Surveys: More Americans Want Starlink Than 5G Home Internet(pcmag.com)
pcmag.com
Surveys: More Americans Want Starlink Than 5G Home Internet
https://www.pcmag.com/news/surveys-more-americans-want-starlink-than-5g-home-internet
69 comments
I'm not surprised. Consumers have been subjected to at good 20 years now of being conditioned to associate anything that matches the pattern /\dG/ with increasingly exaggerated, hypoxic, and unbelievable sales pitches. The only reason US telcos haven't been properly called on their BS is that people (understandably) don't see taking their money and going home as a realistic option.
Because the modis operandi of telcos has been "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further" for as long as they have existed.
The spokesperson for Verizon was literally the voice of Darth Vader.
IMO coop-owned fiber is the best answer in the US. Low ping, truly no caps, and generally costs less than the incumbent monopoly. With everyone having done so much tele* over the past year, now is the time to push for it in your community.
IMO coop-owned fiber is the best answer in the US. Low ping, truly no caps, and generally costs less than the incumbent monopoly. With everyone having done so much tele* over the past year, now is the time to push for it in your community.
I worked for Cox when one of the first cities in Louisiana voted for municipal broadband. We had terrible service in the city and were not going to spend the few million to fix it. After the city had that vote, in one day they established a 2 million dollar legal and advertising fund to stop the city. And they did hold them up in court for years. I got out of that industry pretty quick.
FYI, it's 'modus operandi'. (:
Agree wholeheartedly with the typical stance of large telcos in the US.
Agree wholeheartedly with the typical stance of large telcos in the US.
It comes down to data caps, in my experience. Especially in rural areas.
My current options:
Dial-up (the 'high speed' option offered by big telco [F** you AT&T]): No cap, $50/mo
Satellite: 15gb/mo cap, $80/mo
Cell: "No cap", but throttled to 1x at 2gb/mo/line. $138/mo for 2 lines.
Thank Satan/God/Buddha/Whoever, the local ISP secured a rural internet grant to run fiber past our house this year.
My current options:
Dial-up (the 'high speed' option offered by big telco [F** you AT&T]): No cap, $50/mo
Satellite: 15gb/mo cap, $80/mo
Cell: "No cap", but throttled to 1x at 2gb/mo/line. $138/mo for 2 lines.
Thank Satan/God/Buddha/Whoever, the local ISP secured a rural internet grant to run fiber past our house this year.
I have Starlink and a T-Mobile 5G home device (largish gray cylinder).
T-Mobile: $50/month. No data caps. ~40-50mb/s down, ~5-10mb/s up. Intermittent connectivity drops (30-60 seconds at a time) and stalls. Line of sight to the tower. Device indicates I'm on LTE as 5G hasn't been enabled yet (either on the device or tower).
Starlink: $100/month. No data caps. ~100mb/s down and up. No intermittency or stalls. Kids love watching Dishy acquire satellites.
If your budget affords it, I would recommend Starlink.
T-Mobile: $50/month. No data caps. ~40-50mb/s down, ~5-10mb/s up. Intermittent connectivity drops (30-60 seconds at a time) and stalls. Line of sight to the tower. Device indicates I'm on LTE as 5G hasn't been enabled yet (either on the device or tower).
Starlink: $100/month. No data caps. ~100mb/s down and up. No intermittency or stalls. Kids love watching Dishy acquire satellites.
If your budget affords it, I would recommend Starlink.
Is "no data caps" sustainable for Starlink?
In my city, we had a wimax provider set up shop a while back (10 years now, I guess?). At first the promised, and delivered on, high speed and no data caps. Then more people started signing up, and clogging up the network, and they ended up imposing throttling and caps to try and deal with it.
In my city, we had a wimax provider set up shop a while back (10 years now, I guess?). At first the promised, and delivered on, high speed and no data caps. Then more people started signing up, and clogging up the network, and they ended up imposing throttling and caps to try and deal with it.
> Is "no data caps" sustainable for Starlink?
Maybe not. This was the first hit for "starlink downlink bandwidth"
https://www.lightreading.com/4g3gwifi/starlinks-network-face...:
> Starlink, the satellite Internet provider from Elon Musk's SpaceX, will be able to support just 485,000 simultaneous users at 100Mbit/s across the entire US, according to one firm's new estimates. And that kind of performance won't even be available until the end of 2026, when Starlink floods Earth's skies with up to 12,000 satellites.
I don't really understand the fascination with wireless for fixed services. If you can run a wire, you should, because wireless is basically just using the air as a single shared wire, and the longer the range the more people have to share that one wire.
Maybe not. This was the first hit for "starlink downlink bandwidth"
https://www.lightreading.com/4g3gwifi/starlinks-network-face...:
> Starlink, the satellite Internet provider from Elon Musk's SpaceX, will be able to support just 485,000 simultaneous users at 100Mbit/s across the entire US, according to one firm's new estimates. And that kind of performance won't even be available until the end of 2026, when Starlink floods Earth's skies with up to 12,000 satellites.
I don't really understand the fascination with wireless for fixed services. If you can run a wire, you should, because wireless is basically just using the air as a single shared wire, and the longer the range the more people have to share that one wire.
This. I used to have an RV and looked into satellite options in case we ever wanted to go fully remote. They were pricy but justifiable when you need it for something like that.
Where I am, my Spectrum service is fantastic for a reasonable price and I can’t imagine justifying paying for Starlink at my house. If anything the only upgrade I ever expect to make is when AT&T fiber finally makes it to me.
Even then, I’m pretty happy with the TV package and my TiVo units so switching to a non-cable provider is questionable if I don’t really need it.
Where I am, my Spectrum service is fantastic for a reasonable price and I can’t imagine justifying paying for Starlink at my house. If anything the only upgrade I ever expect to make is when AT&T fiber finally makes it to me.
Even then, I’m pretty happy with the TV package and my TiVo units so switching to a non-cable provider is questionable if I don’t really need it.
> I don't really understand the fascination with wireless for fixed services. If you can run a wire, you should
Sometimes the economics don't play out for being able to run a wire. Often times things like water towers will have fiber conduit run to them as the city will want to have monitoring equipment and their own RF services operating on them. So it becomes cheap for a WISP to also put their own equipment on one of the taller structures in town. Split it out to several different sectors and you can carry dozens of customers at decent speeds for far less than the cost of digging the fiber to connect a single customer, meaning the payoff time of the equipment install is in months to a single year instead of a decade.
Sometimes the economics don't play out for being able to run a wire. Often times things like water towers will have fiber conduit run to them as the city will want to have monitoring equipment and their own RF services operating on them. So it becomes cheap for a WISP to also put their own equipment on one of the taller structures in town. Split it out to several different sectors and you can carry dozens of customers at decent speeds for far less than the cost of digging the fiber to connect a single customer, meaning the payoff time of the equipment install is in months to a single year instead of a decade.
>I don't really understand the fascination with wireless for fixed services. If you can run a wire, you should, because wireless is basically just using the air as a single shared wire, and the longer the range the more people have to share that one wire.
I generally agree, but here in Kansas we have long sight lines. On our farm we use fixed wireless to the grain elevator three miles away. The alternative would be running 1.5 miles of wire for three potential customers.
For years we had Hughes satellite service. Compared to fixed wireless it had higher latency (the speed of light is too slow to geosync), usage caps (none now), and was twice the cost.
I generally agree, but here in Kansas we have long sight lines. On our farm we use fixed wireless to the grain elevator three miles away. The alternative would be running 1.5 miles of wire for three potential customers.
For years we had Hughes satellite service. Compared to fixed wireless it had higher latency (the speed of light is too slow to geosync), usage caps (none now), and was twice the cost.
I grew up in an area with forested, rolling hills. Terrestrial wireless will forever be a challenge, and even geostationary satellites are troublesome unless shaving your property bald is your bag of chips. (Which, if it were, why are you living in the northwoods instead of the great plains?) But line of sight going straight up is usually pretty decent.
Starlink is going to make a killing in areas like that.
Starlink is going to make a killing in areas like that.
> I generally agree, but here in Kansas we have long sight lines. On our farm we use fixed wireless to the grain elevator three miles away. The alternative would be running 1.5 miles of wire for three potential customers.
Yeah, I totally agree. There are definitely cases where the economics of running a wire doesn't make sense, though what you describe seems a lot more desirable than Starlink. Generally, I'd think you'd you want to get a wire as close as possible, and minimize the wireless distance. So wires are better than 5G/Wifi, and 5G/Wifi is better than Starlink.
Yeah, I totally agree. There are definitely cases where the economics of running a wire doesn't make sense, though what you describe seems a lot more desirable than Starlink. Generally, I'd think you'd you want to get a wire as close as possible, and minimize the wireless distance. So wires are better than 5G/Wifi, and 5G/Wifi is better than Starlink.
> I don't really understand the fascination with wireless for fixed services.
The local DSL can barely reach 5 Mbps -- direct quote from the guy who installs them around here. The local cable television doesn't support cable internet. I'm currently on a point-to-point wifi link to a small local ISP, and while the wifi works perfectly, the ISP's uplink is often congested. I'm quite eager for Starlink to reach my latitude, just to shake up the competition.
The local DSL can barely reach 5 Mbps -- direct quote from the guy who installs them around here. The local cable television doesn't support cable internet. I'm currently on a point-to-point wifi link to a small local ISP, and while the wifi works perfectly, the ISP's uplink is often congested. I'm quite eager for Starlink to reach my latitude, just to shake up the competition.
>will be able to support just 485,000 simultaneous users at 100Mbit/s across the entire US
I mean sure, but presumably more considering they aren't going to be super correlated?
Based on a quick search, it appears that average bandwidth used by cable subscribers (who only use internet and not TV) is probably a little over 1 Mbps (and that's higher than the median) so it seems like your figures imply the ability to handle around 30-40 million customers.
I mean sure, but presumably more considering they aren't going to be super correlated?
Based on a quick search, it appears that average bandwidth used by cable subscribers (who only use internet and not TV) is probably a little over 1 Mbps (and that's higher than the median) so it seems like your figures imply the ability to handle around 30-40 million customers.
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in a lot of areas of the US, you can't and telco's won't run a wire.
my sister lives an hour outside of phoenix. her dsl was down for days and Verizon told her that not enough people in her area had complained for them to do anything about it.
my sister lives an hour outside of phoenix. her dsl was down for days and Verizon told her that not enough people in her area had complained for them to do anything about it.
Classic ethernet.. in space!
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I struggle to see how "data caps" would solve this issue. The problem isn't that the total sum of data transiting the network is somehow more than Starlink (or others) can handle--it's that the _burst usage_ is exceeding the network's capacity.
The policy of data caps certainly reduces all data usage, but it's a nuclear bomb to solve an anthill: they should just do a decent job of QoSing their traffic. Say "peak hours" speed is, I dunno, 15mb/s or something, and then offpeak is full speed. People can do their game/os/whatever updates off peak then, and as long as everyone isn't streaming netflix and downloading iOS updates while you're on a zoom call, you should be fine.
The policy of data caps certainly reduces all data usage, but it's a nuclear bomb to solve an anthill: they should just do a decent job of QoSing their traffic. Say "peak hours" speed is, I dunno, 15mb/s or something, and then offpeak is full speed. People can do their game/os/whatever updates off peak then, and as long as everyone isn't streaming netflix and downloading iOS updates while you're on a zoom call, you should be fine.
My guess is that it's better understood as a social solution than as a technical one. Basically just a way to chase the torrenters and Netflix junkies off of your network. Because it hurts them a lot, and it doesn't hurt the most profitable customers at all.
It's one of those "no data caps but don't use more than 1 TB every month" kind of things.
How is the real world latency? In the past latency has made satellite almost unusable, but those were geosynchronous sats, not ones in very low orbits like Starlink. (They're claiming 20ms, but I get 9ms on my fibre and I've seen reports that the real latency is somewhere around 50ms.)
Fast enough for me to participate in Zoom chats and no one knows my bits are flying through space.
Could you measure it for us?
Will report back.
Username reminds me of an old saying in charities etc - if you want something doing, give it to someone who has too much to do already. Very appropriate..!
30ms-50ms average, some spikes up to 100ms but rare enough that it hasn't caused me any issues.
All of the real world numbers I've seen from users have been lower than cell latency.
If real world latency is 50ms, that would put it in the same ballpark as cable internet, wouldn't it?
speedtest.net consistently shows pings in the 38-45 ms range for me with starlink, with 150 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up. I've been able to video chat and game without any issues. My previous satellite connection was nearly the same price as starlink, for only 100GB, pings of 600-800ms and only 1-5 Mbps up/down. For those of us poorly served Starlink is an absolute quantum leap.
I've personally seen as low as 30ms, but also up to 60ms. I also have a bit of packet loss, but my dish is just sitting on the ground in my wooded back yard right now. Once the weather turns back towards just being cold, I'm going to move the dish to my roof and see if that helps the packet loss. Maybe being able to see more of the sky will help get a more consistent latency too, but I'd guess more satellites are really going to be the fix there.
Budget? Here in NH, Atlantic Broadband is $100 per month after the six month offer expires, so same as Starlink.
You do have to amortize the $500 dish, but even that is only $40 more a month for the just the first year and $10, if spread over four years.
You do have to amortize the $500 dish, but even that is only $40 more a month for the just the first year and $10, if spread over four years.
T-mobile is capped sort of, once you hit like 50 GB you are throttled to worthless speeds.
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Not on home internet. I have the 4G version and used something like 1.5TB last month with no slowdowns (mostly just streaming 4K content)
Check it out here...
https://www.t-mobile.com/isp
No price increase, no contract, no hardware fees, no data cap, $50 per month. With no commitment I am think of giving it a shot.
https://www.t-mobile.com/isp
No price increase, no contract, no hardware fees, no data cap, $50 per month. With no commitment I am think of giving it a shot.
Mildly interesting fact: the USDA issues grants for broadband development (in the US, obviously): https://www.usda.gov/reconnect
>> the local ISP secured a rural internet grant
Not Satan. The federal government who setup the grants. The state government who licensed the experts who did the work. The local governments who issued the permits and made sure they didn't cut into anything. And the IRS who collected the taxes that paid for the grants. All hail our functioning socialist system.
Not Satan. The federal government who setup the grants. The state government who licensed the experts who did the work. The local governments who issued the permits and made sure they didn't cut into anything. And the IRS who collected the taxes that paid for the grants. All hail our functioning socialist system.
"socialism is when the government does stuff. And it's more socialism the more stuff it does. And if it does a real lot of stuff then it's communism"
I do expect SpaceX to eventually start acting like a legacy communications provider. They don’t seem to be right now, which makes them the most compelling choice on the market for me.
Just wait until their in-home boxes start crapping out because the software burned out the RAM from writing too many logs.
If what you described were even possible, I’d buy a new Dishy McFuckface every month if it meant never talking to Centurylink again.
Generally RAM doesn't burn out, so I don't think that will be the reason.
My guess it will be around capacity, though if the LEO ISP market has multiple players all covering the same areas, there is a chance we don't fall into the market segmentation we have now since there will be multiple options.
My guess it will be around capacity, though if the LEO ISP market has multiple players all covering the same areas, there is a chance we don't fall into the market segmentation we have now since there will be multiple options.
5G is mostly an advertising gimmick at this point. I've studied the 5G engineering documentation and there are some good ideas in there but it's not going to give most consumers anything fundamentally better than what they have now, even when it's built out. And even then it won't help rural consumers get better internet. And since it's coming from the cell providers everybody expects they'll just game it as yet another monopolistic revenue extraction tool.
Contrast with Starlink which will help rural consumers get better internet and introduce real competition into the marketplace, and the advantage is clear.
Contrast with Starlink which will help rural consumers get better internet and introduce real competition into the marketplace, and the advantage is clear.
Wouldn't decent 5G coverage require a large amounts of masts? Starlink just seems more reasonable for areas with low populations and large distances.
If it's true that 5G has a range of only ~300m, then, in the area where I grew up, we'd probably have needed one tower for every 1-2 houses.
So yeah, seems like an urban tech to me. In rural areas, it would degrade into a Rube Goldberg version of fiber.
So yeah, seems like an urban tech to me. In rural areas, it would degrade into a Rube Goldberg version of fiber.
There are multiple versions of 5G. Some are fast and have a short range (think 1gbps) others are slower but have longer range.
I’m in a rural/urban transition area and we have a solid 5G signal that gives me 200mbps on my phone.
I’m in a rural/urban transition area and we have a solid 5G signal that gives me 200mbps on my phone.
> 200mbps
So 4G speeds then .. (assuming the phone used is a modern device)
So 4G speeds then .. (assuming the phone used is a modern device)
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In Northern Ontario where I'm located, I think the local rural ISP's are going to die out pretty quickly. They all rely on huge government grants to build towers that will provide shoddy internet to 100 people. We're getting more and more clients ordering Starlink dishes and if the numbers are anything like what they're saying they're getting it's not even a competition.
Had an interesting experience with Comcast recently.
They send me an email stating that I have exceeded the 1.2TB monthly cap on my Unlimited plan, but that I can upgrade to a Truly Unlimited plan for another $25/mo.
I go to their website and apparently the upgrade is $30/mo if I want to use my own equipment but $25/mo if I use theirs. That makes no sense, but whatever. I sign up.
A few days later their integrated modem/wireless router shows up. I forget about it.
A week or so after that, late morning on a weekday, my internet goes down. I was in the middle of a work Zoom and my kids were on Zoom for school. Terrible timing. Turns out, Comcast turned off my internet until I connected the new equipment and signed up for the "new" service.
I was pretty livid. Researched Starlink. Hmm, 100-150Mb/s. Let me see what I'm getting from Comcast.....run a speed test.....389Mb/s. Oh well, guess I'm staying.
They send me an email stating that I have exceeded the 1.2TB monthly cap on my Unlimited plan, but that I can upgrade to a Truly Unlimited plan for another $25/mo.
I go to their website and apparently the upgrade is $30/mo if I want to use my own equipment but $25/mo if I use theirs. That makes no sense, but whatever. I sign up.
A few days later their integrated modem/wireless router shows up. I forget about it.
A week or so after that, late morning on a weekday, my internet goes down. I was in the middle of a work Zoom and my kids were on Zoom for school. Terrible timing. Turns out, Comcast turned off my internet until I connected the new equipment and signed up for the "new" service.
I was pretty livid. Researched Starlink. Hmm, 100-150Mb/s. Let me see what I'm getting from Comcast.....run a speed test.....389Mb/s. Oh well, guess I'm staying.
Can you just plug in your networking great into the Comcast box and ignore their wifi?
No, they literally turned off my internet, putting me into their walled garden. Any outbound connection attempt was redirected to their captive portal telling me to install the new gear and activate my new service.
At this point, 5G just seems like a gimmick for selling you internet connected devices that you can't unplug.
I don’t know a single person that ever asked for speeds faster than 4G on their phone. The jump from 3G to 4G solved all complaints I heard.
Improved coverage? Yes I’ve heard that a lot.
It seems like 5G is being pushed for other reasons. Corporate growth, ability to sell more surveillance data, etc.
Improved coverage? Yes I’ve heard that a lot.
It seems like 5G is being pushed for other reasons. Corporate growth, ability to sell more surveillance data, etc.
Most 5G hype cycle I hear isn't about the phones though. I mean yeah it's mentioned when the latest top end phone has it but it's not really where the hype is directed.
Neither Starlink nor wireless telco mobile services are home internet. They are home web+. If an ISP does not give you an ipv4 address it is not an ISP. It's a web service provider (WSP).
What protocols are you thinking of that don't work over ipv6? Everything from ftp to gopher to ssh works fine.
Every IPv4 address created has been assigned. There have been at least two rounds of clawbacks. The current mode of operation is to buy blocks from Ethiopia, since they're IPv6-first. There's really no need for a new internet connection to be assigned an IPv4 address.
Every IPv4 address created has been assigned. There have been at least two rounds of clawbacks. The current mode of operation is to buy blocks from Ethiopia, since they're IPv6-first. There's really no need for a new internet connection to be assigned an IPv4 address.
Participating in peer to peer networks and hosting from home to start. Pretty much anything that involves talking directly to other humans instead of having to go through a corporation requires having an internet routable address and ports.
It'd be great if ipv6 were adopted, but it isn't. Only having an ipv6 address effectively cuts you off from 99% of the internet. All that's left is big corporate websites.
It'd be great if ipv6 were adopted, but it isn't. Only having an ipv6 address effectively cuts you off from 99% of the internet. All that's left is big corporate websites.
IPv6 is internet-routable. You seem to be objecting to a different thing than the IP version used. Maybe the use of CGNAT, or the non-persistent assignment of IPv6 addresses? (The first is a IPv4 thing, the second also a thing under IPv4.) DynDNS is a very workable solution to counteract non-static assignment of addresses.
EDIT in reply to EDIT: Gee, if only there were some wide-scale home internet use adoption giving everyone an IPv6 address in order to ensure it's supported.
EDIT in reply to EDIT: Gee, if only there were some wide-scale home internet use adoption giving everyone an IPv6 address in order to ensure it's supported.
It's prudent to assume that every ISP surveils your naive traffic, so native IPv4 service isn't good for much anyway. A VPN (whether consumer or self-hosted VPS) will add a mere $5/mo to the cost. Providing the physical layer is what's important.
The inability to dial in without first performing some form of NAT traversal to escape CGNAT is an interesting take on what being on the internet means (especially since >99% of users need to do this with normal NAT even when they have a public IP anyways) but even if you accept this "WSP" is still being pulled out of thin air as there isn't anything special about accessing the web vs any other thing on the internet.
Either way v6 is definitely as much the internet as v4 and NAT64 is not really worse (though different) than NAT44 when it comes to accessing that half of things.
Either way v6 is definitely as much the internet as v4 and NAT64 is not really worse (though different) than NAT44 when it comes to accessing that half of things.
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My grandparents had cellular internet until they moved closer to the city. It was unreliable and they kept on altering the prices and what was in the deal.
If it costs $100/month, and you can get local streaming TV service from it too, then this can compete with cable tv.