At the end of my last post about the state of rural internet, I mentioned that we were about to try something new: Starlink by SpaceX. We've been using it as our primary internet connection for two weeks now, and TL;DR it would be tough to give it up, but it does have some limitations.
Download speed via Starlink is excellent. Samples I've taken via Speedtest.net over my wifi have never measured less than 30Mbps. Most samples are in the 60-80Mbps range. My highest measurement was 146Mbps. Upload speed via Starlink is also excellent. Speedtest measures them anywhere from 5 to 15Mbps. Ping latency bounces around a little bit, but is usually in the 40-50ms range.
Typical speeds I measured via fixed wireless were 20Mbps down, 3Mbps up. So Starlink, in beta, is already providing a pretty consistent 3-4x speed improvement. I no longer worry about downloading updates while trying to do anything else on the internet.
Unfortunately there is a "but", because while the speed is great when it's running, the connection drops for a second or five every few minutes. The dish's statistics indicate that these interruptions are about half due to Starlink making updates ("beta downtime") and half due to the trees blocking my dish's view of the sky ("obstructions"). I'll be working on the latter when the weather warms, and they're constantly working on the former.
These short interruptions have almost no effect on browsing or streaming. Every once in a while, a page will pause loading for a moment, or a video will re-buffer very early on. I notice it only slightly more frequently than I remember cable internet hiccups.
But what these short interruptions do affect is video calling. Zoom, Facetime, etc. are frustrating. It /almost/ works. For two, three, five minutes everything is smooth, but then sound and video stop for five to ten seconds, and you have to figure out what the last thing everyone heard or said was. My wife participated in a virtual conference this past week, and she tried Starlink each morning, but switched back to fixed wireless after the second or third mid-presentation hiccup each day.
And yet, there's also a silver lining to the outage story. One of our frustrations with our fixed wireless provider is that we've had several multi-hour outages over the last three months. On Thursday, we finally had a two-hour Starlink outage. Why is that a silver lining? When I loaded Starlink's support page over my cellphone's limited 4G connection (remember, my wife was video conferencing on fixed-wireless), they had a notice up that they knew about the outage in our area, and listed an expected time of resolution. That sort of communication is something we have never gotten from our fixed-wireless provider. It completely changes how I respond to an outage, and it gives me hope that Starlink better understands what people expect from internet service today.
If you're curious whether data backs up my subjective review of Starlink connectivity, please continue to my next post, which includes the dish's own statistics.
The comparative price of the two solutions is nearly a wash. Starlink hardware is $500 plus shipping and handling (another $50). Our fixed wireless installation was $119, with the option to either buy the antenna for an additional $199, or rent for $7/mo. That makes Starlink at least $200 more expensive up-front, without including any additional mounting considerations (brackets, tower, conduit, etc.). And don't get me wrong, white the setup seemed simple to me, the value of professional installation and local, in-person troubleshooting should not be overlooked.
But once everything is in place, the monthly costs are the same: $99. For fixed wireless, that gets me 25Mbps that handles video calls well, but goes out overnight. Starlink is currently a no-guarantees beta, marketed as "better than nothing" for people who can't get even my alternatives. Even in this state, it's providing 4x more speed for me, with better communication about downtime. I think they'll have no trouble selling these to loads of people, and if they significantly improve the video-calling experience, they'll put fixed-wireless out of business.
Categories: Starlink
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