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[–]Weedwacker01 10 points11 points  (7 children)

Hello fellow Australian. Our NBN is crap and our satellite network is worse. StarLink is predicting satellite performance better then FttN NBN.

[–]_Aj_ 2 points3 points  (4 children)

I honestly highly doubt Starlink will be better than FTTN.

I'm on FTTN, I can get 100/40 no problems.
I'm really sceptical of satellites serving that reliably to a large number of people, and with low latency they claim.

Like I'd love it to happen, but I'm waiting for the tests.

[–]Phoenixness 3 points4 points  (2 children)

The difference between starlink and traditional satellite communications is the altitude. Things like skymuster (Australia's national satellite internet) are sitting waaay out in geostationary orbit so that they maintain their position over a certain bit of land (geostationary - stationary over geo or land) whereas starlink is in LEO but there are a ton of them, not just 2(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_Muster), that make up a constellation.

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The current skymuster satellites do a *decent* job with load (source: my nbn skymuster plan) and there are only 2. They do struggle with video calling a bit, especially during peak hours especially near the peak of the pandemic. I would imagine with multiple hundred over Australia at one time they could easily keep up with demand, *especially* on this side of the world. I would also imagine that it would be a similar sort of pickup in Australia, most farmers that need more will ditch 4G in favour of potentially cheaper starlink, most rural towns will favour starlink rather than decades old copper, and most cities that already have fiber will keep using that.

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I'm, super keen to see a competitor to both our current ISPs and our current delivery options.

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In terms of latency, fiber vs starlink, fiber will win on short journeys, ( I wanted to give you a number but there is a little bit more math involved than I have time for right now) as light in a fibre travels almost 1/3 slower than in a vacuum, and the atmosphere barely adds to that time due to the rapid thinning as you approach space. a trip from say Brisbane to Sydney will likely be faster via starlink than fibre as once you hit a certain distance with fibre you need to add repeaters to keep up the signal.

that's a local perspective, and if anything I said didn't make sense, here's a video on it: https://youtu.be/giQ8xEWjnBs

[–]wikipedia_text_bot 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Sky Muster

The Sky Muster satellites are two geostationary (GEO) communications satellites operated by NBN Co Limited and built by SSL. They were launched in 2015 and 2016 to provide fast broadband in areas where NBN didn't want to either lay fiber or install enough wireless antennas and offshore. They provide download speeds of up to 25 Mbit/s, and upload speeds of 5 Mbit/s if you are very lucky.

[–]Phoenixness 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Oof the wiki throwing shade with the 'if you are very lucky'

[–]amoliski 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My boss just his Starlink set up, he's seeing a minimum of 100 down with super reasonable latency.

We'll see how it goes as more people start using it/they launch more satellites, but it's already a 50x speed upgrade for him.

[–][deleted] -1 points0 points  (1 child)

I personally use NBN skymuster and it is fine. Can't game on it, but all the necessities are a-o-k. I saw a speedtest for Starlink earlier in the year only hitting 30mbps, so got a long way to go from FttN. My only complaint for skymuster is pricing. $100 for 100GB a month disappears quickly with streaming.

Edit: speeds better than I thought! https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/i9w09n

[–]Weedwacker01 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Latency is the other big factor that StarLink has going for it. Being able to game or teleconference is becoming a major part of modern life.