Starlink Posts

Saturday, September 21, 2024

Four years ago, we submitted an offer on a house in the far north of Wisconsin immediately after checking the final box on our search list: could we get internet service there? Last month, almost four years to the day of accepting the seller's counteroffer, a Spectrum salesperson knocked on our door.

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Monday, January 23, 2023

Another January marks two years of Starlink internet service for me. As I predicted at the end of my last experience post, there wasn't any single event worth writing about. But, here's a wrap-up of the last eight months:

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Thursday, May 12, 2022

Our growing season has now started again, and the leaves are about to come in. But I prepared this year. In March, I called an arborist who helped me plan the necessary work. After waiting out our road limit season, the team came out on Monday.

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Friday, October 29, 2021

I skipped my Starlink update posts at the end of August and September. I wrote a draft for August, but was never happy with it. One of the firmware updates changed the format of the dishGetHistory fields I was using to chart my connection quality. So, it wasn't really the data-driven kind of article I like to write.

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Sunday, August 1, 2021

July marks my sixth month of Starlink Better-Than-Nothing Beta service. Many of these months have been rough, and even July brought its own oddities, but as I look through the data I've collected, it's obvious that the network is rapidly improving right now.

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Friday, July 2, 2021

June was an exciting month for networking in the Northwoods, with lots of new data collection activity.

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Tuesday, June 1, 2021

I said at the end of last month that I was looking forward to writing this month's update. Mid-month, I built a tower and got Dishy up in the air, hoping to cure my obstructions. So how did it go?

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Wednesday, May 19, 2021

One reason I haven't worked on fixing my obstructions before now is that winter makes the ground impenetrable, and the roofs treacherous. The second reason is that I didn't want to attempt any solutions without having data to guide me.

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Thursday, May 6, 2021

This one is a bit of a shorter update, because there's not a lot new to report. Outages remain frequent, and longer, like they did in March. Starlink announced that they would be rolling out an update that would allow the dish to change which satellite it's connected to when it sees an obstruction. If that has made it to my dish, I haven't noticed its effects.

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Thursday, April 1, 2021

Another month has passed, in which I continued to use Starlink as my primary internet service, except when I needed to make Facetime or Zoom calls. From a subjective standpoint, I can tell you this: March was a far more frustrating experience than February.

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