[jagtstronaut]

Despite the hate on the promo the tech they offer is still pretty cool. Only way I knew my in-laws were safe near Asheville was because one of their neighbors had starlink and a generator. Took a week for them to get power and cell phone service back and there is no way to get to them without a helicopter so if it wasn't for the product we would have just learned that they were alright.

[RowanH]

In New Zealand we're very much natural disaster prone. I run a SaaS working out of home - we wired the house for generator backup and have a starlink unit that sits in a box exactly for this reason, even if the proverbial hits the fan for a week I can still keep on top of the business.

Every couple of months the geny gets sparked up and everything tested. For a very small investment it's very comforting to know we've always got power/internet, regardless of what happens.

[fennecfoxy]

As a Kiwi I wouldn't say we're prone to natural disasters per se. Certainly not on a yearly basis.

Though that said, Mt. Taranaki is meant to do the big boom soonish. That'll be interesting.

[rafaelmn]

Wondering if solar/batteries would do the same thing as a generator but cleaner and also useful in general ?

Because I've thought about solving a similar scenario but just assumed solar/batteries would be the play here.

[parl_match]

If you spent 10 minutes running the numbers, you'd probably answer your question pretty handily.

[ta1243]

If I fully decked my roof out I can generate a good 20kWp

I'm assuming OP isn't actually serving out of home (starlink won't help with it's CG-Nat), so it's not like they're running 5kW of servers. 10kWh a day seems perfectly reasonable amount to keep going.

Given just running a generator it going to eat 20 litres a day on lowest load, over 3 weeks that's 400 litres you'd need to store.

With a battery setup even if you had to charge from a generator you'd be able to run it more efficiently for a shorter period.

So having spend 10 minutes I reckon the answer is "yes, OP should certainly get a solar/battery system set up"

[s1artibartfast]

That's crazy. There are huge differences is costs and use cases.A generator is $500, and mine can run for 24hrs on 5 gallons of gas. A 5kw solar system is about $25k to 35k in my area before batteries.

[ta1243]

Solar is far cheaper than that in my location - especially if you put the panels up yourself, and storing 100 gallons of gas (400 litres) to run for 3 weeks is far more expensive.

[grecy]

> A 5kW solar system is about $25k to 35k in my area before batteries.

Do you live on the moon?

Earlier this year I installed a 7.8kW system in Canada for $13k CAD all in, inc the inverter and labor. (Then I got a $5k subsidy to bring it to $8k out of pocket.)

It’s cheaper now, panel prices fall every month.

[h0l0cube]

Depends on the price of batteries, which are rapidly declining. Within the next few years the numbers will change in favor of batteries. Though it also depends on the load and having enough space/sunlight for the solar array

[jmb99]

I can buy a used diesel/propane/gas/pick your fuel generator today for a few hundred bucks that could power most of the essentials in my house. I bought a brand new one during an extended power outage due to storms last year for $500 CAD. That and 80L of gas (~$120 CAD) can run my sump pumps, fridge, freezer, the electronic side of my furnace, my homelab server rack (including 6 PoE access points), my workstation, and key lighting - for 5 days. If I cut that back to essentials, closer to 3 weeks. That’s roughly 200kWh for $120, plus $500 up front.

Currently, the absolute cheapest I can find lithium batteries (I am planning a solar+grid load-balancing setup) is about $160CAD/kwh. To prepare for the worst case (i.e. minimal solar generation during and following the storm - say, middle of winter/happens to be cloudy/panels are damaged/etc) I’d need to spend over $30,000 in batteries alone to have the same capacity as $120 of gas. Not to mention the sheer amount of space that would take. And the cost of solar panels (10kW actual generation capacity, minimum, to keep essentials running), at roughly $1/W in Canada, adds another $10,000 to that estimate. And that’s not including the cost of installation, which based on what I’ve heard, probably adds another $10-20k.

While there are some interesting advances being made, I do not believe that battery capacity costs will decrease by 3-4 orders of magnitude “within the next few years,” unless you anticipate gasoline/diesel/etc prices to go parabolic. It’s very obvious why people would much rather have a generator and some Jerry cans for a few hundred bucks than a solar + battery setup that costs more than their car.

[h0l0cube]

> I do not believe that battery capacity costs will decrease by 3-4 orders of magnitude “within the next few years,”

Fair call for lithium chemistries, which will probably drop closer to one order of magnitude within 2-3 years (if the trend from the last year-to-date holds). But if we're talking about sodium ion, I wouldn't be surprised if that did drop by a couple of orders of magnitude, which is already sitting about ~140USD/kwh for consumer packs (but before shipping from China). It has a weird discharge voltage curve and needs a more capable inverter to handle it though, but at the prices I'm seeing, overcapacity is plenty affordable.

[happyraul]

The solar and batteries have much lower emissions, and can be used as all times (not just during power outages) to lower the cost of electricity. Anyway it doesn't have to be generator or solar + batteries... Why not both? Have the solar, reduce emissions and utility bills. Have the generator as a backup if power is out and batteries are empty.

[parl_match]

My quick math came up short on batteries. But as you say, it's worth running those numbers every year. I can't imagine I'll be sitting here in 2030 saying "batteries aren't there yet".

[h0l0cube]

> I can't imagine I'll be sitting here in 2030 saying "batteries aren't there yet".

Or if you're looking now at sodium ion. It's only just hitting the consumer market, but it's already cheap enough for energy storage at the scale GP is talking about. Might take a few years for cell quality, inverter, and charging technology to improve, but by 2030 it will be so dirt cheap to the point that it would be economically sensible for any household.

[nativeit]

Curious…it’s not been a week yet? It certainly feels longer. Glad to know they’re alright. My family is in Swannanoa, and still without power and water.

[jagtstronaut]

Edited to a week. I was actually shocked how quickly my in-laws got power back with how widespread the destruction was and how many of the roads are out. They have well water so as soon as power was back on they obviously have water.

[lkbm]

In Asheville / if you're close to the river, it's still recommended to boil your water. (I'm in Marshall ~700ft higher than downtown, so I'm assuming it's fine where I am, but guidance has been non-specific.)

[mlindner]

That's entirely dependent on the depth of your well and how well it was constructed. A properly built well is accessing water below an impermeable layer of rock so shouldn't be affected by ground water. The boil warnings for wells I've heard is mostly about surface water running down your own well borehole (or into your neighbors accessing the same aquifer water).

[deelowe]

It has not. I have family impacted who still does not have power. One week will be tomorrow.

[mysterydip]

I still do not have power but Duke Energy is getting it back on one neighborhood away from me right now. Hoping tomorrow is our turn.

[matthewdgreen]

To ask a tech question: how much capacity does Starlink have? If every single person in US rural areas switches to Starlink, can the system handle it? What's the bandwidth/customers/capacity limit for the service? (I'm obviously not talking about emergencies, where degraded bandwidth is acceptable.)

[AlotOfReading]

The bandwidth is limited on a per-cell basis, somewhere around 700Gbps max per cell. Actual capacity at any time is somewhat less. If everyone is actively using theirs, you might get single digit Mbps or less at cell capacity limits, even if there aren't bottlenecks elsewhere.

It's fine, but it's highly dependent on having extremely low customer density. The system doesn't work well if everyone is using it all the time.

[kortilla]

> 700Gbps max per cell

> having extremely low customer density

I think you need to define “extremely low” because 700gbps is plenty for several thousand people. And the question was specifically about everyone in rural areas switching.

If you go by rural being <1000 people per square mile and a cell covering roughly 97 square miles (assuming the larger 15 mile hex diameter), that lands at 7.2 mbps per person if there are 1000 people in every square mile all trying to use it at the same time.

That sounds fine considering standard consumer usage patterns mean you’ll get 10x that as an individual even in peak times. That’s also assuming maximum density for what’s considered rural.

[hattmall]

Our power company linked fiber provider with 18,000+ customers only has a 10gb backhaul. They are by far the best of the 3 fiber options I have access to.

[threeseed]

> that lands at 7.2 mbps per person

Which is ridiculously poor.

This would simply create a digital divide further increasing inequality in rural areas.

[why_at]

>This would simply create a digital divide further increasing inequality in rural areas.

Not sure what you mean? The more remote you get the better your bandwidth gets because you are sharing it with fewer people. This is the opposite of most ISPs which tend to ignore rural areas.

[caeril]

The primary use-case for high-bandwidth consumer connections is streaming brain-rotting video content in UHD. OP is suggesting that people without access to said connections will end up with increased inequality because they won't be able to spend their time on Love Is Blind marathons.

My personal experience, as someone who has lived in, and worked from, rural areas with limited bandwidth, is that latency (for SSH connections) is the only thing that matters for learning and productivity.

But OP clearly knows better, because if we just gave everyone gigabit fiber, the access to UHD Pornhub, Netflix, Amazon Video, etc, will instantly correct the "digital divide". And OP has a point. I know someone who started designing > 500k qubit quantum computers with > 5s coherence after spending two weeks straight watching all seasons of My 600Lb Life.

He kept mumbling something about "It's not in the box, it's in the band"

[threeseed]

Its about giving slow satellite to rural areas as opposed to fibre.

[jmgao]

I'm currently paying for 2Gbps symmetric fiber via 10Gbps XGS-PON that's multiplexed to 32 users, which is a mere 39 Mbps per user. In practice, this is absolutely fine and I have never run into any bandwidth limitations, because utilization rates for regular consumers rounds to basically nothing.

[hattmall]

Is that calculation correct? Wouldn't 10gbps be more like 300 for 32 users?

[caeril]

Unbelievable how much millennials and zoomers are spoiled. I remember when I got my first DSL line at 384kbps symmetric in 1999, I was absolutely over the moon ELATED.

Sure, 7mbps may not be good enough to supply the demands of your multi-screen 4k UHD loli goon cave, but it's more than enough to send a < 1kB message to your family that you're safe in a disaster area.

Try to get some perspective.

[gpm]

That number looks to be before multiplexing, so it's not that bad. If 10% of the people in the area are using the internet at the same time (as in are actively downloading at full speed, not just are scrolling through already downloaded content) it should go up to 72 mbps per person, and so on.

[AlotOfReading]

It's not actually those numbers. For one thing, bandwidth is split between upload and download. 700Gbps isn't the actual capacity either, just the theoretical bandwidth. It's less in practice, limited by things like gateway capacity etc. the bandwidth also isn't evenly allocated between terminals because starlink has service tiers like other ISPs. Terminals are also not people. They're usually shared by households that may encompass multiple users at a time.

There's very good reasons starlink has such low limits on terminals per cell.

[kortilla]

>Which is ridiculously poor.

That’s HD video. The alternative for these people is even slower DSL or heavily throttled LTE tethering if they are lucky enough to have cell coverage. You’re living in a privileged bubble.

[throwaway48476]

That's fine for disaster response.

[huijzer]

Oversubscription is also an issue on wired networks. It might be a problem but usually you shouldn’t notice; on wired at least.

What is your extremely low customer density source? In theory they could reduce beam size and throw more satellites in space. How much they can handle is up for speculation, but your “extremely low” claim could use a source.

[AlotOfReading]

Do you really need a source? It's obvious from the numbers. Starlink limits to low hundreds (~300) of terminals per cell. We'll round that to 1k to be generous for future improvements. Let's say each terminal serves 4 customers. Cell size is in the neighborhood of 150 sq. mi. That's a customer density of 27 customers per sq. mi, or 9% of the density threshold for "rural areas" in the US. Using more reasonable numbers gives us an effective max density around the same as Mongolia, the least densely populated country on earth.

It's just the nature of the technology.

[trevyn]

>Starlink limits to low hundreds (~300) of terminals per cell.

That’s… very incorrect.

[verzali]

Do you have a correct number by chance?

[threeseed]

> Oversubscription is also an issue on wired networks

Wired networks can include fibre optic to the house like we have in Australia where the speeds can reach a consistent 1Gbps even in highly dense areas at peak times. And internal testing is happening on 10Gbps.

If US cares about supporting the internet of tomorrow satellite services like Starlink will never be capable enough.

[kortilla]

1gbps to the house doesn’t mean you’re not oversubscribed. An ISP that has a 10,000 homes on 1gbps connections absolutely does not pay for 10 tbps of transit capacity or even internal capacity to carry all that to its peering points.

Cheaper fiber to homes definitely made last mile scale better bandwidth-wise, but it didn’t change the fundamental nature of needing to heavily oversubscribe to make it affordable.

[threeseed]

Many major services e.g. Youtube, Netflix, Cloudflare have servers colocated with ISPs.

So they don't need to have equivalent transit capacity.

Which is not a capability Starlink can provide.

[throwaway984393]

Yep, in a few years these dishes will be $600 paperweights. We need real rural broadband.

[Alupis]

You can have real rural broadband today. You just need to be willing to pay for installation out of pocket.

When an ISP runs fiber to a new building (be it in a business park or rural farm), the math is almost entirely based on recuperating their installation costs - which they often pay for entirely out of their pocket. Your entire first contract term is usually just paying back the installation costs alone...

For some perspective, at a previous building we tried to bring fiber across the street into our office. The installation costs were too expensive to make the math work - so the ISP offered to split the installation costs 50/50 instead. Our half was over $94,000. This involved directional boring and the works, to go ~200ft to the right-of-way vault and into our MPOE.

One can only imagine the expense of running fiber (or any type of cable) out to the boonies. It's totally feasible - but the costs make it not palatable in reality.

[ta1243]

One wonders how we ran electricity out everywhere.

Running a fibre is about the same cost as running a power cable.

[hattmall]

That would be the REA, Rural Electrification Act, part of Roosevelt's new deal. Citizens could form co-ops and pay some of their own and get some grants from government. A very big number of those co-ops are now running fiber too.

[s1artibartfast]

Cheaper labor and fewer challenges.

There is a lot of infrastructure where the cost to replace is an order of magnitude higher than the inflation adjusted original cost.

[Sparyjerry]

Above ground power lines make up most of the it. A pole and wire isn't that expensive. Burying is drastically more expensive.

[rdsnsca]

They are actually running fiber almost everywhere in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Source : https://internet.buildns.ca

[jagtstronaut]

At least last time I looked into starlink it most definitely cannot. Definitely more ideal for very rural or very poor areas where you are gonna be one of a few dishes. That may have changed now though.

[colechristensen]

I don't know if that kind of information is public. Starlink is continually adding new satellites, and each one adds bandwidth capability. Likewise with end user ground station hardware updates and spectrum purchases (at least the former is happening on a regular basis), capacity likewise goes up.

I don't believe there is a theoretical or practical upper limit which would exclude very wide adoption of Starlink and similar competitors.

Put in another way, I think it is possible that in a decade or two the only cell phone/data service that doesn't come from orbit will be a few terrestrial towers in dense downtown urban areas and around things like sports venues.

[CorrectHorseBat]

5G is going exactly the opposite way to provide higher bandwidth, more cells with each less users.

With satellite internet you're sharing the medium with everyone, and that doesn't scale well. Beamforming probably helps a lot, but I don't how accurate it can be on that distance.

[Retric]

You can have essentially unlimited satellites the issue is the percentage of time each one spends over high density areas.

Design for NYC density and 99% of satellites would be redundant at any given moment. The solution for increasing density is dropping costs so it’s viable for satellites to be idle 95% of the time. At least as a first approximation, there’s some tricks with how you setup orbits after the basic network is done.

[CorrectHorseBat]

You're still sharing the medium (the sky), so at some point interference is going to be an issue. A quick search tells me the beams a satellite uses is measured in km, so you can only have one satellite serving several square km (you could have more channels of course).

[Retric]

Let’s be pessimistic and say it’s ~25km^2 with current designs. Surface area of the earth is 510,064,472 km² so you estimate limits things to ~20 million satellites X however they can slice up the available spectrum. IE essentially unlimited satellites.

As of September 2024 they have 6,371 operational satellites and ~ 4 million customers globally.

[Sparyjerry]

Musk himself has said Starlink is not designed for cities and fiber is a much better option there. To supply say NYC, you would need also be supplying bandwidth to the entire world underneath the orbit that the satellites. That is a lot of wasted satellite time as it flies around the earth with zero users most of the time just for the brief moment while users spike to the scale of a city like NYC.

[Retric]

Yea, fiber + 5G + Starlink is more efficient than any of those technologies alone.

It’s always worth remembering that efficiency and technical limitations are different things. We could absolutely blanket the US in 5G towers but the cost is vastly higher than the benefit.

[AdamJacobMuller]

It depends how you define rural of course.

Starlink could pretty easily serve everyone whose only current option is 4G/5G/DSL/Satellite.

Basically everywhere where there is no Fiber or Cable. That's still a decent chunk of the population.

[Andys]

I don't know the specs, but since they control both ends of the link, (ie. the client-side router) they've done a remarkable job of smoothing out load imbalances to make it highly usable even under problematic conditions.

[rtkwe]

No they're already added a one time "congestion charge" of $100 dollars to some (unspecified afaik) areas to try to lower the demand. Or cynically maybe it's a profit taking maneuver get more money out of areas where it's most popular. I tend towards the former personally.

[hammock]

>Despite the hate on the promo

What does "hate on the promo" mean?

[Spivak]

Offering a "30 day free trial" doesn't really feel like a gift as much as it's an ad for the service trying to onboard customers. It's not a bad thing per se, just kind of in poor taste.

[dotnet00]

There were just a few hours between Elon accepting to do it on X, and the update being deployed, I think they can be forgiven for not having it super polished. However, they've also explained that it's 30 days for now, as the end of that approaches, they'll re-evaluate to see if an extension is warranted. I recall them also mentioning refunds or maybe account credits for affected people if they've happened to pay already.

[hshshshsvsv]

They probably used the free trial system for a quick release instead of having to build some new system for this.

[seadan83]

I agree. Giving the equipment out for free*, 30 days free, and no return charge would smell of true disaster relief rather than promo.

* perhaps equipment charge after 30 days, or a half off on the equipment after 30 days. Those would very feel reasonable.

[seadan83]

I have learned now from other replies that there is a free return. 2 of 3 criteria I stipulated are met.

Units being donated meets the first criteria, though that still relies on a donation. The logistics of returning the equipment is then also complicated too..

[mlindner]

The equipment is properly free for many people and many people had previously bought it for backup.

[seadan83]

> The equipment is properly free for many people

I'm curious how do you know this exactly, and how many is many?

[inemesitaffia]

There's people paying for it, the people using it are using it for free

[numpad0]

Likelihood of word "hate" appearing in musk-related topics is beyond sus