https://www.pcmag.com/news/half-of-america-is-ready-to-switch-to-starlink-satellite-internet

A bit misleading when they only surveyed 500 people but interesting all the same.

Where do the people in the survey live? Starlink won't be available to those in urban areas, so I'm not sure how many could actually switch.

Not in my house.

2 hours ago, goates said:

Where do the people in the survey live? Starlink won't be available to those in urban areas, so I'm not sure how many could actually switch.

 

It will ultimately be available in urban areas. Underserved areas first as they are in greatest need, then urban afterward. 

Its not just Starlink of course, there are numerous companies planning to do the same. Low Earth orbit will be jam packed with thousands of satellites. OneWeb which the UK government has just acquired, Amazon Kuiper. Quite a few of them. 

Edited January 15, 20215 yr by martin-w

600 Bucks up front and then 100 dollars a month? And they think half of the US population will go for that? Yeah right!

6 hours ago, Chock said:

600 Bucks up front and then 100 dollars a month? And they think half of the US population will go for that? Yeah right!

For those in urban areas, especially areas with fibre, this won't make much sense at all. However, there are plenty of people in rural areas all across North America who have very poor options right now for whom this will be very attractive, even at that cost. And that cost, the hardware in particular, is likely to come down over time.

7 hours ago, martin-w said:

It will ultimately be available in urban areas. Underserved areas first as they are in greatest need, then urban afterward. 

It may come to urban areas one day, but I wouldn't hold my breath. There are more challenges than just the number of satellites to overcome.

Quote

"The challenge for anything that is space-based is that the size of the cell is gigantic... it's not good for high-density situations," Musk said. "We'll have some small number of customers in LA. But we can't do a lot of customers in LA because the bandwidth per cell is simply not high enough."

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-says-starlink-isnt-for-big-cities-wont-be-huge-threat-to-telcos/

Never trust a Survey, for example, 50% of the Mercedes Benz Customers we asked in a Mercedes Benz Service Department in Houston, Texas Said, We Are Ready to Switch to Starlink. But then we changed to title to Half of America ready to switch to Starlink claimed!

But we weren't lying 🤣

10 hours ago, Chock said:

600 Bucks up front and then 100 dollars a month? And they think half of the US population will go for that? Yeah right!

 

Thats the Beta program. It will be competitive with other providers when fully deployed. There are a lot of rural areas in US though, that don't have reliable, fast Internet.

1 hour ago, martin-w said:

 

Thats the Beta program. It will be competitive with other providers when fully deployed. There are a lot of rural areas in US though, that don't have reliable, fast Internet.

True, but that means half of America actually isn't ready to switch then. 😉

Edited January 16, 20215 yr by Chock

I think this goes together very well with the current times.

Before the pandemic, there was a huge difference in housing costs between urban and rural areas, because everybody wanted to live as close as possible to work, which drove up houses prices in the cities to crazy levels but now, since smartworking seems to be the latest trend and many companies like Microsoft said they plan to keep a large percentage of their works at home, even *after* the pandemic, many people might prefer bigger and cheaper homes in rural areas, possibly with spare rooms to use as an home office, rather than drown in debt to live in tiny homes in the cities.

We are seeing this in Europe too ( and in Switzerland particularly, where housing is also quite expensive ), and most analysist are predicting some kind of "return to the country", which is the opposite of what happened in the past years.

But of course, you can't think of smart working without a proper internet connection, and this projects seems to fit the bill nicely, since traditional cable/fiber private companies don't want to go in rural areas, unless they are subsided by the governments, and this seems to happen extremely slowly, so it's another sector that needs some shaking up from people like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.

I don't think the price is very high, considering if you want fibers in your home, you can't expect it to get it outside the expensive urban areas so, if you take into account what you can save living away from big cities, and if you need internet for *work*, I don't think it's expensive at all.

2 hours ago, Chock said:

True, but that means half of America actually isn't ready to switch then. 😉

 

As I said in my first post... the survey was only 500 people so a bit misleading. From what I've seen though, looks like it will achieve Musk's objective and generate enough funds for his Mars endeavors.

Estimated to bring in $30 billion per year.

As much as I admire and usually promote technological progress, there's a real negative side to Starlink (and other satellite-based internet).

Both optical and radio telescopes are heavily impacted by the satellites, either by blocking the view of the Cosmos or being noisy in some of the radio bands used.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10/starlink-already-threatens-optical-astronomy-now-radio-astronomers-are-worried

https://physicsworld.com/a/dark-coated-starlink-satellites-are-better-but-not-perfect-say-astronomers/

The problem is that satellite-broadcast internet is a profitable venture compared to scientific discovery.
Astronomers may miss a key piece of information that could lead to new knowledge or miss the appearance of a dangerous asteroid.

There needs to be balance between the needs of the here and now versus the benefits for the entire human species from scientific discovery.  /rant

3 hours ago, F737NG said:

As much as I admire and usually promote technological progress, there's a real negative side to Starlink (and other satellite-based internet).

 

 

Yep, I have great concern for the pile of stuff that will be up their. Not just in terms of astronomy but it terms of space debris. 

4 hours ago, F737NG said:

or miss the appearance of a dangerous asteroid.

The population will be blissfully clueless and die happy whilst chatting on social media... 

13 hours ago, goates said:

However, there are plenty of people in rural areas all across North America who have very poor options right now for whom this will be very attractive, even at that cost.

It may come to urban areas one day, but I wouldn't hold my breath. There are more challenges than just the number of satellites to overcome.

There is also still quite a number of households in urban areas with poor internet who would benefit from this as well. Most people in a big city will likely have good internet anyway so they probably won't switch to Starlink or anything similar, especially as long as the price is high. This way urban areas would be served as well but not anywhere near the entire area.

I live in a city of 600,000+ a few kilometres outside of the city centre and my entire area only has 5-8 Mbit/s. Given the city or any providers just won't get their @ss up and provide contemporary internet, this will be a real alternative.