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Starlink yea or nay?

DVanVorous

DVanVorous

Full curmudgeon
Joined
Jun 8, 2020
Member Number
1906
Messages
35
Loc
High Lonesome somewhere in the Mission Mountains
Contemplating it and might like a few opinions, observations form folks that have dealt with SpaceX and the Starlink subsidiary along with the enjoyable task of self installs.
Reason for the contemplation is a 1.5mb/sec down load speed via DSL (dish or starlink are my only alternates in my area)
Interestingly one can get the "residential unit" at Best Buy along with the majority of fiddly bits thru Amazon...

1. How much of a hassle is the "tree" issue
2. Does the heated dish work well enough to not having to go out and smack the dish during snow storms
3. Reliability so far
4. How many of the horror stories about Starlink customer service are real?

Not interested in the performance specs as anything that doesn't require smacking the dish due to snow and has a speed better than 1.5 down load is a bonus. I'm aware of the up front and monthly which are in budget (so far)
 
DVanVorous said:
Contemplating it and might like a few opinions, observations form folks that have dealt with SpaceX and the Starlink subsidiary along with the enjoyable task of self installs.
Reason for the contemplation is a 1.5mb/sec down load speed via DSL (dish or starlink are my only alternates in my area)
Interestingly one can get the "residential unit" at Best Buy along with the majority of fiddly bits thru Amazon...

1. How much of a hassle is the "tree" issue
2. Does the heated dish work well enough to not having to go out and smack the dish during snow storms
3. Reliability so far
4. How many of the horror stories about Starlink customer service are real?

Not interested in the performance specs as anything that doesn't require smacking the dish due to snow and has a speed better than 1.5 down load is a bonus. I'm aware of the up front and monthly which are in budget (so far)
Click to expand...

Have you downloaded the app and done the horizon survey yet? That'll help determine if you have an acceptable location for the dish and/or how much outage time you could expect due to obstructions.


I tried it early on and ended up sending it back because it wasn't a whole lot better than my LTE setup for about 4x the price. But I was also doing some magic to even get it at the time and I'm pretty sure I was pointed at satellites outside my grid, which would have greatly affected my speeds.
 
We love it. Our only choice vs cell phone hot spotting and that is from only one cell service provider....can't shop around.

Never an issue with the snow or ice rain here and we get snow and ice November to March/April.
 
Trees are an issue, most horror stories are from people expecting it to punch through an Amazonian tree canopy while sitting on the ground.

I’ve had nothing but good service so far, but I have a near perfect sky view.
 
TRINDU said:
I'm in the middle of a field, no trees or obstructions to the north. Far better than a Hotspot. No issues with ice.

10/10 would recommend for rural
Click to expand...
This is my exact experience in the two months we've had it.

Install was easy. I was on a hotspot (essentially) for 3 years prior.
 
According to the skyview app I've got about 10% obstruction but the only outages I ever seem to have are hail/blizzard/biblical downpour. Worst outage we ever had was about 30min during a spring storm this year. Most are .1-2 sec, maybe 1% are a minute to 5min. That 30 minute outage probably accounted for 30% of our total outage time in 15 months of having it. I like it, can stream from 6 devices and never have an issue. Never run out of data (even the 1TB "max" is probably only going to ever get hit if you're trying to run a decent-sized online business or you're mining bitcoin, we've never come close and it's the only type of media we have).
 
IowaOffRoad said:
According to the skyview app I've got about 10% obstruction but the only outages I ever seem to have are hail/blizzard/biblical downpour. Worst outage we ever had was about 30min during a spring storm this year. Most are .1-2 sec, maybe 1% are a minute to 5min. That 30 minute outage probably accounted for 30% of our total outage time in 15 months of having it. I like it, can stream from 6 devices and never have an issue. Never run out of data (even the 1TB "max" is probably only going to ever get hit if you're trying to run a decent-sized online business or you're mining bitcoin, we've never come close and it's the only type of media we have).
Click to expand...

We have never hit the limit. My wife works through a VPN and everything is on remote servers, no data is stored on her laptop, large online video conferences all day long, my kids streaming crap, my work, emails, streaming. It just works. Its what made it possible to move to the woods for us.
 
Screenshot_20230619-191109.png


Obstructed but working
 
What's wrong with 1.5mbit internet? I had 700something k for a long time. Recently it upgraded to 3mB
 
I think I am on week three now. Twice it has gone blank for a short time while watching tv. NBD. So much better than Viasat it is not even funny.
 
DVanVorous said:
Contemplating it and might like a few opinions, observations form folks that have dealt with SpaceX and the Starlink subsidiary along with the enjoyable task of self installs.
Reason for the contemplation is a 1.5mb/sec down load speed via DSL (dish or starlink are my only alternates in my area)
Interestingly one can get the "residential unit" at Best Buy along with the majority of fiddly bits thru Amazon...

1. How much of a hassle is the "tree" issue
2. Does the heated dish work well enough to not having to go out and smack the dish during snow storms
3. Reliability so far
4. How many of the horror stories about Starlink customer service are real?

Not interested in the performance specs as anything that doesn't require smacking the dish due to snow and has a speed better than 1.5 down load is a bonus. I'm aware of the up front and monthly which are in budget (so far)
Click to expand...
I’ve been using Starlink for 2 years now with the original round dishy.

1. depends on your property. I put my dish on my roof and well away from most of my trees. Just limbed one thy was close to the install point and was giving a few minor obstructions. Pole saw made jack work of that.

2. yes. I leave mine on auto mode for this and I’ve never had issues from snow build up but once. And that was only hen we had some super wet and heavy snow that just stuck to everything like glue. All I did was use the app to put the dish in stow which makes it go vertical. Everything slid right off, I unstowed it and it was flawless again.

3. reliability has been great. I’ve only experienced 3 outages in two years and all 3 were global outages where everyone was down. Even these didn’t last very long. I think the longest was n hour. It has worked great in all sorts of weather conditions here in Maine.

4. I can’t speak to that. I’ve never had a need or reason to try to contact customer service.

I did the install myself. It was easy and straight forward. I also have my dish plugged into a UPS in my server rack with the rest of my network hardware. This way even when we have a power outage, my internet stays up. I also have a standby generator so the UPs keeps the internet and all my important stuff powered up until the genset kicks in ndy takes over.
 
Texas97 said:
just looked at their map online. says its not available now in my area, but supposed to be coming in 2023.
Click to expand...
It's not an issue of availability, it's an issue of too many users in your area. You can sign up for $100 and get on the list for when space opens up. If you aren't in line, it probably won't be available until a lot more satellites are launched.

You can sign up for the RV package but its more expensive and you don't get priority. Thats usually available very quickly.
 
Void_of_Light said:
It's not an issue of availability, it's an issue of too many users in your area. You can sign up for $100 and get on the list for when space opens up. If you aren't in line, it probably won't be available until a lot more satellites are launched.

You can sign up for the RV package but its more expensive and you don't get priority. Thats usually available very quickly.
Click to expand...
interesting.
 
I have had mine for awhile now and have lots of very large trees on the property. We were obstructed enough that it was down 20 seconds of every minute on average but even with this we could still watch Netflix, etc. There are no other options in my area so could not really complain. A few months ago we cut down a bunch of the trees on that side of the property and now there are no obstructions at all.

Also have never had it go down unexpected when I was using the internet so have never had to deal with customer service. I give it a 10/10
 
Texas97 said:
interesting.
Click to expand...
Because as of right now they don't have the inter-satellite coms fully working, and they have limited base stations. Iirc, and this has probably changed by now, all satellites have to communicate directly with its own base station at this point in time.

In the future the sats will link with each other and kinda form a mesh network where they can all share. We're just not there yet
 
XtremeJ said:
Probably get all the answers you need if you read the Starlink thread.

In other words
Search noob :flipoff2:
Click to expand...
I was certain that all the experts on the topic resided on this very web site not on the Starlink or Utube sites...that and I'm and old entitled curmudgeon that doesn't spend hours surfing like younguns. :laughing:
 
Texas97 said:
just looked at their map online. says its not available now in my area, but supposed to be coming in 2023.
Click to expand...
I'd been on the waiting list for 2 years, they kept pushing it back. When I got moved out to the property I signed up for "best effort" since it was my only real option. I was on best effort for like 5 days before they automatically upgraded me to full residential.

I've got one tree that interferes at the very edge of the zone. A couple/few times a day I'll have to refresh a page. Other than that, I've had no issues, and I can stream Amazon Prime/Netflix movies without a hiccup. Mine came with a 75 foot cable to go between the router and the dish, I ordered a 150 footer to get it out from under the one tree that's causing me issues. 150 is the max that Starlink recommends, but people have gone out further with varying levels of success.
 
Ummduh said:
Because as of right now they don't have the inter-satellite coms fully working, and they have limited base stations. Iirc, and this has probably changed by now, all satellites have to communicate directly with its own base station at this point in time.

In the future the sats will link with each other and kinda form a mesh network where they can all share. We're just not there yet
Click to expand...

Are you sure about that? I've always understood it's just a matter of density. They can only have x many customers per satellite. If there's more demand that capacity in your grid, you're on the waiting list until they launch/move another satellite to cover the demand. As far as I've read, the meshing is the whole concept behind the system.
 
bgaidan said:
Are you sure about that? I've always understood it's just a matter of density. They can only have x many customers per satellite. If there's more demand that capacity in your grid, you're on the waiting list until they launch/move another satellite to cover the demand. As far as I've read, the meshing is the whole concept behind the system.
Click to expand...

And those satellites are limited because of base stations and the lack of inter satellite communications. AFAIK the whole linking thing hasn't been implemented yet.

That's my understanding of it, but I've never been mistaken for a satellite networking engineer.

Edit: I can't really find any good reads on this quickly while at work. It's entirely possible I'm wrong or they've upgraded to point my understanding is outdated or was always wrong, lol.
 
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