American taxpayers paid for both Starlink and Space X. Overpaid, actually, that’s why he’s the richest man in the world. None of his businesses are profitable, he just skims hundreds of billions off the enormous government grants he gets.
Since we overpaid for that tech, we should just confiscate it from him. He can be thankful that he doesn’t go to prison for misappropriating government funds.
He can keep Tesla. It’ll be bankrupt in 2 years anyway.
Company says that everyone should give them money and stop using competing products.
Obvious thing to say in the land of self-interest.
How about no
How about we take down every starlink satellite so NASA can operate unabated, and our telescopes aren’t interfered with.
Fuck off and give me the fiber that was promised and paid for decades ago.
“Oligarch mouthpiece demands diverting of major public funds to oligarchs instead”
Story of America, really.
SpaceX can fuck right off with that plan.
I got a better idea: a civil war against oligarchs
No fucking thanks. Gigabit+ fiber > Nazi-ass satellite internet that doesn’t have even remotely near the needed bandwidth for actual dense population centers.
Remember how Elon Musk conned Vegas out of millions with the hyperloop.
Satellite internet is not the future; it’s cell internet.
it’s cell internet.
Physical lines first.
We already have physical lines.
Businesses and governments aren’t going to invest in digging and laying down more cables to give people in rural America access to fiber. They’re already reluctant to do it for major cities.
They actually have invested multiple times. Problem is the companies they give the money to just pocket it and don’t update their infrastructure. Give this money to the local community or coop owned fiber operators. Stop giving money to these huge corps that don’t need it and fund the small coop and community run fiber operators.
Fibre deployment is getting cheaper and easier. Both in terms of cost of materials and in the equipment and labour skills.
It’s also much more secure from interference and disruption.
For populated areas, there’s zero justification to rollout wireless over fibre lines. And most major cities already have fibre in most, or many, areas. And the thing with fibre is that the physical lines can be used to deploy faster speeds with upgraded endpoints.
Tech bros would have you think physical connections aren’t a good choice anymore, because laying down fibre isn’t sexy enough for that VC money.
Ok.
What about everyone else?
It’s still worthwhile.
Who’s going to pay for it?
Where? In the US? It’s already been paid for multiple times over, through government grants and subsidies.
Conned them and then Nashville, I think it is, is also paying him for it. True stupid, the US isn’t a country of learners, it seems.
Wireless data transmission should only ever be used for nomadic, temporary, and/or sacrificial links.
They’re useful for quick deployment, but are intrinsically brittle and terrible for resiliency and efficiency.
The longer the dependence on them for a given use case, the less defensible arguments in support of them become.
I’m all for the use of satellite delivery of internet services, but only when it’s used in conjunction with a broader roll out of hardwired infrastructure, at which point it can reasonably be relegated to serving as a secondary, backup diverse path.
Cory Doctorow described it as anti-futuristic tech. Where fiber networks get better, faster, and cheaper the denser they get, wireless satellite will get slower and less reliable the more people share that spectrum.
Going from the most secure, hard wired formats to a con man’s satellites would be a fatal error. Any sort of military conflict and the network is all down, atleast broadband keeps secure networks intact.
Just have a look at what’s going on in ukraine. Once they started using drones, the drone were attacked through their wireless connections. Now they trail fiber optic cables for control. What does that say about the relative reliability and security?
Gotta gear up for America’s century of humiliation.
“Give me all your money” says world’s richest person, in a fit of originality.
all you can eat latency and an oversaturated network on devices with a limited lifespan… what else could you ask for!
Starlink has much better latency than most satellites, but still 10 to 50 times as much as fiber.
ha yeah… not having to make a 340 mile round trip instead of the hundreds of feet to the nearest router will do that
Uh, how often are you using the Internet to connect to a computer in your home town? Maybe 5% of the time?
I’ve never used Starlink, but with a basic understanding of geography and optics, I’m going to bet that in most scenarios the latency difference between Starlink and fiber is negligible, sometimes even being faster on Starlink, depending on the situation.
That said, I’m not suggesting Starlink is a realistic replacement for fiber, just that latency isn’t the big issue. (It has other serious issues)
Much more frequently than you think with CDN endpoints.
Ok, so actual question, How useful are CDN endpoints these days with https everywhere? Because most encrypted content is unique to a single web user, caching isn’t super useful. Also you can’t cache live content like video calls or online games. I’d imagine the percentage of cacheable content is actually fairly low these days. But like I said, I don’t actually know the answer to this, i’d be curious to hear your take.
Edit: it’s weird to get down votes for a question.
HTTPS / TLS has little to do with it. Don’t think of the endpoint as a cache between you and the origin. The DNS name given to the endpoint is the origin from your browser’s perspective. How content gets cached on the backend is irrelevant to the browser. Live video that someone else in your area is also watching is cacheable. Images to load a page, very cacheable. The personal stuff is mostly HTML specific to you but that’s quite small.
HTTPS can in fact be cached, and most modern browsers will do so unless given a header or something to tell it not to.
Source: Devtools network tab + https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Guides/Caching
Browsers partition the cache by “origin” now though, so while it can cache HTTPS content, it can’t effectively cache shared content (It’ll store multiple independent copies).
So Youtube still works fine, but Google Fonts is pointless now.
Edit: Oh yeah, and any form of shared JavaScript/CSS/etc. CDN is now also useless and should be avoided, but that’s always been the case.
Netflix and Amazon Outpost makes it quite useful.
I live near DE-CIX and have fiber. So a decent chunk of web services I use is available with a latency of under 5ms. And everything else hosted in a European datacenter with under 20ms.
So almost all of my internet traffic has a lower latency than starlink has under ideal conditions
Living right near a massive CX that services the US-Canada border… most times.
Just for reference, I get about 45-50 ping playing Marvel Rivals on Starlink.
That’s basically perfect, with regards to online gaming.
I got better ping playing Quake multiplayer in 1996
Online and not LAN? I have doubts.
That used dedicated servers, right?
On fiber, while I don’t play that game, I’ve never seen a ping longer than 10-13msecs.
The point is, unless you’re playing some hyper competitive game where a 30ms difference in reaction time is noticeable (this is less than 1 frame in a fighting game, for example) Starlink works perfectly well. Lower numbers are better, but for games you only need to compare that number to human reaction times (150-200ms) to see that both are small values less than the reaction time of any person.
Previous satellite Internet using satellites in geosynchronous orbit had 1500ms latency, for comparison.
where a 30ms difference in reaction time is noticeable (this is less than 1 frame in a fighting game, for example)
You have some pretty bad understanding of how netcode works if you think a 30ms ping in an online multi-player game means your game or input is delayed by 30ms. It’s a lot more complicated than that, and especially in games with bad netcode you will absolutely notice a difference between 10ms or 30ms ping
Oh, please explain the complexity to me like I’m a system administrator with only 25 years of experience. I didn’t realize that computers could connect to each other over a network until 3 days ago, imagine my surprise.
You could start with the fact that many online game servers (ex: Valorant, Apex, Overwatch) artificially increase everyone’s latency at the server, except for the people with higher network latency in order to compensate for lag through a technique called lag compensation. So having 10 ms ping and 50 ms ping just means the server introduces a 40ms delay on the player with 10ms ping so both players experience the same latency.
Or maybe you could explain how game state updates happen with a set frequency and the gap between the state updates can also be adjusted by the server for each client so that state updates are sent to higher latency users earlier in the update window. I mean this technique is essentially lag compensation as well, but it applies to how the client updates are sent instead of being applied to incoming packets.
Or, you could avoid all this and simply declare me incorrect by pointing at a game that doesn’t use lag compensation or otherwise move the goal posts so that you don’t actually have to explain the complexity that you were hinting at.
Previous satellite Internet using satellites in geosynchronous orbit had 1500ms latency, for comparison.
Yes, and are far more stable, not hyped, and are already at pretty much peak congestion. Starlink will get progressively worse, the more people use it. Right now, it’s over provisioned.
The point is, unless you’re playing some hyper competitive game where a 30ms difference in reaction time is noticeable (
Ever try a voice call with 30ms of latency?
Ever try a voice call with 30ms of latency?
Lol what? You’re not gonna notice a 30ms delay in a voice call…
@[email protected] downvote with no reply even though you were painfully wrong. Sad.
Yeh, 30ms is still inside the haas delay.
If you are a professional listener (sound engineer, musician, dancer) then you can probably perceive it (in a similar way that eyes theoretically only need 25fps, but 60/120/144 is noticeably better).In 30ms, sound can travel 10 meters.
So, if you’ve ever had a conversation with someone across a classroom, you’ve had a conversation with 30ms latency.For data, 30ms is 8100 km for electricity over copper, or 6000km for light over fibre.
Meaning 30ms over fibre (considering no transmission delays) would be roughly the direct distance between US and UK.
So yeh, 30ms is nothing
And I’ll downvote ya again, if I could :)
FWIW, I don’t owe you a reply :)
Yes, and are far more stable, not hyped, and are already at pretty much peak congestion. Starlink will get progressively worse, the more people use it. Right now, it’s over provisioned.
They were not more stable. Any occlusion, including thick clouds, would degrade the signal to being unusable. I used Hughsnet for years, then swapped to cellular (100ms+ latency) and finally to Starlink. Starlink is a pretty solid 100Mb/s, with low jitter, packet loss and latency.
Ever try a voice call with 30ms of latency?
Yeah, I use voice chat every day, it’s not noticeable.
They were not more stable. Any occlusion, including thick clouds, would degrade the signal to being unusable
You have the same issue with Starlink…
Yeah, I use voice chat every day, it’s not noticeable.
The people on the call do…
So if my ping is currently 90ms on fiber, it’ll become 900ms - 4.5s on starlink?
Probably no. Your ping is abnormally high for fiber, I’d expect a sub 10ms ping for you.
That makes a lot of assumptions about what I am pinging, and the networking context.
In my case I was quoting my average ping in VRChat.
How can you quote 10-50 times higher and then tell me no when I calculate what that means for me?
Is it because latency does not scale in that way?
Is it because latency does not scale in that way?
Yes, your understanding is fundamentally flawed. Starlink adds a fixed latency on top, if you ping to a server was 2ms with fiber and 52ms with starlink, then your ping to a server that would be 100ms with fiber would be 150ms with starlink
- Run a
tracerouteliketraceroute cnn com - Kill that by
ctrl-cat the third line. - Ping that third IP address.
Don’t try to ping UK.battle.net or your numbers will be skewed by everything in between.
About 5ms.
Based on the various replies, it sounds like the poster I was originally replying to does not mean pings in any context.
They just mean in this context. Along optimal routes. Right?
So then 10x makes 50ms; sounds about right
Of course they don’t mean in every case. Yeah, if you have to go halfway around the world from two addresses that are very far away from hubs, Starlink might be better. 99.99999% of the time this isn’t happening though and fiber will be better. There are situations for some people where it’s worth it. Fiber is better for the average case though, and it’s where money should be invested.
- Run a
Of course. Still, an exception doesn’t disprove expected averages.
So you were only talking about when testing with ideal servers? Why is my example an exception? Are all games an exception?
Because we’re talking about the inherent latency of the connection, obviously.
You’re probably really far away from the VR Chat server. Try pinging Google or Cloudflare, which will tell you ping to the nearest datacenter (a rough estimate of ping caused by your local ISP).
Based on their numbers, you could probably expect 50-100ms to Google, and then add an extra 90ms to get from there to your VR Chat server.
My personal fiber connection gets under 2ms ping on Speedtest
It depends on the instance (people can make them in 4 regions of the world) but 90ms is common for US west and east, for me.
- Cloudflare.com: 5ms
- Google.com: 24ms
That makes sense then. When people talk about their ISP ping, they’re usually talking about how long it takes to get out of the ISP’s network. So that 5ms Cloudflare ping is likely pretty close to what people would consider your internet’s ping.
Speedtest.net is a really common tool for measuring this, since it will automatically check where the closest server is. For your connection, any ping above 5ms you can probably assume is based on your physical distance to the server, or latency on the server’s end. I’m guessing Google doesn’t have a server quite as close to you as Cloudflare
My average latency on Starlink over the past year is 32 ms. It varies throughout the day from around 20 to 40 ms.
If you are getting 90ms on fiber, you are either pinging a server that’s a long ways away or something is very wrong.
If you look at the rest of the comments, you’ll see I was taking about my ping in a game. Not my shortest path to a nearby server.
A subscription that somehow still manages to use surge pricing? I’m assuming that’s the next logical step.
Well, to be fair, the dishes do make great outdoor cat beds!
Hmmm ditch lightning fast and stable fiber for the mediocre speed and unstable micro satellite internet connection controlled by a petty asshole…
What to do, what to do?
Just think how much control he can have if he owns the medium which people access the internet.
And he’d only do good things with that power /s
I mean, you don’t have to guess. He’s interfered in a war and turned a social network into his personal bullhorn.
If Intel has to give the US government 5%, Starlink should have to give back 25%.
