There's another aspect here that is often overlooked when looking purely
at the data rate that you can get from your fibre/cable/wifi/satellite,
and this is where the data comes from.
A large percentage of Internet content these days comes from content
delivery networks (CDNs). These innately work on the assumption that
it's the core of the Internet that presents a bottleneck, and that the
aggregate bandwidth of all last mile connections is high in comparison.
A second assumption is that a large share of the content that gets
requested gets requested many times, and many times by users in the same
corner(s) of the Internet. The conclusion is that therefore content is
best served from a location close to the end user, so as to keep RTTs
low and - importantly - keep the load of long distance bottleneck links.
Now it's fairly clear that large numbers of fibres to end users make for
the best kind of network between CDN and end user. Local WiFi hotspots
with limited range allow frequency re-use, as do ground based cellular
networks, so they're OK, too, in that respect. But anything that needs
to project RF energy over a longer distance to get directly to the end
user hasn't got nature on its side.
This is, IMHO, Starlink's biggest design flaw at the moment: Going
direct to end user site rather providing a bridge to a local ISP may be
circumventing the lack of last mile infrastructure in the US, but it
also makes incredibly inefficient use of spectrum and satellite
resource. If every viral cat video that a thousand Starlink users in
Iowa are just dying to see literally has to go to space a thousand times
and back again rather than once, you arguably have a problem.
And yes, small neighbourhood networks of the type Mike described could
put a significant dent into that problem. But do Starlink actually see
Mike supplying 100 people as helpful, or do they see it as 99 customers
they can no longer sell a dishy to? Given how they push their services
into the market, I suspect it might be the latter.
On 31/08/2022 10:07 am, Brandon Butterworth via Starlink wrote:
On Tue Aug 30, 2022 at 02:01:49PM -0700, David Lang via Starlink wrote:
> You are absolutly correct that people who can get fiber (and
probably even
> most DSL) are far better using that than Starlink, and
> last-few-hundred-meters wireless can be better (like DSL, it depends
on the
> exact service available)
...
> People who can get that sort of service are not the target users for
> Starlink.
But unless Starlink turn them away some will still take the
service despite better options.
I do UK FWA and FTTP in rural areas and know others in the
industry. Some have reported being turned down as the
odd customer is waiting for Starlink (instead of taking a
government GBP4k+ subsidy giving them free fibre/FWA install)
There's no telling some people.
brandon
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Dr. Ulrich Speidel
School of Computer Science
Room 303S.594 (City Campus)
The University of Auckland
[email protected]
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
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