Fibre is an investment that can be used and upgraded for decades. Starlink is a subscription service forever to a private company.
Yeah! I want my internet connection run by a man baby who turns off your access if he doesn’t like you!
I wish there was a way for the average person to shoot down starlink satellites.
I’m a starlink customer and think it’s one of the best advancements in the past decade as it provides real access to rural addresses. The side effects of this is nearly immeasurable.
Spacex needs to STFU about this though. Fiber should continue to be deployed where possible.
Fiber should be deployed to rural addresses like yours (and should’ve been a long time ago). Instead, that money was funneled to the likes of Time Warner and Comcast who never even followed through on their part of the deal. Now, SpaceX is getting funneled the cash.
I’m super thankful that WA State supports and gives assistance to counties building out public LUDs for fiber access, many paying attention to rural communities first. I escaped Comcast two years ago because of it.
Time Warner and Comcast need to have all that grant money clawed back. They contracted with the taxpayers to deliver a service and they didn’t even make a good faith effort to start.
It can’t, and the taxes you would pay to support fiber to my home would be extreme.
But fiber to a local wireless solution? Sure. But even that’s not possible for everyone, and they were expensive and unreliable until starlink started showing up. LEO internet has its benefits.
Hello neighbor!
Fiber also has far better performance that satellite can never match.
Seriously, this is in the “well, we know you want all the free money you can get, but: no. Now go do your thing on your own dime.”
Fiber in the ground is infrastructure like paved roads. Satellites? One counter-orbiting frag bomb can take out a satellite constellation in less than a day.
do they know what competing is? fiber is much cheaper, stablier, offers less latency and more speed.
We should also dump passenger trains for…electric car tunnels?
The tech behind starlink is good. LEO satellites play a purpose. Upsides are they have less latency than GEO satellites. Speeds are the same though.
Downside is you have to deploy them evenly as a constellation or else you get service inturruption. Which means if you look at any population map 90% of your constellation is going to be underutilized, and the other 10% is going to be full.
The real target audience should be mobile broadband. Airplanes, ships, RVs, cars, phones, etc.
But what do you do in the meantime? Fill in the unutilized constillation with rural residential. You can’t compete with fiber tech, so you sue the govt for free money.
Yeah, I can’t imagine a medium sized town all using Starlink at once without issues.
Read this quick before the people selling generators get it buried: https://www.wtsp.com/article/money/consumer/south-tampa-generators-fail-during-hurricanes-teco-peoples-gas/67-144d70da-bb27-496c-8928-ab7e61a53b00
The gas company finally figured out how to deflect their responsibility in the matter: they say that the generator owners “didn’t register” their generators, but… now that it has been a year, has the gas company done anything to improve service capacity?
Anyway: the tie-in with Starlink is, anything like this works great until everybody tries to use it all at once at high capacity. When all 53,000 residents of Grand Island Nebraska decide to stream different high definition videos all at once? A good fiber system can handle that, Starlink? I’m curious…
Keeping the electrical grid balanced with varying loads is so hard I’m amazed it works at all.
It’s something that’s only possible because of the scale a grid works on. It also helps to have generation like hydro, which can ramp up and down very fast.
Companies like Viasat with GEO sattelites have the advantage of one mololithic sattelite with massive coverage. They have a ton of little antennas on each sattelite that they can adjust as demand changes. Need more coverage in an area due to demand? They can task an antenna not doing anything over there.
Latency is a B though. Minimum 500ms each way. Which is minimum 1sec round trip just physics not actual. What’s interesting is the layperson (non online gamer) doesn’t notice much. It’s not abnormal for a rando website to take a few seconds to load on my wifi. Or for a netflix stream to take a few seconds before it starts buffering. The biggest problem a company like viasat has is old tech in the sky. They can’t handle the load of everyone watching netflix. So, they have to data cap everyone. It’ll be interesting to see if their new sattelites later this year fix that or if they keep the caps on.
Not only do you have to deploy them in a constellation, you have to deploy them in a descending constellation. They are constantly burning up all the time and you have to keep launching new ones forever just to maintain current capacity. It’s the perfect business plan to make SpaceX look better on paper.
Heh yep, in fact they’re not lasting as long as they were supposed to.
Here’s a better idea: nationalize SpaceX and tell Musk to go fuck himself first. Not going to happen? Then no grant money.
SpaceX can suck my ass
all you can eat latency and an oversaturated network on devices with a limited lifespan… what else could you ask for!
A subscription that somehow still manages to use surge pricing? I’m assuming that’s the next logical step.
Starlink has much better latency than most satellites, but still 10 to 50 times as much as fiber.
ha yeah… not having to make a 340 mile round trip instead of the hundreds of feet to the nearest router will do that
Just for reference, I get about 45-50 ping playing Marvel Rivals on Starlink.
That’s basically perfect, with regards to online gaming.
I got better ping playing Quake multiplayer in 1996
That used dedicated servers, right?
So if my ping is currently 90ms on fiber, it’ll become 900ms - 4.5s on starlink?
My average latency on Starlink over the past year is 32 ms. It varies throughout the day from around 20 to 40 ms.
If you are getting 90ms on fiber, you are either pinging a server that’s a long ways away or something is very wrong.
Probably no. Your ping is abnormally high for fiber, I’d expect a sub 10ms ping for you.
That makes a lot of assumptions about what I am pinging, and the networking context.
In my case I was quoting my average ping in VRChat.
How can you quote 10-50 times higher and then tell me no when I calculate what that means for me?
Is it because latency does not scale in that way?
- Run a
tracerouteliketraceroute cnn com - Kill that by
ctrl-cat the third line. - Ping that third IP address.
Don’t try to ping UK.battle.net or your numbers will be skewed by everything in between.
About 5ms.
Based on the various replies, it sounds like the poster I was originally replying to does not mean pings in any context.
They just mean in this context. Along optimal routes. Right?
So then 10x makes 50ms; sounds about right
- Run a
You’re probably really far away from the VR Chat server. Try pinging Google or Cloudflare, which will tell you ping to the nearest datacenter (a rough estimate of ping caused by your local ISP).
Based on their numbers, you could probably expect 50-100ms to Google, and then add an extra 90ms to get from there to your VR Chat server.
My personal fiber connection gets under 2ms ping on Speedtest
It depends on the instance (people can make them in 4 regions of the world) but 90ms is common for US west and east, for me.
- Cloudflare.com: 5ms
- Google.com: 24ms
That makes sense then. When people talk about their ISP ping, they’re usually talking about how long it takes to get out of the ISP’s network. So that 5ms Cloudflare ping is likely pretty close to what people would consider your internet’s ping.
Speedtest.net is a really common tool for measuring this, since it will automatically check where the closest server is. For your connection, any ping above 5ms you can probably assume is based on your physical distance to the server, or latency on the server’s end. I’m guessing Google doesn’t have a server quite as close to you as Cloudflare
Of course. Still, an exception doesn’t disprove expected averages.
So you were only talking about when testing with ideal servers? Why is my example an exception? Are all games an exception?
Because we’re talking about the inherent latency of the connection, obviously.
I say this as someone who actively pays for starlink out of necessity.
Fuck you, no. Fiber is much better for everyone. Eat shit muskrat.
Basic physics says satellites using Ku-band or whatever they use can’t compete with fibre.
Satellite internet has its uses like for ships at sea.
Or rural and remote areas. I think it would be a ton of fun to go backpacking with a foldable solar panel and an antenna.
Business owned by greedy manbaby says to give money to business also owned by greedy manbaby. Hmmm…
Don’t forget Nazi
Remember when our government spent billions of our taxes on getting high speed internet out to as many Americans as possible? Remember how literally nothing happened and they just shrugged when we asked where the money went?
This was during the Obama years too if memory serves correctly.
It doesn’t matter what they decide to do. The money will magically vanish and we will all get left holding the bag once more.
Clinton era Telecommunications Act of 1996 was where it all started.
Thanks to corporations for pocketing the money, and the Republicans for blocking Democrats from providing consequences.
You know I’m starting to suspect that maybe corporations don’t have our best interests in mind…
While you’re correct and I agree, they REALLY shouldn’t do whatever Elon wants.
Oh absolutely. He can pull himself up by his velcro straps and make his business work without government subsidies for once in his life.
That being said I don’t have any faith in our government to actually improve anything for general americans when it comes to internet access. Even if the federal government somehow did everything right the states would find a way to regulate and fuck it up.
This country is so cooked
