One week of Starlink

[The Heretic]

Last weekend I got my Starlink Dish and set it up. You just put the dish somewhere with a view of the northern sky (for now), plug it in and let it do its thing.

The first day (late afternoon of 5/28) the system took about 12 hours to figure out where and what it was - especially what obstructions were present and where they were - which is an issue with my current location; I have some very tall trees to the north and that is where the dish has pointed itself.

Speedtest by Ookla - The Global Broadband Speed Test

Use Speedtest on all your devices with our free desktop and mobile apps.

www.speedtest.net

If you go to the bottom of the page and click "show more" a few times you can get the whole week - it defaults to three days I think.

You may notice that the speeds vary a lot, from 3 mbps to almost 300 mbps. For now, this is mostly normal. For one thing I have the RV account, which means it is a third tier priority account; Business accounts are highest, Residential accounts next, and RV accounts get the hind nipple. I do notice that it seems to slow down when Residential accounts are home and awake. From midnight to 6-7 AM, I regularly get speeds of 100+ mbps. When people are at work I get good speeds. When they come home about 5-6 PM, speeds drop off.

This is to be expected - I saw the same thing with cable (years ago) and somewhat with fiber.

I had three afternoons, two which were consecutive, where the dish got confused for a few hours and would repeatedly have issues with connectivity, searching for satellites this way and that. On the third day I decided to reboot the system and since then no problems of that sort that I have noticed. I hope it doesn't repeat itself, and if it does that a reboot is an actual fix.

I have some significant tree obstructions so I only have about 93% connectivity; I have these short dropouts of 1-15 seconds every 5-15 minutes, sometimes more often, and that interrupts the connectivity but most of the time, especially with streaming TV, it is not noticeable. The systems calls them "outages" and I may just be reading or typing when they happen and other times I am loading something I may or may not hit that dropout. I use Amazon Prime for TV and usually I don't have any problems because the source buffers (some channels buffer better than others) so mostly the dropouts don't cause buffering pauses in the show/movie.

I have swapped out my old HD TV for a smaller 4K TV I used as a computer monitor and it is nice to watch TV in 4K now, although I see that there are not that many 4K shows, I believe the TV upscales the others.

I switched to Starlink because I had a WISP prior to that (long distance WiFi connection to a provider who has fiber, about 4 miles down the mountain). Other than WISP I could only get DSL, which was only about 1.5 mbps. I get cell coverage, but no providers offer anything above 15 mbps and unlimited data (they will degrade once you get to a certain amount) and they cost as much as the Starlink service, plus I can use Starlink almost anywhere in N. America, double plus, if power goes out, I can still get Starlink service.

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[308]

Last weekend I got my Starlink Dish and set it up. You just put the dish somewhere with a view of the northern sky (for now), plug it in and let it do its thing.

The first day (late afternoon of 5/28) the system took about 12 hours to figure out where and what it was - especially what obstructions were present and where they were - which is an issue with my current location; I have some very tall trees to the north and that is where the dish has pointed itself.

Speedtest by Ookla - The Global Broadband Speed Test

Use Speedtest on all your devices with our free desktop and mobile apps.

www.speedtest.net

If you go to the bottom of the page and click "show more" a few times you can get the whole week - it defaults to three days I think.

You may notice that the speeds vary a lot, from 3 mbps to almost 300 mbps. For now, this is mostly normal. For one thing I have the RV account, which means it is a third tier priority account; Business accounts are highest, Residential accounts next, and RV accounts get the hind nipple. I do notice that it seems to slow down when Residential accounts are home and awake. From midnight to 6-7 AM, I regularly get speeds of 100+ mbps. When people are at work I get good speeds. When they come home about 5-6 PM, speeds drop off.

This is to be expected - I saw the same thing with cable (years ago) and somewhat with fiber.

I had three afternoons, two which were consecutive, where the dish got confused for a few hours and would repeatedly have issues with connectivity, searching for satellites this way and that. On the third day I decided to reboot the system and since then no problems of that sort that I have noticed. I hope it doesn't repeat itself, and if it does that a reboot is an actual fix.

I have some significant tree obstructions so I only have about 93% connectivity; I have these short dropouts of 1-15 seconds every 5-15 minutes, sometimes more often, and that interrupts the connectivity but most of the time, especially with streaming TV, it is not noticeable. The systems calls them "outages" and I may just be reading or typing when they happen and other times I am loading something I may or may not hit that dropout. I use Amazon Prime for TV and usually I don't have any problems because the source buffers (some channels buffer better than others) so mostly the dropouts don't cause buffering pauses in the show/movie.

I have swapped out my old HD TV for a smaller 4K TV I used as a computer monitor and it is nice to watch TV in 4K now, although I see that there are not that many 4K shows, I believe the TV upscales the others.

I switched to Starlink because I had a WISP prior to that (long distance WiFi connection to a provider who has fiber, about 4 miles down the mountain). Other than WISP I could only get DSL, which was only about 1.5 mbps. I get cell coverage, but no providers offer anything above 15 mbps and unlimited data (they will degrade once you get to a certain amount) and they cost as much as the Starlink service, plus I can use Starlink almost anywhere in N. America, double plus, if power goes out, I can still get Starlink service.

Did you use the app to scan the sky? Mine points straight up slightly northwest.

 

[Catfishmoon]

I have thought about getting Starlink when I retire soon and RV more...

 

[The Heretic]

Did you use the app to scan the sky? Mine points straight up slightly northwest.

Yes - and the dish orients itself. Mine points about 45* up almost straight north.

Neighbor just got his dish and I spent the last couple hours showing him the ropes and trying to find the best place for it. Turns out it is probably going to be on his deck. He is getting about 100 mbps, and it hasn't yet optimized. We tried right next to the house but at that point about a third to half the sky was not visible to the dish and he got 10 mbps at best. When we moved it about 30' out onto the lawn so it could see over the roof then it got about 100 mbps. Then we tried the deck and that was just as good and my bet is once it has optimized by tomorrow, it will get better yet. But he is happy as he had even worse performance from the WISP than I had, plus he works from home - 100 mbps with 90+ connectivity is much better than 1-5 mbps with 25% connectivity.

 

[Alexx1401]

Yes - and the dish orients itself. Mine points about 45* up almost straight north.

Neighbor just got his dish and I spent the last couple hours showing him the ropes and trying to find the best place for it. Turns out it is probably going to be on his deck. He is getting about 100 mbps, and it hasn't yet optimized. We tried right next to the house but at that point about a third to half the sky was not visible to the dish and he got 10 mbps at best. When we moved it about 30' out onto the lawn so it could see over the roof then it got about 100 mbps. Then we tried the deck and that was just as good and my bet is once it has optimized by tomorrow, it will get better yet. But he is happy as he had even worse performance from the WISP than I had, plus he works from home - 100 mbps with 90+ connectivity is much better than 1-5 mbps with 25% connectivity.

Damn system sounds really promising from what you have been saying about it. It sure sounds like the damn guy came up with one hell of a great little idea. So much depends on the net now so its great they are coming up with something for those who live where the "standard" options are not there or work poorly at best. Amazing tech, no wonder the guy is so rich.

 

[The Heretic]

On Reddit a lot of early users are now complaining that they went from 300 mbps down to less than 100 mbps due to other users being added.

I am in a "waitlist" cell - that means that no more Residential accounts in this cell until SL adds more capacity (satellites). I still have a deposit in on a Residential dish, but probably won't get an reply on that deposit until next year.

Starlink is going to put up new much larger satellites with their new much larger rocket, probably later this year. That will probably add a lot more capacity.

I am fine with what I have. I am going to leave the deposit ($100) in place for the residential account because I may find it useful to offer that to a buyer of my property.

I plan to move this year, and with the RV dish that will be real easy as the account tier type allows for moving from one spot to another without any account changes. With a residential account, it is not so easy to change service addresses, unless you move to an "open" cell. I also plan to convert my truck to an RV and it would be nice to have internet for the RV too.

An additional benefit is that if there is a region wide power outage or other infrastructure issue, Starlink users will probably still be online - especially as Starlink is sending up satellites with lasers for intercommunication between satellites, so they can connect to ground stations well outside of a region where the dish is. Eventually - if I understand it correctly, the goal is to have very few ground stations and rely on the satellites themselves to communicate around the world using the lasers. The will still need ground stations to connect to the rest of the internet, but there will be less reliance on those stations.

 

[The Heretic]

Sunday evening was fairly poor performance, but still better than what I used to have.

The last three days have been mostly ok - people gone off to work leaves plenty of bandwidth for me. Evenings it slows down considerably - 10-30 mbps at times, which is still enough for streaming TV and more than enough for web surfing. Speeds came back up about 11PM - about when most people had gone to bed.

Yesterday I had a lot of dropouts in the afternoon. I didn't wait to see if it would correct itself, I went ahead and rebooted it. After about 10-15 minutes it reoriented itself enough to start working normally and since then, no real problems - getting rates near 200 mbps right now.

I would rate the reliability about one step above what I had with Comcast cable about 20 years ago - I had to reboot their modems at least once a day. Fiber was much better and rarely needed any fiddling - so reliable I just took it for granted.

 

[The Heretic]

UkraineX: How Elon Musk’s space satellites changed the war on the ground

From artillery strikes to Zoom calls, the tech billionaire’s internet service has become a lifeline in the fight against Russia.

www.politico.eu

 

[RainMan_PNW]

I've been on waitlist for nearly 2 years now. I have been on bubblegumty DSL service (max 5Mbps up, 0.5 down) out in the hills of NE Clark County for 16 years and it is painful. I also have essentially no cell signal at the house, and no possibilities for wireless either. I'm tempted to give the RV gear a try, but didn't want to be paying oodles to find out it wasn't much better than what I have. It is encouraging to hear you're getting even 10-30 during "bad" times with the RV gear inside of the waitlist cell.

 

[The Heretic]

There are times when it seems the speeds are in the single digits, but I am learning to trust the SL stats more than Ookla now. For a while it seemed it was the other way around, but then I started looking at the almost instantaneous (it lags some seconds behind - maybe about 10 seconds) strip chart in the SL stats, and noticed some behavior that made me trust it more. Maybe it's stats are only to the satellite (I think so) and not beyond it, where Ookla is all the way to its servers. If so then there is some considerable overhead somewhere between the satellite and Ookla, or after Ookla to the volunteer servers.

If you have the wherewithal to buy the kit & shipping (mine was $650) and pay $135/mo for the RV service, I would not be hesitant to try it out; if it doesn't work you can get a refund for most/all of that cost if you return it in 30 days after receipt.

Within a few hours you should know if it will work at all, they don't start the billing for the service until 14 days after it is shipped (mine started today), they are prompt for the shipping (mine got here two days after it was shipped via FedEx). Within a week you should have a pretty good idea of how it will work term in your cell (weekends will be the crunch time).

It remains to be seen how this will work long term. I think the majority of people using SL for months to years are satisfied, it is hard to know for sure. There is always the bias of the fact that people happy with the service usually don't say much while those who are dissatisfied complain loudly and often.

Customer service is not very good, so far (I have not needed it, but I read reports of people waiting weeks to months for help with issues of no service) - hopefully it will get better and I won't need that help.

 

[RainMan_PNW]

Thanks for the follow up.
Currently traveling so I might chat with the Mrs. and see if she wants to pull the trigger on the RV setup to start/test.

 

[308]

I've been on waitlist for nearly 2 years now. I have been on bubblegumty DSL service (max 5Mbps up, 0.5 down) out in the hills of NE Clark County for 16 years and it is painful. I also have essentially no cell signal at the house, and no possibilities for wireless either. I'm tempted to give the RV gear a try, but didn't want to be paying oodles to find out it wasn't much better than what I have. It is encouraging to hear you're getting even 10-30 during "bad" times with the RV gear inside of the waitlist cell.

We have TMobile and I mentioned we had no bars at our house, so they sent us a TMobile cell booster that connects to the ISP router. Got 4-bars after that. There was no charge from them.

 

[RainMan_PNW]

We have TMobile and I mentioned we had no bars at our house, so they sent us a TMobile cell booster that connects to the ISP router. Got 4-bars after that. There was no charge from them.

Yeah, I've used TMobile, ATT, and VZW cell boosters in the past. But that circles back to the dog-crap ISP I've got...

 

[The Heretic]

So I am well into my third week. Since the weather was halfway decent today I did some chores.

One of those chores was to put the dish up on the roof. I didn't want to go up on a wet mossy roof by myself, so I just pushed it a few feet up from the eave, but that was about ten feet above where it was on the deck.

Apparently that made a difference - I seem to be getting about half as much obstruction interference as I was with the dish on the deck. That is more of an improvement than I expected. I will see in the morning if this is a steady state now - it takes about 12 hours for it to map the obstructions and optimize for them. But right now it says to expect an interruption every 2 minutes - which is more than double what I had before (every 45 seconds).

That is pessimistic though - what I am actually seeing is more like some interruptions every 3-4 minutes, and then a space of about 10-15 minutes before another interruption.

I didn't have an adapter to use my antenna mast so I am going to try it on the roof for a while. Next week the weather is supposed to be nice so I will have my SIL come up and we can put the dish up near the peak of the roof and also another 15-20' away from the trees, and put some sandbags/etc. on the base to keep it steady in the wind. Hopefully that will mostly eliminate the obstructions and give me near 100% uptime.

I also have my WAP antenna and Ethernet adapter so I may be able to put the antenna up and get better WiFi outside the house.

 

[Alexx1401]

So I am well into my third week. Since the weather was halfway decent today I did some chores.

One of those chores was to put the dish up on the roof. I didn't want to go up on a wet mossy roof by myself, so I just pushed it a few feet up from the eave, but that was about ten feet above where it was on the deck.

Apparently that made a difference - I seem to be getting about half as much obstruction interference as I was with the dish on the deck. That is more of an improvement than I expected. I will see in the morning if this is a steady state now - it takes about 12 hours for it to map the obstructions and optimize for them. But right now it says to expect an interruption every 2 minutes - which is more than double what I had before (every 45 seconds).

That is pessimistic though - what I am actually seeing is more like some interruptions every 3-4 minutes, and then a space of about 10-15 minutes before another interruption.

I didn't have an adapter to use my antenna mast so I am going to try it on the roof for a while. Next week the weather is supposed to be nice so I will have my SIL come up and we can put the dish up near the peak of the roof and also another 15-20' away from the trees, and put some sandbags/etc. on the base to keep it steady in the wind. Hopefully that will mostly eliminate the obstructions and give me near 100% uptime.

I also have my WAP antenna and Ethernet adapter so I may be able to put the antenna up and get better WiFi outside the house.

I heard one of the morning talk guys promoting these last week. Not as a paid ad, just him being quite happy. He lived were net was pretty much worthless. He mentioned the "RV" unit was a way to get around the LONG wait and he was quite happy with it. So far sounds like this thing should be great for those who had no net access until now.

 

[308]

@The Heretic, Sounds like you have a lot of potential obstructions on your property. Not that it matters, but we have clear skies 360* around our dish and very steady service, however, it appears we get 6-20 second interruptions maybe 4x a night between midnight and 3am. So far on our side it's been solid.

 

[The Heretic]

I heard one of the morning talk guys promoting these last week. Not as a paid ad, just him being quite happy. He lived were net was pretty much worthless. He mentioned the "RV" unit was a way to get around the LONG wait and he was quite happy with it. So far sounds like this thing should be great for those who had no net access until now.

IIRC SL actually marketed this as a "better than nothing" solution. That it is. If you have some other service that is reliable and relatively fast - say 50+ mbps - and you don't need something that will work almost anywhere while traveling, then I don't recommend SL as you may be disappointed. Don't get this because you hate Comcast or your local ISP, but they are reliable 90%+ of the time.

OTOH, if you live in the boonies like I do and there is just no way to get reliable internet of 10+ mbps, then Starlink is a solution to consider.

FWIW - most of what I have read on Reddit indicates that once you are up and running, SL customer service is severely lacking. Certainly do not expect them to hold your hand, much less show up at your house to fix your system - not going to happen. They do not make it easy to contact them and it can be weeks to months before they get back to you. The best bet for help on anything is Reddit or some other user group support forum.

Not that most people will need help - they won't, SL made the system very simple and somewhat robust for most situations - but if you do, it will usually be crickets you hear from Starlink.

 

[The Heretic]

@The Heretic, Sounds like you have a lot of potential obstructions on your property. Not that it matters, but we have clear skies 360* around our dish and very steady service, however, it appears we get 6-20 second interruptions maybe 4x a night between midnight and 3am. So far on our side it's been solid.

My obstructions are not potential, they are 200' tall conifers that I am not going to cut down as I mostly love my trees - more than any view that their removal would provide.

My obstruction stats went from 43-45 minutes down to 14 minutes per 12 hours. There are some periods of 30 minutes with no obstructions recorded, and a few with 45-60 minutes. That is a huge improvement and I have not moved the dish up to the peak of the roof yet - I will when the weather turns nice next week, the roof dries out and I have my son-in-law come up to call 911 if I fall off the roof and break my neck.

I hope to get to the point where the obstruction interruptions are significantly fewer. If what I did yesterday decreased the obstructions by 75%, then moving the dish that much more should hopefully reduce it that much again. Either way, I am quite satisfied with what I have now - it is now at 98% connectivity/uptime, and speeds are ranging from 20-200 mbps.

That is the other thing people should consider; speeds will vary greatly from minute to minute - don't expect 100 mbps constantly. Some regions/cells are only getting double digit speeds now due to the number of users. The RV service can expect to be deprioritized with preference given to the higher tier accounts too.

Some people are disappointed because they used to get 300 mbps and now they get 50 mbps. As more people jump on the RV service one should expect to see the speeds decrease even more in some cells (a cell is a 15 mile radius with a hexagonal shape). Again, being in the situation I am, I am quite satisfied with what I am seeing for performance; it is better than nothing, which is pretty much what my previous service had degraded to, and I really had no better options, and still don't.

This (speed and dealing with obstructions) should improve as Starlink adds more satellites, and sometime this year more powerful satellites, but once launched, it takes them 2-4 months to get into an operational orbit - so I do not expect to see improvements until next year, and even then, I expect Starlink to add many more users to match the capability of the new satellites. How they balance that is probably based on their finances/revenue more than any customer satisfaction. At some point though they will probably reach saturation of their market. Right now, some people have calculated that congestion may start to occur when there are more than about 100-150 users per cell.

 

[308]

I used 'potential' because I've not seen your place cuz you never invite me over to play COD, drink Mt Dew and eat Chimichangas…lol

 

[pdxjimbo]

I've had Starlink for almost a year in the Panhandle and give it two thumbs up.

Prior internet service was copper wire DSL with max 2.5 mbps, barely enough bandwidth for videoconferencing.

With Starlink we can stream movies, music and video conference without problems.

Occasionally we drop the signal for a few seconds but my coworkers on the video conference know I'm on satellite.

It's been a game changer for us.