this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024
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Found the person who's never lived in a area with dial-up or conventional sattelite as their only options. I hate Elon as much as the next person, but starlink is revolutionary for those with no other options.
Second-hand experience from many years ago when Starlink first rolled out: my friend has a cabin in the Appalachians, outside any cell service, so Starlink sounds great for that. However, Starlink site says there is "no coverage" for that area. Yes, somehow, no coverage for a satellite service. The nearest area with coverage was a town with already-decent 4G. And most large US cities had coverage too. So our inside "conspiracy theory" was that Starlink resells 5G/4G modems for hipsters.
Have no idea if the situation changed since then.
Starlink works differently than conventional sattelite. I'm not an expert, so I'm not going to try to explain it beyond saying that I think it's due to the properties of the sattelites being low orbit, requiring more ground transmission stations and more sattelites than conventional sattelite internet.
I believe their coverage has increased greatly over the past few years. When it was first out my parents also didn't have coverage. They do now, and have for a couple of years.
it's really not though it's mid at best.
Do you understand how slow dial up is? Do you understand that conventional sattelite throttles you to unusable speeds after a shockingly low data limit is used up? Those services are not modern internet services. Starlink is. In my testing, I got an average of 45mbps down over a 40GB download. That's so fucking fast compared to even DSL, which is commonly 10mbps down, and even slower up.
Also, typical satellite has horrendous lag. I used to work with someone who was in a remote area (didn't even have cell service) and the quality was fine talking with him through VoIP, but it would take a few seconds to get a response for anything. I can only imagine video. Current boss has Starlink and I wouldn't know a difference.
Heck, up until a few years ago my father-in-law had 1.5mbps DSL and that was pretty much unusable.