SpaceX Starlink

First deployed Starlink start of 2021 as part of the beta, and it's remained a rock. Glad to see it continuing to evolve, and very much looking forward to how the network improves further once Starship starts letting them get up full size v2+ sats. But as someone who started with and is still running a bunch of the gen1 dishy's for various clients, I do regret that SpaceX chose to move away from (let alone improve) having the terminal by default be useful as a plain dedicated WAN with no pushing of their router at all. You could certainly use their router if you wanted, but could also just plug the power brick directly into a regular network and that was that (which is what we've done, generally via simple fiber translator). At least on the more expensive business version it'd be great to have native SFP or separate data plugs, power directly off a standard 12V terminal, etc, the way normal high performance outdoor networking gear works. It's certainly possible to work around it, but it's an irritation and diminishes the experience to not have things integrate as smoothly as they should (and indeed as they did). That said they've been evolving it rapidly, dropped the price, and it's really Just Worked. For all fixed locations I really wish there was fiber too, but until that happy day arrives sometime in the distant future I'm really grateful for what Starlink has enabled for rural internet.

I leave my Starlink Mini in Standby Mode, which is $5/mo and is capped at 500KB/sec. I got the dish for free because I'm already a subscriber at home, so adding the $5/mo really isn't a big deal. It's perfect to go camping, because I might want to let my friends know that I had to move campsites, but I don't want to sit there and surf all day long and watch YouTube. Though 500KB/sec is more than enough to do all of that...

That's nice for you. We got starlink for our rural property. We were previously paying over $200 a month for vastly inferior service (long range Wi-Fi), much slower and dropped out all the time. If you can get a wired connection, get it. Starlink is for people who can't, and it's far and away the best option for those people.

> their router can be submitted to the elements, outdoors. good luck doing that with an rj-45 on the device Um, that's very, very easy to do actually. And indeed the original v1 Starlink cleanly separated the terminal and the router. There was zero need to ever use the included one, you could just treat the terminal as a pure WAN link and that's it. Works extremely well. The v2 was a significant and regrettable downgrade in that respect. There were some reasonable arguments for going away from ethernet since they weren't within the official spec which unfortunately maxes out too low for power [0]. But I wish that at least with the business one they'd simply separated out power and data at least as an option while keeping the terminal self contained. > Now, CPE wireless stuff (like at&t fixed wireless) has ethernet ports, but you have to have bulk cat6 wire, the rj-45 connectors, and a crimper to "service" it. Or, you know, just get a preterminated shielded patch cable? Or for stuff SFP use fiber, again preterminated is fine. There is no downside to having this be easy for those who need it and the same for those who don't. ---- 0: Though I'll edit to add that I've had people tell me they've powered them just fine with standard 100W PoE++ injectors. It may be that either SpaceX is being generous with their claimed power needs, or the full power is only ever used for serious snow/ice melting with the heaters and is a worse case scenario that much of the planet will never need…

Me (for a client). I got it in January 2021 and deployed a few weeks later. At 10 below zero F in a fairly stiff wind natch, quite memorable :). Deployed up near 45°. This was of course a generation 1 circular unit, which actually turned out to be superior IMO since it has zero need for their router though it does have a fixed cable. I used an SFP<>ethernet adapter to bring the signal the rest of the way to our OPNsense router and bypass any grounding issues in that respect, it's functioned continuously ever since. First few months as warned there were occasional dropouts, but I could watch those steadily become rarer and rarer as the weeks went by, and the bandwidth go up as well as more sats came online. There was nothing significant long before it went officially public. Less anecdotally, Starlink passed 400,000 customers as of a month and a half or so ago [0]. I wouldn't be surprised if it was pushing towards the half million mark now or fairly soon. They're limited now in terms of terrestrial cell density primarily, and that cannot be solved without more and more powerful sats which can actually shrink the physical cell size and improve beam count and bandwidth. Mobile/RV is therefore useful for them because it's lower priority with no guarantees, but that's ok for that usage model. The times where it will tend to be very important are in remote areas where cells are not full, and the times where cells are full there is also more likelihood of LTE, and RV can by definiti…

I have picked up the dish in hand and walked around my rural block of land whilst on a social Google Meet call with a co-worker at Gitpod. He was wondering the same. Will it work? Turns out the answer is yes. Was pretty wild walking around a paddock with iPhone in one hand and Starlink auto homing in the other. Didn’t really miss a beat until I tried spinning on the spot lol.

Ukrainian refugees legally crossing the US Mexico border at San Ysidro 24/7 about 500-1000 people a day needed internet to get in touch with their close ones and plan their next steps. Video about the setup: https://twitter.com/novaukraine/status/1517926239587037184?s... The internet has been a number 1 question they ask once they cross the border and come to the volunteers camp as their ukrainian cellular service roaming in the U.S is either not available or too expensive. They stay at the camp for some time most of the time 50-100 people at a time, while figuring their next steps and getting help from the volunteers. The difficulty - it is a camp so no power outlets, no landline internet access, cellular carriers T-mobile and Verizon said they don't support home internet service at this location, ATT plan is a joke - I think 10Mbps for $70. So volunteers used to be coming up with adhoc solutions like trying to share their own cell internet or getting handheld battery power hotspot device - all of which was inadequate for the load and way too expensive. So we got a Starlink terminal, thanks to SpaceX for a quick response to this urgent need - It was shipped at 10pm and arrived the following day. Got a small just enough capacity Li-ion battery and a solar panel and got the Starlink terminal powered this way. A more advanced router, as expected proved also to be needed, which improved the internet quality under the heavy load when there are too many devices connected and som…

Great answer, thank you for following up. Makes sense about considering the fuels around you. I see cool places for sale in Sebastopol to Guerneville, but seems like fire traps potentially on those windy roads. Starlink and a backup mofi sim router that is config'd a bit will suffice, I'm in a pretty rural spot but more mountain west. It's on the base tripod in my backyard (no roof mount) and works fine.

If you can get high speed, low latency, affordable internet access another way then Starlink probably isn't for you. We've just moved to a place where our only other option was a £400 a month leased line delivering synchronous 100Mbps. For less than a quarter of that, Starlink gives us roughly 120-150Mbps down, around 7Mbps up, and pings around the 30 ms mark. Upload is slow but workable for now. It's easy to complain for clout when you don't actually need the service. But if you don't have another affordable option, Starlink is remarkable. I keep having to remind myself that I'm running a business from my rural home via space. And, sure, there are elements that aren't perfect (the cable on our dish isn't replaceable unless you want to manually splice wires, but reports on the Starlink subreddit say that Starlink will send you a new dish if the cable gets damaged). The power draw is around the same as a fairly typical lightbulb from 20 years ago, so I can totally live with that. I know it's frustrating for people who can't get Starlink, especially if they know someone who wants transfer their dish to them, but that's the price of avoiding oversubscription. If you can take the Starlink dish off your roof and still post your videos complaining about Starlink then you were never the target customer anyway.

I dunno. I've got it, it works fine. I really doubt the constraining factors are with network load or regulation, though; if you can source the components for a couple hundred thousand routers and radar dishes, I'm sure the rest of the industry is dying to hear where you're looking.

Recently got Starlink. From 10Mbps/0.5Mbps to 150/10 is a god send. I'll gladly pay for the extra power consumption. I have some sympathy for the astronomy crowd, but I wonder if its inevitable. And is world wide broadband more/less important to society than having to correct for light streaks? The router debacle is just ridiculous though. All of the networking tech being used is so ubiquitous, why not include a damn ethernet port. I just received my ethernet adapter 2 months later and... it doesn't work. Tried multiple configurations including straight into a PC - nothing. to top it off my support ticket was closed without any response... so my $300 mesh wifi will just sit on the shelf while half the house gets poor connectivity. Overall its exciting to have decent internet and not live in a city. The future of it is exciting too -especially the space laser links. Imagine a situation where you can hop directly to a ground station on or very nearby a data center. A lot of people saying Starlink is great if you don't have access to something better, but Starlink may end up being the "fastest" internet available.

I'm talking about data not able to leave the building , not even data getting lost on the way. One example was a site that had fiber and coax, from different companies. They might have shared a pipe at some point along their length, hard to say. But both connections went down at the same time for digital reasons, not physical. The providers had simultaneous unrelated backend router problems and the site lost contact to both gateways. This was with a nice SD-WAN system that routed everything dynamically across both pipes to address latency and errors, but if the packets get dropped at the first hop in both networks, there's not much you can do! The saving grace in that case was the third redundant connection, a 4G cell modem, with a lot less bandwidth but able to keep the critical transactions going. These days I'd certainly want Starlink on the roof as well.

Hardware gets a bit easier in some respects when you have unit scale and don't need to make COGS+margin back on the sale. If Ubiquiti sell a base station, half of the unit price is gross margin. If SpaceX sell a Starlink terminal, they don't even have to cover COGS for it to be a good business case, because they're selling the service not the device. The Starlink terminal is a very cool piece of kit, but it's not nearly as interesting as what they're hucking into LEO, and how they're doing it.