Starlink Satellite Internet

I was hopping we'd see better upload speeds but I think that functionality will really increase with the 2.0 sats.

 

Alright - first not so great feedback from me. Got to our rented cabin on the river in CO and get the Starlink rolling. Starts slow - 14MB/s. Then - worse - it says the satellite receiver is disconnected from the router. This goes on for a an hour of me resetting, unplugging, checking plugs etc. finally reconnects but still not so great speeds.

My theory is being so far from a metro area kills the transmission quality.

these speeds are still wayyyy better than cell phone coverage or what you can get locally so beggars can’t be choosers I guess.

 

We've got TMO and pretty happy

This is with weak coverage, got a tower less than a quarter mile away that's going to be converted from LTE to 5G then we should be smokin'.

 

Dad just got his kit in the other day and was floored that it has no LAN ports. He had to buy an adapter, which he did, because he's a hardwired kinda guy.

The poor guy is in an area where his best internet speed was 25 Mbps on a good day. Not bad if all you wanna do is email and surf, but he's a gamer and spends HOURS in an MMO. He has a need for speed. I kept telling him to get on the Musk train and he finally bit the bullet.



He's in love.

 

Just thought I’d give an update - still very happy being able to have reliable high speed anywhere but the speeds have definitely slowed where I’m at - I’m assuming due to the number of people using the system. Average test speeds are now around 60mbps down and about 12mbps up. Still plenty for everything we do.

 

Funny this thread popped up. I don't want to revive an old thread, but I thought it might be worth it in this specific case.

With daily temps at 115°F - 120°F and the UV index pegged out most days in the summer, the Nevada desert has the tendency of quickly destroying plastics within a season or two. I've been thinking of signing up for the service notification (it's coming to our area in "Spring of 2023") and putting my money down.

Anyone have experience with how well this equipment might hold up long term in high temps & harsh UV? Even plastics & polymers that advertise themselves as "UV Stable" & "UV Resistant" tend to turn brittle in short order here. It's been a concern of mine.

 

Mine has been sitting outside in the AZ desert for the past 9 months - no issues with the dish or the cable showing signed of wear or deterioration. Mine sees temps from freezing to 115ish and the occasional monsoon downpour.

 

That's helpful. Thanks @AZBoatHauler. I've been reluctant to plop down the cash for the equipment not knowing how it would hold up over time.

Our rural ISP maxes out at 25/5. That speed was fine 5+ years ago, but now with upwards of 4K streaming becoming pretty common it's struggling to keep up.

 

We use stinky at work. Works great!

 

Just got an email - $10/month price bump.

 

Only $10? Mine said it's going up $20 for a cabin we hardly go to

 

$10 increase in “high demand” areas making it $120/month. $20 increase on the people who are paying less due to excess availability to $90/month.

 

Boooo

 

Mine went up from $135 to $150. Only had it two weeks.

 

It has been a while, how have things been going for those who frequented this post? Any one jumped ship in the last few months? Any new additions?

I work from home and have two residencies, one in Texas the other in Minnesota. The Minnesota house is limited to one provider 50mb down with bundled TV/phone that you cannot unbundle for $120/mo total after router fee plus taxes.

I plan on getting the RV plan to use SL in both locations and just looking for feedback.

Also, being a tech guy I way overbuild my networks. Has anyone tried putting a firewall between the SL router and the home network? Both residencies have multiple VLAN's for different devices which is likely far beyond the capability of the SL router. If not, I'll report my findings! I cannot imagine it won't work.

 

My Starlink is in the mail. Got the mobile version for use when we are camping in our trailer. The plan is to do a bit of remote work next summer. Will post my results in a few weeks when I get some testing done.

 

You couldn't install a solar screen of some sort over it?

 

how does Starling do in the winter or on cloudy days? I've got Mediacom here and it's less than impressive.

 

Clouds aren’t an issue and the dish has a built in heater for snow accumulation. But really heavy snow, rain sleet can disrupt signals.

 

Still happy with mine. Speeds are usually around 75-100mb/s down and around 15-20mb/s up. Latency is the downside of StarLink - I never see much better than 80ms usually around 150ms.

We don’t get tons of clouds in AZ but it seems to operate without issue through clouds and rain we’ve had. It does have some buffering occur when the wind is blowing hard enough to move the antenna.

At this point I primarily use mine while traveling and the ability to have high speed coverage anywhere is worth the cost for me.

For anyone running off DC power - the system typically runs at about 45 watts. Boot up and connecting to the satellites can have wattage around 100 for the first 5 minutes or so.

 

Thanks for the power info. Was going to test that with a few inverters I have. Nice to see it is low power

 

Got my Starlink today...

Power consumption at start-up was in the neighborhood of 80w, with one fast spike to 92w. It didn't seem to correlate to when the dish moved, so everything is very low-power.

Setup was easy. Did a couple of trials of power from the house, but then switched to my 300w pure sine wave inverter from Amazon. It ran like a champ. I've got a cig outlet in my trailer, so I'm just going to plug the router into this inverter and not bother wiring something more permanent.

Bad news is my router is defective. It works as an access point just fine, but I cannot get into the Settings menu via the app to do important stuff like rename the access point and activate a password. Irritating AF cuz that sure seems like something that you can test for in the factory. However, I sent an email to Starlink Support and 20 minutes later they replied to tell me they're sending a new data cord and router. Plus they gave me a one-month credit ($150) on my account.

My 30-day trial starts today I guess, so that clock is ticking. If shipping takes forever then I'll just send it all back and try again in the spring.

 

Decided to try booting SL off my old (8ish+ years) Goal Zero. The batt went almost immediately from 100% to 60%, but stayed at 60 for about 20 min.

This 168Wh will prob only give me about 1hr of use. Still nice to see it can boot the system

 

Update...I got my new SL equipment today. Booted the new router and while it worked better, it still wasn't 100%. Was kinda pissed, but instead of emailing tech support I decided to delete the app on my phone and reload it fresh. Boom. Problem solved...full functions.

Decided to push my luck and tried the original router. It works now too. So in reality, the original router was fine. My app just didn't update correctly. As an added bonus, the new router can do the mesh network (extender). I got that all set up tonight nicely and now my entire house has good coverage.

I've done a few speed tests. Had one at 100mb, but they normally 4-30mb down and 3-4 up. My neighbor has a huge tree right where the dish faces, so I know the speed is impacted by nature. Tried a FaceTime tonight. The video froze up every 5-8 seconds for about half a second, while the quality ranged from great to "640x480". The audio quality was better but not perfect. Overall I'm pretty happy as I wasn't expecting perfect, especially in the city. It will work great when we're camping and far away from any service.

 

we brought ours to Burning Man, and I'm glad that we did. ended up letting a bunch of people use it to let families know they were ok (the media *REALLY* blew the situation out of proportion) and everything worked great. We have the Starling Roam (RV) package, didn't pay for priority access, and it all still worked just fine. We activate it only when we go on trips, which is still quite handy.

 

Picked up a universal mount off Amazon for the Starlink. Realized quickly that ladder work is stupid. Will be ordering that flagpole mounting solution on Sunday

 

Last weekend I made a diy 30ft pole out of conduit so I didn’t have to get on the roof (now/future). The pole adapter starlink sells worked pretty well and the through the wall kit too, shipping was pretty slow.