Comment by bri3d
4 days ago
Starlink is definitely cannibalizing the boutique WISP market, which for the most part probably deserved to be cannibalized, although it's sad for cool grassroots efforts like the parallel thread about Ayva. Many WISPs make a lot of their money on enterprise service, for example, construction trailers, rather than residential service. This type of service is being absolutely destroyed by Starlink, which while expensive, is much easier to install and maintain than WISP solutions, and tends to be much more reliable.
In the case of the linked article project, however, I suspect there's limited impact from Starlink. The linked article was a subsidy project. The subsidy is to provide fiber in places that don't have landline Internet options, so it's still eligible in spite of Starlink. With subsidies, Starlink isn't hard to compete with due to its price (customers would be rather irrational not to switch to a $55/mo service that was comparable to their $80-$120/mo Starlink).
> and tends to be much more reliable.
maybe you don't have starlink?
the variance in latency is dogshit, especially in the evening when everyone in the area hops on netflix :) and i don't even play online games.
> maybe you don't have starlink?
Maybe you haven't had a crappy boutique WISP? They're genuinely awful usually.
My house isn't served by any landline provider (frustratingly, it's also _almost_ in a city, so there's no hope for subsidy access like the linked article), so over the years I've had a mix of corporate WISP (Rise), boutique WISP, and LTE as well as Starlink. I also work with a fairly large geographically distributed deployment of Starlinks professionally. Overall I would rate Starlink as excellent in the past ~9months or so.
It's been a pretty rapid improvement - a year ago I'd say Starlink was fairly, to use your phrasing, "dogshit," but now I'd say it's better than all competing wireless solutions I've used for moderate throughput needs (<100mbit) when the whole package is considered.
Good, well engineered fixed point to point ISM wireless can certainly be much faster and a decent amount lower latency but is a pain to install correctly, and licensed microwave is obviously superior at the massive overhead of, well, licensed.
On the other hand, Starlink is so easy - set the service address, plug it in, and a few minutes later it's Just Working with a nice /56 worth of IPv6 addresses.
In my experience WISPs usually take weeks or more to install, have terrible neteng, struggle with IPv6 and even public IPv4, deliver frequent backhaul outages, and often end up with bad enough buffer bloat to somehow deliver inferior latency to Starlink. For semi-mobile solutions like construction trailers, command centers, or even sensor telemetry use cases where LTE isn't available and you don't need a whole LoRa setup, Starlink is a no brainer compared to a WISP. For residential service it's certainly a last resort, but a superior last resort to all but the very best WISPs.
One thing we have noticed is that the plan prioritization is VERY aggressive in oversubscribed regions, though. The Mobile and Lite plans get quite aggressively chopped off compared to the Residential/Enterprise/Priority plans.