Starlink - anybody finding this the best internet solution for where you're located?

[Clint Yeastwood]

Starlink will be available in my area in mid-2022. The equipment will cost $500, and the service will cost $99 per month.

No; wait. It will be available in late 2023. The service will cost $110 per month, and now the equipment costs $600.

Elon keeps moving the carrot.

I now have what is known as "best effort" Starlink. It means I pay the full Starlink price, but the service is a lot slower. I see insane speeds (by my area's standards) when I use various speed tests, but what Starlink doesn't tell you is that tests are rigged. I may see 100 Mbps when I test, but I download at 3 Mbps a lot of the time.

It sounds great not to have a contract, but Elon doesn't have a contract, either, so he can do anything he wants. When the price here went up, I wasn't asked to consent. I was informed.

Starlink is much better than the garbage phone-line service I had at first, and it's better than the cell-based service that replaced it, but it's not fantastic.

 

[Rodent]

I'm currently VPN connected to Corp HQ in Europe, and Speedtest.net just returned this at 6P local (fairly close to as much peak usage as there will be today)

 

[Clint Yeastwood]

Here is what I was told: ISP's are aware people use Speedtest, so they have worked it out so it gets better performance than other sites.

I judge my speed by downloading files, and it's not pretty.

 

[sweetcell]

Survived a cold, often snowy/icy winter and never had an issue with ice build up on the dish. Even a blizzard type snowfall one Jan afternoon didn't cause issues with my VPN connection and video calls with customers.

the dish has a heater that turns on to melt snow. i was impressed by that bit of design.

 

[Rodent]

the dish has a heater that turns on to melt snow. i was impressed by that bit of design.

The ability to work during inclement weather is a feature I've been tracking and updating here. I was curious how well the features would work in the real world vs advertisement selling fluff, and so far the hardware has been delivering beyond specs.

Even the high temps last summer didn't cause for ol' Dishy to do a thermal shutdown, and I was able to remain working on endless mind-numbing video calls with heavy data transfer to/from remote servers while connected via VPM (o, and also with my SO streaming movies on the big TV in the other room)

 

[corkybstewart]

the dish has a heater that turns on to melt snow. i was impressed by that bit of design.

What powers the heater?

 

[Rodent]

there's a low voltage feed thru the cable connecting the dish to the modem base unit. you can set the heat capability to on/auto/off via a setting in the app

Edited to add this interesting read: Starlink in the Snow

 

[corkybstewart]

there's a low voltage feed thru the cable connecting the dish to the modem base unit. you can set the heat capability to on/auto/off via a setting in the app

Edited to add this interesting read: Starlink in the Snow

Interesting. Where we live now in NM we normally only have a handful of days over 100F, and we're not usually here in the summer anyway. But somebody usually is so we'd have to take that into account.