The Cellar / Rural Broadband must be Happening?

**Posted by griff** 9/20/2021 6:26 am

Cuz Frontier isn't even trying anymore. Seriously though, it won't happen. The Feds have gotten bogged down in their usual bullshit and an easy win slips away.

Help me Star Link, you're my only hope.

**Posted by Flint** 10/27/2021 2:31 pm

I drove out to a Radiologist's rural cabin yesterday, way out on logging roads, on a cloudy, rainy day, and his Starlink internet pulled ~100 Mbps down, ~10 Mbps up, on Speedtest.net

Last edited by Flint (10/27/2021 2:32 pm)

**Posted by griff** 10/28/2021 6:17 am

luxury- That is pretty frickin awesome.
I'm starting to think I won't have broadband until I retire and move.

**Posted by Flint** 10/28/2021 1:03 pm

while you're at it, throw your phone in a lake

this sounds like the ideal situation

**Posted by griff** 10/28/2021 4:47 pm

You may be reading the situation properly now that Bacefook has designs on the Metaverse.

**Posted by tw** 10/28/2021 10:17 pm

Flint wrote:
... his Starlink internet pulled ~100 Mbps down, ~10 Mbps up, on Speedtest.net

Those satellites should be getting spaced apart by now. Have not checked them for many months now. Over how long was that reception? Was it in bursts? Or consistent over an hour?

**Posted by xoxoxoBruce** 10/28/2021 11:05 pm

Have a friend in a Dallas suburb who has been actively searching for a house in western PA. No city and doesn't want a subdivision or HOA. The big stumbling block has been his wife works from home and needs a good internet connection.
Hard to come by outside the cities. Bell Labs, or their successors, bought him out a couple years ago so he's retired but still freelances and needs a fast connection to do that.

Last edited by xoxoxoBruce (10/28/2021 11:06 pm)

**Posted by Flint** 10/29/2021 1:37 pm

tw wrote:
Flint wrote:
... his Starlink internet pulled ~100 Mbps down, ~10 Mbps up, on Speedtest.net

Those satellites should be getting spaced apart by now. Have not checked them for many months now. Over how long was that reception? Was it in bursts? Or consistent over an hour?

I ran another test after they hooked up a Cisco Meraki, and it pulled 40 down. I have a hard time believing Cisco's device would suck up that much overhead, so maybe the down speed was sporadic. Up stayed ~10

Last edited by Flint (10/29/2021 1:37 pm)

**Posted by tw** 10/29/2021 10:27 pm

Each satellite should be available for about 2.5 minutes. Constant speed testing for about an hour should say more about how many satellites are consistently available at any minute.

Download speeds would probably say more about this consistency. Too few birds serving too many customers would result in slower download speeds.

I'm guessing that only half the constellation has been launched.

**Posted by Flint** 11/01/2021 12:40 pm

You know, I assumed the satellites would be geostationary

Interesting, how they're doing it

**Posted by BigV** 11/01/2021 9:13 pm

Amazon’s Project Kuiper hopes to launch first two prototype satellites in late 2022

Amazon’s ambitious satellite-internet project, Project Kuiper, aims to launch its first two prototype satellites in the fourth quarter of 2022, according to an experimental launch license the company filed with the Federal Communications Commission today. Called KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2, the two prototypes are supposed to launch on an experimental new rocket called the RS1, currently being developed by startup ABL Space Systems based in El Segundo, California.

Kuiper’s goal is to launch a giant constellation of up to 3,236 satellites into low Earth orbit over the next decade in order to provide low-latency broadband internet coverage to the surface below. The plan is to serve rural communities and other areas where it’s difficult to provide infrastructure for traditional internet services. It’s a similar concept to that of Starlink, SpaceX’s broadband internet satellite constellation, which proposes sending nearly 12,000 into low orbit around Earth. But unlike Kuiper, Spacex has actually launched more than 1,700 of its satellites and even created a beta program for hundreds of users. Kuiper has yet to launch any satellites.

400 mbps, that's pretty good!

**Posted by LWKale** 11/05/2021 11:05 am

400 mbps, that's pretty good!

Still 100 times faster than my connection...

**Posted by BigV** 11/05/2021 5:52 pm

welcome aboard LWKale!

**Posted by griff** 11/06/2021 7:14 am

LWKale wrote:
400 mbps, that's pretty good!
Still 100 times faster than my connection...

Mine is similar to yours when it stays connected Frontier is crap. Broadband is in the "bipartisan" infrastructure package, but will we see it? Welcome aboard!

**Posted by tw** 11/06/2021 5:12 pm

Flint wrote:
Interesting, how they're doing it

A massive transmitter is required for a satellite to receive your signal 22,500 miles away (GEO). 200 mile satellites (LEO) can receive a CB (5 watt) transmission. Then it must get your signal to somewhere else where a ground station exists. So a mesh network configuration might send your transmission to another satellite with a higher orbit (MEO).

Software, to do things on each satellite, must be extensive. Previously, satellites were simply repeaters. They simply received and retransmitted what was received. Most computations work was done by computers on the ground. Only recently have satellites contained computers. First ones did not even have the computation abilities beyond a single chip computer inside a keyboard.

To put that into perspective, Martian Rovers only used 8086 processors - as found in the original IBM PC. Putting that much computational power into a satellite is a major accomplishment.

**Posted by glatt** 4/23/2025 8:32 am

I found myself in West Virginia on Monday night, to unload a truckload of 1,000+ board feet of sawn white oak boards. The guy whose place we are using to stack the lumber to dry has Starlink internet at his off-grid cabin. His solar panels run the well pump, LED lighting, minifridge, and internet. He was lamenting a little bit that he recently broke down and is now writing a check to Elon because there is no cell service in his valley and he wants internet.

After dinner, we went out onto the porch to enjoy the night sky and look at the stars, and there was a very strange light near the ridge line in the southern sky. It looked exactly like the pictures I had seen online of Elon's rockets that have mistified millions when they look up and see these weird lights in the sky. And then I remembered that I was vaguely aware of a launch that was supposed to be visible up the East Coast in the last week or two, but kept getting scrubbed. So I connected my phone to Elon's internet, and looked it up, and saw that he had launched something from Cape Canaveral just a couple minutes earlier. It was pretty cool. From a valley in the mountains of northern West Virginia, we saw a rocket that took off from Florida! I had no idea you could see little things that far away.

**Posted by griff** 4/23/2025 8:51 am

Pretty cool. I wish Elon had had the ability to focus on forward thinking instead of getting caught up in terrible political ideas. We have St*r Link here which is contrary to our strict no funding billionaires rule.

The electric co-op here is finally stringing the fiber optic cable. Ezra Klein has been writing about Democrats getting wrecked by slow roll outs of good ideas. This is a classic case.

**Posted by footfootfoot** 5/03/2025 6:27 am

GF lives in Shangri=La and the company offering fiber optic has told her that she needs to provide a pull string from the phone pole to her house. At her house the phone lines come through the concrete foundation directly, rather than in a conduit. My guess is they used direct burial wire. GF seems to remember when they built the house they had to trench from the pole about 200' through the neighbor's yard and then another 50' to her foundation.

She's probably going to miss the fiber optic bus...

**Posted by griff** 5/03/2025 7:53 am

That’s not great.

**Posted by tw** 5/03/2025 7:58 am

Today they use a torpedo instead of trenching. Then pull a flexible pipe through that underground hole. Getting inside through a concrete foundation is easy.

Those older installations used direct burial; not a pipe. So no hole would exist for a pull string.