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Elon Musk Is Charging Starlink Customers Gigantic Bogus Fees Because Its Network Is Being Crushed by “High Demand” (www.yahoo.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 22 points 3 months ago (14 children)

I have a neighbor who has access to 1gb cable and 1gb fiber from two ISP's. Both have high data caps. Instead he is rocking the starlink and I can't for the life of me figure out how he thinks that shit is somehow better than a hard link.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (13 children)

    I don't run starlink, but I run Starry (fixed point wireless) when AT&T and Spectrum are available because:

    1. I do networking for a living, including wireless (or technically my coworkers do). I know how this thing works and what it's limitations are
    2. I live in an area where it almost never rains, so little to no attenuation
    3. AT&T is on my banlist after shutting down my account for migrating to a 5G phone not on their approved list. Customer service didn't even let me transfer the sim back to the old 4G phone. The account termination was immediate. I ended up convincing customer service that I needed my phone number for emergency contact, and immediately transferred the number elsewhere upon it being restored.
    4. Spectrum routing is shit
    5. Wireless can be as good (or even better) than wired in ideal conditions (see 1), my current 1Gbps plan also only costs $20/month.
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  • [+] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (9 children)

    Starlink and your short hall wireless solution are not really in the same ball park. I'm sorry for your problems with ATandFee. I use them for 1gb fiber. It hasn't dropped once in the nine months or so I've had it. I had cable internet for 14 years before that. For ten of those years I was the sysadmin for the company. It was a local Four city cable company that finally sold out to a larger operation. We maintained a really high availability with most outages being upstream of our connections. We helped maintain several wireless bridges for commercial companies who were outside our service area and in heavy rain or even fog the signal would drop on a ten mile shot. The 60ghz short hall links also would also suffer from interference from weather on occasion.. No wireless connection is as stable as a fiber link. None of them and they never can be.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (8 children)

    1. I agree LEO Sat is different from 60GHz. But the detrimental effects of wireless is completely overblown. People running into issues should just run a signal test first to make sure it's not their setup that's the problem.

    2. There is no such thing as weather in SoCal (other than that one week of continuous rain each year).

    3. If you are just looking at 4 9s or 3 9s latency while the link is not saturated, it's fine for general use (assuming my first bullet point holds). It's not like I'm running aws off of my home network.

    4. Even in the rain, the latency is mostly fine. It's usually just the minute it starts raining that the latency goes through the roof. My assumption is that it's sampling and adjusting the modulation/coding scheme.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (7 children)

    Let me tell you a little story about a 2008 Chevy truck. Around 2018 we had daily interference with our satellite receivers. It was a ongoing problem and we couldn't find anything wrong. We changed out LNB's and even the receivers. Ran temporary cable replacements on the ground. Finally someone noticed out outdoor wifi was going down at the same time as our other problems. We fired of a spectrum analyzer hooked to a tuned 5ghz dipole and nothing out of the ordinary. The next morning our CEO was calling cause fox news went out in the middle of his daily indoctrination and he was getting calls from his assholes buddies he golfed with were not getting their fix of manufactured outrage. We go to the headend and sure enough its out and the spectrum analyzer was showing a massive signal wider than the analyzer could display at once.

    We of course were dealing with the problem and didn't notice the twenty year old in one of our old trucks loading up what he needed to bury some drops that day. We also didn't notice as soon as he drove off that everything started working again. After a few minutes of getting our ass chewed when the CEO called and wanted to know what we did and we had done nothing, our operations guy called the kid in the chevy back for something unrelated. As soon as he drove up everything went tits up again and it dawned on us all it was that truck. We switched him to a different vehicle and parked that one. After replacing a number of parts the problem went away on the truck.

    It doesn't matter if its the weather or if it exists in you corner of the world. It can be anything cratering your signal. I've seen old lighting ballast interfere and all manner of electrical appliances. I know you can't be convinced because it hasn't happened to you yet but wireless is a poor poor substitute for a hard link.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (6 children)

    I've mentioned plenty of times under ideal conditions. If the condition is as you say (where there is known massive interference) I'd say that's a good indicator to either 1. figure out what the interference is and whether it's possible to mitigate it or 2. Switch to a hard link. This is very much the right tool for the right place problem.

    For a majority of users wireless is definitely sufficient and that they can tolerate a reasonable amount of disconnects/drops/latency spikes. I'm not saying for every scenario wireless is a good substitute, but it can definitely handle certain scenarios good enough for home users for a fraction of the cost.

    Besides, if I'm not having any major sources of interference now but somehow that develops later, that's no different than getting a congested link at peek hours, or a faulty switch somewhere along the path 2 years down the line. It's just another form of network disruption, those can develop in the same way in hard links.

    Side note: I've done work over ssh and webapps with a constant 200-500ms latency and periodic disconnects for prolonged (months) periods of time. It is absolutely usable though a bit slow. I've even played PvP in MMOs (SWTOR, ESO) with those network stats back in the day and still managed to do well enough. People overestimate the quality of Internet service they need all the time.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (5 children)

    Under ideal conditions or any conditions a wireless connection can never equal a hard link. End of story. You keep trying to convince me what you said had merit when Its clear I don't think it does. Unless you live in a dessert you are exposed to constant interference including congestion brought about by simply sharing that single link aka the wireless spectrum you operate at with everyone else nearby. Whereas If you have a fiber link back to the switch and the line isn't oversold you wont have congestion problem on your last mile. The last mile of your connection is shared with everyone whereas mine currently isn't being shared with anyone or more to the point I get what I pay for with little worry someone is gonna install a shitty appliance and start knocking my internet out.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (4 children)

    You're still missing my point. What type of application are you running at home that requires that level of SLA? If you are somehow running something that has that type of reliability/QoS constraints, how can you guarantee that your residential ISP with a fiber connection isn't oversubscribing the links, causing the same sorts of periodic service disruption outside of the end user's control?

    I see no reasonable situation where user experience for home applications would degrade over wireless any more than bgp policy misconfigurations or congested links would. Especially when Spectrum drops packets to NTT almost every Monday night.

    As a side note, high frequency trading uses shortwave instead of fiber for transferring data due to latency reasons. There is nothing saying wireless is always worse in latency than fiber. But that's no longer in the realm of home use, so I don't really think it matters.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (3 children)

    Why wouldn't I want my connection to be stable and reliable? I have a tunnel to work that is stable. I have ssh sessions that last until I restarted one side or the other.

    You keep moving around from one useless point to another. I'm making a basic statement about your statement about how a wireless connection is just as reliable and better than a hard link. Its not and its pretty obvious that it isn't. I don't use spectrum. Never have. Don't care if they don't know how to manage BGP. I know or at least I knew back when I was using it for a year to balance out two small connections to keep the plant I was responsible for from getting congested. It would probably take a week or two to get back into the groove on it.

    We took over half the households that ATandFee had in our service area in six years by doing it right. As bad as ATandFee's management is the techs and plant engineers are top notch. I know some of them and they know how to make it all work. They also know the places where they have the most trouble is where they have to rely on microwave links. They know and I know. Anyone who has maintained a wireless infrastructure knows it. As a result of the great uncongested speed provided by that cable plant ATandFee finally started putting in fiber in the area. It isn't oversubscribed and I know I'm getting what I'm paying for.

    My router logs all these things because I have no trouble setting it up and maintaining it. Its trivial for me. I know they haven't oversubscribed the line because I know how to test for it. I also know because of the throughput logs on my router. I know that my old ISP. The one that I ran the back end largely by myself for a decade learned not to oversubscribe. That when the QOS was just a little faster than they were paying for so all the speed tests went over the speed. I know because even though I went another direction after the buyout I maintained a professional relationship with them. I know the very next year after they took over they upgraded the whole plant by moving to node plus one and upgrading to docsis 3.1 All the subdivided areas upgraded expanded the return frequencies on the the HFC plant. I know just like I would know how stable and how much ingress there was on any wireless link I had. The two links I still have any dealings with have seen the ingress increase steadily over the past decade and there is no hope it is going to drop. I know because I've been a network guy since token ring was the thing.

    Who cares that traders use shortwave for trading. I bet that is some legacy shit right there.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (2 children)

    1. I'm not moving around from one point to another. I am simply stating that a majority of home users do not need the reliability and operate off of larger tolerances. Reliability costs money. If you need it, good for you. But a majority of people (including those in tech) do not need it, otherwise we'd all be on infiniband and ditching Ethernet by now. There is nothing wrong with a wireless transport, beam forming tech has come a long way to minimize interference, and direct point to point wireless IS faster than underground fiber with no retransmissions.

    2. I've been in networking research for more than half a decade now, spanning from various forms of wireless (RFID, LoRA, wifi, 4G, 5G, etc) to wired Ethernet (1Gbps, 100Gbps, 800Gbps), at both the transport level and protocol level (Ethernet, IP, NDN, RoCE, TCP, QUIC, BGP). I've taught courses on how these things work. Before that, I was in IT networking for 4 years. From what we've seen, no matter how good you say they are, ISP and carrier operators inevitably screw it up on the configuration end (because they are human). BGP, NAT, 5G mobility are all a buggy mess because of this. When it comes to deploying new tech, corners are always cut and it comes back to bite people in the end. Wireless transport is fine, it's human error that plagues both wired and wireless tech.

    3. Shortwave for trading isn't some "legacy shit", it's where industry and research is headed in the last decade. Your dismissal of new technology and skills is indicative of what this argument has been about: you start from your conclusion and dismiss all evidence before you even think. Issuing blanket statements that are too broad in scope. Everything I said has been quantified with specific assumptions and conditions.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    You keep trying to convince me that because someone can make a mistake there is no difference between the two. You are not a network guy or you would accept just because someone occasionally fat fingers a table entry on BGP it doesn't brink a hard link down to the less reliable wireless links. Everything you have said is basically a amateurs view of it. I get it you like wireless and you don't think that wireless link you have is connected to any routers that use a hard link or BGP. I'm done I said earlier I couldn't convince you simply because you lack the experience to make such a statement.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago*

    You are not a network guy or you would accept just because someone occasionally fat fingers a table entry on BGP it doesn't brink a hard link down to the less reliable wireless links.

    If it wasn't for me trying to keep my anonymity on the platform, I would love to give credentials for this. You refuse to see anything other than the densest approach with zero regard in proper networking theory, algorithmics, and beyond. YOU are not a networking guy, you are a cable install guy. You refuse to give any evidence other than ad-hoc experience, refusing to elaborate other than repeat the same thing over and over again, now claiming my "amateur understanding" as your defense. As soon as I mentioned BGP issues, your mind defaulted to "a guy making typos", not the difficulty of algorithmic verification for BGP or the implementation differences between different vendors hardware, or the different use of metrics between different ISPs. YOU are the amateur here, exhibited by your refusal to address any of my points heads on, and misconstruing my point of practical networking errors makes it similarly impossible of hitting certain SLAs on residential networks, regardless of wireless or not. The fact that it's wireless or not does not matter, you are NOT hitting 4 nines availability, you do NOT NEED 4 nines availability. And you are the one making strawman arguments claiming I don't know wireless going through BGP.

    Everything you said just re-enforces the problems of industry - move fast, break things, fix them never. No need to understand anything because "everything current just works and anything else is the spawn of Satan". It's people like you that IP is dead, nothing but TCP and UDP can make it across the Internet.

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