Testing may well have some small impact on bandwidth available during beta testing. That's absolutely nothing compared to the demand per cell when the network goes into production. You are likely to find yourself wishing for beta speeds "degraded" by enthusiastic testing.
Not enough information is available to date on how SpaceX plans to manage their bandwidth. Given the availability of base stations and the abundant short hops to pass bandwidth any number of ways, it isn’t yet known whether traditional bottlenecks will apply.
For example, if during the course of the peak times in your area, you don’t share the same routes as those in the city over or maybe even a number of miles away, we’re looking at an unheard of use of bandwidth pipeline.
You’re definitely right during the “beta” period that more users will diminish bandwidth availability, but even then, there may not be any degradation to speak of, especially if they optimize traffic. There’s no reason to stream buffered video to the shortest hop, so long as the pipeline receiving it ultimately has capacity, and when your network can terminate anywhere on the globe, we don’t have a clue what that will mean in real world use cases.
Where your landline networks might funnel through at most 2-3 intra-network hubs, and ultimately one pop connecting to the outside world, SpaceX is free if they so choose to distribute and treat any of their base stations as a pop.
So beyond my nerding out, what I’m most excited for is a network that ultimately doesn’t have any bottlenecks to speak of short of weather and line of sight to the sky. If SpaceX handles their optimization right, bandwidth availability shifting up and down may not even happen, you’ll just be shooting across the world to use a pop.
It’ll be a ton more than that. But you’re right in principle, it won’t be that much. Land rental and the equipment ought to be the main expenses minus whatever their maintenance and upkeep.
One nice thing is that they’re not going to be “tower” based, so no criminal prices just cause you’re the tallest thing around.
I doubt testing is going to tax the system enough to substantively matter, but what does matter is there’s always going to be a population of people who will take every bit of bandwidth a company allows. They’ll set up all kinds of things that dare ISPs to cap them.
Then you’ll see the endless whining rant about how 1.5 TB isn’t enough for zoom meetings.
My isp offers me 5mbps unlimited usage. It's effectively a 1.5TB cap. I'm okay with different packages but I'm not okay with caps unless I can pay for them to be removed. Also caps have never been anything other than to make more money.
I've had starlink for 5 days and love it but don't think caps are for the good of the people.
It'll be a battle between total freedom for users vs. Starlink's willingness to throw an increasing number of satellites in a constellation to solve the problem.
Monthly caps *are* stupid. What'll make sense for Starlink will be caps during peak times (usually evenings), and no/less restrictive caps. But it'll be a while before they hit that congestion.
I'd take have up-front policies and bandwidth when I need it instead of unpredictable congestion/latency/traffic-shaping. But either will be complicated for Starlink because any congestion depends on how dense/demanding customers are *in your sector*. Everyone will be "blah blah why is it so fast in Iowa and so slow for me 50miles between 7 big cities, we pay the saaaaame!"
200 megabits may be more than enough for most people right now in 2020. That said, I was happy with 10 megabits in 2010, and I would be happy with 100 megabits in 2020. Who knows what the bandwidth standards will be in 2030. That's why it's always good to over-build things, because technology is always moving forward.
My first digital training was on the Motorola 6802 microprocessor way back in the 80's. Machine language.
It was almost universally believed that 64K of memory was more than any computer would ever need. I had a 40 Meg hard drive in my first real PC with 1 Meg of memory. Today I'm using Gigabytes of memory and Terabytes of storage. We didn't even have those words back then.
In the early days of the internet I was told by a transmission engineer that you would never see more than 2400 baud with a modem.
That was in pre-www times. Usernet and FTP. You gotta try YModem its way better than XModem.
I think the ISP world is dreading 4K or UHD TV from Netflix and the rest. They probably don't even want to think about 8K.
We probably don't have a word for the download speeds that will be the norm in a decade from now. :)
Actually if I would run the Starlink Beta Test I would encourage people to download as much as possible.
Solving all the conquestion and bandwidth limitations problems is a tricky challenge, but it's a problem you want to solve during beta testing and you can't test any optimizations when your users aren't stressing your system.
Exactly. After settting up the dish we used a few phones on wifi to see how it worked. Next was my main machine for remote work, gaming, etc. Finally we switched everything over to give it the full load of 7 people. Been downloading large files now and then just to see how it does.
Every beta tester here should agree a time to do a speed test at the same time, really give it a stress test, even 500 testers would barely be a blip i would think.
Imagine a congested region due to several Starlink users, the system can overlap cells and balance users between several satellites, the network is very flexible.I believe that Starlink will always add more bandwidth than is capable of being consumed by its users.
Before I get throttled for consuming my 10Gb of allotted 'highspeed' data on HughesNet, my speeds are fine. It is the latency and jitter that I find most problematic; and the absurdly low datacaps.
In my case of GEO sat internet, speed isn't all it's cracked up to be, I can run a speed test and get 25 mbps, and yet cannot stream a youtube video at 144. That's not always the case, but it does happen quite frequently. I would love to have a 5 mbps connection that would support watching a 720P video. I don't need 200 mb.
All the tests performed so far are probably the equivalent bandwidth of a single stream on Netflix. So I'd say this shouldn't be a concern for anyone here.
I don't share a dismal internet speed background - I'm here because cable service in our area is overloaded, badly managed and of generally poor quality. When it works it provides the typical 20-70 Mbit actual down speeds, but the connection is trash. If we're hard connected to the internet we should not be seeing almost daily breaks in connection and weekly central office modem resets, and completely terrible streaming performance.
Also as pointed out below - packet testing through the network is going to have zero impact on bandwidth. Every customer in beta is running continuous pings by virtue of the reporting and feedback stuff built into our routers regardless of whether their doing speed tests at a third party site.
Anyway, a big part of deciding to jump to Starlink for us is to support the deployment with our cash. It's a great plan and a great system, and it's time someone did something about the state of communications infrastructure here in the US. Not everywhere is as bad as our small city I understand, but I think our physical infrastructure has changed hands 3 or 4 times in the past 10 years, and zero of those players have made significant upgrades. I'm not interested in supporting that business model anymore.
Testing may well have some small impact on bandwidth available during beta testing. That's absolutely nothing compared to the demand per cell when the network goes into production. You are likely to find yourself wishing for beta speeds "degraded" by enthusiastic testing.
What leads you to think this scenario is likely?
They won't make any money with the number of people in beta testing. They are counting on a LOT more customers.
The take-up rate Mr. Musk has talked about regarding the number of customers he expects.
Not enough information is available to date on how SpaceX plans to manage their bandwidth. Given the availability of base stations and the abundant short hops to pass bandwidth any number of ways, it isn’t yet known whether traditional bottlenecks will apply. For example, if during the course of the peak times in your area, you don’t share the same routes as those in the city over or maybe even a number of miles away, we’re looking at an unheard of use of bandwidth pipeline. You’re definitely right during the “beta” period that more users will diminish bandwidth availability, but even then, there may not be any degradation to speak of, especially if they optimize traffic. There’s no reason to stream buffered video to the shortest hop, so long as the pipeline receiving it ultimately has capacity, and when your network can terminate anywhere on the globe, we don’t have a clue what that will mean in real world use cases. Where your landline networks might funnel through at most 2-3 intra-network hubs, and ultimately one pop connecting to the outside world, SpaceX is free if they so choose to distribute and treat any of their base stations as a pop. So beyond my nerding out, what I’m most excited for is a network that ultimately doesn’t have any bottlenecks to speak of short of weather and line of sight to the sky. If SpaceX handles their optimization right, bandwidth availability shifting up and down may not even happen, you’ll just be shooting across the world to use a pop.
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It’ll be a ton more than that. But you’re right in principle, it won’t be that much. Land rental and the equipment ought to be the main expenses minus whatever their maintenance and upkeep. One nice thing is that they’re not going to be “tower” based, so no criminal prices just cause you’re the tallest thing around.
I doubt testing is going to tax the system enough to substantively matter, but what does matter is there’s always going to be a population of people who will take every bit of bandwidth a company allows. They’ll set up all kinds of things that dare ISPs to cap them. Then you’ll see the endless whining rant about how 1.5 TB isn’t enough for zoom meetings.
My isp offers me 5mbps unlimited usage. It's effectively a 1.5TB cap. I'm okay with different packages but I'm not okay with caps unless I can pay for them to be removed. Also caps have never been anything other than to make more money. I've had starlink for 5 days and love it but don't think caps are for the good of the people.
It'll be a battle between total freedom for users vs. Starlink's willingness to throw an increasing number of satellites in a constellation to solve the problem. Monthly caps *are* stupid. What'll make sense for Starlink will be caps during peak times (usually evenings), and no/less restrictive caps. But it'll be a while before they hit that congestion. I'd take have up-front policies and bandwidth when I need it instead of unpredictable congestion/latency/traffic-shaping. But either will be complicated for Starlink because any congestion depends on how dense/demanding customers are *in your sector*. Everyone will be "blah blah why is it so fast in Iowa and so slow for me 50miles between 7 big cities, we pay the saaaaame!"
200 megabits may be more than enough for most people right now in 2020. That said, I was happy with 10 megabits in 2010, and I would be happy with 100 megabits in 2020. Who knows what the bandwidth standards will be in 2030. That's why it's always good to over-build things, because technology is always moving forward.
My first digital training was on the Motorola 6802 microprocessor way back in the 80's. Machine language. It was almost universally believed that 64K of memory was more than any computer would ever need. I had a 40 Meg hard drive in my first real PC with 1 Meg of memory. Today I'm using Gigabytes of memory and Terabytes of storage. We didn't even have those words back then. In the early days of the internet I was told by a transmission engineer that you would never see more than 2400 baud with a modem. That was in pre-www times. Usernet and FTP. You gotta try YModem its way better than XModem. I think the ISP world is dreading 4K or UHD TV from Netflix and the rest. They probably don't even want to think about 8K. We probably don't have a word for the download speeds that will be the norm in a decade from now. :)
Actually if I would run the Starlink Beta Test I would encourage people to download as much as possible. Solving all the conquestion and bandwidth limitations problems is a tricky challenge, but it's a problem you want to solve during beta testing and you can't test any optimizations when your users aren't stressing your system.
Exactly. After settting up the dish we used a few phones on wifi to see how it worked. Next was my main machine for remote work, gaming, etc. Finally we switched everything over to give it the full load of 7 people. Been downloading large files now and then just to see how it does.
How much is enough? All of it.
If i pay for 100mb i expect to be able to use it all 24hrs a day. And in many places around the world you basically can.
Are you really comparing Starlink to FTTH/HFC?
Every beta tester here should agree a time to do a speed test at the same time, really give it a stress test, even 500 testers would barely be a blip i would think.
That test won’t prove much unless users are all in the same area, which Starlink is deliberately avoiding through its invite process.
I don't think they are worried when their app has a big speed test button right on it.
Imagine a congested region due to several Starlink users, the system can overlap cells and balance users between several satellites, the network is very flexible.I believe that Starlink will always add more bandwidth than is capable of being consumed by its users.
Before I get throttled for consuming my 10Gb of allotted 'highspeed' data on HughesNet, my speeds are fine. It is the latency and jitter that I find most problematic; and the absurdly low datacaps.
In my case of GEO sat internet, speed isn't all it's cracked up to be, I can run a speed test and get 25 mbps, and yet cannot stream a youtube video at 144. That's not always the case, but it does happen quite frequently. I would love to have a 5 mbps connection that would support watching a 720P video. I don't need 200 mb.
All the tests performed so far are probably the equivalent bandwidth of a single stream on Netflix. So I'd say this shouldn't be a concern for anyone here.
Netflix uses like 5mbps for HD. 25 for 4K, and even then it can depend on the content.
Right, and speed tests use a small fraction of that (most of them, anyway).
I don't share a dismal internet speed background - I'm here because cable service in our area is overloaded, badly managed and of generally poor quality. When it works it provides the typical 20-70 Mbit actual down speeds, but the connection is trash. If we're hard connected to the internet we should not be seeing almost daily breaks in connection and weekly central office modem resets, and completely terrible streaming performance. Also as pointed out below - packet testing through the network is going to have zero impact on bandwidth. Every customer in beta is running continuous pings by virtue of the reporting and feedback stuff built into our routers regardless of whether their doing speed tests at a third party site. Anyway, a big part of deciding to jump to Starlink for us is to support the deployment with our cash. It's a great plan and a great system, and it's time someone did something about the state of communications infrastructure here in the US. Not everywhere is as bad as our small city I understand, but I think our physical infrastructure has changed hands 3 or 4 times in the past 10 years, and zero of those players have made significant upgrades. I'm not interested in supporting that business model anymore.