Itās an entirely new physical network architecture that relies on a very high degree of coordination between its elements. Frankly, I expected a lot more problems than existing users seem to be experiencing. Thereās still risks of more issues as the constellation scales up, and the routing and handoff becomes more complicated, but theyāre doing pretty well so far.
Regarding speeds, the link isnāt very alarming in size, and presumably is due to customer signups increasing faster than satellites are being launched. You have to click through to find the source for the article:
It still significantly beats other satellite providers for bandwidth (especially considering other satellite providers have fairly tight data caps - I think HughesNetās cap for the equivalent price is 20 GB per month), and destroys them for latency.
Starlink will have to decide what their cutoff will be for customer density. It will probably vary by market, but in order to provide acceptable service, they need to avoid too many customers per satellite.
Iāve done some research and estimating on my own, and would very roughly estimate Starlink can serve somewhere between 5 and 50 million customers globally with a connection that averages 100 Mbps once the full 12,000 satellite constellation is complete. There was an analyst report recently commissioned by landline ISPās trying to beat out Starlink for FCC rural broadband funding that estimated they could serve no more than 485,000 customers in the US only, which I think is roughly consistent with my estimate.
The bottom line is most people should plan on not using Starlink, but for people with no ground-based option (including 5G), itās a promising possibility.
For my own purposes, I probably should have signed up for Starlink when it first became available, but the cost held me back - almost 3 times what Iām currently paying for DSL that is slow even for that technology, plus the $500 up-front expense.
If I sign up today, itās forecast to be a year or more before I get service. Meanwhile, T-Mobile has been offering fixed wireless home internet for several years. They started offering it as a 5G service in many areas over low band last year, and are rapidly upgrading towers to offer mid-band 5G to most of the country this year and next. Thereās 3 T-Mobile towers within 2 miles of me, so I have high expectations that it will be available on a similar time-frame as Starlink, but for half the cost, and with potential to achieve higher speeds.
Of course, if Verizon or AT&T want to cherry pick underserved areas, they could beat T-Mobile to my address and earn my money, but in general, T-Mobile seems to be in the lead for ground-based wireless home internet.
They finally started offering fiber where I live. I went from 400 down / 20 up to 1,000 down and 500 up. The difference is astonishing. Iām using an ASUS AX-89X with CAT 8 running to all the rooms of the house.
Ya most of my devices are 5 GHz except for a couple old 2.4 ones. I just ran a speed test from my iPhone 12 Pro Max on the top floor and got 620 down / 430 up
My original plan was to buy another of the same router and put it on the top floor and use 10 gig backhaul but the signal is so powerful I may not need it
Iām going to plug everything into the CAT 8 jacks where possible.