[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.

[kortilla]

Starlink doesn’t prevent fiber and there has been zero interest in giving fiber to these people with or without subsidies. So it’s about giving fast satellite internet to people in rural areas or leaving them with much worse than options.

[ta1243]

And how much contention is on that fibre?

At a typical residential contention of 50:1 that's 350mbit

At a really good residential rate of 10:1 that's still 70mbit

[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?

[jmgao]

Oops, no, it isn't, it's 39 MB/s, not Mb/s.

[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.

[trevyn]

AlotOfReading, based on your other post in this thread, your information on Starlink limits is very out of date.

Readers, I would take posts from this user with a large grain of salt.

[kortilla]

You’re just making shit up at this point so it’s not clear how to respond. I use Starlink in a city of 300k people in the mountains in the west and never see <50mbps download even during peak congestion.

The bandwidth is not split between upload and download, it’s very explicitly optimized for download capacity which is what most people are interested in. If you want to upload much beyond 15mbps, Starlink is going to suck for you regardless of congestion.

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

High density areas are broken into smaller cells to help with this. don’t forget that the limit doesn’t apply to roaming users either.

[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.

[vel0city]

It's not just a question of transit capacity. Most residential PONs are still oversubscribed, like the fiber cable running down the street can't handle all clients maxing out their throughput all the time. With PONs you'll have multiple clients all sharing the same physical port, in the same way in coax DOCSIS networks. One single cable goes through multiple passive splitters to branch out to a lot of final clients. They almost always wouldn't be able to support all clients maxing out all their bandwidth even if that traffic never left the local office, because once again its still dozens of clients on a single actual physical port.

Fiber to your home doesn't mean you've got dedicated bandwidth to your ISP. You're still usually on a shared medium. You're likely to get all your speed most of the time though because most residential customers aren't constantly using anywhere near a gigabit of throughput constantly.

That said though, a regular ISP can just run another line out. Starlink can't just will additional useful frequency ranges out of nothing. There's only so much spectrum to be used in the giant shared medium of the sky. Beams are only going to be so tight at those distances (outside of using lasers), only so many useful orbits, etc.

[kortilla]

This is incorrect. Youtube does not in network content caching. That’s pretty unique to Netflix.

Youtube meets you at exchange points and if you’re an ISP anywhere that isn’t a major city, there isn’t an exchange point there.

Take a place like Boise and a municipal fiber provider there. They aren’t big enough for Netflix to offer an OCA and there isn’t an exchange in Boise with good content provider density on the fabric. So that provider needs to pay for transit or a private lease to the nearest big exchange (SEA, PDX, barely SLC) where it can get connectivity.

Your mental model is completely wrong for ISPs that aren’t serving the same city as one of the <10 major exchanges in the US.

[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.

[ta1243]

So run the fibre on the power line

[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.

[CorrectHorseBat]

How is that relevant? Adding satellites over the Pacific doesn't improve New York's service. The question is how dense of a population they can serve, not how many satellites Starlink could theoretically have.

[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.