| I remember when they announced Starlink (and 3 or 4 competitors started angling at the space too) that I made a rough prediction that its never going to become a global internet, its a niche product for rural users that will immediately hit a ground station in the same country. Despite consistent, vocal, misunderstanding from rusted on musk stans, this continues to be the truth. In fact Starlink continues to obey every Carrier and Satellite related law in every country that it does business. Musk spends significant time shitting on the australian government, but he absolutely pays for his spectrum and he absolutely submits all requested information to the australian government. Starlink's ground stations basically operate like a traditional ISP, just worse. To the point where to really get any traction its more or less a Vocus operation in Australia these days. >Yes, Biden and the FCC successfully fought Starlink, they got the awards for rural connectivity revoked, and the appeal of the revocation also kept the award revoked because starlink supposedly couldn't provide rural connectivity. So at least on paper starlink has "failed" to meet the needs of rural folks. This doesnt surprise me in the least. Where my customers use starlink in an area with any kind of population its a race to the exit. Where it is doing amazing is on remote cattle stations with near to no density. I have seen what passes for Rural in the USA and its positively urban by Australian standards. Where WISPs are professionalising they arent really becoming threatened by Starlink (where they suck they are getting creamed by them however) >T-Mobile is betting pretty clearly that starlink WILL be able to deliver messaging via a space based backhaul. T-Mobile probably has to meet Starlink at every base station in the country they are working on. >And rumor has it that starlink is bringing in some real money even if the govt has determined its not technically feasible so there is some market validation of their ideas. This doesnt surprise me. I have evaluated several alternative satellite internet providers, and starlink is extremely cheap in comparison. Lack of layer 2 services is a dealbreaker for some companies however, which is why I was still seeing 15k pa 20M sat services as of 2024. Theres some interesting things happening in MEO. Ironically, if Starlink ever hits multigig, we will probably see MEO services hit widespread availability of roughly 200M and the corresponding cost saving might throw starlink under the bus. >space based backhaul. This remains the untested claim. Much like Tesla cars becoming commonplace, Spaceship going to Mars, hyperloops etc, the actual stated goal of the company is what lies unachieved. My rough calculations were that space based backhaul is prohibitively expensive, and doesnt benefit well from scale out of small satellites. Its all about routing density. He has a line of larger sats going up, but even then I just dont see it. Every increase in routing capacity is going to come with increases in heat and failure. The starlink constellation is good at dropping the link at the nearest ground station, its very unlikely to ever become good at sending your data to a ground station on another continent. |
- I ordered starlink for testing even though I have Telekom DSL in a small town. Did not even install it the first day (as I had to put it up on a pole), then Telekom failed for me and lots of my neighbors. No phone, nothing. The next day I installed starlink and had Internet again at 200Mbs (faster than my DSL, albeit more expensive at first, they have since reduced price to parity).
It took 7 days for Deutsche Telekom to fix the issue. And that repeated every once in a while. I have since setup a failover with PRIMARY usage via Starlink.
- A customer of ours has Telekom and Vodafone Cable. The entire VOIP runs over Telekom , but is so slow as to be unusable (Rather big city in Germany) for that many people. They got cable as a secondary web surfing link. Number of failures over the year 2022-2023 was not funny, we had a LOT of calls to make to get this back up.
- Another customer, still big city but on the outskirts in the industrial area does not even get any good DSL at any sensible cost. He installed Starlink with us and its his primary connection for years now. Including daily and hour-long video calls.
- A school I know has had a huge number of issues with their fiber internet connection often resulting in very intermittent internet which disrupts classes etc.
So to say its always better is just not true and having some alternatives definitely dont hurt.