Starlink

[John_Mc]

I install Fiber for a living and trust me, there is no such thing as cheap fiber. We have all buried fiber, we don't do any aerial. Yet. In rural area's it is just cost prohibitive to get your money back in a decent amount of time. I have approximately 20 subdivisions I work in constantly. We sell our 1GB with free gateway and free installation for $65 a month all in. No contract. You can't beat that price. But the return on your money is very quick when you have a concentration of 100 homes within a 1/2 mile radius. Lots of local rural COOP's doing fiber but the up front cost for the consumer is pretty pricey. It costs a lot of money to put fiber in the ground and do the build out. So in rural areas it just doesn't make sense to plow fiber to homes 1/2 mile or further apart unless you can pass that along to the consumer and most folks wont pay for it. But they will ***** about it, that's for sure.

It made even less sense to run electricity to a lot of places in the US, but it was done. Now, at least the poles are already there. (No one seems to be putting fiber in the ground in VT, at least not in our area.)

In our case, about 2/3 of the 1.5 mile run from the nearest fiber to the edge of our property is aging copper that is not reliable even for voice calls. Every pair of wires in the run is currently in active use, with the exception of the ones that have been flagged as no good. No room for adding another house, or someone who wants a second line, or change to "bonded DSL" The phone company knows they need to replace it. A group of us at our end of the run have offered to pay the difference between the cost of running new copper and running fiber. We can't even get the phone company to respond at all, let alone agree. We hold out some slim hope that all of the federal money being dumped in to this might result in getting fiber extended out to our area.

 

[square1]

Have to hand it to Musk. So far he's delivered very little on Starlink but that isn't stopping him from starting to take orders for his new Starlink Premium service for $500 a month

 

[kcflhrc]

I think the best hope for us Rural Folks is upgraded Cellular Data. Much easier to run fiber to a single tower and then let the wireless take over. Lots cheaper than getting fiber to each home.

 

[Fixastuff]

Have to hand it to Musk. So far he's delivered very little on Starlink but that isn't stopping him from taking orders for Starlink Premium service for $500 a month

That's not what the people who have it think.....

 

[kcflhrc]

It made even less sense to run electricity to a lot of places in the US, but it was done. Now, at least the poles are already there. (No one seems to be putting fiber in the ground in VT, at least not in our area.)

In our case, about 2/3 of the 1.5 mile run from the nearest fiber to the edge of our property is aging copper that is not reliable even for voice calls. Every pair of wires in the run is currently in active use, with the exception of the ones that have been flagged as no good. No room for adding another house, or someone who wants a second line, or change to "bonded DSL" The phone company knows they need to replace it. A group of us at our end of the run have offered to pay the difference between the cost of running new copper and running fiber. We can't even get the phone company to respond at all, let alone agree. We hold out some slim hope that all of the federal money being dumped in to this might result in getting fiber extended out to our area.

I can only speak for our area and we bury everything. I'm sure other areas of the country aerial is much more prevalent but has more risk of failure than buried. Some would argue the fact that good Broadband Service is just as important as electricity, not for me. And you certainly cant have one without the other. We haven't put any new copper in the ground for years, doesn't make sense to. The fiber in the ground or in the air is a small cost to all the electronic gear it takes to light it up and make it functional. I knew going in that when I moved to the country internet service was going to suck and I just deal with it. I can get 25 meg over my AT&T Cell Data and there is nothing I cant to with that. I can access my camera system, thermostat and anything else remotely. Stream anything without buffering so it works for me. I live close enough to a major highway my LTE Speeds are pretty good.

 

[JasperFrank]

Maybe this is a very, very stupid question..... I'm okay with that, cause I love stupid questions, but why can't we run a tiny modulation on top of the Power Grid, we already have in place?

 

[kcflhrc]

Maybe this is a very, very stupid question..... I'm okay with that, cause I love stupid questions, but why can't we run a tiny modulation on top of the Power Grid, we already have in place?

It's been tried but has failed miserably

 

[JasperFrank]

Still, all it takes is a good filter, and some safety fuzzing. Why did we go this way to have so many other ways?

 

[LouNY]

It works there was not enough demand for it. Also it doesn't handle passing through transformers good.
You can get Power Line network units for home use.

 

[kcflhrc]

So in my area most homes have their own transformer dropping the voltage to 220 VAC, so not much good to anyone hence the lack of demand so pretty much worthless.

 

[JasperFrank]

The voltage has little to do with modulation. The carrier is still 60 HZ.

 

[ponytug]

The voltage has little to do with modulation. The carrier is still 60 HZ.

You are right, but..., indirectly, it does affect the ethernet signal as the transformer is a whopping big inductor and filters out the high frequency signals that they have tried to use in the past for Ethernet over power lines. There are devices that can "jump" the transformer to pass the signal, but the general problem was that the speeds weren't very high.

All the best,

Peter

 

[BigBlue1]

Have to hand it to Musk. So far he's delivered very little on Starlink but that isn't stopping him from starting to take orders for his new Starlink Premium service for $500 a month

Delivered very little?? That's a curious analysis. I think what they have put in place in terms of satellite infrastructure, ground station infrastructure around the world and the user terminal devices is quite a feat. It has revolutionized remote location network connectivity. Sounds like some bitterness built up somewhere causing a blurred view of the situation...

 

[John_Mc]

Delivered very little?? That's a curious analysis. I think what they have put in place in terms of satellite infrastructure, ground station infrastructure around the world and the user terminal devices is quite a feat. It has revolutionized remote location network connectivity. Sounds like some bitterness built up somewhere causing a blurred view of the situation...

Delivered enough to keep my family happy.

 

[JasperFrank]

"
You are right, but..., indirectly, it does affect the ethernet signal as the transformer is a whopping big inductor and filters out the high frequency signals that they have tried to use in the past for Ethernet over power lines. There are devices that can "jump" the transformer to pass the signal, but the general problem was that the speeds weren't very high."

In back of my head i knew this to be the case, yet, Cell Tech uses packets, which can have corrections built in. A little bit of buffer and Check Sums and I see not a problem. "Slow," has to be defined. The wife and I don't ever expect of care if we can get HD TV. We have a very small TV. And we certainly don't care about 4K. But even at our lowly rates we can watch Netflix and do video conferencing. I can even watch Netflixs while the wife is video conferencing on Zoom, and we don't have drop outs. This is on a DSL 10 Mbsp down and a .5 up. If slow fits into that, I'm still all for it.

 

[kcflhrc]

The voltage has little to do with modulation. The carrier is still 60 HZ.

Never said it did. But I did say it had to do with the transformer.

 

[JasperFrank]

Transformers don't change the ac frequency. Just say'en.

 

[John_Mc]

Transformers don't change the ac frequency. Just say'en.

Transformers do block the high frequency signals used to send data over copper lines... Just say'en

 

[JasperFrank]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_over_power_lines. Remember they are talking about non-redundant signal methods. Which we have the tech to do now.

 

[John_Mc]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_over_power_lines. Remember they are talking about non-redundant signal methods. Which we have the tech to do now.

From the article you linked:

"There have been many attempts worldwide to implement access BPL, all which have indicated that BPL is not viable as a means of delivering broadband Internet access. This is because of two problems: limited reach, and low bandwidth which do not come close to matching ADSL, Wi-Fi, and even 3G mobile. World major providers have either limited their BPL deployments to low-bandwidth connected equipment via smart grids, or ceased BPL operations altogether." [Emphasis added]