SpaceX Starlink First Impressions
Many people have asked about my experience with Starlink, so I am writing a blog! As someone who lives in a rural area and began the pandemic with 10 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up internet speeds, I’ve been counting the days until Starlink was available to me. Even though I submitted my information at each stage of the Starlink announcements and beta, I did not receive a notification that Starlink was available for me to order. I found out from a coworker instead. After reading his Slack message, my order was confirmed in 10 minutes. I also placed an order for the Volcano Roof Mount at the same time.
Three days after my order was placed, the Starlink dish kit shipped. It was supposed to arrive 2 days after that. FedEx has been delivering packages to my house for about 1.5 years now. Every once in a while, they cannot find my house, so I have to call and give them directions after I see my package was on the truck for delivery and returned to the warehouse that evening. Of course, this was one of those packages. After the additional 2 days for delivery due to a snowstorm and the new driver, I finally had the Starlink box in my possession.
Starlink POE Injector and WIFI Router in a plastic bin on my deck.
I immediately shoveled the 4 inches of snow off my deck and setup the dish with the router outside. It was entirely too cold to crack a window or door to run the ethernet cable inside unless I wanted to pay $2000 for my propane bill that month. So, I used a large plastic storage bin to house the PoE injector and router and plugged the power into an outdoor outlet on the deck. They kept each other warm in their cozy plastic bin with the lid snapped shut!
First speed test of Starlink.
The instructions said the dish needs to face north. That isn’t exactly true. The dish needs a clear line of site from slightly NW to NE. My deck is on the west side of my house, so the house was blocking line of site for the dish most of the time. But I was able to connect and do a speed test. Considering the conditions of the “install”, I was impressed to see 79 Mbps down, 18 Mbps up, and 42 ms latency. I left it online in this state after weighing it down with a duffel bag and backpack full of cans from the pantry. My partner and I noted we need to purchase sandbags.
I left it online overnight so we could stream Netflix since my current internet service was down. In the morning I peeked at the app and saw the stats for how much time the dish was connected with internet access and how long it was down “due to beta”, upgrades, and obstruction in the app. It was obstructed almost 50% of the time from the moment I brought it online the afternoon before. I was impressed we could watch Netflix almost uninterrupted from a WIFI router in a plastic bin outside 20 feet away with 50% downtime! Unfortunately, the wind was picking up, and I didn’t want a $500 tumbleweed. I packed it up and brought it inside that morning.
Two days after the first test on the deck, my internet from service provider for the last 1.5 years was still down. The radio burned out on their dish. They don’t send out technicians on the weekend, so I was without internet for 4 days as, of course, this failure occurred late Thursday night. The technician was supposed to arrive Monday morning to repair the radio, but my roof was covered in snow and ice. We rescheduled to Tuesday afternoon. Tuesday was Global Leadership Forum at work, and I had at least 6 other meetings on my calendar. Spotty 4G hotspot on my phone wasn’t going to cut it for a full day of meetings. I hauled my plastic bin to the east side of the house and ran the cable for the dish as far north and slightly east from my front door as possible.
Starlink dish without obstructions, or so I thought!
At this point, it was physically impossible for there to be an obstruction. But the app still reported an obstruction about 10% of the time. There must be a lot of space garbage blocking the signal. My theory is they use “obstruction” as a catch all for no connectivity. Interesting tidbit: in the stats in debug mode in the app during the “obstruction” the dish was still connected and showing stats for upload speeds and ping, but it showed no data for download speeds. This meant I couldn’t get through a Zoom meeting without a significant audio and video freeze or full disconnect. Starlink was fine for watching others present on Zoom, but it wasn’t ready for interactive Zoom meetings. It also wasn’t ready for online gaming with these short, frequent outages.
Luckily my internet technician showed up around the time I found out that Starlink was not ready for Zoom meetings, and he replaced the radio on my other dish. I was back in business with 26 Mbps down and 6 Mbps up on my point-to-point WIFI internet service. The wind was picking up again, and I didn’t want any animals chewing on the ethernet cable overnight, so I packed up the dish and bin until my roof mount arrived.
I checked my account on Starlink to see if the roof mount was scheduled to ship. There was no update in its status, so I emailed support through the app. I heard back from support about 24 hours later telling me my roof mount will ship in the next 7-14 business days. I only had to wait 5 days to receive the shipment notice and delivery was only delayed by 1 day due to snowstorm. This gave me 3 days to get my brother-in-law to agree to do all the hard work of the installation on the roof. I’m grateful he is the type of person who always shows up when you need him. He agreed to install the dish on the roof, and we waited until the weather was nice enough to work on the roof safely.
Check out Part 2 of this series to see how the roof installation went!