Starlink now open for pre-orders.

Oafley Jones · 24-02-2021 8:32pm

I’ve just ordered this. It’ll probably be a bit of a disaster at first, but so is Imagine, at least here I might have some chance of improvement down the line. Sick of restarting the router multiple times a day, sick at looking up the openeir map, while our immediate neighbours FTTH connections and knowing that the 300m to the road means we’re probably fawked for quite some time. I just need hope.

joe123 · 24-02-2021 8:45pm

Bit annoying they cant guarantee a delivery date between now and 6 months. Likely scenario of being stuck in a contract with someone like Vodafone and then having to pay Starlink 99 a month on top of whatever Vodafone etc get.

Well def keep a close eye on it. The more I think about it, I might just swallow the 99 euro a month as at least it will give me decent broadband until the NBI come along - still haven't been surveyed so thats 3-4 years at the earliest.

joe123 · 24-02-2021 9:07pm

Marlow wrote: »

I posted a link to the twitter feed in the very first post. It is full of very recent speed tests. Typically 25-30 Mbit/s upload. Best to read that.

Especially seeing as nobody here has the service yet.

/M

Just coming back to upload speeds, had a look through the thread. Not overly encouraging unless I'm looking in the wrong place.

Upload speeds of ~13Mb

For me I think I'm going to wait until more people start using it, especially in Ireland.

irishgeo · 24-02-2021 9:12pm

Oafley Jones wrote: »

I’ve just ordered this. It’ll probably be a bit of a disaster at first, but so is Imagine, at least here I might have some chance of improvement down the line. Sick of restarting the router multiple times a day, sick at looking up the openeir map, while our immediate neighbours FTTH connections and knowing that the 300m to the road means we’re probably fawked for quite some time. I just need hope.

https://satellitemap.space/

Shows the starlink live satellite above your location. Alot more over Ireland than the last time I checked.

aFlabbyPanda · 25-02-2021 12:19am

I'm fine with the price. We don't have Sky tv and instead use saorview/freesat/netflix/amazon/bbc player etc so 99€ is still better off for the faster link than paying sky for TV and someone else for broadband etc.

Its about priorities really. For me(us) having 3 times the speed is more than worth twice the price of what we pay now.

TheWonderLlama · 25-02-2021 11:06am

Put my name down for this yesterday and paid the deposit.
No idea if I will get it or not.
our home has copper only and we're lucky to get 5MB on a terrible connection that keeps dropping out.
Anything is better that what we have currently. If this works, i can work from home. Happy to pay the price.

theguzman · 25-02-2021 4:43pm

I have decided to sign up for this as my house in Ireland is in a very remote location and my parents house is also. I am paying €90 per month already for a landline service and eir mobile package plus €26 for Sky TV, all these will be cancelled and replaced by Starlink + GoMo so I'll actually save like €3 per month but have far faster speed.

Both my extreme rural house and parents rural village suburban house were recently surveyed for NBI FTTH and Starlink is a temporary solution until the fibre arrives, it is not and will never be the final solution for rural connectivity.

Lets imagine Ireland is back in 1951, Musk is a great Generator salesman and his generator is amazing but costly, if we listen to the naysayers anti-rural brigade (Dimmy Toolbag types) then we should stop rural electrification entirely and rely on Musk's generators. The NBP is the same as rural electrification and it is well into the future that it will be appreciated, only those with no tech understanding or vision want to stop it now. Ireland is one country, rural V urban is not an argument and we are a tiny nation and fibre to 5m is very important.

I am a fan of Starlink and can just imagine how it will revolutionise comms in truely rural areas, think African villages and developing countries, not Ireland a country with extremely high GDP and development. You could pop up a 4G cell tower in rural Congo powered by starlink, I'm sure Musk will be open to some type of wholesale sharing agreement if the price is right.

darrenheaphy · 25-02-2021 7:14pm

When you all say you're signing up do you mean the €99 deposit or it's moved from pre-order to the actual purchase of the hardware? I paid the deposit a few weeks back, can't wait to find out when I actually order it

ted1 · 25-02-2021 7:20pm

NIMAN wrote: »

I read the headline about the Kerry trial but this is a non-runner is it's going to cost €99 per month (and that's excludingthe €500 For setup).

I appreciate that it's expensive technology but that's simply too much for residential customers. Perhaps companies might take it up more though?

But it’s the ok for the government to spend 10k per house on broadband

€500 is a steal for a rural house that was cheap as it had little to no utilities.

ted1 · 25-02-2021 7:22pm

F00t13f4n wrote: »

There is at least one other satellite internet provider already operating in Ireland - an ad for konnectme.ie appeared on my Facebook feed last week.

I have no idea how good / bad they are, but they seem to be more realistic in their pricing anyway.

Realistic ? No they will offer poor latency. And a poor service compared to starlink

joe123 · 25-02-2021 8:24pm

ted1 wrote: »

But it’s the ok for the government to spend 10k per house on broadband

€500 is a steal for a rural house that was cheap as it had little to no utilities.

Little to no utilities? What?

Some people really do have a warped view of "rural"

Not everyone lives in a mud hut up the side of a mountain demanding fibre speed broadband so they can watch 4k netflix.

ted1 · 25-02-2021 9:11pm

joe123 wrote: »

Little to no utilities? What?

Some people really do have a warped view of "rural"

Not everyone lives in a mud hut up the side of a mountain demanding fibre speed broadband so they can watch 4k netflix.

Tick the utilities rural house have:
Broadband
Cable tv
Mains water
Mains sewage
Natrual gas
Electricity

listermint · 25-02-2021 9:36pm

ted1 wrote: »

Tick the utilities rural house have:
Broadband
Cable tv
Mains water
Mains sewage
Natrual gas
Electricity

Ted I know your trying to be edgey and controversial. There's homes in central. North West and south Dublin with 'broadband' speeds under 10mb .

This is meant to be a hub of technology in the world. 10k per household is absolute peanuts to stay in the game.

Peanuts.

joe123 · 25-02-2021 9:52pm

ted1 wrote: »

Tick the utilities rural house have:
Broadband
Cable tv
Mains water
Mains sewage
Natrual gas
Electricity

I'm honestly not sure if you're on a wind up here if you genuinely believe rural areas dont have the same/similar utilities listed there. :pac:

I realise this is getting well off topic now but Jesus. I was initially joking about people thinking rural was mud cabins on mountains.

Anyways I think theguzman summed it up really well above. Ireland is a small country, and can easily be passed by for one reason or another. Seeing our little island fully connected to the gold standard is only going to be a good thing in the long run. For enticing business and as a place to live.

As for Starlink, I'll personally be keeping a close eye on progress, as my area are likely looking at 2025 before Fibre arrives so it could definitely end up being an option for the foreseeable.

degsie · 25-02-2021 10:18pm

Starlink will be a game changer and will reshape how/where people want to live. I think in time this technology will be considered to be up there with the likes of the industrial revolution.

25-02-2021 10:23pm

degsie wrote: »

Starlink will be a game changer and will reshape how/where people want to live. I think in time this technology will be considered to be up there with the likes of the industrial revolution.

Will it though, it'll fill in some gaps in rural fibre but a satellite has the same bandwidth feeding it as a small rural exchange covering a much larger geographic area. It'll get slower as more people connect

ted1 · 25-02-2021 10:41pm

listermint wrote: »

Ted I know your trying to be edgey and controversial. There's homes in central. North West and south Dublin with 'broadband' speeds under 10mb .

This is meant to be a hub of technology in the world. 10k per household is absolute peanuts to stay in the game.

Peanuts.

Do those homes in Dublin come under the broadband scheme?

Spending 10k to provide broadband to a one off housing , where the Presin who built it snd bought it knew that there was no broadband is madness. One off houses like that shouldn’t even have been allowed

Marlow · 25-02-2021 10:55pm

Deleted User wrote: »

Will it though, it'll fill in some gaps in rural fibre but a satellite has the same bandwidth feeding it as a small rural exchange covering a much larger geographic area. It'll get slower as more people connect

Not quite. This is where Starlink is quite unique, once the links between the satellites are turned up.

The satellites are meant to be interconnected by laser. Like the laser or light, that is used in fibre optics. But because the light between the satellites travels in a vacuum, it's nearly twice as fast as it would be inside glasfibers.

As a result you have the capacity and multiples thereof .. as large exchanges.

The bottleneck will be the traffic volume at the ground station. But these groundstations can be placed at big bandwidth hubs. So a satellite, that doesn't have access to one of those hubs/groundstations can send the data across other satellites, until it hits one, that is in view of such ground station.

The bottlenecks, that OpenEIR has with some of their rural fibre exchanges literally don't exist.

Also .. and this is especially for Ireland ... the chances of those optical satellite interconnects to be broken and the timeframe to reposition a satellite to fix such a break is fractions of time, of what it takes OpenEIR to fix a broken/busted fibre and replace a bunch of storm damaged poles. Just saying ! Reliability Starlink vs. OpenEIR will be through the roof.

When a tree falls on a cable or fibre, the fibre or cable breaks and the link is gone. If the tree falls into a wireless link (or optical link in space), nothing happens, unless said fallen tree blocks it

You see packet loss for few milliseconds. And I have yet to see trees in space.

To put above into a simple statement: the scalability of Starlink's irish footprint, once fully deployed and operational, is beyond OpenEirs fibre network in rural Ireland. It is not meant to compete with urban 5G deployments. For low to medium density areas, it's unbeatable though .. on scalability .. the price point is a different story. (both in cost to deploy and cost to subscribe)

I leave this picture here for prosperity:

Yes .. that's a phone pole behind the fallen tree. Yes, there was an overhead VDSL cable (or what Eir would have glorifiedly called "eFibre") from said pole to the building behind me, taking the picture. As I said .. WAS ! Time to fix: .. well ... it'll be a while.

Can you see the advantage with not having overhead lines ? Or a wireless or fast/quick satellite connection ? Especially in Ireland ? Do you know how many broken rural FTTH connections there's been this winter already ? Co. Cork has been a disaster this week .. to put it mildly, with entire exchanges being offline for multiple days.

/M

listermint · 26-02-2021 9:07am

ted1 wrote: »

Do those homes in Dublin come under the broadband scheme?

Spending 10k to provide broadband to a one off housing , where the Presin who built it snd bought it knew that there was no broadband is madness. One off houses like that shouldn’t even have been allowed

Yes they do.

Will that make you stop and think a bit more about what infrastructure means to an all island economy....

At some point you might start thinking past your own front door

heffo500 · 26-02-2021 9:17am

For most people outside of the cities, a 4G or 5G connection with an external aerial will cover all their needs, all for only €20/€25 respectively Government should have invested more in this tech and left fibre for the big cities. Who in their right might would pay Eir money to rent telephone poles given they have pilfered the network. The worst thing the government ever did was privatised the telephone network, we would probably all have fibre by now otherwise.

Wanderer78 · 26-02-2021 9:18am

heffo500 wrote:

For most people outside of the cities, a 4G or 5G connection with an external aerial will cover all their needs, all for only â‚¬20/â‚¬25 respectively Government should have invested more in this tech and left fibre for the big cities. Who in their right might would pay Eir money to rent telephone poles given they have pilfered the network. The worst thing the government ever did was privatised the telephone network, we would probably all have fibre by now otherwise.

Now now, the wealth 'trickles down'!

listermint · 26-02-2021 9:20am

heffo500 wrote: »

For most people outside of the cities, a 4G or 5G connection with an external aerial will cover all their needs, all for only €20/€25 respectively Government should have invested more in this tech and left fibre for the big cities. Who in their right might would pay Eir money to rent telephone poles given they have pilfered the network. The worst thing the government ever did was privatised the telephone network, we would probably all have fibre by now otherwise.

This is really poor attempt, try harder. 2 / 10

ted1 · 26-02-2021 11:01am

listermint wrote: »

Yes they do.

Will that make you stop and think a bit more about what infrastructure means to an all island economy....

At some point you might start thinking past your own front door

All island infrastructure is great when people live in areas with high density. But if people choose to build on cheap land in low density , then the trade off is that they don’t get the infrastructure. The tax payer sound not be left picking up the tab to subsides their lifestyle choice.

Orebro · 26-02-2021 11:14am

Marlow wrote: »

Not quite. This is where Starlink is quite unique, once the links between the satellites are turned up.

Also .. and this is especially for Ireland ... the chances of those optical satellite interconnects to be broken and the timeframe to reposition a satellite to fix such a break is fractions of time, of what it takes OpenEIR to fix a broken/busted fibre and replace a bunch of storm damaged poles. Just saying ! Reliability Starlink vs. OpenEIR will be through the roof.

When a tree falls on a cable or fibre, the fibre or cable breaks and the link is gone. If the tree falls into a wireless link (or optical link in space), nothing happens, unless said fallen tree blocks it You see packet loss for few milliseconds. And I have yet to see trees in space.

To put above into a simple statement: the scalability of Starlink's irish footprint, once fully deployed and operational, is beyond OpenEirs fibre network in rural Ireland. It is not meant to compete with urban 5G deployments. For low to medium density areas, it's unbeatable though .. on scalability .. the price point is a different story. (both in cost to deploy and cost to subscribe)

I leave this picture here for prosperity:

Yes .. that's a phone pole behind the fallen tree. Yes, there was an overhead VDSL cable (or what Eir would have glorifiedly called "eFibre") from said pole to the building behind me, taking the picture. As I said .. WAS ! Time to fix: .. well ... it'll be a while.

Can you see the advantage with not having overhead lines ? Or a wireless or fast/quick satellite connection ? Especially in Ireland ? Do you know how many broken rural FTTH connections there's been this winter already ? Co. Cork has been a disaster this week .. to put it mildly, with entire exchanges being offline for multiple days.

/M

Point well made. I'd still take FTTH over Starlink any day though, even if it meant taking my chances with storm damage. Also if it got that bad chances are you'd be without electricity too!

Wanderer78 · 26-02-2021 11:14am

ted1 wrote: »

All island infrastructure is great when proper live in areas with high density. But if people choose to build on cheap land in low density , then the trade off is that they don’t get the infrastructure. The tax payer sound not be left picking up the tab to subsides their lifestyle choice.

...so to solve the problem, we use said tax payers money, contract a private sector business to provide the infrastructure, and at the end of it, said private sector business owns the infrastructure, say wha!

degsie · 26-02-2021 12:43pm

Jazus lads this is a Starlink thread.

26-02-2021 12:44pm

Can the I'm alright Jack anti NBP crowd PFO to some other thread!

Marlow · 26-02-2021 2:05pm

Orebro wrote: »

Point well made. I'd still take FTTH over Starlink any day though, even if it meant taking my chances with storm damage. Also if it got that bad chances are you'd be without electricity too!

Of course. If it's available, I'll take it, too. But I'm in a village with under 1000 houses, that is VDSL enabled, so I'm not going to get FTTH. And additionally, due to work requirements, Starlink will be a very welcome upgrade and backup.

As per my initial post:

Marlow wrote: »

This will not compete with the likes of FTTH, DSL and fixed wireless broadband on pricing. But it will give professionals who need a backup or a faster connection a seriously usable option and it will bring FTTH speeds to rural areas, that have nothing else. World wide !!

As I started out in the first place: Starlink will not replace FTTH nor really compete with it.

The "unreliability" of FTTH in Ireland is mostly down to it's implementation and the environment that we have here. Nothing wrong with the technology.

/M

Marlow · 26-02-2021 2:07pm

ted1 wrote: »

Do those homes in Dublin come under the broadband scheme?

Spending 10k to provide broadband to a one off housing , where the Presin who built it snd bought it knew that there was no broadband is madness. One off houses like that shouldn’t even have been allowed

Wanderer78 wrote: »

...so to solve the problem, we use said tax payers money, contract a private sector business to provide the infrastructure, and at the end of it, said private sector business owns the infrastructure, say wha!

AGAIN:

Marlow wrote: »

Yep.... this is not the NBP thread. This is about fast and quick satellite broadband.

Those who want to discuss the NBP, can go to the NBP thread, please.

/M

Romer · 26-02-2021 2:15pm

I have a co-worker in the States who was in on the Beta Testing. His professional technical opinion is that it's "F*cking awesome Dude."

I've been WFH before it was fashionable. Had FTTH whilst living in the arse end of Wexford so when I moved to a small town in KK I didn't really even consider it wouldn't be an option. No FTTH on my street. No foreseeable plan for it either. Currently on some wireless yoke that gives me 50MBPS at the best of times. The best of times is between 11:30 PM and 9:30 AM. Outside of that it's a crap shoot between 50MBPS and .02 MBPS.

Based on that, I'm signed up. Go Starlink!

Starlink now open for pre-orders.

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