Starlink

[LarsMac]

Back in the summer of 21, I signed up for Starlink, Elon Musk's venture into Global internet.
Well, last week, I got an email saying our dish was on the way.

Granddaughter and her mate signed up about the same time I did, and we received our dishes same day.
They live in a second house on the same property.
They set theirs up the first day.
A down side to the initial package is that you get a wireless router attached to a dish. They will offer a Ethernet pluggable option soon, but that is on back-order.

I pointed my old Netgear W2500 Wifi receiver/Ethernet router at their Starlink and started playing with it.
We were seeing an average of 40 Mb/s down and 11 Mb/s up at our house. The wifi was traversing about 75 feet, with a steel garage, and our RV in between routers.
At one point we had both houses running off the single dish, and we were playing MMOs with no interference or interruptions.

Yesterday, I set my unit up, and after some time for the system to sort out the satellites and figure out the optimum direction it wanted, it has settled down quite nicely.

So, I have the dish on the roof of the RV, and the wireless router inside it, and my W2500 connecting from the house.
The RV is next to our house, so we've eliminated the Steel Garage as interference.

With this setup. I am clocking 90-100 Mb/s down, and 20-25 Mb/s up on my Laptop inside the house.
Starlink router, itself is reporting 160-180 Mb/s down and 40-60 up on internal speed testing.

I'll be working to secure our dish to the RV, so we can go mobile.

[spot]

That's very pleasing. I don't know anyone else who's using one.

If they get deployed one at a time in third world villages it will make a huge difference.

[LarsMac]

A year on, it's time for a revisit.

for a while last year there seemed to be a learning curve. we would lose connection for a while ( A few minutes) and recover, and at times, I would need to reboot the sat controller. But, by mid summer it settled down. We've been seeing 30-40 Mb/s reliably for quite a while, with minimal interruptions.
We can register a different address and connect from other locations if we travel with the RV. It's a bit cumbersome, but works well, most of the time.

It's a bit pricey, but really I could be paying the Cell phone people much more for a lot fewer Megabits.
I LIKE IT!!!!

[spot]

That's very encouraging, I'm glad the network is stable. It makes a huge difference to people out of range of the normal distribution channels. I like the idea that you can be in the middle of the Sahara and still have a fast download link, and enough upload to manage a good video link for conversations.

Presumably SpaceX is offering wider coverage in the US before heading out to less wealthy areas of the world. Each satellite only handles so much ground, and you only get a thousand or so subscribers in each 176 square mile cell. I'm sure the satellite bandwidth will get a lot higher for each new generation that gets launched, but the cell size and hence the number of satellites in orbit is probably fixed by how far up they are flying.

[LarsMac]

Here's something to get a picture of where they are.

https://satellitemap.space/?norad=48119

[Bryn Mawr]

Here's something to get a picture of where they are.

https://satellitemap.space/?norad=48119

You can see why the astronomers dislike them.

[spot]

Here's something to get a picture of where they are.

https://satellitemap.space/?norad=48119

That's a very neat site. There's an app too, I'm sufficiently tempted as to get it just to go back to on occasion.

You can see why the astronomers dislike them.

Well, maybe not. No professional or research astronomer uses an eyepiece any longer at work, that's a hobbyist issue. All research telescopes have sensors and record to computers. All the data goes through software. Regardless of how many reflective satellites are in orbit, the software can recognize them from frame to frame and compensate them out of the dataset. Whether it's tens or tens of thousands the issue is the same, these swarms of telecommunications satellites are effectively invisible if they're handled rationally.

The one area where observation from the ground is wrecked is in the part of the spectrum where data is being transferred, the radio bands. Every satellite, whether it's a telecommunications satellite or any other, is doing that on a fairly continuous basis - all that Earth observation mapping data, for example. If you're scanning deep space on those frequencies you stand no chance, but again the number of satellites isn't the problem, it's that they exist at all.

[LarsMac]

I've just been informed that we are on an area of limited resources, and therefore will be required to cough up an additional 20 bucks a month for the privilege of using their service.
My first reaction was to say, screw THAT! and go back to a land-based provider.
But then I remembered all the adventures said providers had given us since we moved out to the Boonies, and my investigation showed that I would probably go back to horribly unreliable serve to save that extra 20 bucks.

For the now, I reckon that I am committed to staying with it and coughing up the extra cash.

[Bryn Mawr]

I've just been informed that we are on an area of limited resources, and therefore will be required to cough up an additional 20 bucks a month for the privilege of using their service.
My first reaction was to say, screw THAT! and go back to a land-based provider.
But then I remembered all the adventures said providers had given us since we moved out to the Boonies, and my investigation showed that I would probably go back to horribly unreliable serve to save that extra 20 bucks.

For the now, I reckon that I am committed to staying with it and coughing up the extra cash.

They should have thought of that before giving you a contract - demanding extra money later definitely come under the category of shady practice.

[spot]

They should have thought of that before giving you a contract - demanding extra money later definitely come under the category of shady practice.

Most major UK ISPs have added an annual hike of inflation plus 3.7% to their existing contracts, which I would term lazy wickedness.