Elon Musk Is Charging Starlink Customers Gigantic Bogus Fees Because Its Network Is Being Crushed by “High Demand”
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/transportation/articles/elon-musk-charging-starlink-customers-170100747.htmlOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
265 replies
Billionaires will kill us all, while millionaires scream and yell. Thousandaires defend them both, while we all suffer in hell.
That's great, gonna have to print it out on stickers and place them around town.
dramatic much?
Over promise and under deliver, the musk way. Fucking clown ass Nazi piece of shit. I know there’s not a lot of viable alternatives, but if you’re using a Nazi service, I lack sympathy when the Nazi raises your prices.
Meanwhile the airlines rolling out "free Starlink WiFi" without so much as an asterix about who provides and controls the bits you're sending through it.
Imagine how much data musk will be able to glean getting free access to travelers internet habits and probably a lot more.
If they're offering "free Starlink WiFi" they are telling you who is offering it. If they are offering "free inflight WiFi" they are hiding it
I was just on a flight with that, and it was ass. I got a few text messages in and out, but that was about it.
They must always know where we are, but we must never know where they are. Funny how that happened while lawmakers stood idly by.
funny way of saying 'actively participated'
I think most of the data going to and from your phone is gonna be https, I doubt it would provide much value tbh
Unfortunately there's still plenty of unencrypted traffic from normal usage (e.g. DoH is still fairly rare).
I mean, I guess you can get a list of domain names accessed, but accessible data is still quite limited imo.
Don't get me wrong, I'd rather avoid it entirely or use a VPN if I'm on such a network if I must.
Some places have to use starlink sadly, like the ones in remote zones and islands in the middle of the ocean
Geo makes more sense for theses use cases. Yes you'll have more ping. But for data dumps it matters not.
What makes sense is the quality of service offered at the price point. There's a reason why Starlink outcompeted Hughes so badly.
Yeah, but as this article points out, the price point is a lie.
The price point has been very much true, it is just early on the enshittification curve.
With these price hikes, we'll see.
My point was that Hughes was really bad.
So basically:
His companies are hilariously insolvent, so he rolls them all together and does the biggest IPO of all time to raise money.
But he still needs more money.
So then he tries to do a corporate bond issuance... doesn't go super duper well.
So he still needs more money.
Welp, ok then, jack up fees, whatever, not very original, but does at least kind of work.
Any takers as to whether or not he'll still need more money?
If you guess correctly, you get a free Neuralink installed in your head that you can send OTA bluetooth firmware overrides to nearby devices with your brain!
Or well, maybe it works... maybes its the opposite of that. Whatever.
... But you can recharge them with your solar roof tiles! And then get in your Tesla Roadster! And then take a Starship ICBM flight to Hong Kong or Moscow or Buenos Aires or Rome! And then take the hyperloop to Antarctica!
Yeah, none of that is a sign of a thriving business empire if you ask me.
Not sure I want those to actually thrive though.
Investors should have learned by now that Musks endeavors are 100% ADHD cycle projects; hyper focus, obsess, launch, start to lose interest, hop on the the next, abandoning previous project, instead of building on the success.
I remember when starlink first became available here and had better speed than you could get with terrestrial services. 5 minutes research showed network bandwidth would be a problem once they had significant adoption. Lo and behold...
I'm sure it will get better. Just give him a few more goverment subsidies, grants, and 0 interest federal loans to be forgiven later, have the entirely military fleet of humvees replaced with CyberTrucks that he'll never produce, give him carte blanche to fill more layers of the sky with his private satellites without any oversight, regulation, forethought, or concern for the actual good or needs of humanity, and suddenly your current 3 Megs download may hit 5, even 6 megs in off peak hours! Only an extra $150/month for their premium subscription plan!
Who are you who are so wise in the ways of science?
I mean, tbf, all the big telecoms have received billions over the last 20+ years to "connect rural America". A lot of us still don't have access to alternatives.
Oh I'm aware. The amount of screwing over rural residents the telecoms have done and continue to do is massive. Satellite internet helps bridge that gap. But there are better and cheaper ways to do that just by running some more wire. If county governments did their damn jobs for their residents, there wouldnt be as much of a need for satellite internet to supplement the land-based ISPs.
Upvoted for proper spelling of "Lo and behold".
All the Elon books and profiles love to fluff Elon about how he always holds things to the raw physics and makes sure the math works.
Either that was BS or he needs to find a different cereal from Special K.
America will do anything except lay some fucking cable to provide internet to the ruroids.
It's crazy how behind US is on that. Americans say "yeah but US is bjg and mostly empty space" so is Asia and the rest of the world yet they are not defeated by a cable. It's just cable laying - come on, we solved cable laying 50 years ago.
How many big empty rural areas in Asia have fiber optics internet relative to big empty rural areas in the US? I thought starlink was heavily used by a lot of counties where people didnt have great access to internet?
I think China has done it for all of their rural villages (or maybe 98% it seems)
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201908/02/WS5d43f3c6a310cf3e355639b3.html
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1043951X22001110
Basic all rural areas have fiber/cell towers in Asia. Depends how you measure it but like 90% of populated Asia is connected and most of these stats are only being held back by Russia too.
The US has a weird mix of big emplty spaces, really fucking expensive existing underground utilities and roadways, and private property (easements ain't free) that makes new underground utilities stupidly expensive to run.
You have to buy big easements, negotiate utility contracts with local and state governments (to use the public right-of-way), dodge existing infrastructure while repairing what you break, and lay a fuckton of cable.
I work on the municipal side, and despite Google Fiber having a utility agreement with us for years they still have yet to lay a single foot of underground fiber because we won't allow them to cut across roads that we just replaced in the last year, require their microtrenches to follow engineering standards, and they need to show existing underground water, gas, wastewater, and electrical services on their plans because they're famous for just running a trench and making it the water district's problem when they cut 7 public lines in an hour.
Same reason rural places in the US also haven't discovered electricity yet. Oh, wait…
It does seem like that at times. But at least in Minnesota, the ruroids often seem to have better availability of fiber than the suburbanites and exurbanites. Possibly due to state broadband grants.
This is how it was where I grew up in Washington State. We were not rural enough for our neighborhoods to qualify for grants, but not densely populated enough for it to be financially worth it to lay cable. I moved out in 2018, where the best options were still dial up or conventional sattelite.
I did discover that by voiding Cricket Wireless' TOS you could use your BYOD as a hotspot with unlimited data and you'd just have to change sims/numbers every few months when they caught on. Of course now Starlink and T-Mobile home internet exist instead and hey, maybe they laid cable in the past 8 years, it's possible.
Including paying companies specifically to lay that cable then never forcing them to actually do it.
This is why satelite internet is a dead end. The latency and bandwidth are fundamental limitations of physics which are incredibly expensive to scale up compare to cable and cell towers.
Even if we have a complete satellite roll out we'd still have to go back to cell towers for better latency. So why even entertain this detour if not for war machines - one niche where satellites are actually better.
Satellite is better for remote people. I know a woman whose Alaskan village (indigenous, not colonizer) got significantly better internet once starlink was rolled out.
Now you could say that nations with meaningful duties to remote peoples should band together and essentially jointly operate (maybe having the UN administer it) such a service for them and use it as the last resort akin to sat phones. And I'd be cool with that. But I so think such people should have internet, and this is probably cheaper than running and maintaining cables all across Alaska and northern Canada.
That's true, but it's largely due to a market that doesn't prioritize remote clients and a regulatory system which has roped off huge parts of the radio spectrum.
Instead of a starlink receiver talking to low orbit, you could have a dish that uses fixed wireless access or point to point connections to access a terrestrial tower. In exceptional situations geostationary satellites make sense, but these low earth constellations are getting out of control.
We had point to point internet for years. Then they went belly up. Which is why we have starlink today.
Give them internet via a geo stationary satellite.
You only need a few in a space where there is a lot of room, and it won't bug anyone, contrary to the shit show we have with the countless starlink satellites visibly zipping over while working hard to make the Kessler Syndrome a thing.
I'm not even talking about the pollution caused by those rocket launches
We have that already. Its comparatively very expensive, and also very very high latency simply because for the speed-of-light. The satellite at GEO sits at 20k kilometers. That by itself introduces 250ms of latency each way. So a 500ms latency is not uncommon for GEO satellite internet. Also, GEO satellites are very expensive because of how much energy (deltaV) it takes to get the satellite out that far and for how long they have to operate to make that money back.
Yeah, my family was forced to get starlink because ATT and other wireless internet sucks in where we live
But it's not better. It's just rhe only option. They would very much prefer to be connected with a cable or a cell tower no? Why wouldnt they?
You have permafrost melting so northern tundra areas will be worse to build on going forward. But the context is tiny rural places that don't have roads and you travel by plane or snowmobile, they're not getting cable.
Could do point to point wireless. And only have towers every so often. The land is cwey flat.
why not?
Hundreds of miles of expensive cable because terrain make expensive to serve dozens of hundreds.
It's significantly cheaper still. Cable is dirt cheap, technology of laying cable is mature and we already have roads developed to piggy back off infra off. Now think about satellites that only live a few years and are incredibly expensive and immature.
20,000-30,000 miles to cover 250,000-300,000 people (I looked for numbers based on places with at least 100 people) for a total cost of $2,000,000,000-$7,000,000,000.
Good luck with that.
Which part of permafrost do you not understand?
Beyond permafrost it's also extremely remote and often separated from Anchorage (metro area has the majority of the population of Alaska, at a similar population to the city of Cleveland) by national parks, mountains, and rivers. It's very expensive to run cable out to such small populations
Do they have electricity?
Cables dont freeze lol
Ah. I see. You're thinking to let the fiberglass cables lose on top of permafrost like it's a hose from a shed.
If you're able, you can learn why that is a bad idea online. There is plethora of reasons why fiberglass cables usually go underground.
How many people is that? Maybe a million in the entire world? Less? I dont think internet is on their mind that much tbh
5G is the answer for most people. The few people living in extremely remote places are not worth rolling out special satellites for them. It will not be profitable. They can use existing satellite services for basic communication.
Oh shut up with the colonizer bs. So its OK for the indigenous to use a Nazis system because burns hits them.
And even then, why the everlasting fuck do you want low watch orbit satellites for this? Why do we need to pollute the shit out of our ecosystem, our LEO, and our night sky (fuck those moving blips) just to have latency low enough to play a game over na internet connection that shouldn't be used for any of that...
Everything about starlink is maddeningly stupid and it is negatively impacting so many people that want nothing to do with it but hey, it's Elmo Musk, so just let him do that shit anyway!
I’d say LEO is where we want these, no? My understand is that if SpaceX went defunct tomorrow, the satellites would (eventually) burn up on reentry, so there’s no risk of them managing to fragment and become more permanent bullets wizzing around in our orbit. Or is that incorrect?
That's sort of like saying you'd want the milk to spill in the kitchen because it's easier to clean up. But the thing people are upset about is that the spilling of milk in the first place is not necessary.
Satellite internet is extremely important for certain regions of the world. Good luck running anything to remote areas like Alaska, or areas of northern Canada.
It’s an extremely important piece of infrastructure, even if you have zero use for it.
Thousands of satellites are immune to anti satellite missile, with only a few dozen geosats one country could blow up those sats and cut a few ocean cables and cut off most of the International transocean internet access. That's a good thing, because it makes it so that any nation preparing for war isn't tempted to cut off internet because it wouldn't work anyway.
Idk if I'd call it a dead end so much as a service of last resort. There's definitely utility in a global network of always-on wireless communication. But because it's expensive to deploy and saturated quickly, you can't operate at the volume of a wired network or local wireless system.
I think you've answered your own question. The incremental value of satellites as part of a weapons system far outstrips normal business applications (nevermind consumer markets).
But you still run into the same constraints at a certain scale. Even if your transmission system is unassailable, it cannot support the volume of traffic of wired connections. So you're still going to see drone pilots with enormous spools of fiberoptic wire moving along the battlefront.
Latency is theoretically much better because the speed of light is much faster in the vacuum of space than fiber optics. So the ping from continent to continent is better using a satellite network that transmit data to each other using laser light.
I suspect we could be moving the orbit of the satellites higher so we can reduce the insane number of them, while still have better ping. I don't see a technical reason why bandwidth would be more limited in space than on the ground. It's fundamentally easier to scale since you can just launch more satellites along certain orbits to add bandwidth.
The fundamental problem is of course privatization and the inevitable monopoly. It will never really be cheaper than land based internet, and so both will continue to coexist, so it just adds additional resource waste for no real benefit except to make some guy rich.
I can't remember where I read it, but there was an article in high finance tech, where they were dealing with billions of transactions per second and relied on sub-millisecond timing. They still used terrestrial long-haul (cross-continent) microwave tower networks for this because even the time it took to transceive between optics and electrons in each switching segment meant fiber was slower. The latency tolerance for those applications preclude the drive up and down to space.
Vacuum of space? Dude there's an entire atmosphere with clouds and shit in it.
In low earth orbit?
yes, where else it would be?
So what are you trying to say? You signal goes up a few kilometers, then you're in near vacuum in space where signal travels with proper light speed and results in faster transcontinental ping.
There are no clouds and atmosphere in space. That is what makes it space.
EDIT: Actually radio signals already travel near speed of light in the atmosphere. Only light in fiber optics is about 66% of speed of light.
EDIT2: Oh wow, a Chinese research initiative just achieved a breakthrough with hollow core fiber optics which does transmit close to the speed of light. This could render that advantage of sattelite internet moot! Upgrading cables is going to be a massive infrastructure project though.
and what's in those few kilometers? not atmosphere? Sure the signal travels a bit faster between satellites themselves but this is not relevant in modern networking. Almost everything is cached on edge in your regional server these days so only "the last mile" is what matters for latency. Even if you ignore all this the math would still favor cable every time - 66% reliable speed of light will always beat "potential 100% speed of light sometimes for some part of the distance"
Ping
To be fair, the network being crushed by high demand is extremely unsurprising. Cellular networks have always had this problem in dense areas, where it’s no way you're reaching the advertised speed. This is mainly due to the available channels being shared by everyone in a relatively large area, connected to the same cell. Which is mitigated somewhat by setting up more cells with shorter range for a higher cell density in cities.
How could a satellite based network ever scale? Where you have what, a handful available cells to cover an entire state?
I thought the whole point of this service was to provide internet to places that traditional services couldn’t reach. Meaning they wouldn’t be over populated because those people already have good internet.
Now that I think it through, there’s no way that demographic is generating enough money to make this work.
Whoops?
Starlink has always been a shitty cell service at best. Only now the towers have to be entirely replaced every three or so years if memory serves.
Coulda just run fiberoptic but that would be the boring solution with a lower return.
It does make sense for very rural customers. For my parents to get fiber like you suggest, someone would have to string up about 10 miles of fiber to gain like 50 customers, maybe. With another 90 miles of fiber they can get all the way to 1000 people served; idk how many households that is but the unit economics don't make sense.
I mean if we're looking at pure economics, it's probably not even worth running power lines to your parents. Matter of fact, they probably wouldn't even have electricity if the government didn't force electrical companies to build power lines to everyone, with the electrification act of 1968.
It isnt worth it, but at least in Canada and USA we've given the ISPs billions of dollars to service them, and they keep adding a token amount of people and saying shucks all the money is gone we couldn't do what we said, and then we give them more. Rinse and repeat.
It's not. But fiber isn't a regulated utility like power is, so the argument is moot until that changes.
Yes, and that's the problem. Fibre should be treated the same way as electric and, formerly, landline phones. For the last 20-30+ years, the government has handed billions out to connect everyone. With very little movement in a LOT of places.
Give it 50 years of replacing satellites and I am willing to bet a one time install of fiber would have been cheaper.
Fiber wouldn't be a one-time charge though. There's regular ongoing maintenance needed for a fiber network.
There's an old joke in the telecom world:
Q: If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and you could only take one thing with you, what would you take?
A: I would take a small bundle of fiber optic cable. As soon as I was on the island, I'd make a small hole in the sand and bury it. As soon as I turn my back there would be someone with a backhoe there to dig it up.
The cost of sending crew out to fix a 10 mile fiber run servicing a single household would wipe out any possible profit from that subscriber for more than 100 years. Now multiple that by how many 10 mile+ fiber runs we'd need to service all those widespread low-density rural customers.
Those satellites are all earning profit everywhere else around the world they can service. That line to a 100 person community taking decades to be profitable is money the ISPs dont want to spend because it'll take decades.
Rural, cellular dead zones (eg desert, mountain passes), air, ocean/seas/large lakes.
To cover rural reliably though you end up having to be over dense areas as well, but they cant really compete in the dense areas as they'll be cheaper options, but you can make some money there since you already cover it. The area they could best compete there would be critical backup service.
I'd like to see someone setup cell towers across the pacific ocean. I even started dreaming up what it would take/cost - but I soon realized it would never be worth it so I'm not asking for investors. (though probably I should have... Anyone know a VC with money to burn?)
Wait so you're saying the ships, just the ships moving across the pacific are enough reason to have low earth orbit satellites in such quantity they impede things as simple as looking at the stars? The ships can get internet from higher earth orbit satellites that don't have to be constantly replaced. We haven't been choosing between internet and no internet with starlink, there has been satallite internet way before starlink and there will be way after. All it takes is a less cooperative FAA not allowing so many rocket launches for the AI nazi company and slowly holes form in the coverage as the satellites burn up.
No, I'm saying that the ships would like it. Also having used geosynchronous satellite internet I have first hand experience that the lag sucks. Better than nothing, but Starlink has less lag. Probably faster but I don't know what the latest speeds are. Still geosynchronous covers a lot of area which means you are sharing with a lot of people.
Cruise ships pay a lot for internet because their customers want it. Crew on all ships want it for their breaks.
Starlink isn't worth it for just the above, but add in rural people on land and it makes sense. Though I understand the astronomers hate it.
I'll be short with you.: I don't care how much nicer starlink is, putting that many satellites into low earth orbit all the time is not good for the climate. The few thousand people on ships at any given time can wait to stream high def porn or download it while at port. All the needed uses of the internet can be met via slow higher orbiting satellites.
Lots of things are not necessary and are bad for the climate. You likely enjoy many of them. You start by reducing your own consumption.
Its by delibarate choice
Increase the orbit by a bit and it quickly goes from about 5 years to decades and decades for reentry
The entire point is that they will be replaceing them that often anyways, may as well get some other benefits
Fiber cables cross-cross the oceans many times.
Fiber without cell towers are pointless. Ships and boats commonly have starlink internet now, because it is so much better than any alternative. Cell towers are needed for fiber to compete.
The pacific has some deep trenches, I don't think fiber runs across them.
map of fiber cables:
That would be a reasonable expectation, but I want to remember this being talked about as a revolution for internet in the US; how much better it would be compared to shitty cable providers and how you would get Gigabit speeds without having to run fibre.
Sure, it looked impressive early on, but a wireless system like this will always degrade the more customers they get.
I also remember it was cautioned early on that they had limited bandwidth and so focused on rural areas and a backup for cell phones. For rural areas this is better than having to run fiber (rural areas typically didn't have cable, though they were running fiber close enough to get DSL - better than nothing but very slow)
The whole point is war not helping consumers. Wire and cell towers are already not only cheaper but straight up better in every measure: latency, bandwidth, cost, maintenance, deployment, maturity.
You could literally cover entire land mass of earth for space x valuation with fiber and cell towers and still have left over money to do the ocean too.
The sats pass by every location, because of physics they circle the globe constantly rapidly. They can't only operate in rural areas. So you will have some people in cities use it just not very much.
And that was supposed to be the backbone of the space based data center
Pipe dream was supposed to be the backbone of another pipe dream. The Elon way of doing business.
LOL...from the beginning of this grift, experts said Starlink was not scalable.
From what I see, 99% of the business community thinks all graphs linearly extrapolate.
Spoiler alert: AI learning is not scaling either.
Theyre still improving bandwidth with each launch as the newer hardware goes up, they haven't approached the flat line of 1 dish comes down for 1 dish going up which would be at the 5 year mark of no improved hardware or launch capabilities.
Once starship is operational, its 20x the bandwidth per launch, and cadence will increase so there's still tons of room to scale, and its not like those dishes wont improve either.
How could someone who knows all about computers and networking not predict the logistics problems for such projects? /s
That tweet is almost impressively stupid.
What the fuck does the download size of Wikipedia have to do with anything?
I can also fit some of the largest LLMs on my phone. Where is all that AI investment going to???
Bad example, maybe.
The world's first trillionaire doesn't get to call anyone else greedy.
Clearly it does.
Yes, that is what everyone has been warning about for years and why we want the communication monopolies torn down... Fucking leopards running loose out here eating faces and they still just kinda shrug and go "wish there was an alternative to letting all the leopards run free eating our faces".
To be fair, if you've ever had to use HughesNet, a leopard eating your face is a welcome change of pace.
Goddamn HughesNet. I had vehicle dealerships on that fucking piece of shit for their parts system and payroll. What a horrible service, for thousands of dollars a month.
Brother... You speak the truth...
Should we pull up the record and see who voted to allow that to happen in Nebraska while on the subject?
"We only have the option to use this hyper expensive private satellite service... because we spent all of the wired rollout grants/funding on bullshit."
Oh, it's worse than that. The grant money was the wrong party color, so it had to be disposed of rather than lead to a positive outcome.
But you see, if they took the grant money and used it for something that people liked, they'd have to admit that the party they don't like did something useful! Can't have that!
I saw my first billboard advertising Starlink in Billings, MT today. They have avoided advertising in the past.
Generally they haven't needed to. For most of the situations where Starlink really shines like rural connections, the alternatives are objectively a lot worse. And the other common situation is to avoid a regional monopoly which is still like 90% of the US.
Starlink basically sells itself, even with Elon at the helm.
Starlink will enshittify like all other non-PUD ISPs. This article shows that, and it's already begun to struggle with throughput and scaling it is becoming more and more of a challenge.
There is one alternative that has been shown to be better than anything else: PUD projects which treat internet access as a utility and not something to make more and more money off of. The FCC has rural grants for ISPs that serve rural areas, but instead of exclusively funding PUD projects, they keep giving money to big for-profit ISPs (like Starlink).
Starlink should be considered a band-aid and only something that you'd need when you were in a super rural area without other utilities. The solution is giving everyone with grid connections public fiber via PUDs.
I know we don't live in a utopia where that will happen overnight, and we don't have an FCC that gives a shit. But the FCC should not be giving a trillionaire taxpayer dollars for a half-baked, polluting, wasteful service that will ultimately do the same rugpull that other private ISPs have done.
What's pud?
Public utility district (although sometimes "people's utility district"). Used for utilities like water lines, sewer lines, and fiber. Typically the cost is paid by a group of neighbors, an entire neighborhood, or it can be county wide as well. Usually also subsidized by the county, state, or federal government to help reduce cost.
At my previous employer, we just used Starlink as a third backup circuit. There they'd be better suited for that and travel vs whole home internet.
Fortunately rural fiber rollouts are happening very frequently now. The big ISPs don't want to miss out on the starlink money.
sounds like MUSK is desperate.
The whole concept is rotten right from the start.
"How can Europe compete with that?" I ask myself more and more often (also AI bubble/data centers). Hopefully in the long term.
Brendan Carr deserves a fate worse than Mr Hands.
The competition with Starlink is the Eutelsat Group with it's Oneweb satellite internet product. This is a French company. The founder was championing LEO satellite internet before SpaceX was in the game. Oneweb actually has the more preferred orbital slots and frequencies that SpaceX wanted. However SpaceX far outpaced Oneweb in technological growth as well as orbital constellation deployment.
From a consumer point of view Oneweb is massively more expensive to subscribe to than Starlink. 100GB of Starlink data will cost you $55/month while the hardware will cost $300. 100GB of Oneweb will cost you $325/month with the cheapest hardware costing $3800.
Aren't they building an LEO constellation backed by the EU and ESA?
The primary Oneweb constellation exists right now in orbit. You can buy hardware and service today if you wanted to. Also yes, they continue to expand the constellation.
The article states that pushing consumer satellite internet instead of cables/mobile is basically BS, in my words.
The question wasn't so literal. Much broader.
Guy is being a little too trigger happy with this bait and switch but it should still surprise absolutely no one. Starlink with it‘s thousands of satellites, requiring hundreds of rocket launches is ridiculously expensive to operate and can‘t hope to compete with fiber price wise.
the reason why this is happening now is many countries are launching alternatives. Telesat Canada launches it's first LEO in December, ...but off a Falcon 9.
I have a neighbor who has access to 1gb cable and 1gb fiber from two ISP's. Both have high data caps. Instead he is rocking the starlink and I can't for the life of me figure out how he thinks that shit is somehow better than a hard link.
I don't run starlink, but I run Starry (fixed point wireless) when AT&T and Spectrum are available because:
telecom operators in america can terminate your service if you use the wrong phone? wtf?
They were checking against a whitelist of IMEIs to force people to migrate to 5G phones. While my new phone was 5G, it was acquired internationally and thus not on the whitelist. So as soon as it got on the network, the line got terminated.
that's nuts. you're not allowed to use 4g dumb phones???
Starlink and your short hall wireless solution are not really in the same ball park. I'm sorry for your problems with ATandFee. I use them for 1gb fiber. It hasn't dropped once in the nine months or so I've had it. I had cable internet for 14 years before that. For ten of those years I was the sysadmin for the company. It was a local Four city cable company that finally sold out to a larger operation. We maintained a really high availability with most outages being upstream of our connections. We helped maintain several wireless bridges for commercial companies who were outside our service area and in heavy rain or even fog the signal would drop on a ten mile shot. The 60ghz short hall links also would also suffer from interference from weather on occasion.. No wireless connection is as stable as a fiber link. None of them and they never can be.
I agree LEO Sat is different from 60GHz. But the detrimental effects of wireless is completely overblown. People running into issues should just run a signal test first to make sure it's not their setup that's the problem.
There is no such thing as weather in SoCal (other than that one week of continuous rain each year).
If you are just looking at 4 9s or 3 9s latency while the link is not saturated, it's fine for general use (assuming my first bullet point holds). It's not like I'm running aws off of my home network.
Even in the rain, the latency is mostly fine. It's usually just the minute it starts raining that the latency goes through the roof. My assumption is that it's sampling and adjusting the modulation/coding scheme.
Let me tell you a little story about a 2008 Chevy truck. Around 2018 we had daily interference with our satellite receivers. It was a ongoing problem and we couldn't find anything wrong. We changed out LNB's and even the receivers. Ran temporary cable replacements on the ground. Finally someone noticed out outdoor wifi was going down at the same time as our other problems. We fired of a spectrum analyzer hooked to a tuned 5ghz dipole and nothing out of the ordinary. The next morning our CEO was calling cause fox news went out in the middle of his daily indoctrination and he was getting calls from his assholes buddies he golfed with were not getting their fix of manufactured outrage. We go to the headend and sure enough its out and the spectrum analyzer was showing a massive signal wider than the analyzer could display at once.
We of course were dealing with the problem and didn't notice the twenty year old in one of our old trucks loading up what he needed to bury some drops that day. We also didn't notice as soon as he drove off that everything started working again. After a few minutes of getting our ass chewed when the CEO called and wanted to know what we did and we had done nothing, our operations guy called the kid in the chevy back for something unrelated. As soon as he drove up everything went tits up again and it dawned on us all it was that truck. We switched him to a different vehicle and parked that one. After replacing a number of parts the problem went away on the truck.
It doesn't matter if its the weather or if it exists in you corner of the world. It can be anything cratering your signal. I've seen old lighting ballast interfere and all manner of electrical appliances. I know you can't be convinced because it hasn't happened to you yet but wireless is a poor poor substitute for a hard link.
I've mentioned plenty of times under ideal conditions. If the condition is as you say (where there is known massive interference) I'd say that's a good indicator to either 1. figure out what the interference is and whether it's possible to mitigate it or 2. Switch to a hard link. This is very much the right tool for the right place problem.
For a majority of users wireless is definitely sufficient and that they can tolerate a reasonable amount of disconnects/drops/latency spikes. I'm not saying for every scenario wireless is a good substitute, but it can definitely handle certain scenarios good enough for home users for a fraction of the cost.
Besides, if I'm not having any major sources of interference now but somehow that develops later, that's no different than getting a congested link at peek hours, or a faulty switch somewhere along the path 2 years down the line. It's just another form of network disruption, those can develop in the same way in hard links.
Side note: I've done work over ssh and webapps with a constant 200-500ms latency and periodic disconnects for prolonged (months) periods of time. It is absolutely usable though a bit slow. I've even played PvP in MMOs (SWTOR, ESO) with those network stats back in the day and still managed to do well enough. People overestimate the quality of Internet service they need all the time.
Under ideal conditions or any conditions a wireless connection can never equal a hard link. End of story. You keep trying to convince me what you said had merit when Its clear I don't think it does. Unless you live in a dessert you are exposed to constant interference including congestion brought about by simply sharing that single link aka the wireless spectrum you operate at with everyone else nearby. Whereas If you have a fiber link back to the switch and the line isn't oversold you wont have congestion problem on your last mile. The last mile of your connection is shared with everyone whereas mine currently isn't being shared with anyone or more to the point I get what I pay for with little worry someone is gonna install a shitty appliance and start knocking my internet out.
You're still missing my point. What type of application are you running at home that requires that level of SLA? If you are somehow running something that has that type of reliability/QoS constraints, how can you guarantee that your residential ISP with a fiber connection isn't oversubscribing the links, causing the same sorts of periodic service disruption outside of the end user's control?
I see no reasonable situation where user experience for home applications would degrade over wireless any more than bgp policy misconfigurations or congested links would. Especially when Spectrum drops packets to NTT almost every Monday night.
As a side note, high frequency trading uses shortwave instead of fiber for transferring data due to latency reasons. There is nothing saying wireless is always worse in latency than fiber. But that's no longer in the realm of home use, so I don't really think it matters.
Since the article doesnt make it clear
This is for new or re-activating customers in a congested area.
This isnt a random usage fee, this is for areas they claim are too busy, so you gotta pay if you want to gain access.
Its like when you call a contractor and they quote you a stupid high number. Its often because they're too busy, but if you'll pay the stupid high number theyll do it.
There was no world where SpaceX could support unlimited customers in a cell region.
Congestion pricing is the PC way to describe it.
Price gouging is the more honest term.
You can charge a fixed rate and ration bandwidth during peak use.
Or you can charge a variable rate in order to maximize revenue during peak demand.
One maximizes utility while the other maximizes profit.
Neither of those options would support everyone living in a high density urban area, bandwidth would drop to nothing and no one would want to buy it, and people generally hate inconsistent bandwidth, or random peak hour usage charges on their bill.
Edit: Their overall bandwidth per cell is just too low to be able to support everyone in high density areas like that.
That's why dense urban communities prefer using ground fiber and big routing stations to cellar satellite, sure.
But now we're talking about the real bandwidth capacities, not the pricing for connectivity.
I mean don't get me wrong, it's 100% pure capitalism to do something like, we can confidently service 1000 people per cell region and maintain our advertised service, but once we reach 950, we're going to charge super high fees to connect. They don't have to be doing what they're doing, but they saw a way to make money.
Edit: And this is all assuming the congestion is even real.
I don't doubt the congestion is real, as consumption - especially data consumption - rapidly expands to fill its container.
I might suggest that some of the early adopters and insiders are receiving subsidy rates in order to goose Elon's investor briefs on adoption. And the folks on the back end who are eating the exploding prices exist to pad Musk's proposed future revenue estimates.
"We added 10,000 people a day for the last 30 days, even as we raised rates from $10/day to $100/day!" tells a very attractive story to investors without tipping your hand and revealing what the next 30 days will look like. But it also becomes a kind-of self-fulfilling prophecy, when it results in banks giving you another hundred billion dollars in low-interest credit to expand your network.
They did exactly that with the new standby mode.
You used to be able to pause your service for free. Then they changed it to $5/m but you got unlimited 256kb/s bandwidth and the dish would always be up to date. Just before the IPO they doubled that to $10/m and removed the ability to use it while in motion.
I'd love to see how many people dropped the service after that 2nd price jump which wouldn't have been apparent until after the IPO. Both changes happened within a year.
That's why they used to restrict signups in certain geographical areas. But then people complained that they couldn't sign up. So here we are.
Oh did they stop that entirely? I remember areas being unavailable in the past.
The country that invented the internet... has the worst internet infrastructure in the developed world. Worse than some developing countries too. Astonishing.
No, its pretty in character.
No, we in Germany are almost as bad for almost those prices.
That's more astonishing to me.
Is it really??
I used to be jealous of some friends with their 10mbit symmetric lines while I was getting a whopping 4mbps (down only) on cable. (Obviously.... not recent).
While most around us (Switzerland, Austria, Netherlands for example) have either 10gbit fiber amd or cheap internet, Germany meanwhile has much DSl or coax commections. Fiber is getting popular and is subsidized heavily (you basically receive it for free to the house when signing a contract for some years) a good chunk of seniority are refusing it with "Well, DSL was already enough for me. I don't need this new fangled stuff. And it costs 75-100% thab my current contract for more unneeded bandwidth. Nah, I'll pass on the offer".
Meanwhile the grandson in 30 years will be very "thankful" for a house in a good condition and having to order a telecom contractor to connect the house to fibre network for 10k €. Just because granny was (not unjustified) a bit cheap.
And this analogy can be expanded to the highest of governments in Germany.
Old rich people, disconnected from reality, ruling over the commoners and deciding their fates.
Just recently our local newspaper showed an example of it.
A divorced/widowed father with a grods income of 5000€ would receive more state child support than an equal family with an income of 3500€.
Just why...
Quote from the paper (feel free to use a translator of choice)
(I really hope I understood the article correctly and not making a fool out of myself. But the idiocracy should be enough to see where it's generally going here in Germany)
That is.... frankly just nuts, and I'm sorry to hear it.
It sounds like the majority are still on the same connections I was envious of 30ish years ago, and the government certainly isn't helping things.
It got certainly faster (16 to 50 mbps for me. Which is moatly sufficient) and most of the MSP cliemts I work with have a 100-500mbps to a rare 1gbps wire but it's rarely a given.
the US didn't invent the internet. yes the US made ARPNET, which is the underlying functions that the internet was built upon. but the internet that we know today wasn’t created in the US, the WORLD wide web was created in Switzerland in 1989 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research). the world wide web, or the internet, uses a lot of the same protocols that ARPNET created. but ARPNET is not and was not world wide until Sir Tim used the same protocols to allow regular people to traverse ARPNET from around the world. the US built the underlying tech, but Sir Tim Berners-Lee and CERN built the internet on top.
The web is a layer on top of the internet. They're not the same thing.
the web layer is the most important part of the internet. without it it wouldn't have taken off like it did in the 90s. it is the key part that made the internet the internet. without it, the internet we, you and i, wouldn't be communicating right now.
I just can't imagine having such excessive wealth and not saying "eh, whatever" when someone tells me I'm losing money on some internet fees.
You fucker, you could make the world at least a tiny bit better for billions of people at virtually no expense to you, but you just keep playing your stupid fucking rich manchildren games with your billionaire parasite buddies.
Keep grinding bro, maybe this way you'll get used to the feeling of having your bones crushed in the grinder.
That's the thing with massively wealthy people (which until recently meant billionaires and near-billionaires). They're not interested in making the world better for others. The one thing that makes them happy is... more billions added to their wealth. Why? They don't know... but they must have it. But the happiness is only temporary - until they become unhappy again and crave even more billions.
It makes more sense when you realize his wealth is all smoke and mirrors based on a shared lie.
You don't get that wealthy in the first place by not gobbling up every fucking penny you have a chance to. You think he's just going to take the dub and stop?
It's not evem really losing money it's inventing in the infrastructure youre using to make money.
How else you get to inflate the stock price?
You got to get the returns on it.
That's why you'd never attain that wealth.
I know, he's better than me by a factor of his net worth divided by my net worth. So around, what, 100 millions times?
Not better, just a hoarder.
It's why there are no good rich people.
It isn't just the company leader. It is the brigade of product managers, pricing accountants and more that are involved in these types of corporate consensus decisions.
There is a fleet of people who see their bonuses, commissions, and rev share increasing.
Greed is contagious.
This is like those people who bought Meta glasses and then acted surprised when they got screwed. Did you really not expect something like this from Musk?
so that's what that bottle of lube in the Starlink receiver was for.
If a V1 satellite only has 24 Gbit/s in total capacity on its links to the base station, and a V2 mini satellite only 96 Gbit/s, then it's no wonder really.
The v3 dishes will be 20x bandwidth per launch than the v2 mini.
Even if starships 2nd stage isn't reusable, it'll still be able to launch those into orbit, albeit at a much higher cost.
Bandwidth per launch?
The important question is how much bandwidth to the base station does the satellite have, unless the dedicated coverage area per satellite shrinks, that would also help with congestion.
How much downlink capability they have. Its more per dish, and more dishes, so its 20x per launch compared to today. I think each satellite is 10x
Edit: they've also been lowering the shell a little, so i think that also shrinks the area slightly? It'll definitely help with latency.
Edit: i don't know if they're increasing the satellite density per cell with the v3 dishes in general once the v2 come down. e.g are they fitting all the extra dishes into the same dispersal area as a v2 launch or are they getting spaced out more due to being more dishes?
I mean, high demand shouldn't justify surprise pricing
We've noticed that our service no longer works properly, so we're going to charge you more for it.
Poor Elon, down to his last Trillion
First trillion?
We have terrestrial radio and cables. What is the point of this complex space-based trash?
The US taxpayers literally paid TWICE to privatized telecom companies (telco) to run fiber optic to the home, once in the 90s and again that last early "surge" of FTtH(fiber to the home aka "last mile") when google started competing direct against telcos that would not get the lead out so they all buried a fuckton of (dark)fiber that they then kept artificially turned off and sat on their excess bandwidth instead of releasing that excess supply to the market to do bare standard minimum of using their good taxpayer funded fortune AND their privatized, ridiculously gained profits from the calculable increase of use in the information age YOY to offer it for reasonable prices. We could all be on $25 a month or less no cap 1GBps fiber in many places but again, the market forces at work at this point seem more actively just hostile to the rest of us on ground level here now. It's a fascinating and also infuriating subject as an ex-IT person that helped build out this infrastructure that only could watch as it all remained dark. I was stuck in rural nowhere where we still had a small local telephone cop-op. They took that money, laid fiber and sat on their asses with it while they charged exorbitant rates for 56k dial up service while Netzero and the such took dome of that broadband at a time when independent local ISPs were cropping up, teaming modems and some fiber to offer a service with a saner price structure and this was all before data caps and bandwidth throttling was evenr a thing because all you needed was single rack in strateic locations , set the equipment up and basically forget it with the only fixed costs was your mainline fiber, equipment, colocation etc and such yet they STILL offered 100% FREE dial-up internet, co caps off those systems(of course subsidized by ad networks).
htps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fibre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Service_Fund
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TD-2
We coulda had Local Loop Unbundling all this time.
"Market forces" in this case being oilgoplistic rent-seeking. Which, I suppose, is the result of market forces if you refuse to regulate that market to force competition.
It's the only high speed solution if you're more than 30 miles away from the nearest town and you live completely surrounded by trees or hills. 4g internet is pretty good for home use and that covers most rural areas but that's not large amounts of data usually. It's good for a lot of edge cases like open ocean or really remote areas. And crucially it can do that with very low lag unlike any other traditional geosat space internet.
Yes but people in cities getting it makes no sense. Unless your a neither town.
It's more useful as a backup in case your internet goes down, for things that need 1 or 2 backups for high connectivity uptime
Go to hyperspace, bro. That's where Jesus and Joseph Smith transcended to. Enlightenment is a process of becoming an independent phenomenon. God is an independent phenomenon; it created itself. The Alpha is the Omega; the restuarant at the end of the universe is the transcendental particle that can be in multiple...stepmoms? Tf you saying God? Yea, I got a big stepmommy fetish, tf is your point of bringing it up now? No I don't toe? Tf is toe for? I'll put my big toe in your pussy and be happy to call you about it in the morning so you come to church with me. This is why God made me a Mormon Occultist, because ain't nothing on this world for me but sin, and I did but didn't to learn defilement as the Buddhists call the möbiation of entanglement, as I call the phenomena. But space bro? Space doesn't exist bro. Get over yourself or Jesus's dad is gunna fuck your ass up.
Hm, many valid points to ponder.
That epithet is not funny.
edit: The "R" word
Nothing to do with religion, a severe mental illness afflicting many, is funny.
The used the "R" word, an epithet.
On the contrary, you are clearly a troll, and even if you were correct, you do not get a pass on that word.
Yeah, it ain't kosher. 2 out of 3 Abrahamic religions say don't do that, though I am of the view that any belief system that bans carnitas cannot be the whole truth.
You should only be a Starlink customer if you have no other feasible choice.
Fine by me. All his customers are a bunch of suckers
Ehh, some are. Some just live so far out that the sweet song of broadband feels worth it.
I hate the fuck out of the man, but if I were doing camper life, i'd want it.
Yeah I know a Yupik woman who's talked about how much it improved things in the village she's from. Places that need a small plane charter and a snowmobile to visit still benefit from having internet these days
Yep
At the end of the day it serves a purpose nothing else does
Frankly i couldnt care less about spacex (both the rockets and satelites) if anyone else even close
Unfortunatly their competitors are at a similar place to where they were a decade ago
Ukraine is a user, as is (with stolen terminals) Russia.
I am an IT bod with a mountain rescue team in the UK. Personally I would bin starlink in a heartbeat. I dislike Elon, I dislike the privatisation of satellite garbage. The impact it had on the night sky, on astronomy. I dislike the pettish for abuse from a fascist American oligarchy and government.
However... For now it is by far the single best option when cell communications are out of range.
Who wrote this article?
"A SpaceX support page (which appears to only be available in Swahili, for some erason)"
Don't get me wrong. Fuck any satellite service, and especially FUCK fElon. This article is trash, though.
Sending money to a clown and NOT expecting a fucking circus, are we?
"High demand" meaning underprovisioning.
Satellite internet is a last resort. People shouldn't be using it if they have fibre broadband or 5G options that provide the same speeds. It's a lifesaver if you're on a boat, or live off grid, or just a few miles from where the broadband ends. But if it's anywhere with other people then it's going to max out with horrible contention. At the point the only option is "moar satellites".
Even the 50k sat max size constellation isn't anything for dense urban areas. That's never been the intended market.
This is sooo on cue, right as my AI loving IT colleagues are talking about getting starlink, only to have a backup internet connection in case of an outage.
And I read somewhere that he may be trying to buy t mobile to be able to meet that demand.
That doesn’t make much sense, how is a completely different infrastructure going to help their capacity issues? Unless the plan is to pivot from satellite to 5G or something
I doubt he wants the actual infrastructure. He probably just wants their RF spectrum license.
One shop for all connectivity infrastructure, so yes 5G too
They already provide cell service via a different set of starlink satellites with special antenna, but its very bandwidth limited, for cellular deadzones. You can get it in many countries around the world today.
They recently acquired more spectrum though, and with the v3 dishes will likely start to offer some sort of better sevice once they start launching.
Only people who aren't close to a celltower would use the satellites, which would cut the usage considerably.
Satellite as a primary network link for consumers was a dumb idea to start with, and it should have been a backup link to a land based ISP all along.
I would love to see solar/battery powered cell towers plopped down in the middle of nowhere with a starlink or other provider back link
Fuck, I hope not. My only other fiber option is ATT
Then he will buy that too. America loves monopolies!
My only hope is Time Warner Cable. I mean, Spectrum.
I am guessing this is to amp up the stock price of the GrokSpaceLink IPO.
I think they'll rug pull hard line internet for residents.
It's all that escaped with a bit of net neutrality.
Cellular and satalitte both allow traffic shaping and that's the more profitable.
Hell, maybe they can nationalize it and get Elin paid.
You can traffic shape wired traffic as well
I thought that was still legally protected, but I know it's been a target for a while.
If you can traffic shape cell network data, thats not much different. Everyone has to BGP peer with another network to provide connectivity to other networks. I guess its just where do you prioritize one type of customer traffic over another
Nationalizing it and turning it into a public utility instead of for profit would be a good thing. Or in this case it should belong to the whole world and run by the UN.
He recently rolled up several failing businesses into this IPO. He may be worth a trillion, but he also owes a lot of people money.
First, Musk is a nazi-saluting asshole. Now that we have that established, this article is mostly rage-bait with selective truths on the Starlink service. I'm all for calling out bad behavior a company (and there is a little bit here, but not much regarding the customer billing concerns). This (mostly) rage-bait article is (mostly) distracting focus from the very important problem with Starlink regarding Musk's influence on the government entities that are supposed to protect us from oligarchs. Not only does this include the FCC, but the SEC that let musk bend and break rules to IPO the SpaceX stock enriching himself at the cost of the American people
The narrative of the article is "Starlink has massive hidden fees! Look $1500 charge! Look $500 charge! Look $1000 charge!"
There's three different reasonable explanations for the situations all three these.
$1500 charge - it was a billing software bug, not a policy change, and Starlink reversed the charges costing the subscriber nothing. Yes, I agree customer service could be better and faster.
$500 charge - Subscriber was trying to skirt the rules to save themselves money by subscribing to the [long term plan] for [short term] use. When a subscriber signs up for [long term plan] the extra charge is clearly shown before the service is subscribed to. Yes, the fee is there, but its not hidden. Yes the fee is high, but the prior version of how subscription works meant that the customer would simply be told "we're at capacity for your area, no service for you at all". Instead if service is that important for a user they can choose to pay the fee. Yes, there should be an extra warning when someone is changing their address for [long term plan] but this should be a minor edge case and the poster would not have even run into an issue if they had been subscribing to the appropriate [short term plan].
$1000 charge notice - See detail from the $500 charge explanation why this particular $1000 charge notice exists. The alternative is a possibly customer would just be told to go away with no recourse when they may desperately need the service even with the high priced fee. The fee was clearly labeled before purchase and the customer chose not to go forward, which is entirely their right if they don't see the value.
Don't be distracted by the rage-bait from the important concerns of Musk's government influence.
Frankly im just annnoyed
There is enough to hate
Why make stuff up?
Why with all the full on nonsense im seeing in some of these comments? (Upto and includeing includeing "people should just deal with haveing shitty internet")
Isnt nazi with fucking "mecha hitler" ,along side significantly more, not enough ?
And they pay it? Outside of contract?
Will never use his services or products. Until he is dead and his children divest.
are his children/baby mamas even eligble to his fortune. probably only the one that he used as a human shield. it will be hilarious when 14+ children fight in court for his money,.
It’s likely all in a trust. Protected from any one of them having control.
When do I get charged??
I've had Starlink for two years. My monthly bill is $55 a month, and no rental either...
Common dude, don't support elon
There are no options in rural areas, yet.
For many people, their options are supporting Elon, or not having internet access. I don’t blame anyone for choosing the former.
We don't all live in overcrowded cities.
Ah great. My Starlink hardware just arrived.
I wasn't charged any high-demand surcharge though. I probably wouldn't have ordered it if I had to pay one of those.
I don't think my area will have high demand for Starlink anyway. Even their fastest options are slow. There are options for like 5-10x the speed around the same price in my area. The only downside: There's like a 50% chance of lightning frying my modem each year, and it takes like a week to get a tech on site.
Starlink is a great backup connection. It's cheap to just keep in standby mode (~$15/month, IIRC). An unexpected, heavy surcharge might be a deal breaker though
Pretty amazing to see the comms industry predictions coming to fruition. We have seen some of the most advanced technology developed for the internets fibre infrastructure but Elon has better physics. Sad.
Stuff like that is regional
The satelites go around the world
May as well think of it as not as anything specific but as "the entire globe gets the same amount of bandwidth and its completely independant"
If it can support 100 people per km² then thats perfectly fine for a place where only only 10 people per km² live, but for a high density city where 10,000 people live per km²?
Its just not enough
(Numbers are purely illustrative)
I believe we'd rather see honest waitlists.
Didn't they just drop the startup equipment costs a lot?
Moved the hardware to a subscription.
Oh you thought he was going to save you from the cable company?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/starlink-takes-page-from-cable-firms-with-10-monthly-rental-fee-for-hardware/
"high demand" usually equates to throttling
good