Broadband connection - wired 5G Starlink ?

[chris_leyson]

This weekend my broadband speed dropped to 40kB/s on average, it varies from < 10kB/s and occasionally hits 1MB/s. We've had some local flooding and that might explain problems with wired or ADSL connections but these days it's mostly fibre to cabinet and maybe fibre to premesis if you are lucky. Is the sudden speed drop due to physical infrastruture problems or an increase in traffic due to more people working from home perhaps. Some of my colleagues are working from home but they don't need wideband connections back to servers at work, so I'm thinking perhaps it's due to physical infrastrure problems. 5G or even satelite connections such as Starlink might help with some of the infrastructure problems but you still need some sort of physical connection into the 5G infrastructure or direct RF links to satelite constallations. Would be interesting to see what experince othe forum members have and if anyone works in the telecoms industry it would be nice to get some thoughts. it's still faster than dialup acoustic coupled modems but only just.

[Ranayna]

You don't say what your normal expected and contractual speeds are...

But going down to 40kbit/s is very likely due to some hardware issue. Call your provider, if you have not done so yet, depending on how many people are actually affected, they may not even notice this themselves.
By the way, water ingress would be just as bad, if not even worse, for a fiber connection than for a copper connection.

Regarding Starlink… I have to admit I have not read up on the technology behind it, except from what you get in the news, for example regarding the light pollution of the satellites. So take my musings with a grain of salt. 
I would assume that each subscriber to Starlink gets an individual box. Everything else would not make sense in my opinion, giving the explicit goal of Starlink to provide internet to areas lacking infrastructure. I would expect for example, that an option including solar power will be available.
But I would not expect this to be cheap internet access in the "developed world" as well. The company still needs money, and I would be surprised if they are not using regional pricing for the connection. Also there will very likely be datacaps. And finally, even if you get comparable throughput, the latency will be worse in most cases, depending on the number and locations of the ground stations and their connectivity to the internet. And latency, depending on your workload, may be more important than raw speed.
Starlink will also likely suffer from similar effects of any other wireless media: Congestion. All users in the same cell have to share the bandwidth. No two clients on the same frequency can talk at the same time. Now imagine a Starlink cell (I do not know how large they will be, I heard something in the single digit square kilometer ballpark) covering a city, or even just a dense suburb...
Of course, depending how tightly controllable the individual satellites are, they could be maneuvered to provider better coverage in dense areas.

Starlink is an interesting project, to be sure. But if they can keep their promises has to be seen. In places where a wired infrastructure is in place though I doubt it will ever be able to provide equal quality. But that is true for any wireless media.
And the fact they are littering the sky with thousands of satellites might also be seen as quite critical.

[Halcyon]

By today's standards, the speeds your are experience are certainly indicative of a faulty connection. You mention you are on ADSL, do you know how far your line is to the nearest DSLAM/exchange? What kind of sync rates do you normally get?

Over here I'm on a 100/40 VDSL2 connection. I sync at higher than the actual port profile, which means I'm shaped down to 100/40 (+15%). I wish I could get faster, but unfortunately we don't use G Vectoring in Australia and there has been no indication whether or not we're going to get it. To upgrade to fibre would cost me in the ballpark of $30k. LTE/5G is a very viable option for me but unfortunately I would blow through the data quota within days (and I don't get a static IPv4 address on consumer cellular plans). Starlink looks like an interesting alternative once it actually goes live, but the proof will be in the pudding. Since no pricing or speeds have been announced yet, it's hard to say.

I'm also going to move this thread into the computing section.

[tautech]

Chris, sounds like you have an ordinary ADSL 1 connection and you might be able to confirm it is by logging into your modem and checking the outside line link speed which is probably in the 6Mb region however this only reports your POTS line speed back to the DSLAM at your telcos cabinet.
Whatever the backhaul infrastructure is that connects your local DSLAM's to the 'net is likely to have the biggest impact on your connection speed as it did for us in rural Auckland when at busy times our connection was even slower than yours. 
Our backhaul up until very recently was 3x 2Mb copper pairs shared between some 50 ADSL customers but now our cabinet just 1km away is fiber provisioned and I believe the service is finally far better.

We couldn't wait after some years of  with our telco so cut the copper umbilical and totally jumped ship to a local mom and pop ISP with a point to point 5 GHz link to their high site that was already fiber provisioned.
A small 300x200mm dish and their modem and VOIP box was all that was needed for a 30MB/s 10km link that offered another world of connection experience than anything we'd had before.
Before long they approached us wishing to place additional infrastructure on our roof top so to offer connections to other customers that didn't have line of sight to their mast and now we have 8 of their customers connected to 2 small sector panels and as payment for such favors gave us an upgraded and free connection that nudges 100 MB/s up/down. Due to the odd power cut they also provided a UPS to keep their gear up and running which of course our modem is also powered from. To say we are happy with such arrangements is an understatement !

I suggest you look around in your locality for small data providers and if your house is in an elevated position like ours they could well be interested in doing deals for mutual benefit. 
None of the gear they use is anything more than off the shelf point to point hardware like the range of stuff from Ubiquity:
https://www.ui.com/products/#airmax

We've also provide our ISP with another high site for them to beam into other locations with the likes of this setup below of which the big dish has not long been upgraded to an 11 GHz link offering a 1 GB link.


None of this stuff is hard at all for those of us into electronics.
Good luck.