Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by acover 621 days ago
The requirements they failed was meeting 100mbps down and 20 up. They were measured at 90/9.

Starlink meets the intent of fast internet, if not their arbitrary line. Everyone I know who has one loves it.

https://spacenews.com/fcc-commissioner-criticizes-starlinks-...

3 comments

Yes, everyone loves it, but it fails the surprisingly sane criteria. Try uploading a video to YT on 9. Or even do a cloud phone backup. Why do we tolerate connections that force us to be nothing but consumers online? Creation needs real upstream bandwidth.

Starlink is also painfully expensive. I've sent them several customers, but I know what it is: a last chance for rural people who've been abandoned to rotting DSL lines. That being said, line of sight is impressively competitive both on bandwidth potential and the most important factor to casual users, cost.

For anything wired I fully agree, but radio-based connections are sometimes power limited (as opposed to bandwidth limited) in the uplink path.

You don't want your mobile phone to drain even faster than it already does, or a Starlink antenna exceeding microwave radiation limits for anyone walking past it (I've seen many of them installed on the ground or at least below eye level).

In my major metropolitan san diego suburb, I have one option for high speed internet. No fiber in the ground. (Closest is about 2 miles away) and I live in a canyon, so 5g is very hit or miss. I get Spectrum Cable. And they give me ~200 Mb down, 10 Mb up for 80$ a month. The upload speed is hard limited. Its abysmal. If I need to back up my server, I pack it up and take it to work. It's literally faster to move my server to a new location then try to back up 10Tb of data.
9 up is abysmal.