I was pleased when we lived in Boston where our building and many others was able to put microwave-based services on the roof. It was internet-only but very fast and inexpensive - just what we needed. Now we are in Louisville and back to the only two mediocre and more expensive choices - ATT and Spectrum. And if you go out into the country many homes are stuck with satellite internet service from Hughes which is damn near unusable.
As a transplant to Boston I was thrilled that for the first time in my life I actually had a choice of internet provider; I went with "not Comcast", aka RCN, because they were the one who didn't charge an absurd fee to let me use my own router, and the service has been extremely reliable and inexpensive. Apparently Verizon has just begun fiber service as well to my area, so with a whopping three providers to choose from I am perhaps the luckiest person in America.
(The microwave service you mention, Starry, sadly isn't in my area yet, but HN will be delighted to hear that their microwave relays use Rust internally in embedded context.)
There are alternatives in Louisville, like IgLou (on AT&T's network afaik). I'm happy with AT&T fiber 1gb service, although it's not available everywhere in the city and is expensive.
Yeah, I'm out in the country with Hughesnet, and it works fine provided you haven't hit the data cap. But streaming 720p or higher is going to be pausing rather consistently.
Online games on HughesNet are unplayable. Called and complained that ~500ms RTT is unacceptable but they made up some excuse as to why it couldn't be faster, some mumbo jumbo about the speed of light
They didn't make that up.. the satellites are literally no closer then 118ms (one-way). If you and the source/destination are directly under the satellite you may be able to get a packet + response in 480ms under most-ideal conditions. (that is four legs of transit between ground & space)
Elevation of orbit is 35,768,000 meters [1], and light moves at ~300,000,000 meters per second.
In case someone doesn’t know that the sp is joking, geosynchronous satellites are 36k kilometers above us. The speed of light being what it is, you’re looking at 250ms just to bounce the radio wave from earth to the satellite and back. That’s just between earth and the satellites, it does not include the trip from the satellite base station to hackernews or google or whatever and back. Processing and other silicon latency gets you the rest of way to half a second or worse.
