Meh. I know a number of folks who moved to rural areas, and not a single one was able to use Starlink due to tree coverage and the extremely narrow band of sky their receiver had to be pointed at.
I'm glad it worked for you! But the rural places where my friends live have lots of trees, tall ones, and they made Starlink totally unusable.
It's worth noting that most alternatives require a satellite dish of some sort. Before Starlink, I had a roof-mounted HughesNet dish (and before that a custom WISP receiver).
Either way, I'd say Starlink is an enormous improvement over every other satellite solution I've tried. The lack of data cap alone puts it head-and-heels above the competition, and the speeds are good enough to coax people off 4G. I have some small complaints about CGNAT and the provided router, but the service itself is more reliable than some cable connections I've tried.
Having seen (and tried) a lot of the alternatives, there really aren't any pushbutton services that compare.
It’s still unlimited beyond that, you’re just “deprioritized.” Depending on how rural you are, you might not even notice.
It’s much like a cell tower where a geographical area has finite capacity. You use your “priority” data that has speed guarantees, then it slows down, but is still unlimited. Apparently some users were reselling the link & maxing out the upload/download 24/7. (yeah, I get it, but in this case some kind of QoS probably needs to happen to turn a profit)
I’ve been a beta user since the first couple months of launch. They’ve had growing pains, but it has overall been light years ahead of our local WISP or Hughesnet/Viasat in terms of speed and reliability. Several of my neighbors have no other option than traditional geostationary satellite providers, and I don’t think any of us every want to go back to 600ms+ latencies!
edit: I just wanted to add that for many people, priority speeds for 1TB & having sub-100ms latency is far, far better than the alternatives.
You don't know real suffering until you've tried browsing on HughesNet. $74.99/month for 50gb of 4mb/s up and 1mb/s down (yes, in 2023).
Don't worry though, once you hit your gratuitous 50gb/month limit, they only make your network 8x slower until you pay $10/extra gig... I wouldn't praise Starlink if it wasn't such a steal by comparison.
I know some people used to chop down trees to get a line of sight for satellite TV. Starlink is different in that you need more than a single LOS to a specific spot in the sky, but I wouldn't be too surprised if a lot of people ultimately chop down more trees to get access.
Alternatively, perhaps the starlink antenna could be mounted on a large pole or modest radio tower. That would be ugly but probably a lot less ugly than chopping down your trees.
Yeah, I have a house in a heavily forested area. I put the starlink dish on top of a 12ft pole mounted on my roof. I have a double of line of sight issues, but it's good enough that I don't notice service interruptions.
For a house in the Adirondacks in upstate NY (heavily wooded), we used a 50' triangular antenna tower with Dishy at the top to clear the tree line. Went from abysmal DSL speeds to ~100Mbps, also added microcells from the largest mobile providers to improve cell coverage on the property (mounted to the antenna structure in water resistant housings). Total cost was sub $5k for everything mentioned.
If close to the home doesn't work, depending on siting requirements, you can erect a tower in a clearing or where there is clear line of sight to the sky and then run power and network to the tower from the nearest structure. Don't neglect lightning surge suppression to protect equipment.
The Facebook groups I used to be in had most people putting them on poles, or even mounting them to the tops of said tall trees. Seemed to work fine, even with a bit of sway.
It’s funny, people don’t hesitate to trim and remove trees for roads, power lines, or plumbing. I would consider trimming a tree to access the internet worthwhile.
This is largest hurdle I've seen for Starlink. I know at least 10 people in the foothills of Northern CA that are stuck with 2 choices if they want Starlink. They can either cut down several massive (100ft+) trees or they can pay someone to climb up a tree and mount the dish. The second options comes with a whole other sets of problems and typically still includes cutting some other trees down.
Side note: If I lived in the Northern California foothills I would be cutting down big trees close to the house due to extreme fire danger. Side benefit, better Satellite visibility.
Well they all have defensible space around their homes. It is a requirement for the only fire insurance they can get. Even the defensible space does not clear enough to get uninterrupted Starlink service.
The house does have a pretty good view of the sky.
I'm not sure what the answer is in general. It's probably not realistic to expect universal wired broadband in very rural areas. Conventional satellite is by all accounts pretty bad. And cellular isn't really an option absent a good 5G signal.
But, other than a vacation cottage, lack of usable Internet isn't really an option either if you're going to be working from somewhere.
But, why is universal wired broadband in very rural areas of the US an unreasonable expectation? We did the same thing 100 years ago with universal service requirements for telephone. As I understand it, the build out was subsidized by the government along with a universal service fee for all phone lines.
Is the infrastructure for low-broadband in low density areas inherently more expensive than POTS infrastructure was 75-100 years ago?
Things are of course a lot different than they were 100 years ago. Bringing electricity and phone service to farms and ranches probably seemed pretty important. I'm not sure how a lot of modern coastal urbanites would feel about a very expensive project to bring wired broadband to everyone living on the side of a mountain somewhere today. (Especially given that wireless technologies are an option for a lot of people, if not everyone.)
POTS bills also at least used to have a universal service charge line item, in part to subsidize rural service.
As one of those coastal urbanites, fucking great. Didnt we already pay a bunch of money for that anyway? Even aside from that the internet is great, I'm not going to feel bad about helping to pay to bring it to everyone.
I don't even really disagree. I just see a lot of hostility on here about providing infrastructure for people who aren't in metros. I'm not convinced that in this day and age it all has to be wired. But it's not unreasonable to consider that at least reasonable Internet should be a basic utility service even for very rural locations.
Some of that is starting to change in the rural South. Georgia changed laws to allow electrical coops and cities to run their own loops. Alabama is also pushing money into local rural fiber builds.
An example, in Carroll County, GA I live outside of Carrollton, GA and have 2 fiber options 1) Charter/Spectrum which I use 2) CarrollEMC/Crossbeam which looks like they just dropped fiber on our power pole within the last month. If you look at the FCC map of Highway 5 it correctly shows ATT DSL availability, incorrectly shows Comcast coax availability, and does not show either Charter/Spectrum or CarrollEMC/Crossbeam. There is only a process to challenge availability on the FCC map, like Comcast...that incorrectly shows availability, and no option to add new providers to the map. It is left up to the provider to claim availability.
Arkansas has also removed some of the barriers for electric coops and municipal broadband, but change has been slow.
There are now plenty of rural areas with symmetrical gigabit broadband available, while most cities are stuck with whatever pitiful options Cox or ATT decides to bestow.
75-100 years ago coincided with the tail end of a massive boom of dirt poor immigrants from Europe. Labor was extremely cheap relative to other things in the economy. It’s vastly more expensive now. It’s the same story as almost all our infrastructure. We couldn’t build the New York subway today either.
> It's probably not realistic to expect universal wired broadband in very rural areas.
I don't know why. It seems incredibly realistic to expect wired broadband in most rural areas. (We were able to provide them with power lines and telephone lines over 60+ years ago, there's no reason fiber would have to be any different)
I'm glad it worked for you! But the rural places where my friends live have lots of trees, tall ones, and they made Starlink totally unusable.