[Starlink] a bit more starship news

[Luis A. Cornejo]

I think they are overpriced for what they deliver, at least in my part of
the world (north of Houston.) I dropped them last month once the extra $10
made it go to $120, they charge $90 in other places in the US. I guess the
MBAs are doing "market segmentation," in other words, just charging what
the market can bear, well given the state of the economy and the costs of
goods, they pushed me out of that market.

I switched to Verizon LTE and it's been really great 50/5 ish for $50. A
pretty good price for the service, Starlink is not 140% better, in fact
it's worse on average, and did not get better for the year that I had it...
well actually it got progressively worse on average.

Now if they ever offer a reasonable plan for a reasonable price, I'll be
all over it, I like redundancy. A 50/5 for about $50/mo would probably
bring me back, or even a smaller bandwidth for less money would probably
bite and I really want them to succeed.

In the case of the WISPs, I can definitely believe the churn. WISPs that
run libreqos are more than likely very well run networks, I bet those who
leave quickly realize how good they have had it. Of course StarLink can
probably mirror (for all practical purposes) a well run WISP, if they would
only listen/hire you for a little while and fix their bufferbloat!

Speaking of WISPs, I thought I was going to get NextLink service at my
place, but it turns out the system isn't quite here yet. I got excited
since I've read that they were deploying Tarana gear, and was looking
forward to testing that out, I've only seen very little with regards to the
Tarana gear in a real world environment. I live among the tall pines of
east Texas and getting line of sight requires obnoxiously large towers.
Anybody else has any information about the Tarana systems in the real world
and not just a PtP quick test? This was pretty interesting though as
someone who appreciates  redundant/fault tolerant systems:

https://www.taranawireless.com/ngfwa-technology-that-keeps-customers-connected/

-Luis

On Sun, Apr 30, 2023 at 7:48 AM Dave Taht via Starlink <
starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

> Aside from using triggering words, like "shrapnel", rather than
> debris, this is a pretty good, and profoundly negative summary of the
> Starship launch. https://youtu.be/ErDuVomNd9M
>
> Nit: I get bugged by folk like this raising local environmental
> concerns, as if you make the half an hour long drive to the launch
> site, there are plenty of wetlands to spare. Obliterating 1000
> diameter meters of it, turning it into a concrete strewn wasteland,
> (and not coated with hypergolic poisons) for a launch site, seems
> trivial compared to oh, paving over manhattan, or what it took to
> build out towns like brownsville in the first place, and reminds me of
> the enormous fight to save the snail darter.[1]
>
> This also, was a fair minded summary of the negatives of where things
> stand: https://thenext30trips.com/p/scrappy-special-edition and what
> seems to me to be a great suggestion in locating the launch site *just
> offshore*, in the comments.
>
> Anyway, over here was a summary of what actually happened, according
> to Musk. The pad damage was not what caused the shutdown of 3 engines,
> and requalifying the ATS is what will take the most time. Still
> projecting 4-5 flights this year.
>
> https://twitter.com/JackKuhr/status/1652466221390913536
>
> I note that my principal interest, at least, in the short term, was in
> thinking about how the Starship development timeline affects the
> starlink rollout. The "v2" satellites already constructed are
> effectively already obsolete, and their technologies being shrunk down
> into the v2 minis and successors, and the network behaviors themselves
> continually optimized. Right now I think it will be 2+ years before
> the first meaningful launch of the larger starlink satellites on
> Starship, and at the same time the flight rate of the falcons keeps
> getting better and better. I would kind of expect the "v3 mini" to
> have roughly the same throughput as the v2s at an ongoing half the
> size.
>
> Starlink is now well over a billion dollar a year revenue business,
> which is insanely better than what iridium achieved before entering
> bankruptcy (Iridium was under 70k users as best as I recall around
> then). Whatever spacex and starlink are spending on R&D makes me
> shudder. I am finding it odd that they have stopped publishing user
> growth numbers - small personal data point: in working with libreqos
> users, I am hearing about a 40% rate of folk that switched from WISP
> to starlink and back - so customer retention might be a problem as
> soon as someone finds a better service elsewhere. Another number I am
> trying to track is the useful life of the v1s - projected to last 5
> years. There are 70+% of the first launch still operational. (
> https://twitter.com/VirtuallyNathan is an ongoing sump of info)
>
> [1] https://twitter.com/JackKuhr/status/1652466221390913536
>
> --
> AMA March 31: https://www.broadband.io/c/broadband-grant-events/dave-taht
> Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC
> _______________________________________________
> Starlink mailing list
> Starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink
>
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