[hunterb123]

Good for the FCC, but it's not very useful if the data is all from congested cities, I can't find where they list their sampling.

Starlink shines when it comes to rural/remote environments, not cities where towers and fiber can reach.

Side note, look at HughesNet and Viasat in their data, LOL!

edit: instead of downvoting if someone could find the sampling method?

[pessimizer]

Nobody else thinks that the FCC decided to exclusively pull data from congested cities (I guess in order to intentionally fool theselves?), so they have no reason to look up the sampling method. You however do, so you should look it up, go through it, then give your evaluation of it.

When you make up an accusation from whole cloth, people are going to downvote it. They'll probably downvote even harder after you ask for other people to give you proof to refute the accusation that you made up from whole cloth. If you find the sampling method, and it turns out your suspicions were true, and then you write a comment explaining that, they'll give you hundreds of upvotes to offset these two or three well-deserved downvotes.

[hunterb123]

You misunderstand. I'm saying if they didn't look at only the rural cells then there's not much point in using that to determine whether to award funding for providing rural broadband...

Just because there's a lot of people in highly populated cells that drag down the speed for people in those cells has nothing to do with the speeds of the lowly populated cells.

tldr; it makes no sense to average all cells together, as the goal is to improve the areas where existing infrastructure have failed in specific regions.

(and in those areas, where hughesnet, or viasat, or old DSL were the few options, Starlink does it's best)

[mike_d]

Cities vs rural has no impact on Starlink speeds. You fall into a "cell" which is a hexagonal region roughly the width of California. Each cell is served by a satellite that has a 20 Gbps downlink to a ground station. Everyone within that cell shares that 20 Gbps, and everyone using the ground station (4-8 cells) shares the backhaul capacity of that site.

(This is oversimplified but puts the capacity scoping in context)

[WJW]

How would city vs rural not have an impact on that??? If your cell happens to have a major urban area in it, you would have to share the satellite downlink with many many more people than if you were living in a cell that covers mostly ocean and a few tiny islands. (Or mostly deserts and some tiny hamlets, of course)

[xienze]

> If your cell happens to have a major urban area in it, you would have to share the satellite downlink with many many more people

In theory most or all of the people in a major metro area would be opting for faster, cheaper ISPs. Starlink is for people way out in the boonies that don’t have any other good options.

[hunterb123]

Providing broadband to rural america, what this whole FCC broadband push has been about, concerns those cells where there aren't many people over a large spread of land, where towers and laying down lines doesn't make sense.

So if you take a cell that has LA in it, it will be much more congested than if you took a cell in Wyoming, or Nebraska.