[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.