Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by great_reversal 1887 days ago
Unless you opt for SpaceX's Starlink. Still expensive, but bandwidth is usually better than without it in remote regions.
2 comments

Well, yes. Current satellite is pretty awful by all accounts. And many places (like my house 40 miles outside of Boston) don't get great cellular reception--which has effective bandwidth caps in any case. In those situations, StarLink looks like a pretty good option, such as at my dad's house where he had 1 Mbps DSL.

But probably not so great for the crowd that thinks they can't live without 1 Gbps and TBs of data/month.

Yes and no. Starlink is definitely a solution for very small village or remote cabins, but economy of scale kicks in pretty fast.

Doing napkin math, the village has 2k people, so let's assume 400 households. If each of those wants 100 Mbit/s, we'd need a 40 Gbit/s link. Maybe 10 Gbit/s with over-provisioning. So that's basically a satellite only for this village. Not to mention that satellites have their own set of vulnerabilities.

Probably easier to just lay a redundant fiber liner and use star link for emergencies, in case the robotic beavers take over :)