Anyone complaining about this has never experienced the frustration of rural living when it comes to internet. This is absolutely amazing, and it will just get better.
Even a reliable 10mbps would be a godsend in many places.
Reliable 10mbps is a stable full hd stream and 5ish mbps to spare. Easily one stable video call or two at lower quality.
It'll be annoying if you want to download the latest AAA shooter coming in at dozens and dozens of gigabytes, sure. But you can do a lot at 10mbps as 1-2 people needing the uplink. That's really nice.
Has anyone come out with a reason for the size? I mean they seem to reuse a lot of the same textures throughout the game so I have a hard time understanding how it managed to swell to that.
But a lot of these games not only Reuse textures but also duplicate them. They do this to improve load times for levels/etc (less seeking).
Playstation DOOM is an early example of this pattern. The WAD files were actually 'per-level' and contained all sprites/textures/etc used in said level.
Wouldn't duplicated textures get de-duplicated by any halfway-decent compression algorithm though? I'd assume the game is sent over the wire compressed
Most compression algorithms have a limited data reference window (dictionary size) - tens to hundreds of MB being typical upper limits. If duplicated data is further apart, it gets compressed again.
If the data isn't pre-compressed, or doesn't otherwise significantly vary, then using the right tools should de-duplicate the data. Things like lrzip, rsync batch mode, bdiff should work well. If large blocks are identical, many filesystem archivers/backup solutions should do good deduplication, and squashfs can be kind of nice.
There are possibly challenges in that however, my understanding of most compression algos (which may be inaccurate or incorrect) is that you'd run into limitations either with size of data overall or the memory requirements.
Of course, I'm sure there's other ways around that (And I have no clue if they are in use). One option would be to send over the assets in a master 'assets' package and then duplicate/assemble the data as intended during installation.
That's not how compression would work. Think about if they are adding a new level. The algorithm would have nothing to compare the files against except what is actually being sent. If the texture appears in each level, and each level comes in a separate update, there's no way for the algorithm to reference or incorporate the files that are already in your computer, so it has to compress it like it's a brand new file. That is unless you have a costume installer which duplicates the file once it runs, but that would probably be a ton more work for the developers.
You have this completely wrong. "there's no way"? It's extremely easy to make a patch file that references existing data. This is a problem that has been solved many times.
And that's not relevant to initial install anyway, which can/should be a single download.
Having a reference dictionary is a type of compression.
You need a program that decompresses no matter what, and the ability to reference existing files barely changes it. It's not a post-processing stage where files get copied around. It's the ability to reference arbitrary chunks of data inter-file just like it can reference arbitrary chunks of data intra-file.
At the most basic level it's like taking a compressed file and chopping it in half. The user already has the first half, then they download the second half and "resume" decompressing.
I assume it must be a massive refusal to deduplicate. For example in the Verdansk map, many of the houses and buildings are cut and pasted. In theory, these could be aliases of the same model, but I suspect they are all baked in.
Other than that I just don't know. Maybe they used bad settings for whatever is their compression algo and they don't have any experts who could actually identify the problem? It's a preposterous idea but I can't explain it otherwise.
The house models themselves might use the same geometry and textures, but if you pre-bake any lighting then that’s a unique texture across every single surface in the world that can’t be deduplicated.
Depending on how the models are expressed in the environment, theres a good chance they end up as triangle meshes with unique coordinates by the time the running game eversees them.
Unless it’s changed a lot since I worked in game dev, models absolutely are instanced but poly counts, texture resolutions and number of textures have gone through the roof. You used to have a texture and maybe a light map, now you have separate diffuse, specular, bump, glow, decals, etc. etc.
Wouldn’t they want to keep reused objects instanced for performance, or is there some other advantage to just meshing everything out into a unique set of level parts?
Games have always had this dilemma. Content creators and level makers will simply try to push in as much as they possibly can until something says stop. Historically this has been the size of one CD but nowadays there are no such clearly defined limits.
If the engine starts compressing better then the map creators will just use that newly gained savings to add even more content.
I can think of two reasons which are purely non-techincal:
- The bigger the game, the less space for other games.
- Much like adding metal to the inside consumer headphone purely to weight it down and give a premium feeling (they do this with other products as well). A larger program may be perceived as more significant.
As someone who lives in a city where ~15 mbps is the max you can get... this is accurate. Streaming in 1080p with high quality may not work. Downloading a game over 80gb requires a couple of days. Oh, and I have just 1mbps upload, so syncing a video from my phone to Google Photos may take a couple of hours as well. ISPs need competition.
My grandma in rural Arkansas would get 26.4 kbps over dialup. Cell service is passable outside so she could get a house mounted antenna but the data caps are so low it's not worth it. Sat internet was crazy expensive last time I checked.
Also she refuses to learn computers so I gave up trying to get her internet but that's not related to this conversation.
There are ways to get unlimited service still, which is what my parents do. It's just a bit... hacky. Basically you get an LTE modem and SIM swap to it. The ROOTer mod of OpenWRT is specifically for using LTE modems and works quite well. There are some drawbacks, but it's certainly better than the 1.5 Mbps DSL alternative (which they keep as a backup / automatic failover).
On AT&T (technically a tablet plan) it gets deprioritized after 22 GB, but that's never been an issue for them, even the one month they did 500 GB. I've never seen their speeds affected. Costs about $20 or $25 / month. This is a riskier plan, in that AT&T could check the IMEI and shut it off at any time if it doesn't match (as they've done in the past).
The Sprint plan (hotspot plan with a public routable IP, $41/month effectively, but prepaid for a year at a time) does not get deprioritized, but it's probably not worth it unless you can get band 41. If you do get band 41 you'll see some very nice speeds though, at least download. But T-Mobile is beginning to shut down Sprint's band 41, and to my knowledge this plan is not permitted to roam onto T-Mobile yet. It's keyed in their system as a mobile broadband plan with a 20 or 25 GB bucket of data, however it has unlimited overage. I done hundreds of GB on it no problem. It exists only because of the licensing arrangement for Sprint to use the EBS band 41 spectrum.
I'll throw a mention in for OpenWRT too. I tether my iPhone to my OpenWRT router when I've had meaningful internet outages. I've done it using wifi and USB/lightning. Being wired is more reliable obviously. I'm sure my carrier can tell it is tethered data though. Which has its own caps/throttling.
Honestly, one of the barriers to my moving to a more rural area and working remotely was broadband access, but Starlink could very well solve that problem...
In Australia I moved to a very rural place, buying a house based on where I could get wireless broadband as part of our nationwide broadband rollout - I now live in a beautiful remote place overlooking the ocean with 50/20mbps Internet. Before here, I lived in another rural place near the ocean, however there was no broadband and 4G was too expensive. I ended up making friends with someone who had a 1gbps fibrelink 10km away - we spent weekends building a point to point network, and I ended up with an extremely reliable 20mbps connection for about $300 in parts over Mikrotik routers.
As other people have said, you can make it happen if you really want!
Ok you got me with "overlooking the ocean". I will admit, I was a little bit envious. But then I recalled the great Terry Pratchett quote that you are living on a continent where pretty much every animal, except for maybe some sheep, is equipped with some venom and actively trying to kill you. Plus some of the plants. So I guess it's fair play.
It is a very much overdone reputation. I've lived in Aus all my life, much of it rural and I don't know a single person who has been bitten by a snake or shark let alone died. Spider - maybe but most a very shy. But again some bitten, not one died that I know of.
Compare to the USA. Cougars and bears should scare you MUCH more than anything in Australia. And rabies. We have no rabies.
Some rabies-like diseases but you would have to be extremely unlucky to get those (lyssavirus from bats for instance)
It took all of two minutes to find a shooting incident in Australia from last year, showing not only that youre wrong, but that yet again gun control stops law abiding citizens but not criminals.
I'm wrong about what? The grandparent made a joke about dangerous animals killing people in Australia, I made a joke about guns killing people in America. Also picking out a single data point is a strange way to prove your point and try and start an argument about gun control in the US vs Australia, a debate I don't care to have since I don't live in either country.
Ok so you have no care about the subject, no care about either country, you saw it fit to respond.....
And yes one datapoint is all it takes to show you can die in Australia from a gun just like in the US and nearly, if not every, country on earth. What a wonderful thing to joke about.
From an Australian perspective, the USA can look like a place where the earth might suddenly turn to jelly and knock your city down, or giant wind vortexes could descend from the sky and carry you away - things which seem more terrifying to me than a few animals I can easily avoid.
I kind of assume those things are blown out of proportion in media much the same way our wildlife is.
We should take into account the fact that Terry Pratchett lived in England where there is very little in the way of either deadly wildlife or significant natural disasters.
Those are generally problems in the warm parts of the US. If you can survive snowy winters, you won't see much of the more exciting natural disasters. There are no hurricanes or tornadoes in Maine.
This is part of a global 5G/Soros/Gates conspiracy to keep Australia uninhabited - I've never been bitten by anything - maybe a bee when I was 12? And I spend the majority of my time walking, hiking, surfing, sailing, camping, etc.
Well as a kiwi I remember at the tender age of 11 going to Australia for the first time and finding a stick insect on the footpath about as long as my forearm the first time we left the hotel. That was fun.
Actually I lived there a couple years in my late teens and you look up at the power lines and see big spiders in them but that's about it.
I've been far more terrified of my encounters with Suzumebachi and Mukade in Japan.
And the one time I went to the USA I nearly had a panic attack as soon as I left the hotel and didn't spend more than 2 hours outside the whole 6 days I was there cos the idea of a lot of poor, disenfranchised, mentally unstable people with guns just freaks me out.
The seriously poor won't have guns, they're too expensive. Generally the (...mentally present...) homeless are terrified of getting injured, because of course no health insurance. They're not doing muggings.
Los Angelino here I gotta say the homeless are absolutely 100% not afraid of being injured and are only on this plane of reality in a physical sense. Take a drive down Venice boulevard to Skid Row and you will see encampments of a symbiotic nature - literal fused together tents with working lights on the ground level of skyscrapers with garbage fires to keep warm. Australia has the reputation for killer bugs, a walk into south side Chicago is exponentially more terrifying than any wildlife encounter as at least animals follow patterns and will typically leave you alone if vice versa. We are an unhinged and well armed people with lack of affordable healthcare. But I do have 90 mbps download and upload speed so I kinda just keep my head in the clouds.
Haha, an Aussie complaining about the insects from other countries. That's rich!! When the mosquitoes are that size, they are easy to see and catch. Here in the southern part of the US, we have to keep our small kids on leashes lest the "mozzies" carry them away.
They’re only actively trying to kill us if we’re actively trying to kill them. So long as you don’t wander into the bush like an idiot, your encounters with dangerous critters are limited to whatever the cat (literally) drags in.
It's the kind of thing you learn as a kid in Australia. It's super common to have "red back" spiders under rocks, logs, or pretty much any object that's stationary on the ground for more than a few days.
Red back spiders are poisonous, evil looking little buggers! ;)
I just moved out of Sydney to somewhere regional (not rural). NBN installation is turning into a joke (probably a month or two off due to tree roots growing through a cable) so I have turned to 4g. Telstra now do 200gb a month for $75, which has allowed me to stay here working (work only data usage is 100-150gb a month). Didn't think I'd be grateful to Telstra ever in my life, but here I am.
Climate, house prices (rather, value - acreage overlooking the ocean surrounded by trees, for less than a suburban shitbox on the mainland), remoteness, no traffic, etc. etc.
I'd rather live in an urban area during a pandemic.
Consider yourself an outlier. I subscribe to several regional real estate newsletters, and for the last five months they've been all about people moving out of the cities and into small towns.
It's counter-intuitive but the access to testing and hospitals is very important.
As with any disease, the best treatment is prevention. Which is what being rural gives you.
However, if you’re able to work from home, you can self-isolate pretty much anywhere, and drive wherever you need to get food.
If urban environments start seriously breaking down due to a food supply chain problem, rural areas won’t be safe from desperate people.
Anyway, both approaches have their pros and cons, but as someone who has a fairly severe back problem and not much inclination to try to live off the grid, I’d rather be in an urban area.
A friend of mine who served in Afghanistan said that the Afghanis living in the mountains had no idea America had invaded and no idea about a war or 9/11. At first they had thought the Americans were Russians.
I think you over estimate how big America is and how remote some places can be.
I've traveled through some pretty remote places in both hemispheres, and the US has nothing on isolation compared to the mountains in Central Asia. Remoteness won't really protect people here, not like it would there.
> rural areas won’t be safe from desperate people.
That's why you need to buy yourself a private, remote island, or at least a farm on a remote island. Also, if you don't live on it alone (regardless of ownership), it may not import more food than it exports, otherwise the other inhabitants will want to get your food.
Of course this is hard to find such an island as there aren't many such places and unless you're very rich it'll be beyond your budget anyways.
Also want to stress again that it won't be enough to just have an island, it has to be remote as well otherwise people just swim over. The number of boats is limited usually so likely few people will get to you.
Not even "barely more". With 30 seconds on Google I found a 6 acre private island in Northern Ontario with a fully furnished 2200 sq ft house connected to marine electric and phone service for 360k USD.
Something more remote is even cheaper, because there's a ton of supply of islands that are only accessible by float plane, and not much demand.
I don't know if rural folks may realize how well-armed we are in the cities. Nearly everyone I know has a gun, and none of us is the crowd you'd normally associate with gun owners in cities.
Per capital is higher in rural, but there are going to be more guns in a N mile radius of you in the city, and a lot more armed individuals (ten people with one gun each are more dangerous than one person with ten guns).
Is it possible that the stats are of the flavor (total guns)/(total people) and inflate rural ownership because of a gun for small game, a gun for large game, a gun for self defense, and in certain parts of the country a gun for extremely big fish? Or is gun ownership when computed as (count of people with guns)/(total people) still inflated in rural areas?
As kortilla mentioned, while you may have a different experience, the statistics are pretty clear. Also, not all firearms are equal, and while I can't back this part up with stats, my general experience has been that rural folk are much more likely to own more effective firearms: many own a semi-automatic rifles chambered in an intermediate cartridge and some own semi-autos chambered for a full rifle cartridge. Both are a lot more deadly than grandad's pump-action shotgun or a 22 lr plinking rifle, which is closer to what most city folk seem to own. All that aside, most rural people use firearms more often rather than keeping them in closets "just in case" and therefore will be much more effective.
I guess it depends on whether you are vulnerable health-wise. If you're fit and healthy and not of retirement age I really can't understand this kind of thinking.
Yes, this is so true. My spouse has a rare chronic condition and moving anywhere rural is a non-starter. Even with great doctors in a big city, it's still a struggle getting the care she needs. I can't imagine if we lived somewhere with less than stellar healthcare.
> I'd rather live in an urban area during a pandemic.
Depends what kind of pandemic. If being in a city increased your exposure and infection rates 10 fold, and the disease is a killer without treatment, it's a lot worse to live in a city.
> But if you NEED to isolate yourself it’s much easier to do in the countryside than in a city.
In practice there are several flaws in that assumption. The lack of grocery deliveries is one major issue with rural isolation. Keep digging and you find several short vs long term issues. Consider, if you need a car you then need to eventually take it in for repairs etc.
In rural areas you have more space to stock food to live completely off the usual distribution networks for a longer time. In cities if you live in a small apartment you are tributary to shopping very often or having deliveries frequently, which increases the chance of contamination.
You can keep a years supply of food in a small closet. Everyone can’t suddenly buy a years supply of food in a crisis. Which is how this really plays out, if everyone tries to suddenly stock up on supplies that fails. So space is not a limiting factor in a pandemic.
Further, going to work is a larger concern. A higher percentage of people in cities can WFH indefinitely.
As long as you are willing to be somewhat discriminating, you can find rural areas with great internet service. My farm has a fibre connection and the ISP offers 100/100 service. If you travel a few miles down the road, the ISP there will provide gigabit service.
> While 60Mbps isn't a gigabit, it's on par with some of the lower cable speed tiers and is much higher than speeds offered by many DSL services in the rural areas
LOWER?! Cable doesn't even serve non-television use near me. Phone lines can carry 5 Mbps DSL if you're lucky. I happen to have a line-of-sight to a major radio tower so I get wifi from a mom-and-pop ISP, with a 10 Mbps cap. If I was on the other side of a hill, I'd be screwed.
No, it's not. So far you don't know anything about the price or the actual speeds that will be offered. So far all we know is that the latency numbers that were promised of sub 20ms are clearly not going to happen.
Because the speed tests show it, and there are no inter satellite links. In fact, because of the limited coverage in a very specific area, is highly likely that what you're seeing is on the lower end of latency for the final system since they will have more hops.
Beta speed tests show that this is the best they can possibly do?
And I think you're being ridiculously unfair about hops there. If you're in a situation where your data could spend 20ms on starlink's network and 40ms on the ground, and they route it so it spends 30ms on starlink's network and 15ms on the ground, would you complain about that?
It seems clear to me that the 20ms number was about how much latency is unavoidable on starlink, the number you get without extra hops, because hops should be pure benefit. It's not like 20ms was supposed to include the path all the way to arbitrary servers, because that's blatantly impossible with the Earth being 130 light-milliseconds around.
You are arguing against exactly what Elon had said at launch. I'm not being unfair with a beta. I've lived this industry for a while; latency will go up with congestion. Let's revisit this comment in a year.
Also if buffers are configured to be very small then congestion does not have to add more than a fraction of a millisecond of latency. Bufferbloat is endemic but it is not unavoidable.
He said 20ms, and you are saying it'll be higher, and that's okay. You can't just shrink buffers to get rid of queuing latency. You introduce new problems with scheduling when doing so.
This first generation of satellites doesn't even have inter-satellite lasers. So those extra hops will never be an issue. It's a moot point. The 20ms number is about the first generation.
But some day, when those links exist, if data goes halfway around the world via satellite, it would be stupid to say "gotcha! longer than 20ms!". That's a complete misunderstanding of the context, and complaining about something that makes the data go faster.
If someone was going to use multi-hop results to 'disprove' 20ms, they don't even need data. Just look at the speed of light. Bam, already disproven! But that's because it's not what the 20ms number was talking about. He wasn't promising to violate causality.
Nobody has ever claimed 20ms to go around the world, because that's physically impossible. He did claim ping times would be 20ms, which is patently false, even within CONUS. There is no "second generation" to date. They have not been launched or tested. So the more of v1 that are out, the less v2 you can launch without deorbiting a very expensive part of the fleet.
But if we need to look at the numbers later, doesn't that mean you're conceding the point about it being "clearly not going to happen" and "patently false" that it will ever reach the promised number?
Or do you think I'm delusional to say "maybe it will, maybe it won't" and you're just humoring me by offering to revisit?
So SpaceX only has 2 PoP locations, and it happens to be the areas where they are doing trials. As soon as the ground system needs to backhaul the signal over long fiber distances, things change quite a bit.
I'm maintaining these are best case numbers and that they'll go up when the service is live. I would bet you'll never see 20ms when paying customers are on it.
When I was growing up, 56.6kbps was the hotness. However, in the boonies where I lived, the best I could do was 33.6kbps. Most of the time, I was lucky to get 28.8, but would never get less than 14.4. Turned out, that the central switch for our town was so old and we were so far from it that there was no way for it to provide a clean enough signal for >33.6.
When HughesNet came out, we tried it. It was horrible. Only if we were lucky would we get a signal better than our dial-up's download speed. The thing about Hughes is that we still connected with a dial-up for Tx. Only Rx came from space.
All of that to say HELL YES, those are amazing speeds. However, as an adult, I became cityfolk, and have full 1Gbps up/down via fiber.
I remember as a teen I'd go on Digg and open all the articles in separate tabs so that by the time I was done reading the text ones some of the images would be loaded on the ones with pictures. We've come a long way.
Oh, you had tabs! We had to use new browser instances! Uphill, in the snow!
Seriously though, I still do this out of habit, as it's just how I like to read. Skim a front page, open all the articles in tabs, and then go back and peruse them.
Actually the way 56k worked is that the ISP would provide a digital signal to the phone switch, and not all phone switches supported this. The problem might have been distance but it was probably the age of the switch!
LOL, try Verizon-level of rural infrastructure neglect. I paid for a guaranteed 3,300Kb/s down, 768Kb/s up. I usually got 900Kb/s down, and 150Kb/s up. to quote the linesman who had the shit job of patching together the literal 1930's(!) phone lines," I was told by corporate to absolutely not replace any lines unless they're taken out by a drunk or a tree. the cable on that spool I pull behind my truck is going to go white from sunfade long before I ever get to use it."
I non-jokingly asked him which tree I should cut to 'accidentally' nail the worst sections of wire. his response was essentially 'they're all so bad you'd need to cut down a lot of trees'. Verizon DSL was my only choice beside Hughesnet or dial-up. I ended up moving instead.
Man that's bad, here in Switzerland my Line was upgraded to 10Gbs from 1 and i was mad that the router just had four 1Gbs and one 2.5Gbs cable ports...so i had to buy the business model router with fiber LAN (witch i like much more..thinner cables).
I was paying in excess of $112 US a month for the priviledge of DSL that had about a 60% uptime on fair weather days, and 0% uptime on rainy days.
I also forgot to mentiom how my DSL speeds got that low; one section of telephone wire on my rural street had literally no usable pairs left (they had all corroded into nothing). the linesman had to reroute our phone line about 1.5miles out of the way in the opposite direction of the CO to get us reconnected. after that, if you picked up the phone, all you'd hear was a ghostly whistling instead of a dial-tone. the only reason I still had a 'working' DSL connection was from modifying the firmware on my D-Link DSL modem to do horrifying things. :|
4G is very hit or miss geographically, and "unlimited" data plans tend to throttle you at usage as low as 2GB/mo, and will refuse to renew your contact if you use too much too regularly (now that contacts are rare, that often means justa few consecutive months over an unwritten amount will get you terminated.
I am with one of the world’s biggest telcos, Telstra, on a fully owned and operated fibre-to-the-premises network. I live in a decade old estate half an hour from the centres of the third and sixth largest cities in the country.
The maximum upload speed currently on sale on that network is 1 Mbps. And it’s a monopoly. Inequality in Internet access aside, that maximum is below the average fixed upload speed of 170 out of 170 countries listed by Speedtest.net.
1 Mbps. I did three months of complaining and got 5 Mbps. The local regulator doesn’t care because even though they’re not actively selling it, said monopoly network is “capable of 5 Mbps”.
Contention aside, this and 5G will be important for those jailed by infrastructure monopolists. Here an extreme example, but the same is true across North America too, for instance. Rural users sure, but this can extend beyond that.
> I am with one of the world’s biggest telcos, Telstra...
You have my condolences :(
That's so bizarre to have that kind of low speed on fibre, though. I'm half an hour by car / bus from the 4th biggest city, and I'm reliably getting 10Mbps upload over the copper lines. (I was getting the full 20Mbps of my plan, until NBN recently botched the repair of a temporary line fault - their repair guy even said it was the legal required minimum speed and he wasn't going to try any harder than that.)
Is iiNet not available where you are? Though since it's all NBN now, the reseller telco shouldn't make any difference.
That 6th biggest city is awesome though - if I didn't live here, I'd move there. 3rd biggest is a nice place too.
It’s “Telstra Velocity”. It just got a special exemption to not make it operate like the NBN renewed because, and I paraphrase the federal government’s words: “because they couldn’t be arsed and if we didn’t renew it they’d turn off the Internet and blame it on us”. I too would like to have regulatory exemptions extended indefinitely with the excuse being that I can’t be arsed, but elected officials can just tell people to use mobile data instead like my local one did. Charging taxpayers more than $30,000 over a year.
No other providers are available. Technically OCCOM and probably still Exetel, but they can’t offer faster speeds and have to charge more than even Telstra.
My most recent communication with the federal communications department included this wonderful phrase:
> “Please note that this legislation applies only to the capabilities of the network. The plans offered to individual consumers may be limited to slower speeds.”
Wow, that's terrible. People like to complain about internet speeds in Australia, but I thought it was OK if you had FTTP. This is the first I've heard of these localised garbage fibre monopolies. https://www.itnews.com.au/news/telstra-gets-two-more-years-t...
Unfortunately it seems like Starlink in particular probably won't be useful for urban areas with poor competition. I'd be interested if it were, but from the sounds of it, they won't be able to handle lots of users in a small area.
Likely, but Australia might have a bit less of that because all the big cities are very distant from each other. A Starlink satellite with a view of Perth, for example, is going to have close to absolutely nothing else on its horizon. Above the US, for instance, that’s unlikely with many people living in between too.
If I can get those kinds of speeds in rural areas, I would legitimately uproot my life and move. I can work from anywhere, and I reckon, there will be more and more people like me in the post-Covid world. This has the potential to reshape our world and turn the tide away from mass urban migration.
>Even a reliable 10mbps would be a godsend in many places.
my first foray into 'rural' internet was during the late 90s, using a satellite+modem setup.
The bandwidth was fairly decent -- equivalent to a fast ISDN line -- but the reliability was horrendous.
Drops constantly, only to wait for a whole new modem negotiation and reconnect. Think about the idea of an analogue phone modem but over an unreliable aerial connection.
My point in this anecdote : don't take the upstream/downstream values at face value -- there are more things that go into a connection that's actually worth using.
That said , I have nothing but hope for Starlink. I still frequent rural areas that , if broadband is available, it's severely limited bandwidth. I'm glad there will soon exist an alternative -- let's hope that efforts are made to keep the astronomers happy so that this network can be a real boon to humanity.
Absolutely! As someone who lived in a third world country for 2.5y (2014-2016), I had to resort to satellite internet for semi-reliable uplink. I have to admit that I’m not too familiar with the differences between Starlink and what’s already available, but what I do know is that I had to settle for 4/0.5mbit and was really happy with it.
Reliability of the connection was much more important than the throughout.
Main advantage of Starlink over existing satellite is a (much) lower latency. Starlink constellation is flying by with a new satellite overhead every 10 minutes or less, and they're operating just above the atmosphere. Musk has claimed 20ms latency, which if true, would be absolutely a smash victory for rural Internet users everywhere.
It would be pretty nifty if the latency and jitter is consistent enough to be used for basic SIP/VoIP. Under 100ms in general would be hard to notice latency much different than a mobile phone. Starlink could go as far as rolling their own VoIP service with guaranteed QoS. I would also hope during beta testing they are developing intelligent queuing to deprioritize bulk transfers, and optimize bursty traffic where latency would be most apparent.
> Why is that impressive if the original press announcement said it would be < 20ms?
It's impressive that they are not too far off, while the service is still in beta. And compared to regular connections you can get on Earth, it's a very decent ping.
As a side note, press announcements are made to generate buzz and create headlines, so you should always expect hyperbole instead of strict facts. If you look at video games announcements, press releases constantly state that every new game is the best ever in their genre.
Satellite usually gets several hundred to nearly 1000 ms of latency, so being under 100 is a big deal.
Satellite latency is so bad most people with smart TVs can't stream to them because most streaming buffers empty faster than the network responds with more packets. They are usually stuck with their computers to pre-download content or increase buffer size/decrease video resolution.
I didn't say the latency was as high as GEO. If a car commercial said a car was $20k, and you got to the dealership and it was $60k, would you just throw your hands up and say it's still pretty good? The point is that the publicity was based on completely fake promises.
When you live in mountainous areas you usually have three options.
Dial-up - if its offered still in your area,
Point to point internet - if you have neighbours in line of sight also participating.
or Satellite - if you are in line of sight to the satellite
Many people I know up-country usually all they get is satellite, so yeah starlink may not the promised 20ms, but its hella lot better than what traditional satellite is providing (also hopeful starlink provides better reliability and tech support which in satellite is quite atrocious as well)
Heh - as far as what's promised vs delivery, read the fine print on satellite internet plans, they have wording saying the hope is to provide the advertised speeds but there is no guarantee that they ever will.
Everything you just said applies to starlink as well. Why the double standard? Still need line of sight, they still won't provide advertised speed guarantees ( no ISP does).
And most people don't care about latency. Bandwidth is far more important.
For real time games, yes, for the vast majority of traffic, no. Streaming and web browsing are plenty interactive enough for this to matter. Even VoIP does perfectly fine if it's tuned properly.
Browsing on 500ms is terrible and 500ms delay on voice ruins conversations. Most streaming apps don’t even have deep enough buffers to deal with the terrible latencies of satellite.
A single web page load of a “modern” website requires 10s of TCP connections to load resources from CDNs, each of which requires TLS handshakes taking 1.5 seconds, which are not initiated until the initial page is downloaded enough to see resources to load.
I had to live on this Internet for a summer. It was awful and was only good for long downloads. Everything else was literally better on dial-up. And this was 15 years ago.
You keep mentioning this, and I can't come up with any announcement that it would be under 20ms, just quotes from Elon saying the target was under 20ms. Is there a press release you're aware of with that quote?
> Musk stated that Starlink's 20ms latency is designed to run "real-time, competitive video games." He also stated that Version 2, at a lower altitude, "could be as lows 8ms latency."
Version 2 is not at a lower altitude. In fact, most of the latency incurred is not from altitude at all. They are moving several hundred kilometers from their highest to lowest orbit, and if you do that math that's not accounting for much of the 20ms.
It's going to get worse. Right now it's completely uncongested. The terminals are not built to handle two satellites at the same time, so the throughput they are getting now is likely close to the maximum that they will be seeing.
Hell for some 'holler down in West Virginia or Kentucky a reliable 3mbps would be amazing. Many of those sorts of places have 384kbps-768kbps DSL or even dialup... in 2020. They just don't have the infrastructure and it costs way too much to build out last mile over vast stretches of land with few customers, and it's compounded in some areas by a lack of even stable right-of-way where you can easily run cable.
The market for this is huge. It's probably not going to displace high-end broadband in medium sized to larger metro areas, but it can clean up when it comes to anything outside of that. The only possible competitor is fixed wireless using next-generation modulations that provide incredible range, but that's hard to deploy over a wide area if the land is not really really flat. I guess 4G could compete too if they radically cut their prices, but I'm not sure the backhaul networks out in them 'thar hills would even be up to the traffic.
Agreed. Maybe it's gotten better, but when I used HughesNet in the middle of the woods in Maine, I would say it was comparable to dial-up except with worse latency and reliability. Anything in the ballpark of a 4G connection would have been phenomenal.
I've been a digital nomad for almost a year now. If I can get 5 Mbps down/up, I can do my work without interruption. In a couple places where I could only get 1 Mbps down/up, I could still do my work w/ a bit of patience on transfer speeds & good enough audio, as long as I didn't need to do much screen sharing & video uploading, and I could usually compensate when I really had to by tethering/hotpotting to my mobile phone. !0 Mbps would be fine for one person for most things. Might feel slow for a family during peak times.
You’ve got that right! I taught remotely all summer long on 6mpbs down/ 0.3 up. Dreadful. Just enough upload speed for PowerPoint + my voice. I’d love for something like Starlink to work.
Agreed. I have travelled to remote places where this speed would have been a godsend, not just for internet but for telephony as well with VoIP. Imagine the kids living in such places finally getting access to all the stuff internet has to offer.
The only thing to watch out would be pricing. I hope there is more competition so the price remains competitive.
Viasat is already available and provides 12-100 Mbps service. Viasat only uses 4 satellites. HughesNet provides up to 25 Mbps service and I think has 5 satellites.
Caveat: Of course I've never used either service myself, so I can not speak to the actual download speeds vs advertised speeds.
I live in a rural area where both of these services are available. They both come with seriously outdated data caps. Hugesnet, if I recall, charges $150/month for their fastest tier, but after 50gb, your speed is reduced to 300kbps.
I haven't experienced either service, but I regularly read that they are riddled with disconnects and spotty service.
Currently we're paying a ridiculous amount, $200/month, to Unlimitedville for what is literally just a 4G hotspot in our house, but with an actual, usable data limit (1tb/month).
I have some serious concerns about Starlink, but until we decide that internet is a utility and rural people need access too, I guess I'm happy to see at least somebody is trying to make rural internets better.
I saw someone in this thread mention hacking a 4g tablet plan to work as modem doing a sim swap. You could possibly do something similar by setting up 2 or 3 separate accounts so have individual data caps on each and cycle through them each month. It sounds like a hassle but could save you enough to be worth it
Both the speeds and the latency are worse than what was originally promised. there have also been no pricing for the plans, nor have there been pricing for the equipment. This has been the biggest downsides since day one.
Those services' satellites are in high orbit and therefore have very high latency (think in the 800ms range), so those seemingly fast speeds rarely result in a fast experience.
I've used both services for several years, and they are perfectly fine. I think people have lost their objectivity completely here and somehow think starlink is a new technology that nobody else was capable of making.
A couple of years back we lived in some mountains in Mexico and the best connection around for miles was less than 5Mbps. Most people had less than 1Mbps.
We then moved closer to civilization and I remember being amazed to be able to watch Netflix in 4K with a 20Mbps connection around 2015 or so.
My Xfinity "Up to 1Gbps" plan never tests above 60Gbps on any speed test other than their own. If nothing else Starlink should light a fire under Comcast, CenturyLink and others to start providing actual fast internet.
I had 5mbps at work. Then finally 5 years later they are able to get me 12mbps. A block down can get 200mbps from same company. My friend a mile away can get 2gbps fiber. And i have joyous 0.2mbps uploads WTFFFFF
this has been done with radio-based meshnets like the puget sound data ring for years, the government hasn't updated the legislation to allow encryption and commercial data on said meshnets, making them useless. we could already be providing free internet to millions if it weren't for the government and their dumb regulations.
I know encryption is controversial, but I cant say I've ever heard someone say that ham radio bands should be allowed to carry commercial traffic (other than people who want to just get rid of those bands all together and auction them off).
This is mentioned on literally every Starlink thread I read, and the response is always that unlike previous satellite internet offerings, Starlink operates in low earth orbit, drastically reducing the ping time. Do you have more to add?
The amount of updates you have to download weekly is insane.
cripples my connection to do anything else for hours at a time. Have to switch to "metered connection" to trick it into thinking im connceted to internet on a smartphone with super expensive$$$ dataplan, so to leave any updates as 'frozen'.
(for a non tech saavy person, they would be driven nuts... every day their computer would just grind to a halt doing network stuff and not know why)
My rule of thumb is to budget 3 mbps for every "real computer" to keep itself up to date. By my count, in my home, that's 15. Here that's phones, traditional computers, VMs, and Raspberry Pis. And about 1 mbps for every "kinda computer". So that would include smart speakers and televisions.
Same applications as anywhere urban. We folk living out in the sticks may appreciate the outdoors more, but there's still those of us who do use computers.
Example: Downloading modern software over anything at 10mbps is a royal pain- VMs, docker containers, bloated IDEs, gigabytes worth of OS updates, tens of gigabytes for games, you name it.
Streaming services cap quality, or stutter out horribly. Don't even bother trying to stream over satellite (even at 25mbs with hughsnet, for example), you'll blow your cap out of the water in a hurry and it'll make you resent leaving the 90's.
To me that frustration comes from a lack of understanding that living in a sparsely populated area comes with the good (less people around) and the bad (worse infrastructure)
It's about expectations. Yes, 10-50 Mbps is pretty acceptable. Today. It won't be in 5-10 years. 5G will make 1000 Mbps at 1ms, pretty much the expectation, and the apps of tomorrow will need it.
In 10 years people will be talking about 50MBps like they do 3G today. I cannot operate hardly a single app on my phone on 3G. It's worthless in 2020.
Even a reliable 10mbps would be a godsend in many places.