The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday reaffirmed its 2022 decision to deny SpaceX satellite internet unit Starlink $885.5 million in rural broadband subsidies.
The FCC said the decision impacting Elon Musk’s space company was based on Starlink’s failure to meet basic program requirements and that Starlink could not demonstrate it could deliver promised service after SpaceX had challeged the 2022 decision.
Rurally here, HughesNet has existed for years. I have never used its service, but why would anyone have been compelled to switch to Starlink?
In theory, StarLink would have been faster because they use many low-orbit satellites as opposed to a handful of further-away geostationary satellites like HughesNet. But “faster speeds” isn’t everything and this money is meant to expand actual broadband/optical internet.
Thanks. The speed part does make sense.
If they were able to meet the actual up/down metrics for the subsidy, I don’t see why they shouldn’t get it. But they weren’t able to do that, so they don’t get the subsidy.
Affordability is also a thing
It’s physics. The old satellite Internet uses geosynchronous satellites. That orbit requires the satellite to be 22,300 miles up.
The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. So pretty much it takes almost a quarter of a second (250ms) just for the signal to travel up to the satellite and down to the ground station.
250ms added to the normal Internet travel time each way makes for a very delayed internet connection (in practice, 650ms average latency or 2/3rds of a second ). Voice chat has notable pauses, gaming becomes practically unplayable, and so on.
It’s a bit hard to visualize sub 1s times, but if you say “how are you” at a normallish speed, the words “how are” would take close to 2/3rds of a second.
Starlink satellites are only 340 miles up. A round trip is less than 4ms. So the packet and the response from the Internet reach you sooner. Also each satellite can handle a fair amount of bandwidth which if the number of users is kept in check means closer to modern bandwidth. Looks like Starlink latency runs about 25ms on land and 100ms in remote areas (far away from a ground station).
Also HughesNet seems to offer a max of 50mpbs while Starlink’s current top (business) service is 500mbps.
So they’re both satellite Internet services, but because in the difference in how they are deployed they offer very different speeds and latencies.
Excellent explanation
Hughes net is popular in my area. It has such severe latency it is unusable for gaming, unfortunately.
Wouldn’t the latency be an issue for Starlink as well? At some point, you’re fighting the speed of light.
https://www.gsma.com/get-involved/gsma-membership/gsma_resources/new-speedtest-data-shows-starlink-performance-is-mixed-but-thats-a-good-thing/
I thought I read that the latency increased since it first launched but it seems like they’re doing pretty well.
No, due to the physical location of the sats. A much lower orbit and light delay only adds like 30ms of latency, versus HighesNet with something in the realm of 700ms.
Looks like Hughesnet starts at 15 GB per month and 15Mbs down for $49.99 a month**
That is pretty bad.
Ping/latency…and upload speed.
Traditional satellite internet using geostationary satellites not only have bandwidth limitations but also very high latency. This is simply physics, even at the speed of light, GEO is pretty darn far out. For regular web browsing that’s not an issue, but anything that is latency dependent either starts failing or becomes unbearable.
Latency to GEO is about 500 milliseconds, that’s half a second for a request you send to get up there, then another half second for it to be sent back to ground stations, then normal internet latency, then another second back up and then down to you. So you have normal internet latency, plus 2 seconds, at the best of times. So things like VoIP and gaming often have many more issues, or sometimes may not even be really usable.
The Starlink contstellation being in a Low Earth Orbit means a much lower latency. Real world latency has been around or below 100ms total, similar to LTE latency times. In the real world it is just more like a mobile connection that works even in the middle of nowhere.