Starlink Internet

[Obie]

Yeah my problem was 100ft tall oak trees and a steep hillside on the east/ northeast side of my cottage.
I was a beta tester for gen1 and I've had it 3 or 4 years. It has gotten better with each launch.
The hills are so steep and there are so many trees that we don't have cell service and the DSL from the phone company is 6 meg down.

[terracore]

I remember when they finally offered DSL here and 6 down was amazing, and so much cheaper than the only other option we had at the time (cell hotspot). Crazy to think that was only a few years ago.

[TomK]

I've not tried Starlink, but I would urge caution. Their satellites are in low earth orbit and not geosynchronous, so coverage could change depending on what satellite is overhead at the time.

[terracore]

I don't know that geosynchronous matters much when it looks like this:

(Hawaii is the center of the map, and each white dot is a Starlink satellite)



Here's the app if anybody is interested in zooming in and watching them move around.

https://satellitemap.space/

Interesting fact: SpaceX put more hardware into space in 2024 than the space shuttle did in it's entire 30 years existence. SpaceX had 138 successful launches in 2024 (which was more than the total number of orbital launches by the rest of the world combined) compared to the space shuttle's 133* from 1981 to 2011. I understand it's an apples/oranges comparison because the shuttle was mostly crewed launches and often with varied mission objectives, I just thought it was an interesting achievement. SpaceX did have 5 crewed launches in 2024. There were many years the shuttle had 5 or fewer.

* Technically there were 135 shuttle launches. 133 were successful.

The problem with geosynchronous satellites is that the latency is so bad the connection is unusable for things like VOIP, gaming, skype, etc.

[oink]

I've had it for over a year here in Southern FL. When using the app it always said it wasn't a good spot (I'm in a pine forest) so I just put it up anyhow. It's really worked very well. The bandwidth varies but it's always been plenty fast. At this moment its 120mbps down and 17.6 up. It is subject to rain shadow but not nearly as much as my DirectTV.
https://www.speedtest.net/result/17247185921

[knieft]

Starlink has been great for us in Opihikao. We have no obstacles and set up was VERY painless. The router is strong and there have been no noticeable downtimes. Even during heavy overcast/rain.

Easily streams 4K. We have had the $120/month unlimited package since inception. Likely twice the price of Spectrum or HawaiianTel, but since neither is available to us, Starlink is a fine value.

Further, since we are standalone solar, we don’t lose internet during grid power outages.

Speedtests show about 170/19 down/up with less than 70 latency. Not impressive specs, but it works for everything we use it for, and we have never had an experience where it was slow enough to notice that we needed more, so to speak. Two years plus.

Cheers,
Kirt

[terracore]

Those stats are pretty impressive. The internet is a terrestrial service and Starlink works through gateways on the ground. So your packet of information has to go from here to space, get routed through a network of satellites until it hits one with a good view of a ground station, beam the packet to the ground, distribute it to the terrestrial internet where it collects all the additional latency inherent to the internet, eventually routes it to another ground station, beams it back into space, it goes through the network of satellites and finally back to your router. Not all the packets make it. Error correction built into the internet protocols finds the packets that need to be resent and the whole thing repeats itself and somehow you can see Kirk beaming onto a planet in 4k streaming watching Star Trek.

I just tested my fiber connection. 10ms latency but that is pinging a server in HNL. When I specify a server in CA it's 50ms.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

somehow you can see Kirk beaming onto a planet in 4k streaming

It’s so disturbing when the Transporter packets malfunction:
   

[HiloJulie]

@terracore:

"I just tested my fiber connection. 10ms latency but that is pinging a server in HNL. When I specify a server in CA it's 50ms."

Is that on Hawaiian Tel fiber?

We have Hawaiian Tel fiber here in Hawaiian Acres - in fact we have two "circuits" one for the main house and the other for the ohana house and I'm seeing latency pings to HNL at 4ms to 6ms and to several CA sites at 7ms to 9ms on either circuit.

I can image that Southern CA may be having some internet issues at the moment, but I'm surprised at those numbers you're getting.