Starlink

[brucehoult]

I'm surprised there's been almost no mention of Starlink on eevblog forum. The only two things I could find were a note more than two years ago of the 2nd Falcon 9 launch carrying Starlink satellites, and another 1.5 years ago in a post complaining about poor conventional internet speeds just casually mentioning Starlink as a possible future solution.

The first members of the public started to get Starlink about eight months ago when it went into "beta".

I'd have thought some members of this forum would have it by now, but I can't find any discussion at all.

After being homeless (staying with relatives) for almost two months in NZ's awful housing market at the moment, on January 3 I was told I was the successful applicant to rent a rather rural house north of Whangarei. Apparently there is no phone line at all -- certainly there are no sockets anywhere. Vodafone and Spark signal is good, but they both say they don't do fixed 4G wireless at this location, and in any case speeds are pretty low on those. My relatives on the edge of Whangarei have Spark 4G and get 25-30 Mbps down and 5-8 Mbps up.

I went on the Starlink site, entered my upcoming address, and was informed I could put in a full order right away at a cost of US$499 for the equipment. I did so. The actual charge was NZ$913 including shipping and GST. Once connected, the monthly charge is NZ$159 including GST. The service is unlimited.

After ordering on January 3rd, the equipment shipped from Long Beach CA on January 7th, and arrived on January 14th and I briefly tested it the same day. I moved into my new place on Saturday January 22nd.

In the box is the 60cm dish permanently attached to a mounting tube a bit longer than the dish radius and to a 30m fairly rugged ethernet cable, which I believe you can extend if you need to. There is a power brick / PoE injector with an IEC connector and standard NZ power cord, an ethernet socket for the disk, and an ethernet socket to your home network. There is also a Starlink-branded WIFI router with one spare ethernet connector labelled "AUX" (with a rubber plug in it). You don't have to use their WIFI router if you don't want to (except maybe for setup?) Anyway, I'm using it at present. Lastly there is a low tripod for the dish. The feet of the tripod have holes to allow you to screw it down to something. The tripod should be mounted more or less horizontally, but a typical home roof slope is ok. Mounting it on a wall or bargeboard would not be -- you can buy other mounts for that (or make one yourself).

Unusually, everything comes in the box already cabled together. You can simply click the dish into the tripod, put it out on your lawn, and plug the 3-pin plug into the mains, and you're ready to go. You need an app on your phone to do a little configuration (mostly SSID and password).

Out of the box my dish took one minute to boot up and position the dish horizontally (it has internal motors), ten minutes to get an internet signal, and another ten minutes to get a stable internet signal and tilt itself to its final working position: in my case at an azimuth of -176.6º, and elevation 66.3º. I'm at -35.5 latitude but the elevation seems to be similar everywhere -- just north or south azimuth varies (always away from the equator, except perhaps at > ±53º latitudes).

I've done a few speedtest runs on my iPhone SE and M1 Mac Mini. The results are attached. The summary is that download speeds are normally between 250 and 300 Mbps. I've never had less than 190, and I've had one result of 399. Upload is normally between 25 and 30 Mbps but I've had as low as 9 and as high as 58.

Ping time is mostly around 75ms to servers in Auckland (which speedtest chooses automatically), BUT they are more like 50-55ms if I manually choose a server in Sydney. The signal actually goes from me up to the satellite, down to a ground station near Whangarei, Wellsford, Auckland, or maybe even Christchurch (depending on which is closest to the satellite I'm using at that time), then to Starlink's POP in Sydney, then back to NZ if that's what speedtest chose.

Speeds seem to correlate quite well with how far away and what azimuth the satellite is at. The fastest results were when starlink.sx showed a satellite passing close to directly overhead.

There are lines of roughly equally-spaced satellites travelling roughly SE (in the same orbit / plane) and lines of satellites travelling roughly NE. You pass under one SE plane and one NE plane about every 5 min 25 seconds. One satellite in each of those planes will pass fairly close to overhead you, the others up to a few hundred km either side. You might get a satellite from each plane overhead you at the same time, or they might be spaced out in that 5 1/2 minute period -- this depends on your exact latitude. But wherever you are there will be a general pattern of passing satellites that repeats fairly closely (not exactly) every 5 1/2 minutes.

[brucehoult]

Wow, really no one has anything to say!

* brucehoult slinks off

[rhodges]

I got in line in April 2021 after my AT&T wireless was shut down. They just turned off the 3G service I had been using for a decade or so.

When I got the Starlink email last week saying my system was ready, I placed the order just 12 minutes after the email was sent. The kit arrived yesterday. I had a location picked out that seemed so-so for obstructions. Ideally, the dish would be best on a mast just above the top of the house, but that's not happening soon.

The kit had the dish mounted on a bit of pipe, a short mount with four feet, the router, and a big coil of cable. I started unrolling the cable from the wrong end, and I had to endlessly pull the cable out of knots as I unrolled it. I should have put a plastic bag around the cable end in case it fell in the snow, but I was lucky and it stayed dry.

The router is nothing like what the pictures and videos showed. Apparently in November 2021, they changed the dish (now square) and the router. This new model has a large glass front with some kind of graphic and what looks like status lights. I plugged in the dish cable and power cable, and waited for the lights. No action. I went away for a few minutes and when I came back I looked at the dish, and it was now horizontal. Great, something is happening. But still no status lights.

I will note my annoyance that the new router does not have an ethernet interface. It is wifi only. But for only $20, I can order the external ethernet adapter. It goes between the dish cable and the router. Okay, what's another $20? And it is available... in March. So I set up a WRT54GL access point with OpenWRT as a wifi client for the Starlink router. It works for my wired network.

The first couple hours were very rough, more down time than up. But it got better, and now on day 2, I am seeing downtimes of a couple seconds here and there. I must have been lucky with my dish location, as the Starlink app reported only two obstruction downtimes, with a total of  5 seconds. Plus 10 seconds of "network" and 13 of "unknown" down time.

I am getting great speeds (up to 40 megabits/s over my 802.1g wifi) and the Starlink app usually reports about 40ms of latency. The app bandwidth tester did three tests, and they ranged from over 100Mb/s to over 300Mb/s.

Overall, I am very happy with my initial experience compared to my AT&T wireless LTE 4G service (which has a 100GB/month limit with harsh penalties for going over).

[brucehoult]

Cool! Thanks for the report.

A lot of people seem to be getting the square dish now. Mine came just three weeks ago but is the 2nd gen round dish.

I don't like the lack of information and configurability of the supplied router compared to what you normally expect e.g. client lists, setting up DHCP ranges and DNS, routing inbound ports to particular computers etc. But it works fine -- the range and speed are good. The Starlink router has an ethernet socket with a rubber plug in it, which I guess I could connect to a switch, but I believe you can also simply not use their router at all and just plug your home network directly into the power brick / PoE injector.

I just moved to this house haven't got all my computers or a home network set up yet, so working with the supplied WIFI router has been ok so far.

[radar_macgyver]

I set up a Starlink dish at my work site which is in a rural area. Existing data is through a wireless link to hop the ~10 km to a nearby location through which we get a connection to main campus. The link is symmetric 20/20 Mbps, and has some reliability issues which I hoped to solve with Starlink. I use an Edgerouter Pro with a dual WAN configuration to do a failover link between the wireless and Starlink, and share it with my workgroup. I've had it going since May 2021.

I measure 150-200 Mbps down, between 10 and 25 Mbps up, it's possible this is because of my router configuration. On occasion, the downlink gets choked, maybe it's switching satellites? The statistics page tells me how many dropouts there were in the last 12 hours, most days its a couple of outages that are a few seconds long, the reported cause is often "network issues". I have the first generation Dishy (round, not square), and I don't use the included router, just the PoE injector brick. We've had several snowstorms recently, and the antenna does a good job melting the snow away. I still have the included tripod stand, mounted on top of a shipping container and weighted down with some concrete blocks. In our location, we often have high winds, and it hasn't blown away yet. I have a pole mount on order, to mount it firmly to a communications tower. That will also discourage any cats from seeking warmth too

I've been very happy with the setup, it's a huge improvement over the previous arrangement in terms of speed and uptime (recent snowstorm knocked out power at the remote end of the wireless link, Dishy kept on going). I do wish the Ethernet cable to Dishy was removable, it makes cable routing simpler and I'd be less worried about the cable getting cut.

They do not currently offer static IP addresses, they do CGNAT so you get a 172.x IP. As far as I know, they don't support IPv6, but I haven't tested it.

Starlink as a company is pleasant to deal with as an individual, but if you are trying to buy service for, say a government site, things get difficult. One of the things I do for work is deploy radar systems on field campaigns around the world, this was one of the reasons we tried out Starlink. However, I can't figure out how to get them to send a quote for service, or establish a service contract outside of me as an individual paying for it with a credit card. Hope this changes soon, it'll be a game-changer for the science community to have high bandwidth data in the field for our instruments.

[SmallCog]

Starlink as a company is pleasant to deal with as an individual, but if you are trying to buy service for, say a government site, things get difficult. One of the things I do for work is deploy radar systems on field campaigns around the world, this was one of the reasons we tried out Starlink. However, I can't figure out how to get them to send a quote for service, or establish a service contract outside of me as an individual paying for it with a credit card. Hope this changes soon, it'll be a game-changer for the science community to have high bandwidth data in the field for our instruments.

We're in no rush to change anything at work, but this is certainly a company/technology we're keeping an eye on for future projects or upgrades in that "science" field

[brucehoult]

Do you know they announced "business" accounts yesterday? Five times the cost ($500/month), the dish is twice the area and gives higher data rates. They're advertising it specifically for connecting branch offices together, and multiple dishes per account. And actual customer service.

[Ed.Kloonk]

Wow, really no one has anything to say!

* brucehoult slinks off

Missed the OP, sorry.

As someone who is in a somewhat remote location not that far from the nearest capital city (Sydney), I can certainly sympathise your predicament. Banging foreheads with so-called telco 'authorities' who forbid anyone to place infrastructure where they refuse to themselves is tedious.

In days of yore, to break away from dial-up, I had to use a object that had a Ethernet port, a 12v input jack and a pop-up antenna that was supplied by a company called unwired. The ads depicted the device on a table right beside the laptop. Ha!

Long story short it was like pulling teeth getting this thing to connect to the tower. Thank Heavens for the great, but very small support forum they had because it was populated by users and techies alike. I learned how to make a waterproof box completed with 5-sided interior lined aluminium that was hoisted up a old radio pole I've got here. I learned more than I ever wanted to know about directional radio, wireless device handshake protocol and God knows what else.

Wasn't long until the company was bought out and the service got switched off because apparently the bandwidth was more valuable for another purpose(?). I then graduated to the marvellous ADSL1. Not ADSL2, mind you. My copper running to the house needed a special router that could remain on ADSL1 cos 2 was dogshit with my wires.

Then a National Broadband Network got announced. Lighting fast fibre to the house was promised. Over ten years later and all we've been offered is a expensive wireless broadband solution and a thing mounted on the side of my house that I don't own, not allowed to touch and frankly, is an eyesore.

And whilst good at first, it now sux at nighttime during netfux time. 

I pay too much for the lowest tier but do welcome this new service. And I'm glad you're covering it. 

When I saw your photo of the antenna mounted on the pallet, it almost warmed my cold, dead heart.

With all that pointless crap I said, I must still pose a few critical questions:

1) Can you run a small server or two?

2) What happens when the service gets saturated with users?

3) How mobile is it? Can you or are you allowed to move the receiver to another property?

4) Can one, as a ordinary user, examine the connection quality?

[ve7xen]

1) Can you run a small server or two?

No, you don't get publicly routable address space and they provide no interface to forward ports. They claim to be working towards IPv6 support which would presumably allow this eventually (IPv6 only of course).

Do you know they announced "business" accounts yesterday? Five times the cost ($500/month), the dish is twice the area and gives higher data rates. They're advertising it specifically for connecting branch offices together, and multiple dishes per account. And actual customer service.

Anxiously waiting / hoping that along with this they announce proper support for some form of routable IP. $dayjob has many customers that could potentially make use of this, where only legacy DSL is a viable option currently, but being stuck behind CGNAT is a non-starter. And honestly even as a home user I'd be pretty annoyed at the CGNAT and lack of IPv6. Ideally static v4 or v6 on the business accounts, but I'll take what I can get. Price might be a bit of a sticking point too. Actually offering a business-targeted solution that allows multiple location management under one account is a good start though.

Overall I've heard good things about the service from home users, and they seem to be growing their network infrastructure rapidly. It's going to be a game-changer for a lot of rural communities. I've visited many folks in rural areas who are making do with 1-10mbps fixed wireless that's usually pretty flaky.

[fourfathom]

I gave them by $99 deposit the beginning of October 2021 and the delivery schedule is still for "late 2022".  My neighbor signed up earlier and has had the system for a few months -- he loves it.

[brucehoult]

When I saw your photo of the antenna mounted on the pallet, it almost warmed my cold, dead heart.

Merely "sitting on", not mounted :-) I just wanted to get a few extra cm of height to get closer to the feijoa hedge and the house roofline being the joint horizon to the south (the most critical direction in NZ/Aus).

Seems to be working ok. I'll attach the obstruction map from the app. It maps which parts of the sky it doesn't receive expected signals from, so it knows to switch to another bird before that happens. You can clearly see the row of bamboo off the SW (left side of this screenshot)

1) Can you run a small server or two?

I'm not aware of any language saying you're not allowed to (and I'm sure not going to go looking for it). As with most consumer ISPs you'd need to use some form of dynamic DNS. I haven't actually been keeping track of my IP numbers but I've just now set up a cron job to do that every 15 minutes. I'll report back after a few days.

The provided WIFI router doesn't have any interface for setting up pinholes, but you are not required to use their router -- it just makes for a more foolproof OOBE.

2) What happens when the service gets saturated with users?

They are restricting the number of users in each "cell", a hexagon roughly 20 km across. Right now they are only allowing people in fairly rural areas to order the service.

There are currently 1288 operational satellites in the initial "shell" (set of orbits with satellites 450 km up) with a further 241 on "standby". I think the launch late January brought the total number of satellites to just over 2000. They are now building a new "shell" of satellites with sat-to-sat laser links that will allow your downlink to be far from you, rather than the maybe 1000 km [1] it has to be at present so that the same satellite can see both you and the downlink ground station at the same time.

Starlink have permission to launch and operate 12,000 satellites, and are seeking permission to increase this to 30,000.

That will give a lot more capacity than now.

It's never going to be able to cope with thousands of people in a city or city suburb. But those places have fibre and/or good 4G/5G signal.

3) How mobile is it? Can you or are you allowed to move the receiver to another property?

You can move house. But you can only move to somewhere where a new user would be allowed to sign up.

Putting it on your RV yacht and moving around every day is not currently supported.

4) Can one, as a ordinary user, examine the connection quality?

You can of course use the normal tools such as ping. The app does goes you a little:




[1] don't confuse this with the often publicised figure that you need to be within 500 km (or some other figure such as 600 or 680 km) of a ground station. That's assuming that you have only one nearby ground station and expect 100% continuous coverage. That means that at times the best satellite will be 500 km the other side of the ground station, and therefor 1000 km from you. I believe that even if you are, say, 2000 km from the nearest ground station, there will from time to time (about every 5 minutes worst case) be a satellite somewhere more or less in the middle, and you can get internet via it for a few seconds or a minute or two. That might be useful in an emergency or to do a batched upload/download, but you're not going to get the kind of continuous internet people expect in that situation.

[bitwelder]

More disappointments with Starlink

[Bicurico]

I was considering Starlink for our weekend/holiday property in the mountains. The property is within a very small classified village (30+ permanent habitants, clssified as in Portuguese heritage).

The internet options are limited to ADSL, TV is provided over satellite and there is regular phone line. Because ADSL is really old tech and the neighbour claims to get around 20MBPS maximum, I opted for now to just take a monthly prepaid 4G SIM card for internet. This is an unlimited speed/data access, valid for 30 days. Then you have to top it up with another 30 days. The advantage for me is that I am not stuck in any fidelity program, the usual ones are over a period of 2 years and I still hope that the fibre will reach this village someday! The speeds vary between 10-100MBPS, normally a connected computer (over WIFI) can get solid 20MPBS. Sometimes my wife, daughter an I are surfing the net, each on his own device and it kind of just works.

Anyway, I looked up Starlink and the geographic location is suported! Yeah!

But then I looked at the prices and went directly into Nay! mode. About 500 Euro for the equipment and 150 Euro per month for the servioce (if I am remembering it correctly). That is much too expensive for me.

I pay 60 Euro per month on my primary residence for 1GBPS fibre (200MPBS download), free national phone, free international phone (20h00-8h00), one generous SIM card (my daughter does not manage to exceed the plafond, including mobile internet) and 60 analogue TV channels plus 100+ digital channels.

So either Starlink comes down to a 50 Euro/month rate or I wait for Fibre to show up on offer.

4G (actually I am using 4.5G, which is using channel bonding and I bought a router for that from Austria, since they are not available in Portugal) is pretty useable, including Netflix.

What is missing and annoying me (since they switched this feature off recently) is that a remote access to my router is no longer possible. This means I cannot do a VPN or other connections.

It would be interesting to know if that is really possible with Starlink.

As a side note, I had a satellite internet subscription for one year (TooWay), just to test it and write a report about it. Surprisingly it worked well enough and prices were fairly acceptable. The problems/limitations were: no remote access, limited data, fairly lonk ping times (the service used geostationary satellites).

Regards,
Vitor

[rob77]

More disappointments with Starlink

that guy is just butthurt because he's not able to transfer the subscription to his cousin

complaining about the expensive custom cable for new dishes and suggest rj45 for outdoors  for a device which is supposed to be self-installed by the end user  he never dealt with weatherproofing any rj45 connection for sure..

[brucehoult]

But then I looked at the prices and went directly into Nay! mode. About 500 Euro for the equipment and 150 Euro per month for the servioce (if I am remembering it correctly). That is much too expensive for me.

I pay 60 Euro per month on my primary residence for 1GBPS fibre (200MPBS download), free national phone, free international phone (20h00-8h00), one generous SIM card (my daughter does not manage to exceed the plafond, including mobile internet) and 60 analogue TV channels plus 100+ digital channels.

If you live somewhere with enough population density to support fibre then Starlink will never compete with that. It also can't support a lot of people in a small area anyway.

I don't know what the euro monthly price is, but the US price is $99 (plus tax?) and here in NZ it's NZ$159 (US$105.47, Euro 93.48) including our 15% VAT.

150 Euro a month seems unlikely.

When I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area before COVID I was paying US$70 plus tax a month for really slow (30/10?) Comcast cable internet with a really low (1000 GB) "unofficial" monthly limit (which I exceeded once and got warned).

Starlink is a pretty good deal. Not competitive with city prices for other technologies, but it's for people who are NOT in cities and can't get anything else.

[brucehoult]

that guy is just butthurt because he's not able to transfer the subscription to his cousin

If the map he showed is accurate, his cousin is just out of something like Joneburg MO and within a couple of miles of I-70. She may be on a farm, but that's a pretty densely populated area.

With the small number of satellites at present they can only support thinly populated areas -- the people who really need it.

If he actually got it a full years ago -- not in May or something -- then he must have had some kind of special journalist access. The constellation was also much thinner a year ago. They have got a full shell of satellites now, so there are essentially no outages due to gaps in coverage.

[Bicurico]

But then I looked at the prices and went directly into Nay! mode. About 500 Euro for the equipment and 150 Euro per month for the servioce (if I am remembering it correctly). That is much too expensive for me.

I pay 60 Euro per month on my primary residence for 1GBPS fibre (200MPBS download), free national phone, free international phone (20h00-8h00), one generous SIM card (my daughter does not manage to exceed the plafond, including mobile internet) and 60 analogue TV channels plus 100+ digital channels.

If you live somewhere with enough population density to support fibre then Starlink will never compete with that. It also can't support a lot of people in a small area anyway.

I don't know what the euro monthly price is, but the US price is $99 (plus tax?) and here in NZ it's NZ$159 (US$105.47, Euro 93.48) including our 15% VAT.

150 Euro a month seems unlikely.

When I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area before COVID I was paying US$70 plus tax a month for really slow (30/10?) Comcast cable internet with a really low (1000 GB) "unofficial" monthly limit (which I exceeded once and got warned).

Starlink is a pretty good deal. Not competitive with city prices for other technologies, but it's for people who are NOT in cities and can't get anything else.

You are correct. The monthly fee right now is 99 Euro.

Still it is three times more expensive than my current solution. But yes, if money wasn't a problem, I would love to have it.

The location is pretty remote for Portuguese standards, but 4G is luckily available and operators seem to expand the fibre to the smallest locations, using the electricity poles

I am interested to know if remote access using DynDNS is possible.

Regards,
Vitor

[radar_macgyver]

Do you know they announced "business" accounts yesterday? Five times the cost ($500/month), the dish is twice the area and gives higher data rates. They're advertising it specifically for connecting branch offices together, and multiple dishes per account. And actual customer service.

I looked this up, does look interesting. The $500/mo is a bit steep, though.

... being stuck behind CGNAT is a non-starter. And honestly even as a home user I'd be pretty annoyed at the CGNAT and lack of IPv6.

I don't know for sure if they support IPv6. Edit: looks like it does. Getting around CGNAT could be done with a VPN tunnel, I am reading up on Wireguard to figure out how to do this. Us North American customers are used to getting a real IP, many other parts of the world are forced to use CGNAT.

As with most consumer ISPs you'd need to use some form of dynamic DNS. I haven't actually been keeping track of my IP numbers but I've just now set up a cron job to do that every 15 minutes. I'll report back after a few days.

I am interested to know if remote access using DynDNS is possible.

This won't help with CGNAT, since Starlink would have to forward specific ports to your CGNAT'd address. Using Wireguard or similar, one could set up a tunnel to somewhere that does have a fixed IP (AWS instance, for example).

Here's a nice live map of their network: https://satellitemap.space/ It shows the cells that Bruce was referring to (they're a bit bigger than 20 km though). Almost all the launched SVs are just bouncing their signals to the nearest earth station, but new ones will have links between satellites to reduce the round-trip delays.

[ve7xen]

Edit: looks like it does.

'Experimental' support in some areas with a /56 PD is the official word. I don't know if that means it's available everywhere and just unsupported or what, but it's not tenable to base our services on something that's not part of the contracted service and may break/disappear at any time.

CGNAT is an unfortunate necessity for 'latecomers', there simply aren't enough addresses to go around - but it really should come with full-fledged IPv6, especially on a greenfield system. It does look like they're doing that, just not as a first-class citizen. I'd also expect static IPv4 to be available for some price on the business plans, as it's pretty essential for business customers.

Almost all the launched SVs are just bouncing their signals to the nearest earth station, but new ones will have links between satellites to reduce the round-trip delays.

Shouldn't have much impact on latency, the purpose of the freespace links is to expand the coverage area of each ground station, so more remote / difficult to serve areas can be supported.

[brucehoult]

Here's a nice live map of their network: https://satellitemap.space/ It shows the cells that Bruce was referring to (they're a bit bigger than 20 km though).

The hexagons shown there are completely unrelated.

The display on starlink.sx is a bit more accurate, but still an educated guess -- the cell sizes are about right, but the alignment is completely arbitrary.

[rob77]

CGNAT is an unfortunate necessity for 'latecomers', there simply aren't enough addresses to go around - but it really should come with full-fledged IPv6, especially on a greenfield system. It does look like they're doing that, just not as a first-class citizen. I'd also expect static IPv4 to be available for some price on the business plans, as it's pretty essential for business customers.

no it's not, static IPv4 is a nice to have, not essential. you can easily workaround the NATs with VPN.. i'm hosting some servers behind 2 NATs .. the server has a vpn connection to a VPS running openvpn with a public IP address.. all public DNS records are pointing to that VPS and it just forwards the traffic through the VPN to the server behind NAT. another benefit is that when my fibre connection goes down i can use LTE as backup - the VPN reconnects and my servers are still available with the same public IP

but fully agree with the ipv6 point.

[ve7xen]

no it's not, static IPv4 is a nice to have, not essential. you can easily workaround the NATs with VPN.. i'm hosting some servers behind 2 NATs .. the server has a vpn connection to a VPS running openvpn with a public IP address.. all public DNS records are pointing to that VPS and it just forwards the traffic through the VPN to the server behind NAT. another benefit is that when my fibre connection goes down i can use LTE as backup - the VPN reconnects and my servers are still available with the same public IP

but fully agree with the ipv6 point.

In other words, you have public IPv4, it's just coming from another provider. However you get it, the service is pretty necessary for many businesses (though as things go more cloud-y, it's becoming less so).

Can you set up tunnels and get your traffic through the NAT? Sure, at the cost of latency, MTU, complexity, failure points, and whatever a nearby VM costs you to host. But requiring that kind of jank for basic functionality is not really a characteristic of a business-class connection, at least in North America; that's part of what you're paying extra for. This is the kind of thing you use to get past a restrictive hotel WiFi, not something you want to run your business on if it can be avoided.

[richnormand]

Lots of interesting points raised in this thread.

The subscription cost and long term viability are what I remember from this youtube:

Unless there are many hidden substities and no other large scale competition.

Any though?

[brucehoult]

I just started tracking my Starlink IP number 40 hours ago. It changed from 103.152.127.142 to 103.152.127.143 sometime between 04:15 and 04:30 NZDT this morning.

The only outage in the last 12 hours was 10 seconds at 04:16 "Network Issue"

[CatalinaWOW]

Surprised you couldn't find anything on Starlink.  A brief search shows mentions in at least 38 threads, with roughly half a dozen that are specific Starlink discussions.  Some of the others are off topic/side tracks that are fairly extensive.

Starlink for me is frustrating.  It looks like a very good service for rural locations, and I am rural.  But I am rural in a mountainous, forested location.  According to the Starlink app I have no where near enough sky view to use their service.  And even if I could I would be many months or even years from the front of the service line.  Maybe when the constellation is built out and they have sold enough that the line gets short the situation will change, but for the foreseeable future I am stuck with expensive and unsatisfactory internet service.