Despite the hate on the promo the tech they offer is still pretty cool. Only way I knew my in-laws were safe near Asheville was because one of their neighbors had starlink and a generator. Took a week for them to get power and cell phone service back and there is no way to get to them without a helicopter so if it wasn't for the product we would have just learned that they were alright.
In New Zealand we're very much natural disaster prone. I run a SaaS working out of home - we wired the house for generator backup and have a starlink unit that sits in a box exactly for this reason, even if the proverbial hits the fan for a week I can still keep on top of the business.
Every couple of months the geny gets sparked up and everything tested. For a very small investment it's very comforting to know we've always got power/internet, regardless of what happens.
If I fully decked my roof out I can generate a good 20kWp
I'm assuming OP isn't actually serving out of home (starlink won't help with it's CG-Nat), so it's not like they're running 5kW of servers. 10kWh a day seems perfectly reasonable amount to keep going.
Given just running a generator it going to eat 20 litres a day on lowest load, over 3 weeks that's 400 litres you'd need to store.
With a battery setup even if you had to charge from a generator you'd be able to run it more efficiently for a shorter period.
So having spend 10 minutes I reckon the answer is "yes, OP should certainly get a solar/battery system set up"
That's crazy. There are huge differences is costs and use cases.A generator is $500, and mine can run for 24hrs on 5 gallons of gas. A 5kw solar system is about $25k to 35k in my area before batteries.
Solar is far cheaper than that in my location - especially if you put the panels up yourself, and storing 100 gallons of gas (400 litres) to run for 3 weeks is far more expensive.
I realize this isn't the case for everyone, but I already have a large propane tank that supplies the house. My generator is tied in to that. So I'm not storing fuel specifically for the generator, but if it came down to it I could probably power the house for a couple months at least. And our geography and flora are pretty unfavorable for solar. So as with most things, it just depends.
> A 5kW solar system is about $25k to 35k in my area before batteries.
Do you live on the moon?
Earlier this year I installed a 7.8kW system in Canada for $13k CAD all in, inc the inverter and labor. (Then I got a $5k subsidy to bring it to $8k out of pocket.)
> California - the moon might be cheaper. The whole system here is corrupt due to regulatory capture
I'm always amazed at how for regular life things it seems you guys has less "freedom" than we do.
It's my house, so I got up on the roof and installed the panels myself (with a friend). I did pay for a licensed electrician to wire the inverter into the main house breaker and double check everything, and he did get a permit for that work (which was $150, IIRC). Then I emailed the electric company, three days later they came out and installed a bi-directional meter for $32 and I'm good to go.
Depends on the price of batteries, which are rapidly declining. Within the next few years the numbers will change in favor of batteries. Though it also depends on the load and having enough space/sunlight for the solar array
I can buy a used diesel/propane/gas/pick your fuel generator today for a few hundred bucks that could power most of the essentials in my house. I bought a brand new one during an extended power outage due to storms last year for $500 CAD. That and 80L of gas (~$120 CAD) can run my sump pumps, fridge, freezer, the electronic side of my furnace, my homelab server rack (including 6 PoE access points), my workstation, and key lighting - for 5 days. If I cut that back to essentials, closer to 3 weeks. That’s roughly 200kWh for $120, plus $500 up front.
Currently, the absolute cheapest I can find lithium batteries (I am planning a solar+grid load-balancing setup) is about $160CAD/kwh. To prepare for the worst case (i.e. minimal solar generation during and following the storm - say, middle of winter/happens to be cloudy/panels are damaged/etc) I’d need to spend over $30,000 in batteries alone to have the same capacity as $120 of gas. Not to mention the sheer amount of space that would take. And the cost of solar panels (10kW actual generation capacity, minimum, to keep essentials running), at roughly $1/W in Canada, adds another $10,000 to that estimate. And that’s not including the cost of installation, which based on what I’ve heard, probably adds another $10-20k.
While there are some interesting advances being made, I do not believe that battery capacity costs will decrease by 3-4 orders of magnitude “within the next few years,” unless you anticipate gasoline/diesel/etc prices to go parabolic. It’s very obvious why people would much rather have a generator and some Jerry cans for a few hundred bucks than a solar + battery setup that costs more than their car.
> I do not believe that battery capacity costs will decrease by 3-4 orders of magnitude “within the next few years,”
Fair call for lithium chemistries, which will probably drop closer to one order of magnitude within 2-3 years (if the trend from the last year-to-date holds). But if we're talking about sodium ion, I wouldn't be surprised if that did drop by a couple of orders of magnitude, which is already sitting about ~140USD/kwh for consumer packs (but before shipping from China). It has a weird discharge voltage curve and needs a more capable inverter to handle it though, but at the prices I'm seeing, overcapacity is plenty affordable.
The solar and batteries have much lower emissions, and can be used as all times (not just during power outages) to lower the cost of electricity. Anyway it doesn't have to be generator or solar + batteries... Why not both? Have the solar, reduce emissions and utility bills. Have the generator as a backup if power is out and batteries are empty.
That's what I'm currently in the planning phases for. Break-even is still the better part of a decade on parts alone, unless you get very creative (for instance, where I live, I can choose to have a special time-of-use electrical billing program where overnight electricity is ~60% cheaper than usual; you can make use of this to charge batteries overnight, rely on solar when it's sunny, and batteries during the more expensive times-of-use).
The overall point though, is that solar and/or batteries are not a viable alternative for emergency backup power, nor will they be "within the next few years." Within the next few decades, maybe.
My quick math came up short on batteries. But as you say, it's worth running those numbers every year. I can't imagine I'll be sitting here in 2030 saying "batteries aren't there yet".
> I can't imagine I'll be sitting here in 2030 saying "batteries aren't there yet".
Or if you're looking now at sodium ion. It's only just hitting the consumer market, but it's already cheap enough for energy storage at the scale GP is talking about. Might take a few years for cell quality, inverter, and charging technology to improve, but by 2030 it will be so dirt cheap to the point that it would be economically sensible for any household.
Last year, when I did the math, batteries still had a 15 year payoff time. I'm not going to be in this house in 15 years. If the state subsidized it more (it is kind of a public good imo), or I could easily roll it into house value, I'd do it.
I'm trying to move to a nicer house. When I do that, I'll almost certainly just go for it.
I'm not sure whether you read my comment, but I was specifically talking about sodium ion which are absurdly cheap even before efficiencies of scale enter the equation. I don't think many are doing the math on that because it's only just become available on Alibaba. BMSes and chargers don't really exist for it yet, but there are whole battery packs for sale.
No, I read your comment. I was just thinking about 2030.
Also, no offense, but I'm not trusting a brand new energy storage technology bolted to the wall of my house. I'll businesses trial it out first for a few years.
Curious…it’s not been a week yet? It certainly feels longer. Glad to know they’re alright. My family is in Swannanoa, and still without power and water.
Edited to a week. I was actually shocked how quickly my in-laws got power back with how widespread the destruction was and how many of the roads are out. They have well water so as soon as power was back on they obviously have water.
In Asheville / if you're close to the river, it's still recommended to boil your water. (I'm in Marshall ~700ft higher than downtown, so I'm assuming it's fine where I am, but guidance has been non-specific.)
That's entirely dependent on the depth of your well and how well it was constructed. A properly built well is accessing water below an impermeable layer of rock so shouldn't be affected by ground water. The boil warnings for wells I've heard is mostly about surface water running down your own well borehole (or into your neighbors accessing the same aquifer water).
To ask a tech question: how much capacity does Starlink have? If every single person in US rural areas switches to Starlink, can the system handle it? What's the bandwidth/customers/capacity limit for the service? (I'm obviously not talking about emergencies, where degraded bandwidth is acceptable.)
The bandwidth is limited on a per-cell basis, somewhere around 700Gbps max per cell. Actual capacity at any time is somewhat less. If everyone is actively using theirs, you might get single digit Mbps or less at cell capacity limits, even if there aren't bottlenecks elsewhere.
It's fine, but it's highly dependent on having extremely low customer density. The system doesn't work well if everyone is using it all the time.
I think you need to define “extremely low” because 700gbps is plenty for several thousand people. And the question was specifically about everyone in rural areas switching.
If you go by rural being <1000 people per square mile and a cell covering roughly 97 square miles (assuming the larger 15 mile hex diameter), that lands at 7.2 mbps per person if there are 1000 people in every square mile all trying to use it at the same time.
That sounds fine considering standard consumer usage patterns mean you’ll get 10x that as an individual even in peak times. That’s also assuming maximum density for what’s considered rural.
Our power company linked fiber provider with 18,000+ customers only has a 10gb backhaul. They are by far the best of the 3 fiber options I have access to.
>This would simply create a digital divide further increasing inequality in rural areas.
Not sure what you mean? The more remote you get the better your bandwidth gets because you are sharing it with fewer people. This is the opposite of most ISPs which tend to ignore rural areas.
The primary use-case for high-bandwidth consumer connections is streaming brain-rotting video content in UHD. OP is suggesting that people without access to said connections will end up with increased inequality because they won't be able to spend their time on Love Is Blind marathons.
My personal experience, as someone who has lived in, and worked from, rural areas with limited bandwidth, is that latency (for SSH connections) is the only thing that matters for learning and productivity.
But OP clearly knows better, because if we just gave everyone gigabit fiber, the access to UHD Pornhub, Netflix, Amazon Video, etc, will instantly correct the "digital divide". And OP has a point. I know someone who started designing > 500k qubit quantum computers with > 5s coherence after spending two weeks straight watching all seasons of My 600Lb Life.
He kept mumbling something about "It's not in the box, it's in the band"
Starlink doesn’t prevent fiber and there has been zero interest in giving fiber to these people with or without subsidies. So it’s about giving fast satellite internet to people in rural areas or leaving them with much worse than options.
I'm currently paying for 2Gbps symmetric fiber via 10Gbps XGS-PON that's multiplexed to 32 users, which is a mere 39 Mbps per user. In practice, this is absolutely fine and I have never run into any bandwidth limitations, because utilization rates for regular consumers rounds to basically nothing.
Unbelievable how much millennials and zoomers are spoiled. I remember when I got my first DSL line at 384kbps symmetric in 1999, I was absolutely over the moon ELATED.
Sure, 7mbps may not be good enough to supply the demands of your multi-screen 4k UHD loli goon cave, but it's more than enough to send a < 1kB message to your family that you're safe in a disaster area.
That number looks to be before multiplexing, so it's not that bad. If 10% of the people in the area are using the internet at the same time (as in are actively downloading at full speed, not just are scrolling through already downloaded content) it should go up to 72 mbps per person, and so on.
It's not actually those numbers. For one thing, bandwidth is split between upload and download. 700Gbps isn't the actual capacity either, just the theoretical bandwidth. It's less in practice, limited by things like gateway capacity etc. the bandwidth also isn't evenly allocated between terminals because starlink has service tiers like other ISPs. Terminals are also not people. They're usually shared by households that may encompass multiple users at a time.
There's very good reasons starlink has such low limits on terminals per cell.
You’re just making shit up at this point so it’s not clear how to respond. I use Starlink in a city of 300k people in the mountains in the west and never see <50mbps download even during peak congestion.
The bandwidth is not split between upload and download, it’s very explicitly optimized for download capacity which is what most people are interested in. If you want to upload much beyond 15mbps, Starlink is going to suck for you regardless of congestion.
>There's very good reasons starlink has such low limits on terminals per cell.
High density areas are broken into smaller cells to help with this. don’t forget that the limit doesn’t apply to roaming users either.
That’s HD video. The alternative for these people is even slower DSL or heavily throttled LTE tethering if they are lucky enough to have cell coverage. You’re living in a privileged bubble.
Oversubscription is also an issue on wired networks. It might be a problem but usually you shouldn’t notice; on wired at least.
What is your extremely low customer density source? In theory they could reduce beam size and throw more satellites in space. How much they can handle is up for speculation, but your “extremely low” claim could use a source.
Do you really need a source? It's obvious from the numbers. Starlink limits to low hundreds (~300) of terminals per cell. We'll round that to 1k to be generous for future improvements. Let's say each terminal serves 4 customers. Cell size is in the neighborhood of 150 sq. mi. That's a customer density of 27 customers per sq. mi, or 9% of the density threshold for "rural areas" in the US. Using more reasonable numbers gives us an effective max density around the same as Mongolia, the least densely populated country on earth.
> Oversubscription is also an issue on wired networks
Wired networks can include fibre optic to the house like we have in Australia where the speeds can reach a consistent 1Gbps even in highly dense areas at peak times. And internal testing is happening on 10Gbps.
If US cares about supporting the internet of tomorrow satellite services like Starlink will never be capable enough.
1gbps to the house doesn’t mean you’re not oversubscribed. An ISP that has a 10,000 homes on 1gbps connections absolutely does not pay for 10 tbps of transit capacity or even internal capacity to carry all that to its peering points.
Cheaper fiber to homes definitely made last mile scale better bandwidth-wise, but it didn’t change the fundamental nature of needing to heavily oversubscribe to make it affordable.
It's not just a question of transit capacity. Most residential PONs are still oversubscribed, like the fiber cable running down the street can't handle all clients maxing out their throughput all the time. With PONs you'll have multiple clients all sharing the same physical port, in the same way in coax DOCSIS networks. One single cable goes through multiple passive splitters to branch out to a lot of final clients. They almost always wouldn't be able to support all clients maxing out all their bandwidth even if that traffic never left the local office, because once again its still dozens of clients on a single actual physical port.
Fiber to your home doesn't mean you've got dedicated bandwidth to your ISP. You're still usually on a shared medium. You're likely to get all your speed most of the time though because most residential customers aren't constantly using anywhere near a gigabit of throughput constantly.
That said though, a regular ISP can just run another line out. Starlink can't just will additional useful frequency ranges out of nothing. There's only so much spectrum to be used in the giant shared medium of the sky. Beams are only going to be so tight at those distances (outside of using lasers), only so many useful orbits, etc.
This is incorrect. Youtube does not in network content caching. That’s pretty unique to Netflix.
Youtube meets you at exchange points and if you’re an ISP anywhere that isn’t a major city, there isn’t an exchange point there.
Take a place like Boise and a municipal fiber provider there. They aren’t big enough for Netflix to offer an OCA and there isn’t an exchange in Boise with good content provider density on the fabric. So that provider needs to pay for transit or a private lease to the nearest big exchange (SEA, PDX, barely SLC) where it can get connectivity.
Your mental model is completely wrong for ISPs that aren’t serving the same city as one of the <10 major exchanges in the US.
You can have real rural broadband today. You just need to be willing to pay for installation out of pocket.
When an ISP runs fiber to a new building (be it in a business park or rural farm), the math is almost entirely based on recuperating their installation costs - which they often pay for entirely out of their pocket. Your entire first contract term is usually just paying back the installation costs alone...
For some perspective, at a previous building we tried to bring fiber across the street into our office. The installation costs were too expensive to make the math work - so the ISP offered to split the installation costs 50/50 instead. Our half was over $94,000. This involved directional boring and the works, to go ~200ft to the right-of-way vault and into our MPOE.
One can only imagine the expense of running fiber (or any type of cable) out to the boonies. It's totally feasible - but the costs make it not palatable in reality.
That would be the REA, Rural Electrification Act, part of Roosevelt's new deal. Citizens could form co-ops and pay some of their own and get some grants from government. A very big number of those co-ops are now running fiber too.
At least last time I looked into starlink it most definitely cannot. Definitely more ideal for very rural or very poor areas where you are gonna be one of a few dishes. That may have changed now though.
I don't know if that kind of information is public. Starlink is continually adding new satellites, and each one adds bandwidth capability. Likewise with end user ground station hardware updates and spectrum purchases (at least the former is happening on a regular basis), capacity likewise goes up.
I don't believe there is a theoretical or practical upper limit which would exclude very wide adoption of Starlink and similar competitors.
Put in another way, I think it is possible that in a decade or two the only cell phone/data service that doesn't come from orbit will be a few terrestrial towers in dense downtown urban areas and around things like sports venues.
5G is going exactly the opposite way to provide higher bandwidth, more cells with each less users.
With satellite internet you're sharing the medium with everyone, and that doesn't scale well. Beamforming probably helps a lot, but I don't how accurate it can be on that distance.
You can have essentially unlimited satellites the issue is the percentage of time each one spends over high density areas.
Design for NYC density and 99% of satellites would be redundant at any given moment. The solution for increasing density is dropping costs so it’s viable for satellites to be idle 95% of the time. At least as a first approximation, there’s some tricks with how you setup orbits after the basic network is done.
You're still sharing the medium (the sky), so at some point interference is going to be an issue. A quick search tells me the beams a satellite uses is measured in km, so you can only have one satellite serving several square km (you could have more channels of course).
Let’s be pessimistic and say it’s ~25km^2 with current designs. Surface area of the earth is 510,064,472 km² so you estimate limits things to ~20 million satellites X however they can slice up the available spectrum. IE essentially unlimited satellites.
As of September 2024 they have 6,371 operational satellites and ~ 4 million customers globally.
How is that relevant? Adding satellites over the Pacific doesn't improve New York's service. The question is how dense of a population they can serve, not how many satellites Starlink could theoretically have.
The only way to add one satellite over NYC on average is to also add several satellites over the ocean and other low density parts of the earth. If you want low latency individual satellites must be in LEO which means they spend most of their time over water and low density bits of land.
Which gets back to my original point where increasing the maximum density inherently reduces the average utilization of each satellite. There simply aren’t enough people living in Iowa etc to balance the east coast.
The current network can handle 1 home per square km on average but averages over a very large area. So ~2,000 as many satellites and you can handle NYC’s population.
It’s actually less than you expect because you can make use of satellites a hundred miles out to the sea, over the Hudson River, and even suburbs. And that’s before considering how few people would pick Starlink when they can use cheap fiber.
> Because you're sharing the medium you'll get interference if multiple satellites service the same area
I’m going to simplify because you seem to misunderstand what’s going on.
Your eyes allow you to see a clear image of your surroundings because photons come from even slightly different angles aren’t interfering with each other. Starlink uses a phased array antenna to achieve a similar effect where satellites in different locations broadcasting on the same frequency can be clearly distinguished by two base stations physically next to each other. And similarly two different satellites can receive clear signals when two Starlink antennas are broadcasting when physically next to each other at the same instant.
There’s physical limits and the phased array antenna in use are much worse than theoretically possible. But, the technology they are currently using really does scale vastly beyond what’s economical viable.
I'm not at all misunderstanding what's going on, I know what phased array antennas are. It's not really like our eyes, we cannot perceive phase differences in light. A phased array is (at theoretically best) like a satellite dish which can move without actually having to physically move.
>Starlink uses a phased array antenna to achieve a similar effect where satellites in different locations broadcasting on the same frequency can be clearly distinguished by two base stations physically next to each other
If by next to each other you mean several km apart, yes.
edit: Ok, I didn't think of that, if the satellites are far away from each other it'll work indeed since it's both the sender and receiver which have directivity. That indeed would make it scale better.
Sure the technology can be improved, but there's only so much you can do at several hundreds of km distance and the sizes of antennas you have. Especially with mobile phones which are small and power limited I really don't see how it could work in anything but very low density areas.
Starlink cellphone connection operates very differently. It’s a different system on different frequencies with different limitations, and it doesn’t scale well.
> If by next to each other you mean several km apart, yes
By close I mean inches. Phased array’s aren’t great at directionality, but both the satellite and the receiver are using them which makes a real difference because the satellites are in different locations even if the receivers aren’t.
At the limit satellite A has a few spot beams one is aimed at say one World Trade Center which also covers several blocks around it. It’s 5 miles from satellite B which isn’t aiming at that location, but another satellite say G that’s 20km away is.
Hypothetically 2 ground stations X1 and X2 are 1 foot apart on the roof of one trade center. X1 can get a signal from satellite A at 25 DB higher than the signal from satellites G because there’s a few degree difference in incoming angle and 50DB higher than from B which is both a degree off and aiming elsewhere.
Similarly A receives a single from X1 that’s 25 DB higher than from X2 because their signals are aiming in different directions.
(DB numbers were picked from a hat but I had a several variables already.)
The real world isn’t that simple, and there’s no way in hell their software is setup for that many satellites but phased array antenna on both side makes a big difference here.
Musk himself has said Starlink is not designed for cities and fiber is a much better option there. To supply say NYC, you would need also be supplying bandwidth to the entire world underneath the orbit that the satellites. That is a lot of wasted satellite time as it flies around the earth with zero users most of the time just for the brief moment while users spike to the scale of a city like NYC.
Yea, fiber + 5G + Starlink is more efficient than any of those technologies alone.
It’s always worth remembering that efficiency and technical limitations are different things. We could absolutely blanket the US in 5G towers but the cost is vastly higher than the benefit.
I don't know the specs, but since they control both ends of the link, (ie. the client-side router) they've done a remarkable job of smoothing out load imbalances to make it highly usable even under problematic conditions.
No they're already added a one time "congestion charge" of $100 dollars to some (unspecified afaik) areas to try to lower the demand. Or cynically maybe it's a profit taking maneuver get more money out of areas where it's most popular. I tend towards the former personally.
Offering a "30 day free trial" doesn't really feel like a gift as much as it's an ad for the service trying to onboard customers. It's not a bad thing per se, just kind of in poor taste.
There were just a few hours between Elon accepting to do it on X, and the update being deployed, I think they can be forgiven for not having it super polished. However, they've also explained that it's 30 days for now, as the end of that approaches, they'll re-evaluate to see if an extension is warranted. I recall them also mentioning refunds or maybe account credits for affected people if they've happened to pay already.
I have learned now from other replies that there is a free return. 2 of 3 criteria I stipulated are met.
Units being donated meets the first criteria, though that still relies on a donation. The logistics of returning the equipment is then also complicated too..
The musk link gave a "please retry", I was unable to read it.
Some of the links felt a bit like puff pieces and none quite helped. The cajun navy link clarified free of service cost to users - but that was not my intended question.
You said the equipment is properly free. To clarify, are you referring to end users, or free to those delivering the equipment to begin with? My impression was the latter. In which case I wanted to know how you knew that, and what exactoy was "many".
My question was not: how many people are using starlink devices for free? My apologies if that seemed like that was the question I was asking. Perhaps I misunderstood what you meant by "it is properly free" (which I interpreted as spaceX giving the equipment away)
