How do you sign up?
Ion drive. Now *this* is the 21st Century I was hoping for.
Deal with Bezos at your own risk. I have Prime and that’s as far as I’ll go with that Nazi.
I had Hugh’s satellite internet for about three weeks.
It was absolutely crappola.
Sounds like high risk and high cost for something done relatively inexpensively today.
“...I have a computer engineering networking background...” You may be over qualified. LOL!
That would be great. I would have to say 30 ms would do for the vast majority of Internet users. I am getting 11ms latency with my new Internet connection with Verizon. It is substantially better than Comcrap. I trade currency (scalping) and latency is important. I do exercises to improve my hand-eye latency because it is the greatest latency involved in a trade and contributes to total latency in a trade - envision the human eye-brain-fingers extended to the OSI seven layers. That price on the screen is not the fill price no matter how fast the network and human body is when entering market orders. (My trading strategy doesn't work with limit orders.)
I signed up -- my rural location has very few even reasonable internet options. Right now I have microwave internet, which most people have not even heard of. The service provider has microwave towers on local mountains and if one has line-of-sight to a tower they will install an antenna on our roof and aim it at the tower.
Latency is 20-30 ms, which is not really bad, but they throttle the speed. We pay for 12 Mbps, but in reality only get 7 or 8, which is marginal for streaming video.
Even if I offer to buy better equipment on my own, they will not support it. They are the only game in town, with all of the customer service complacency that implies.
Even in beta, I suspect Starlink will give us a better experience. If not, the competition should light a fire under our existing provider.
Speed (Mbps), download quantity and cost will be determining factors.
Cellular has broader access than cable in rural areas, but it lacks download quantity compared to cost.
My cable mid-level has 150 Mbps with 1000gb per month at $70 (IIRC). The closest cellular/wireless is around 4g with 20gb at $80.
Cable does need better competition, as they increase rates and speeds without giving users any options.
Landline phone has a good deal (false appearance) of a $49 per month for life. The trouble is, for my address, the speed is a laughable 3 Mbps. That barely services a single streaming event.
I’m signed up too. Hope I get a chance.
Good luck
Potentially direct, nearly undetectable global communication.
The system potentially prevents national control of the information flow.
*ping*
“Starlink, is a company started by Elon Musk that is attempting to create a space based internet service with hundreds if not thousands of LEO satellites...”
Because running Tesla, SpaceX, the Boring Company... is not enough to keep him busy.
The guy is an absolute force of nature.
I signed up
Living in Alaska gives me an edge in selection.
I just want to see the ground hardware.
Elon Musk is one African-American I can support! 8^)
I signed up about the same time as the last launch and have not gotten anything back except for the “thanks for signing up” email.
My average latency is 62ms for a ping test.
For a traceroute test it is 16ms.
Start> Run in Windows 7 or in Windows 10, right click on the Start button> Run
Type cmd then click ok.
In the black window that comes up type: ping www.yahoo.com -t
Click ok. Let run for a minute or two then do ctrl C on your keyboard to stop to see the results.
or tracert www.yahoo.com
Let it finish. This will show the number of hops it takes to get there from your location.
This site has both Ping and Traceroute tools. Their Ping tool will show the latency as well.
https://www.ultratools.com/tools/traceRoute
Measure Your Network Latency Before It Becomes a Problem
https://www.pcmag.com/news/measure-your-network-latency-before-it-becomes-a-problem