numbers, and for subscribers per satellite, higher numbers.
I pretty much go by the list on wikipedia, which reflects what the FCC has approved. That total is about 12k by 2027, and half that by 2024. I don't see the FCC approving more units until at least the 2024 benchmark, and they are currently only 40% of the way there.
Yes, but it’s broken up into thousands of different areas and Starlink didn’t agree to provide service to every single one.
Looking at this map: https://www.starlink.com/map about half of the US is at maximum capacity but because the RDOF has such granularity they could pick and pick the lest congested areas for their bids.
PS: The granularity is reasonable when you consider a Texas ISP might have agreed to build out capacity in Texas but not North Dakota.
Starlink seems to be impacted by obstructions but can still function and this would impact Ookla's numbers significantly. I don't think it falls on SpaceX to go trim the tree that is impacting a customer's speed. The silliest part to me is that Ookla is ignoring latency -- it's not mentioned in the article at all. Other satellite providers are literally >600ms while Starlink is <100ms.
Other satellite providers didn't tell the federal government they can handle 100mbps in exchange for a huge pot of government money...
This is the issue in a nutshell: Starlink agreed to meet a specific threshold in exchange for government funds, and these tests suggest that Starlink will have difficulty accomplishing this if they can't manage to do it when their network isn't saturated.
My experience, lately (the last ~2 months) is that Starlink is oversold. I switch to my backup LTE connection during prime time evening hours in order to stream anything at a reasonable clip. Perhaps it is my base station that's overwhelmed, but I'm not that impressed anymore.
It's going to be a moving target. Just guessing I would say I average 90/10 in Ohio as of late. Last summer it was 180/30 or so.
The thing is they have <3,000 operational satellites from a planned constellation of >30,000, so it's currently oversold but capacity is a moving target.
See today's FCC ruling^ which calls this out for your answer:
"We conclude that grant of SpaceX’s requests for ESIM authorizations and Kepler’s request for ESV authority, including for operations in the 12.2-12.7 GHz band, as conditioned and set forth herein, will serve the public interest by enabling SpaceX and Kepler to offer expanded broadband capabilities and serve unserved and underserved areas."
Starlink is a huge waste of money. Laying optical fiber from point A to point B will always be cheaper and faster and doesn't saturate valuable orbital space which is a scarce resource.
It's a service tailored to suit the needs of yacht owners, cabin owners and the RV enthusiasts. Quite simply: tech-bros, cryptomillionaires etc.
Musk always targets these types because they are the ones having lots free time on their hands and the biggest social megaphone provided by their rich bank account. They can use such megaphone to shove down working class people's throats a marketing campaign and a stock promotion for a service they'll never use or need. Not to mention subsidies.
> valuable orbital space which is a scarce resource.
It really isn't. There are lots of plans and each plan is way, way, way bigger then the surface of the earth. You could literally a single constellation of millions sats and still have lots of space left over.
The actively monitored and controlled sats are not really the problem in orbit and Starlink are low enough that even if they fail, they will burn very fast.
> It's a service tailored to suit the needs of yacht owners, cabin owners and the RV enthusiasts. Quite simply: tech-bros, cryptomillionaires etc.
Nonsense. Its service tailed to literally everybody who doesn't live in a dense environment. In fact, its a of huge benefit to fringe communities such as some native americans. And I am sure all people in the Ukraine who use it are not 'tech-bros'.
You can take 1 Starlink antenna and connect a whole village to the internet with decent speed.
Its a huge advantage for farming, mining and lots industrial activity in low density areas. I am sure the workers in those place would like to watch Netflix and Skype their families. Same goes for people who work on all kinds of ships.
> for a service they'll never use or need.
All those poor dumb people who don't understand that they don't need the internet. They should just by happy not having video chats with their families.
> In fact, its a of huge benefit to fringe communities
Anything that is "fringe" doesn't move the needle in any meaningful way in terms of global quality of life. Musk companies are synonym for fringe.
You know what's not fringe? Pfizer, Moderna, Exxon, Shell, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, BP, JPMorgan, HSBC, VW, Toyota...you know the companies that you see everywhere and that everybody uses.
They have the bad habit of doing it quietly instead of monopolizing the airwaves like mr.Musk does with his empty promises about the far future and pie-in-the-sky tweets.
When you move the needle in terms of quality of life on a global scale you don't need to fool people telling about how you are gonna do so in the far future because duh you are already doing it today.
Yeah manufacturing companies that have existed for much longer are more likely to have sold more products so you see those products far more often. Amazing, how did you come up with that insight? And internet companies are of course different in terms of how easy it is to reach people.
Tesla went from a few 1000s to now more then 10% of what Toyota does while producing far more next generation BEV then both of them together. Tesla are by far the most common BEV on the streets. In terms of yearly production they are getting close to companies like BMW who have 100 years of history. And they are continuing to grow for the next couple years at least and will end up being one of the larger automotive groups on the plant. While being the largest produce of grid batteries.
And yes actually improving the lives of 1% of global people who live in places not easily reached with traditional infrastructure is actually a very large achievement for any single company. Not to mention changing the airline and shipping industry. And that isn't all that SpaceX does by a long shot either.
> quietly instead of monopolizing the airwaves
Given OneWeb, Kupiter and many other planed constellation are managed to share them and there is no monopoly at all.
> When you move the needle in terms of quality of life on a global scale you don't need to fool people telling about how you are gonna do so in the far future because duh you are already doing it today.
So nobody should ever start thinking about improving global quality of life because if they were going to do it, they would already do it. Great way to approach live.
And given the absurd amount of advertisement and political influences the company you mentions buy and their long track record of breaking law your claim that those companies don't need to 'fool' people is hilarious. VW didn't need to fool people, the Disel-scandal never happened.
> So nobody should ever start thinking about improving global quality of life because if they were going to do it, they would already do it. Great way to approach live.
Thinking? Yes. Broadcasting and oversaturating the airwaves to fool people into believing you are doing way more than what you are actually doing if you look at the raw numbers, that's a totally different thing and also the problem that I have with the whole enterprise.
> VW didn't need to fool people, the Disel-scandal never happened.
VW committed fraud on consumers' behalf so that they'd have a cheaper and more reliable car instead of a more expensive and less durable ones due to the environmental regulations which raise costs to build a diesel engine (and also dramatically reduce their lifespan which can easily reach 500k miles if you get rid of all the envioronmental stuff). Huge difference, in my view VW is out there taking one for their clients so that they can sidestep ridiculous environmental regulations and enjoy a greater quality of life. Tesla is out there to screw their clients as much as possible with faulty features, an autopilot which crashes into things and misaligned panels all around which significantly deteriorate their clients' quality of life.
VW takes a bullet for you, whereas Tesla pushes you in the line of fire to use you as a human shield. Huge difference.
"By the end of 2014, America will have been charged about $400 billion by the local phone incumbents, Verizon, AT&T and CenturyLink, for a fiber optic future that never showed up."
Given that the cable companies pocketed huge amounts of money for rural expansion without ever delivering, I doubt the RDOF winnings will be clawed back.
Depends on location. They have arrangements with Google to share networking from their datacenters, so presumably those form a large portion of the backbone in the US.
>All of this data begs the question: What happens if Starlink can’t meet the 100/20 Mbps speed obligations attached to its Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) projects?
Am I the only one who raise my eyebrows? What's the median for wireless internet delivery? What does that has to do with RDOF's completion requirement (by 2028)? How is StarLink doing at this point comparing to the other RDOF winners in terms of deployment?
From the actual Ookla article-
>while Starlink download speeds were slower than fixed broadband for all providers combined in the U.S. (144.22 Mbps) and Canada (106.86 Mbps).
Oh 144.22 Mbps is the industry median of _wired_ broadband. Well no shi* wireless is slower. Starlink can always deploy more satellites to service the demand. Is this a hit piece on Starlink?