Regardless of whether you like or hate Musk;this is another discussion
Supposing his service reaches the promised 1GB/s speed and would cost 99 euros per month plus 400 euros one-time equipment costs,would it be a strong competitor to German ISPs? Or would likely fail to establish more than a small niche on the market?
Edit: apparently,the highest recorded Starlink internet speed was recorded by an user in Kassel,Germany,at 500 MB/s, so the stuff is already available not a pipe dream
[https://amicohoops.net/starlink-satellite-internet-has-achieved-a-record-download-speed/](https://amicohoops.net/starlink-satellite-internet-has-achieved-a-record-download-speed/)
33 comments
For 90€ you get a real 1Gbit Fibre connection. Much faster and muuuch more stable.
And who needs 1Gbit? 200-400 Mbit should be enough at the moment and thats about 50€.
And sure, Internet connection sometimes sucks in Germany, but you have to live at a real remote location that you need starlink in the next years.
Ah, all this garbage rich 0.01% people send to public literal space to solve problems they have and suggest other people should also have as their main problem, with solutions they think fit for everyone.
I was thinking about it as a backup. We sometimes had outages, so it might be useful for that. Also for remote areas.
But if you have regular connections I’d use that as main.
Are there new developments on the power consumption? It’s said the dish needs 100 W, that could add 25 €/month to the bill, and energy costs are rising.
I agree with problems on the ground with Telekom and other telkos (if you make people pay billions of Euro for frequencies, they will try to earn that money afterwards 🤷🏼♂️), but Starlink is a terrible concept.
Starlink seams pointles in Germany there will be edge cases where it’s going to be a good idea but living remote in Germany is not the same as in the US Canada or Australia where there is nothing in a 2 h radius.
I pay 3€ for 1GB 1st tier internet in my Studentenwohnheim.
In 95%+ of use cases, it’s not worth it.
For people in rural areas with bad DSL connection this may be worth it. For anyone in a built up more urban area it doesn’t make sense. The average speeds I’ve seen for Starlink are in the 100-200Mbps range. Even with rising prices on DSL contracts, you can get that for about €30-40/month, with very good uptime.
Starlink can have dropouts, lots of lag so far, costs €100 a month, and electricity is about €25 a month to power the base station. Not everyone has solar either, and those who do generally get a credit for feeding it back into the grid so they’d still lose a little money there.
Starlink could work well for places with no wired infrastructure at all, but almost nobody in those places has the money for Starlink, even pooling together as a community to share a base station.
It’s a Musk ego project, and it’s clear he wants to spin it off as a separate company to bring more shareholders on board. The concept is ok but the execution is poor. It’s been useful as an excuse to launch a Falcon 9 seemingly every week and stuff our sky full of soon-to-be trash.
The cloud above Germany will make the starlink connection very stably unaccessible.
Depends how much do you earn. And it’s completly pointless unless you live in area that has no access to Internet
I don’t think it will be that widely used but it will surely force ISPs to lay more fiber or lose market so that’s something
we already had a thread about that from a couple months ago.
no, starlink is not competetive with “regular” internet providers. and it’s not supposed to be. it is supposed to be an option for people without broadband access
For a self-employed person like myself that does 100% of work online it was a lifesaver. I’m not rural by any means right between Düsseldorf & Köln but the only options were 25/5 but they highest download speed we ever got was 10-12. Upload maybe 2-3.
I’d love fiber, and do miss it from when I lived in the US. Starlink has not let me down yet though, don’t even notice downtimes anymore.
>Is Starlink affordable by German standards?
No. It’s too expensive for consumers. Nobody needs that much bandwidth at home, the set up cost with shipping and everything is actually more like 600€, very few people will be willing to cough that up.
The only real use case is rural villages with shit Internet, the bandwidth is plenty for 10 households and you can split the cost.
You can get 100MBit/s for like 20€ and that’s more than enough for any normal household. Starlink isn’t remotely able to compete with that.
I’m pretty sceptical about Starlink. I’ll link a video that goes through some of the counter-arguments against it. I’m not a fan of Musk. Personally, I think he’s running one of the biggest and most publicised Ponzi schemes ever.
https://youtu.be/2vuMzGhc1cg
Using Starlink in Germany would be more of a flex than anything else.
Northern Bavaria here. I have Starlink and average download speeds in the 100 Mb/S range and think it is totally worth it given that the Telekom DSL I get is at best 11 Mb/S
no absolutely not affordable.
the monthly cost is very high and the dish uses about 100W constantly which means it costs another 20€ per month in electricity to keep that thing running.
If you have no other choice of course this is better then nothing but most people have a choice.
It’s expensive for nowadays standards.
But better than no option for better Internet at all, especially for small businesses.
But if you are able to get glass fiber, get it. It’s most of the time more stable, faster and cheaper than StarLink.
Probably wouldn’t work, I barely have phone connection in my house and I can see the antenna.
Germans will shit on German internet all the time until you mention a US company trying to solve the issue then everyone will pretend like we have 250mbps symmetric internet everywhere, with 1-2gbps around the corner, and 5G available everywhere lol
I would take it in a heartbeat. Already paying 50 Eur for a shit ISP which breaks down quite often with 2 people working and one streaming videos. At 100 EUR. Yes please.
I’m outside of Berlin using star link, tried dsl and was hugely unstable.
I get around 200-350mb/s download and 40-80mb/s upload on average. Biggest incentive was not having to use a crappy network equipment just to have “support”, far happier owning my network equipment.
So, the problem(or the advantage) with Starlink is, that it’s bandwidth is dependant on the number of users and user density. Where traditional gas fibre is cheaper the denser the users are, because the cost for the infrastructure is cheaper per user, Starlink is the reverse. Starlink can cover a huge area, but I that area has a fixed bandwidth of what the satellite can handle. So the denser the user base is, the worse the bandwidth will be per user.
Germany is an interesting case, since our digital infrastructure sucks, but we are comparably densly populated.
So, the problem(or the advantage) with Starlink is, that it’s bandwidth is dependant on the number of users and user density. Where traditional gas fibre is cheaper the denser the users are, because the cost for the infrastructure is cheaper per user, Starlink is the reverse. Starlink can cover a huge area, but I that area has a fixed bandwidth of what the satellite can handle. So the denser the user base is, the worse the bandwidth will be per user.
Germany is an interesting case, since our digital infrastructure sucks, but we are comparably densly populated.
In addition to everyone else saying it’s not worth it: 500MB/s when 1GB/s is promised? In that case anyone getting that in Germany should know that according to German law you can reduce payments or terminate the contract if you’re not getting what you’re contractually owed. Yeah even when they do the vague “up to” shit.
https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/wissen/digitale-welt/onlinedienste/internetanschluss-zu-langsam-was-betroffene-tun-koennen-12763 (German link)
It’s certainly only a niche market for small rural cities or villages. The Telekom charges 41€ for a landline and internet access which is very expensive compared to the competitors. You can get internet access at 15-19€ monthly.
Affordable? Yes.
Competitive? No.
Essentially, in cities and towns no, in certain villages maybe, on rural farms and remote places then probably
Suppose it did, it would be. Seeing as it doesn’t, and there isn’t anything to suggest it will other than the words of a man who overpromises as easily as he breathes, it isn’t in many cases.
I pay for 120 Mb/s down and 5Mb/s Up ~35 Euros/month. I’m 20 km from Frankfurt, which is one of the main European Internet Hubs.
If i can share Starlink connection with my neighbors, i can already get faster internet significantly cheaper.
I consider starlink dangerous space trash in regions that have at least some infrastructure.
It even interferes with research by making telescope observations worse …
No! It’s terribly expensive.