I live in a rural area of the world by most standards. I live between Chicago and Fort Wayne, IN. Internet options are very limited, so much so I’ve been fairly desperate to get a decent internet connection. Prior to finally acquiring a Starlink terminal, we’d been using a mix of line-of-sight (LOS) options to pull internet from a cell phone tower.
Starlink, in principle, is also a LOS system. If you’re curious how Starlink works, make sure to check out this previous post.
What follows is our experience with Starlink so far.
The waiting
Before we dive in, I wanna note what it’s been like to just get my hands on a terminal. When Starlink was first announced, I delayed signing up for the beta program because I was a bit skeptical SpaceX could pull this off — that turned out to be a mistake. By time I did signup, I was wait-listed and my eager beaver rural peers had already received their terminals.
We were initially estimated to receive a terminal in late 2021, then it was pushed back an entire year to late 2022. I had been keeping myself out of contract with the old ISP in hopes that I could switch to Starlink and not have to renew my contract.
Still desperate, Starlink sent me an email saying I was eligible for “Best Effort”. Best Effort is basically “what’s left over” from the users in my area. Because of the way Starlink works, the quality of service in your area depends on how many other users are using it (similar to cable modem service). The price is the same as “normal” tier users ($110/mo as of this writing) and I decided to take them up on their offer. For comparison, I was on a 20Mb Down/ 10Mb Up service for $110/mo — highway robbery when compared to an urban fiber connection.
I’m technically still in line to get “normal” service when available.
Cha-ching
When I made my original reservation for a terminal, it cost $100 to hold a place. When I accepted the offer, the terminal shipped to me. The cost breakdown was like so:
As you can see, my deposit was applied and it arrived in about a week to my door. At this point we were very excited.
What’s in the box?
The product engineering team took an interesting direction with the design of the terminal. Inside the box were very few things:
The dish (rectangular edition).
Dish base.
Modem/Router (all-in-one).
Proprietary cable to connect the dish to the modem/router.
And that’s it. I wanna note that I was a bit disappointed with the dish itself, it clearly looked used which raised my blood pressure a bit. I reasoned it would be outside and get dirty anyway, so I accepted it.
What is very interesting is that there is no ethernet cable jack on the modem. This became problematic as I had an entire house hard-wired with ethernet and access points already (more on this later). Since I already had an ethernet connection from the outside of my house (the LOS system), I was planning to just connect it there. Since Starlink uses proprietary cabling, I had to ponder how I was gonna install this.
Because we’d waited so long, I hastily wanted to see what sort of service we’d get. So a setup the dish in our backyard and powered up the terminal (router was outdoors at this point since I didn’t have a way to punch a hole thru the wall just yet). The first speed test yielded a promising result:
The Starlink terminal is controlled by their app (I’m on Android) which is very simple and easy to use. The night concluded by me having to tear down the terminal and store it away until I could figure out how I would bore a hole in the house and connect to the rest of my network.
More waiting
After waiting over a year for “best effort” service, I definitely was a bit sad that I couldn’t begin using the terminal right away. I had a few problems to solve:
How will I punch a hole though the outer wall into my house?
How will I connect it to the rest of my network once I’ve done so?
Where will I permanently mount the dish?
I solved issue two first which informed issue one and three. I went onto the Starlink website and found a few necessary accessories to purchase:
Roof mount
Angle mount (required to use with the roof mount)
Ethernet adapter
Cable routing kit (bore a hole in wall)
Starlink needs a view of the “dome” of the sky. Legacy satellite internet needs to point dishes to the South (from the Northern hemisphere) because those satellites are geosynchronous where Starlink birds zip around constantly. Therefore the app they have allows you to do a site survey to find the best location for your dish. In the end, the roof will likely always be your best bet unless you have a large field and a very long cable to get it back to your house. For reference, the cable that comes with the original kit is 75 feet long.
I purchased the following accessories:
If you’re keeping score, so far I’ve spent $704.57 and still haven’t gotten to really use it yet. After about a week, I got all my accessories only to find out that the flashing mount was missing all the bolts/screws.
Starlink is notoriously bad to get ahold of a human being. Since I have a shop full of fasteners, I cobbled some together after I couldn’t find a phone number to contact Starlink.
Then it snowed.
Installation Day
We had a warm day finally come scare the snow & ice away and we made the best of our time. I mobilized my wife and son to help install the terminal on the roof.
The installation went well but it was mostly due to the pre-planning we did. We had to find a location on the roof for the terminal that would allow for the cable to come into the house near an ethernet jack. We found suitable area to bore the hole and fished the cable thru the wall.
The Cable Routing Kit came with grommets to tidy up the hole we put thru the wall. Pictured about is the modem/router and in the back right of the picture you can see the ethernet adapter that works by hijacking the signal inline.
Test time
Starlink engineered this to “just work” out of the box. There’s little to do to get internet working quickly. Let’s look at some of the usages we’ve encountered during the first week.
Ping of doom
I setup an infinite ping test to CloudFlare to see how latency/packets looked. So far it’s better in most regards to our old ISP, but not necessarily the best. I’m speculating that some of the packet loss/latency is due to the handing-off of satellites/ground stations:
Team Fortress 2 (PC)
I played one of my favorite games of all time (Team Fortress 2) to see how gaming went. While playable, there was some noticeable lag at times. I do hope the “normal” tier resolves this.
Xbox Game Updates
My son immediately wanted to update some of his games on his console. We were seeing 150Mb/s download speeds. He was pleased :)
Streaming Video
We’ve had no issues with streaming our favorite shows so far, I assume this can only get better when we get upgraded to the normal tier. We’ve been able to stream at least two things at once without issue.
Connecting to the existing network
I use Ubiquity routers/switches/access points in my house (not a sponsor), so fortunately I was able to backfill the Starlink connection to the rest of the network. The things I had to do to make this work appear below:
Buy the ethernet adapter from Starlink, hook it up.
Reconfigure my EdgeMAX router with the help of this video.
Please note that network 192.168.100.0/24 is private for Starlink’s use for management (more below).
The biggest thing I had to do was move my LAN off of 192.168.1.0/24 to something else (but not 192.168.100.0) because Starlink seems to use 192.168.1.0/24 for the mesh router it comes with.
Once you get everything setup, you can go back to the Starlink management IP (192.168.100.1) in a browser where you can do things you can normally do in their app:
You can even get some WAN stats:
Worth it? You betcha
As of this writing, it is very worth it to our family in our specific situation. The wait isn’t over for us as we’re still in line to get “normal” service. From what I’ve been told from some friends associated to Starlink, the current bottlenecks are not space asset related, rather the number of ground stations (and their bandwidth ability) is the problem. As more ground stations come online, that should resolve. Starlink generation 2 birds are supposed to be able to laterally move data between satellites which could help with the lack of ground resources.
It’s rather unfortunate that a country like the United States has such poor access to broadband outside of urban areas. I’d rather be on a fiber line for a variety of reasons, but Starlink is a bit of a godsend so far for folks who don’t like the hustle and bustle of large cities. Rural folks are also very desperate for any sort of high-speed internet and it has translated to much higher prices per MB/s.
I can’t vouch for services in other areas of the world nor their mobile/RV offering. I do think Starlink is a bold/daring/controversial solution to the digital divide.
My advice to prospective Starlink customers:
If you’re in a rural setting get on the wait-list now.
Your experience of the actual services varies based on who is using it near you geographically.
Get the app and do a site survey so you can plan ahead for the install, know what accessories you might need.
Starlink might be tricky to get on the phone, google all-the-things. It helps to have geeky friends help you.
If you can get >100Mb/s down and >10Mb/s via another provider; Starlink is probably not for you.
I hope you found this useful, good luck!