Actually, it is very reliable. I live off grid in an area with zero cell coverage. I use starlink for internet and also for wifi calling/texting as my primary service for over a couple of years now. That has always worked fine.

Just this year I signed up for and received the beta satellite texting service on my samsung phone. It works spot on every time for simple text messages. I have also always had inreach for emergencies, but am probably going to cancel it now. It is slow, takes a long time, and you have to have clear view of the sky. People also get confused on the weird message they get, and over a few messages I have to start to pay.

With Tmobile satellite messaging I get a signal even inside of my metal roofed cabin. Under fairly heavy tree cover, no problem. Was up at my water intake beyond reach of my wifi. In the past I would have to bring a radio with me to check in with my wife if the water looked good. Now, I was able to simply text back and forth. Unlimited texts, and with the normal read/received confirmation. Never mind just driving around out here I get texts where there previously was zero signal.

Now on the device side, obviously the inreach devices are more rugged, last a very long time, waterproof, etc. They win there. But the service is not nearly as reliable or good.

Interesting.... What did you find buggy about it? I have one and wrote my own python publisher to MQTT for it. It has been running 24x7 for 6 months at least now without a single glitch. My only beef with it is that the heating unit affects the temperature reading in the winter as it cycles on and off, so had to get a different standalone temp sensor as well to make it accurate in cold weather. You could see the jumps in the graph as it warmed and cooled itself.

In practicality from people using it, the distance traveled to space and through their network system means latency is in fact higher than fiber. Fiber also travels as the speed of light, albeit in fiber. People often see 15ms or less on good fiber connections, rarely do you see below 30ms on the starlink system. The signal does not stay in the starlink system down to varying pops.... You are always on the same pop that is closest to you. So like in my case in Colorado, I am always downlinked to Denver.

It could be..... It depends on where you are, do you have a good view of the sky (north), and how many others are in your area. I live in rural colorado off grid, and work full time on starlink. This morning the speed test showed 226 down, 22 up, and 35ms latency. Out here where there is not even cell service, this is amazing. For my purposes, it is more than enough. Zoom calls all day long, git check ins, etc. No problems at all.

That said, if you are a gamer requiring ultra low latency, are in a congested area, or uploading huge videos all day long it might not be a good fit.

100bps would be very slow indeed!

But seriously, for 99% of the time those speeds are more than adequate unless you are a huge gamer or something. I have the internet to work (programming, zoom meetings and the like) and watch a few movies, read news, normal stuff. Those speeds are more than adequate for most normal things you are doing. I would rather suffer a little on my upload speed than suffer everyday living in a city, so I can deal with those. Only time it is a challenge is if I need to upload a large video or model binary, but then start the upload and grab a cup of coffee. Not that huge of a deal.....

OK, this is wrong on every level from someone who actually uses starlink as their primary internet provider.

Speed is now sitting at 200-300mbps down, 20-30mbps up. Latency is around 20ms. As far as I am concerned, that is far from 'marginal'

Contention is minimal where it is truly needed. Everyone around out here has them now, and I've only seen my speed increase over the last two years. BTW, there is not even a cell signal out here as an alternative. So Starlink is it. I used to have Viasat, and it was magnitudes of order slower, and 600ms latency.

I live fully off grid running on batteries and solar. Running Starlink directly off of DC power, it draws on average 35w. That is nothing in the grand scheme of things. I would not call that power hungry. I also have the new Starlink mini, and although it is somewhat slower, that only draws 20w. It is absolutely not 'power hungry'.

There is an old copper line up to here, but it literally is dying as no maintenance has been done in years. The cable is coming up through the dirt road. It can not offer dsl even. They will never ever put fiber in up to these kinds of rural places out west in the mountains. Just not going to happen. Meanwhile I am happy working away at my job over the Starlink that I bought and put up myself in a matter of minutes.

My guess is you live in a city and don't know what the rural western US is like. Large amounts of land with mountains and not a lot of investment in infrastructure. I mean heck, we don't even get cell service.....

In the 90s, I had a StarTac phone, and that was significantly smaller than most of the phones today. After that phone, phones continually got bigger and bigger, and are in fact larger than many of the offerings back then. So no, phones today are definitely not smaller than the 90s, but sure, they do a lot more and have big fancy screens.

Hey, I carry an inreach device with a gps in it. They may call you a boomer, but the battery life on my inreach running is many days (like five days), while the phone running maps is going to be lucky to make it through a day. Never mind the inreach can be dumpled into a river and come out working. I won't even begin to get into the rugged factor.

That said I do carry my phone for pictures a lot of times, but I sure don't depend on it for life saving or route finding. They will learn the first time they shatter that big pretty screen and need it to find the way back to camp.

Isn't this product about to be obsolete when Starlink enables their cell phone support? They've already demonstrated it and it is set to turn on this fall, which means every phone that supports those frequencies would have basic coverage over the entire world. I guess they better hurry up and sell a bunch of those units now. Having done SAR for 13 years, it seems doubtful that by the time we go and look for them their battery will still have charge and the phone will just be on. Batteries don't last that long when they are constantly looking for a cell signal.

It's actually kind of simple here. A very high percentage of the h1b workforce are concentrated around software development in reality. So the percentage of workforce in that area is much, much higher than the 4 percent you stated. Even if it was only 4 percent, having artificial wage control over 4% of the workforce is pretty significant.

H1-B is a horrible program in that it is basically indentured servitude. So even though they are supposed to pay average wages, they don't. As someone working an H1-B you have to take the low pay and work whatever hours they ask, or risk scrambling to find another job to stay in the country. This forces wages down for everyone else and creates a captive workforce that puts up with unreasonable expectations.

I'm all for H1-B, but change it so they just have to stay in any job within the US, have a decent period of time to find another job (like 3-6 months), and allow them to shop themselves around rather than being tied to a single company. Then it is a level playing field and this indentured servitude for low wages goes away. I've seen it many times where engineers from India were out and out taken advantage of, they knew it, but had to tolerate it to stay in the country. This depresses the market for everyone.

I live in the mountains in the western US and the town I live in has now banned new installations of woodstoves and fireplaces. We have massive beetle kill and tons of dead trees everywhere. Fortunately, I am grandfathered in and have a woodstove I can burn some of this free wood in. But because of potential pm 2.5, they won't let houses for the last 10 years take advantage of this. So we had a large wildfire, dumping who knows how much pm 2.5 into the air, and now for the last 2 years they have been cutting the dead trees for safety, and burning them in huge slash piles instead of in a nice wood stove with reburners that reduce 2.5. The whole neighborhood has been full of smoke....

We need to take the initiative here and realize that we want people cutting their own firewood and burning it in EPA approved stoves to help with the problem. Instead, we ban it to save the planet, so it then can burn in uncontrolled and much dirtier methodologies, thus destroying the planet. The logic of this is beyond crazy, and is one of the reasons we have forest management problems....

I still save having a residential account. Starlink is a flat 120 USD for unlimited data and high speeds/low latency. Viasat, which was better than hughesnet, was 168 USD a month with all the fees and such tacked on, for only 100gig of data. So for me, I paid off the Starlink equipment fast (when it was only 99 USD), and every month now is a savings that is pretty significant, never mind the much higher quality service.

I am guessing most of the people complaining about Starlink never had to live with Viasat or Hughesnet, as they were truly awful but better than nothing. With a lot of tweaking, I made it work but we had to plan around data resets and such. When I called to cancel Viasat, they asked why I was leaving. Once I said I got Starlink, they didn't even try to keep me as a customer....

It would surprise you, but at 10,000 feet in CO, I am in a valley with dense forest... Most people don't realize how high treeline is out here. That said, for fire safety alone, around my house is cleared out so I do have a good northerly view, which is required for complete uninterrupted service. That's just part of the technology and is in the specs. They give you an app even that you scan on the sky to make sure your view is clear before you purchase. So that shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

Even without a clear view you get pretty good service though. One of my neighbors 2 miles down the road from me has it just sitting next to his house and kind of behind a small tree. He gets drop outs every now and then, but still streams TV and such without issue. So like anything else, if you are happy with just throwing it on a table quickly like he does (only here in the summers) with an occasional drop out, then it works just fine. He sees great speeds, just occasional drops.

I'm going to have to beg to differ on this one from real world experience. I am not a fanboi of anyone really, but am quite pleased with the service. Now that said there is a reason I am a fan of the service. I live off grid at 10,000 feet in Colorado where there is not even cell service available. I had traditional satellite service before Starlink came along, and it was slow and very limited data. I now have unlimited data, generally see over 100 down and 10 up, with 20ms pings. I have not seen an outage in quite a long time. That said, I have residential service level, not Roam/RV, and am not in the middle of a city somewhere.

. Where you hear the complaints are people who have other options like fiber and such and want to game on Starlink. Starlink should be because you can't get fiber, good wireless, or other service. It is not ultra low consistent pings for gaming type usage. It is for us out here where the city stops, want more standard internet services that are not as timing critical, and it has been a life changer. I can stream TV, work full time remote on zoom all day, and not have a hitch. Before Starlink, there were lots of compromises....

The reality is that the cities themselves use a very small portion of the water in Utah. They could cut their usage by half, and it would be nothing but a blip on the charts. The real users are agriculture. Much of it is to grow alfalfa, and a bunch of that is stuffed into shipping containers and shipped to China. We would not have a water problem in Utah if we just stopped allowing the exporting of alfalfa from the state. It's silly to grow alfalfa in the desert:

https://www.sltrib.com/news/en....