Tag: highspeed

Can Starlink Bring High-Speed Internet to Your Next Camping Trip?

Laurent
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Starlink promises to bring high-speed Internet to rural and remote areas currently underserved by wired Internet. Can it also also bring high-speed Internet along on your next camping trip? This weekend, I embarked on a 1,600-mile road trip to find out. 

What’s Elon Musk’s Starlink Device? 

Created by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Starlink’s goal is to spread high-speed Internet across the entire planet. It does that using constellations of small satellites. To-date, SpaceX has put about 2,000 Starlink satellites into orbit. That’s enough to cover most of the contiguous United States, parts of Canada and Alaska, western Europe, all of New Zealand, and southern Australia. Eventually, Musk hopes to bring that total to 42,000 satellites, expanding coverage across pretty much the entire globe. 

Starlink customers use a compact satellite dish to communicate with those satellites. Packaged with a power cord, stand, and modem/WiFi router, the consumer version of that kit currently costs $599, while the monthly service contract, which includes unlimited data, costs $110. To get on the list for one, you’ll need to put down a $99 deposit, which doesn’t include shipping (another $50). 

The dish itself, its cord, and stand are weatherproof. The modem/router is not. Starlink requires a normal 110-volt, three-prong household power outlet to operate. 

Current speeds are said to be between 100 and 200 megabytes-per-second download, and 10 to 20 MBPS upload, with latency as low as 20 milliseconds, depending on how clear your view of the sky is, and atmospheric conditions. Those numbers are consistent with my testing, and are equivalent to most cable Internet connections in homes, if only about half the speed of fiber optic setups.

Starlink should be faster, cheaper, more reliable, and offer more widespread coverage than other satellite Internet providers.

Notable Limitations, According to Crowd-Sourced Data

Here are some

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This Alaskan town is finally getting high-speed internet, thanks to the pandemic : NPR

Laurent

Technicians and engineers set up antennae receivers on Lena Foss’ residence in Akiak, Alaska. Web speeds will double in the city later this month, when it gains obtain to broadband net.

Katie Basile/KYUK


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Katie Basile/KYUK

Technicians and engineers put in antennae receivers on Lena Foss’ house in Akiak, Alaska. World wide web speeds will double in the town afterwards this month, when it gains obtain to broadband net.

Katie Basile/KYUK

Lena Foss thought she bought lucky when she salvaged a dryer from the dump in Akiak, a Yup’ik village in Western Alaska.

She understood it was damaged, but figured she could repair it by on the lookout at tutorials on-line.

“First issue I did was YouTube how to change a belt,” Foss mentioned. “But the online was so sluggish and I imagined it was squandering gigabytes so I turned that off ahead of I wholly finished how to take care of the dryer.”

Akiak sits alongside the Kuskokwim River, which transforms into a frozen freeway in the wintertime. The only other way to get there is on a 4-seater airplane.

The village’s remote spot has built high-speed internet, which is generally shipped by way of cables, a fantasy for its 460-some citizens. Now, it can be about to develop into a fact in Akiak and rural communities about the country, thanks in section to the pandemic.

For Shawna Williams, obtaining broadband will suggest currently being equipped to see her teachers and classmates. Throughout the pandemic, Williams made a decision to get her university degree, when holding down her whole-time work as a childcare employee, and boosting 5 kids. She has the swiftest world wide web approach available in Akiak, but she suggests it can’t tackle video clip all the time, which suggests she attends her distant lessons by telephone.

“The world wide web is so unreliable, and it truly is ordinarily way too slow, primarily in the evenings when I get off of perform, to load even a PowerPoint,” Williams mentioned.

She says she pays $314 a thirty day period for internet assistance now. But when

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