Comments
AKiss20 t1_j9hgfzq wrote
Ditto! We love starry and hated Comcast before it. Shame that the business side of the org sucks when the tech and service side is seemingly very good.
commentsOnPizza t1_j9ieaiw wrote
I'd argue that the tech side "sucking" was what made the business side suck. Yes, if you were a customer, the tech side was great.
Starry's tech was based around millimeter-wave radios which basically require line-of-sight to function. That makes the tech expensive since you have to go to each building individually. The "badness" of the tech would limit Starry's reach to select larger buildings. That badness makes it hard to do marketing. How can you market your home internet service when 99% of the people you're advertising to can't get it? You're throwing your marketing dollars away. But if you don't advertise it, the people who can get it might not know about it.
If Starry's tech were better, more people could have been eligible giving them economies of scale, critical mass to make a strong marketing campaign worthwhile, etc.
If the tech were more effective/better, then the business side wouldn't have sucked. The tech might have been good for you if you were able to get it. However, if the tech was "bad" which prevented economies of scale and they had to sell the service to you for less than it cost them to install/run, then it wasn't really good tech. It was just subsidized tech until their money ran out.
I don't want to sound too harsh on Starry. It's just really hard to use millimeter-wave radios in a way that works for consumers. A business might pay hundreds of dollars a month for a wireless backup for their internet and be willing to eat installation costs, but a consumer doesn't want to spend that much.
I mean, Starlink is offering an alternative to Comcast, but I don't think a lot of people would want to pay $700 for a Dishy + $110/mo to get away from Comcast. Starlink is operating off a model where they're going after customers with no real internet option. Yes, you loved Starry and hated Comcast - but you loved Starry because they were willing to give you service at an unsustainably low price. You would have hated Starry if they kept raising your bill like Comcast. You probably wouldn't have signed up for Starry in the first place if their plans started at $100/mo.
I'm not saying that they would need to do crappy things to create a viable business model, but the tech severely limited the business. And, frankly, a lot of the things you hate about Comcast kinda work. You get people with an introductory offer of $30/mo for a couple years. In Boston, a lot of people move out within that timeframe anyway. Even if it becomes $60 in the third year, you're averaging $40/mo over the 3 year period, $45 over a 4 year period. Even if it becomes $80 in the 5th year, you're still averaging $52/mo over a 5 year period. Yea, it feels painful to be paying $80/mo, but you're not actually losing much compared to Starry's standard $50 rate. If you negotiate it back down (or cancel and get a roommate to get a new-customer deal), you can save money - albeit while starting to despise Comcast.
Starry's downfall is really that their tech wasn't good enough. Yes, it was great if you got it, but it wasn't good enough because they couldn't get it to a lot of people in a cost effective way. Using millimeter-wave spectrum has the advantage that you can buy the spectrum for cheap (compared to sub-6GHz spectrum), but comes with the disadvantage that you need to do a ton more work putting up antennas on individual buildings and then serving a small number of people per antenna. Starry was a bit of a moonshot kind of business - could one make mmWave spectrum viable for home internet. Turns out the tech wasn't good enough.
And I don't want to sound too harsh on Starry. Verizon poured so much time and money into mmWave and barely made a dent. They launched 3.5GHz mid-band 5G and made amazing progress fast. Verizon also bought into mmWave big time and it really didn't work out for them - and they had a ton of advantages over Starry, including legal advantages being the Title II Common Carrier in a bunch of the country which gives them cheap access at fixed prices to a lot of infrastructure, already having a huge fiber network, having a wireless network already, and having many $10+ billion to spend every year on their network. And Verizon failed at mmWave. Sure, it does have a tiny bit of coverage and it's cool when you get it, but the tech just didn't have the impact they'd hoped. Starry: cool if you can get it, but the tech just didn't support the kind of broad availability necessary to be viable.
Organic_Experience69 t1_j9jpc4h wrote
The fuck are you talking about 30 a month? Last time I had Comcast it was 90 dollars a month for internet only and 5 years later it was raised to 110. I switched to starry to halve my bill. Fuck comcast.
ApolloSimba t1_j9jqvsr wrote
That is what comcast is at now. I've had them for multiple years, am on a premium plan to get extra speed cause I am a dork, and have never paid 90 a month. When they do try and and do the it has been 24 months and we will increase your rate thing, you just call and threaten to go to RCN and they give you a good rate again.
Organic_Experience69 t1_j9jrcar wrote
I can't get RCN. My building had no other option until starry and it was 90 dollars that got raised to 110. So I could just not have internet or pay them. It's still 60 dollars to get Comcast here. You are only in a good spot because of RCN and you won't even give them your bussiness.
ApolloSimba t1_j9ju7pi wrote
I had RCN for years and my experience with them was exponentially worse than comcast
Organic_Experience69 t1_j9juomz wrote
Again they are still the only reason you have a cheaper Comcast. If RCN stops existing expect your internet bill to at least triple.
ApolloSimba t1_j9jw98i wrote
Yes, I understand how monopolies work. The solution is making internet a public utility not more internet corporations. RCN and Comcast are both horrible. I happen to be in a place where I have access to both so my experience is slightly less horrible than when someone has access to only one.
Organic_Experience69 t1_j9jx5wp wrote
Do you though? Because your solution to me has been well durr durr why don't you just threaten to go to RCN to get a cheaper rate with Comcast, works everytime. Except I can't
We are never getting a public option and based on your unwillingness to support the smaller provider you're probably gonna lose that too.
ApolloSimba t1_j9jzu0l wrote
I have tried RCN. It was terrible on a scale that I have never experienced with Comcast. You keep ignoring me saying that.
Your premise erroneously limits the options available. I gave you another option but since it is not 'realistic' you disregarded it. (FYI there are at least 3 municipally owned and operated ISP's in MA alone and hundreds in the US. It is realistic.)
It's not that I am unwilling to support a smaller provider. It's that I see the smaller provider as no different than the larger one. It's all symptomatic of the same problem.
Organic_Experience69 t1_j9k047w wrote
It's not just unrealistic. It's non existent.
It's okay to say hey I'm a selfish asshole who doesn't care that they are supporting the greater of two evils. You don't have to make a lengthy diatribe about why you are justified
ApolloSimba t1_j9k0cqw wrote
As I said before, it literally exists in the commonwealth. It is realistic, it literally exists. I don't think you're a selfish asshole; you're misinformed.
Concord seems to be the closest I can find to the greater boston area with it.
Organic_Experience69 t1_j9k0gbd wrote
No I think you're the selfish asshole for supporting Comcast.
Look I've been involved in bringing a communal internet to a town that was eventually tanked because the big isp payed the board members in contract jobs. You try it.
ApolloSimba t1_j9k0kj5 wrote
I'm appreciate you trying that!
I am not trying that because I don't see it as a way individual time and effort can provide value to my community.
I do direct action by giving my time to youth programs in somerville/cambridge. Praxis has many forms.
Organic_Experience69 t1_j9k15sr wrote
Like supporting the lesser of two evils.
ApolloSimba t1_j9k38hs wrote
The only moral option is to not support evil. But alas I need internet to work and I need to work to eat.
Organic_Experience69 t1_j9k3nod wrote
People vote for the lesser of two evils all the time. That's why Biden won for instance. You are just being obtuse and selfish in this particular circumstance
ApolloSimba t1_j9k42sx wrote
Correct but that was not a moral decision. The moral decision there is to abstain or to write in.
But we live in a FPTP voting system which essentially only allows two viable candidates. So someone can choose to make the moral decision (abstain or write in) or the make a non-moral decision that's forced upon them because of a system they did not choose. Sound similar?
Organic_Experience69 t1_j9kg29h wrote
You're assuming morality is binary when it is not.
ApolloSimba t1_j9kmvly wrote
No, I am not. But in this case, I can confidently say supporting evil of any sort (even if it is a lesser evil) is not a moral choice.
Is supporting the lesser of two evils an ethical choice - probs
Is supporting the lesser of two evils a practical choice. - Oh yah.
Is supporting the lesser of two evils a moral choice - supporting evil by definition is not moral.
Moomoomoo1 t1_j9kim59 wrote
I tried Starry for a couple of months and as much as I liked the price and customer service, it just was not reliable enough. Lots of latency issues and mini-outages, which were not noticeable 99% of the time, but it was especially a problem if you play online games and sometimes while streaming, in zoom meetings, etc. Had to go back to Comcast which I really did not want to do but at least in my building has been better.
commentsOnPizza t1_j9i90f8 wrote
Starry has been going downhill for a while (from a business perspective, not your perspective as a customer) and it's hard to see them really recovering.
At this point, it'd be better to hope for home internet from T-Mobile or Verizon 5G.
The problem with Starry is that their wireless signals are extremely high frequency which means that they will be easily disrupted by things like walls, trees, etc. So they install antennas on the top of your building and point it at one of their antennas that they have a good line of sight for. However, this is very limiting and decently expensive.
T-Mobile and Verizon both have substantial low and mid-band spectrum holdings (and more high frequency spectrum holdings than Starry). Unlike Starry, T-Mobile and Verizon's signals can travel from antennas without needing line of sight.
T-Mobile already has 2.6M home internet customers and Verizon (wireless) has 0.9M. Starry has 0.1M. So Verizon's wireless home internet business is 9x larger than Starry's and Verizon has been at this game for less than 2 years. T-Mobile's is 26x larger and they've been at it for around 3 years. Starry has been at it for 7 years without a ton to show for it.
Really, they were going into a capital-intensive industry trying to compete on price with better capitalized incumbents. It's not a great strategy. Starry wasn't going around offering an order of magnitude improvement in service. Their selling point was "we all hate the cable company and we'll offer you stable pricing on a similar product." I'm not arguing that isn't a laudable goal. It is a laudable goal. It's just really hard to do.
T-Mobile and Verizon, on the other hand, both have way more money, way more staff, and a huge investment in infrastructure that they can leverage. "We already have these towers we're upgrading for 5G and we're going to have extra capacity in many areas with those upgrades. We could provide home internet in many of those locations and get extra revenue without extra cost. In other locations, we could put some more money into the network, make our mobile business better, and then sell some home internet." That's a reasonably decent business model leveraging existing strengths that can be extended. For Starry, having to approach all these buildings to get them to either lease space or give them space for free is a very time-intensive business (and staff time is money). Every antenna T-Mobile or Verizon put up can serve thousands of mobile users and cover more home users than Starry. Starry was really working with two hands tied behind its back.
I think in the coming years, T-Mobile and Verizon will continue to improve their home internet product and that will likely include high-gain installed antennas to boost performance, but even today they're making a lot more people happy than Starry was ever able to. Again, I don't mean that as a dig against Starry so much as a realistic view of what one could accomplish given the difference in assets between Starry and T-Mobile or Verizon. Starry doesn't have a truck-full of sub-6GHz spectrum that will offer a decent balance of capacity and coverage. Starry has a bunch of spectrum at 24GHz and 37GHz, but that's a lot harder to work with.
downthewell62 t1_j9iebvq wrote
It also doesn't help that the government gave those massive internet cartels free money
IDK_PizzaBagel2 t1_j9ibh8q wrote
I mean, it's obviously a long-shot and has been for awhile. I even kept my previous modem just in case because I thought something like this would happen. Just saying it sucks 🤷🏻♀️
MarimbaMan07 t1_j9i9nie wrote
Seriously I couldn’t work from home without it. During 2020-2022 my company’s office was closed. I started 2020 off working from home with Comcast spaying for 500 Mbs down and only ever getting 7Mbs upload. I couldn’t turn my camera on for video conferencing or else I’d lag like crazy. I could share my screen either. I switched to Starry, saved like $20 a month, have 200 Mbs down and 100 Mbs up. Starry has made working from home possible and more enjoyable. I need them to survive lol
[deleted] t1_j9kapok wrote
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MarimbaMan07 t1_j9kb4d8 wrote
That’s pretty sweet! I remember calling up Verizon because they technically service my apartment building along with Comcast. They told me it was a DSL connection which would be 3 Mbps down (yeah just 3) and 1 Mbps up. I had to go with Comcast at the time 😭
[deleted] t1_j9kbpby wrote
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darkshaddow42 t1_j9j0x1o wrote
RCN has worked pretty well for me, if nothing else their data rates are much closer to what they advertise
IDK_PizzaBagel2 t1_j9jgkl3 wrote
I don't think I've ever lived anywhere that offered RCN :(
darkshaddow42 t1_j9kp56w wrote
I think I had it in both Jamaica Plain and Watertown, and now Somerville, but couldn't get it in Cambridge
RhaenyrasUncle t1_j9k4g6d wrote
Why not? 🤔
a7sharp9 t1_j9hg7s9 wrote
Let's hope they come out at the other end of this in a more healthy state. Fixed wireless is a great solution in populous neighborhoods taken over by monopolies, and it would be sad if one of the best incarnations of it ultimately fails to work.
commentsOnPizza t1_j9iggw8 wrote
I agree we need internet options. I doubt Starry is going to come out of this healthy. Starry eliminated half its workforce in 2022. At that point, you're the walking dead - especially in a capital intensive industry. You need to be spending money building a network that can sign up customers and that simply isn't going to happen when you've laid off half your workforce.
Already, T-Mobile's fixed wireless business is 26x larger and Verizon's is 9x larger than Starry. In the coming years, it will be relatively straightforward for the big wireless companies to adopt Starry's strategy to augment their more traditional network. T-Mobile or Verizon could cover a large area with mid-band spectrum and then use millimeter-wave spectrum with installed antennas on large buildings offering improved speed and capacity for those buildings. Verizon has installed some street-level mmWave and could also use that to augment capacity in areas that need it.
I'm sad about Starry, but I think the future of fixed wireless is going to involve a much more layered approach that can impact more people and that will require low and mid-band spectrum in addition to mmWave. Low and mid-band spectrum allows a company to cover a reasonably broad area and start signing up customers and if the need arises they can augment capacity using mmWave.
I think there's a lot of competition coming to home broadband over the next few years, but I don't think it'll be from Starry. T-Mobile is looking to have 7-8M customers by year-end 2025 (less than 3 years away) and that might not sound like a lot, but it would surpass Verizon's Fios which only has 6.7M customers. Even though it would be smaller than Comcast, it would be putting a lot of pressure on incumbent cable companies. Verizon is looking to have fixed wireless available to 50M households by year-end 2025 and while they're projecting fewer customers than T-Mobile, it's easy to see how availability to around 40% of American households would have a huge impact on the market.
Broadband monopolies have been acting in anti-consumer ways because they know you don't have another option. Even if you don't personally want T-Mobile or Verizon fixed-wireless, it can still put a lot of pressure on an incumbent monopoly to treat you better.
lifeisakoan t1_j9jn6yx wrote
I've been using T-Mobile Home Internet for almost 2 years because it is not Comcast and Starry was never an option. Can't say it is great. I can get decent speeds, but it seems I need to reset the modem on a fairly regular basis. Although I don't know how much my problems are my company VPN. I see problems on my personal computer and streaming audio has issues - although I don't know how much that is the streaming service.
A while back it totally stopped working, and tech support called me back and spent like 3 hours total on the phone until the issue was resolved.
SideBarParty t1_j9htb2g wrote
God I hate Comcast so much
88stardestroyer t1_j9hdp9b wrote
Yay, even fewer options and less competition!
willzyx01 t1_j9he8cc wrote
They aren’t going out of business.
Pariell t1_j9hmlxq wrote
Huh, I thought bankruptcy == going out of business. TIL
drizzlefoot321 t1_j9hpd9d wrote
there are different types of bankruptcy. Chapter 11 is a restructuring of debt but not necessarily going out of business. Chapter 7 is a liquidation process and relief from debt, most commonly known as going out of business for real.
commentsOnPizza t1_j9igof5 wrote
Yea, they aren't going out of business yet, but they did lay off half their workforce in 2022. When you're in the business of building networks, you need people.
I'm guessing they'll come back and maybe keep the lights on for their customer base, but they probably won't be expanding much in the near future.
drizzlefoot321 t1_j9ihkbc wrote
a lot of these ISPs were looking to surge their user bases and then sell out to the major providers. When you don't get bought out, you run out of capital to grow so aggressively. If they can maintain their customer base and revenue, then there is lot room for keeping the business.
manute-bol-big-heart t1_j9i8yeb wrote
Why are people downvoting this for fucks sake they’re admitting to not knowing something and interested in learning more. God
statdude48142 t1_j9houqh wrote
One of the most annoying aspects of my time in Boston was for the 7 years I lived there (in the same building) we only had one option...and it was Comcast.
Then, about two months before we left, we get a letter from Comcast offering us a cheaper deal . Weird, right? Then we got a letter from Starry saying they were in our building and then got a letter from Verizon telling us FiOS was now in our building.
BradBot t1_j9hwv5y wrote
I wish I could get fios in my part of Cambridge
commentsOnPizza t1_j9ik9s3 wrote
Yea, Fios is only available in a few buildings. A decent part of it is that TV franchises are done on a town-by-town basis in Massachusetts and Verizon only wanted to build Fios where they could also sell TV - and then Verizon found out that their fiber business had poor economics even with TV service and backed out of a ton of their fiber builds in New York and New Jersey.
I think a lot of wired providers found the economics to just be poor when challenging an incumbent. RCN went bankrupt in 2004, 10 years after being founded. It hasn't really expanded its coverage in recent memory and is now just owned by a private equity firm via a leveraged buyout.
On the plus side, it looks like maybe the economics are shifting. AT&T has announced that they're going to be doubling their fiber footprint over the next couple years. Verizon isn't doing anything nearly that ambitious, but they are looking to grow their Fios network by 9% over the next 3 years. AT&T seems to have a difference of opinion on the economics of fixed-wireless vs fiber compared to Verizon. AT&T has said that fixed wireless isn't going to be a big part of their strategy and that the cost to serve customers with fiber is better, but some of that depends on how much data you're expecting customers to use. Verizon seems to disagree and is planning for their fixed-wireless network to cover 2.8x more households than Fios (with a very minimal investment in Fios expansion).
It's hard to compete against an incumbent and invest in a new network where you might only take 30% share. I know, everyone thinks that the whole world would jump on fiber just because they would, but it's hard to take marketshare and with something like Fios, you'd often need a landlord to approve having it installed. RCN has been in Somerville for many decades and can easily hook up most residences without the landlord being involved because they'll use the same coax that an existing cable connection would use (and they can just disconnect the unused Comcast line outside the building). With Fios, you're talking about installing an ONT (optical network terminal that converts the fiber to something usable inside your home) in the basement and then running ethernet from there or trying to use existing coax wiring with MoCA - but a lot of buildings in Cambridge don't even have coax running inside the building because they just made penetrations from the outside on each floor - back in the day for cable TV and back when these buildings weren't worth much during the white-flight era of cities.
In Somerville, RCN has about 27% of the market while Comcast has 73%. Yes, RCN isn't fiber so it isn't really a superior product, but people truly hate Comcast and RCN can only achieve 27% - and RCN has the advantage that they can easily disconnect Comcast on the outside and swap their connection in while Verizon would have a lot more work to do.
That's not to say it can't or shouldn't happen. AT&T is making a huge bet on fiber over the next couple years and they even talked about moving into markets beyond their wireline footprint in select areas where it made economics sense past that. That said, it is hard to compete with incumbents.
BradBot t1_j9kcwb1 wrote
Wow, are you involved in the industry someway or just really well informed? Also, didn’t the government heavily subsidize all of these companies in the past for exactly these kind of buildouts that the ISPs now claim aren’t economically viable?
es_price t1_j9jc97o wrote
Why do you still have that Boston tag if you have moved out?
statdude48142 t1_j9p7xta wrote
On my list of things I needed to do during my move, changing my reddit flairs was not one of them.
Humble_Signature_993 t1_j9hp65n wrote
Oh no! I love Starry!
klausterfok t1_j9i0v4m wrote
Been trying to get Starry in Cambridge and Boston for over 4 years now, kinda sucks
SpaceForceGuardian t1_j9hjvnd wrote
Ugh! No!!!!!!
Zero3502 t1_j9jva1n wrote
Can we get a comment going to talk about non-Comcast options? I'm hoping they continue to stay afloat, but in case they don't, what other options are out there and what have people's experiences been like?
swap_catz t1_j9juhir wrote
I remember a few years ago when Musk visited Boston and it was clear he visited Starry. The idea at the time seemed like it should work out: Connect Starry devices to Starlink sats. Feel like that was forever ago but I probably waited around 6 months before I realized it wasn't going to happen. That was probably one of the few chances they had, but today CEO's seem to only want a $10B exit. Many such cases of missed opportunities.
I'm not surprised that many of the 2010s class of Boston based startups that haven't SPAC'd or M&A'd just aren't making it. I genuinely feel like that window is now closed since we have moved out of a ZIRP and you're probably going to end up in the dustbin. Datarobot, Bevi, Zipcar all come to mind. Some of them are genuinely great ideas but the iron was hot to at least SPAC by 2020, and if you missed it the train left.
[deleted] t1_j9hjg3r wrote
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Aesop_Rocks t1_j9hl8wp wrote
The web site appears to be from the dial up era.
PM_ME_EXCEL_QUESTION t1_j9hjwd0 wrote
Bro, are you having a stroke?
bostonguy2004 t1_j9hm9gd wrote
Is this a real or joke site?
TechOutYourSpace t1_j9hnk2k wrote
Not all Internet providers have to spend hundreds of millions on gimmicks/websites just to lay off 60% of your workers and file for bankruptcy
Some prefer to put the investment into their infrastructure to provide unmatched, wicked fast Internet
Aesop_Rocks t1_j9iggg3 wrote
Sure, but it's still completely uninformative. And the email address - is that you? Is it just you? Comes across as an amateur operation without some of the basics.
TechOutYourSpace t1_j9hjjlw wrote
Boston area
TechOutYourSpace t1_j9hl7tw wrote
Speech to text
[deleted] t1_j9hqldm wrote
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[deleted] t1_j9llasj wrote
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Shemsuni t1_j9hit1a wrote
That love affair ended abruptly.
Pvt_Wierzbowski t1_j9i6j05 wrote
The zero sugar kind is my favorite. I prefer the taste over regular.
IDK_PizzaBagel2 t1_j9hfzet wrote
Hope they can get it together because I don't want to go back to Comcast 😬