Starlink Beta - Impressive

Correction, third largest I think. LOL. For the front range anyway. (DEN reporting station.)
 
FastEddieB said:
I have my deposit down for StarLink service as soon as it becomes available here in E TN.

We’ve been cobbling up cellular WiFi solutions for home internet but each has had drawbacks. Current solution is $140/mo, so StarLink is cheaper after the initial hardware.

Wired via Spectrum was an option, but they wanted something like $13,000 to run the line. I assume StarLink will be a similar godsend for all sorts of rural, and even suburban folks in similar situations.
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AT&T unlimited LTE Data is $35/mo. I used to run two of them and pulled TB’s of data a month sometimes. 20-25Mbps.

The trick is to register it as a tablet then pop the SIM in an LTE Modem or all in one router.
 
I gave Skynet my deposit back in February. I’m on the grid but Comsuck is so bad I’ll pay the premium to finish cutting the cord.
 
Thanks to my fantastic telephone coop, I live in modern boonies. Twelve miles to nearest McD, and supermarket. Gigabit fiber at house and hangar on 200 acres. Dirt road when we moved here a long time ago. Single lane "hard-surface" now. It's amazing how much difference there is from one place to another. All their members in several counties in middle TN have access to fiber, basic service at no extra cost. Most if not all have been installed for telephone service. Since I was able to eliminate one phone line, I actually saved money when they installed fiber. They called a few months ago to tell me I could save $10 a month if I dropped the landline in the hangar, since the modem gives 911 the location, landline is no longer required.
 
YooperMooney said:
AT&T unlimited LTE Data is $35/mo. I used to run two of them and pulled TB’s of data a month sometimes. 20-25Mbps.

The trick is to register it as a tablet then pop the SIM in an LTE Modem or all in one router.
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I did that with an AT&T mobile hotspot for almost a year. AT&T apparent caught on and killed the service.
 
So I should update this overall post with the specifics after a couple weeks.

There’s outages. Lots of tiny outages. They are about a minute in length. About one an hour at this latitude.

For my use cases, steaming never cares since it buffers way ahead. Real time things pause and rarely disconnect. (Like RDP or ssh sessions...)

Longest outage I’ve seen was 13 minutes. Quite rare.

Latency is decent. There’s no getting around physics and the video above mentions needing lots of ground stations. 40-150 ms and variable is common.

All in all even as a beta with outages it beats the hell out of the fixed wireless but I set up dial WAN on pfSense and fail back to the microwave ISP just in case. I’ll usually see that happen once a day. It’ll switch back in a few minutes per my monitoring settings.

Speeds are incredible. Fastest I’ve seen is 210 Mb/sec. But it’s highly variable. Typically it never falls below 40 Mb/sec.

Be interesting to see how it goes as they launch more satellites and such. I’ll be keeping both providers for a while. But enjoying the streaming and speeds.
 
YooperMooney said:
I’ve ran this for years without a hitch. Just get another sim
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For a short while AT&T made a dongle that plugged into a vehicle OBD II port that was $25 a month unlimited and had a WiFi hot spot in it. Intention was to give vehicles cheap data.

Guess what people did immediately? Buy an OBD connector, and a 12V power supply... and took it inside. Hahaha.

Worked for a long time. RVers and such loved it. Deal was killed pretty fast once AT&T realized how dumb they were and people were selling the power supply kits and connector on eBay. Hahaha.

To their credit they grandfathered most of the users for a long while after it couldn’t be ordered anymore.

Best place to hear about wild / dumb deals on stuff like this is the RV Mobile Internet folks. Chris and Cherie are super nice peeps.

A number of frequenters here also know her brother and he’s a pilot and aviation business guy.

https://www.rvmobileinternet.com/news/

Lots of their info can be applied to rural fixed use besides RVing.
 
FastEddieB said:
The tech savvy friend who set me up said AT&T had blacklisted the IMEI number on my device, rendering it unusable on their network.
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Wow they maybe have recently caught on. I moved back into the city and now have Spectrum 150Mbps and life is good again.
 
What's really impressive is seeing the line of Starlink satellites!
 
EdFred said:
How does it work during a thunderstorm? I know my parents dish always goes out when it rains.
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Well, seems they are Ku and Ka band, so sometimes you’ll have rain fade (Ka).

As far as satellite internet on moving objects, they will figure it out one of these days and maybe even get a couple hundred megs to a jet doing Mach .95 at FL400.
 
Still plugging away 7x+ faster than the best terrestrial option here.

Can’t complain.

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NHWannabe said:
iirc, hughesnet did not work with VPN because of the delay.
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The old style satellite services had ping times in the 1000s which some software would detect as a bad connection/error. With sub 100ms pings I wouldn’t anticipate that being a problem on Starlink
 
FastEddieB said:
Not sure what you’re getting at. The IMEI was on a cellular WiFi hotspot, and I’d guess AT&T was in their rights to refuse to provide service to specific devices.
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There are instructions on internet for changing the IMEI on some devices. I have never tried it but I would be looking at it if a service provider decided that equipment that I had bought to use with their service was mysteriously cut off.

It is illegal in some countries to change the IMEI but apparently not the USA. This is likely an attempt to thwart phone thieves.

I think the IMEI has fields for Manufacturer, Device, then a unique number. I might consider changing the Device to one I thought they might like, such as a phone.
 
You might be able to find a LTE modem device that will inherently allow you to assign the IMEI.
 
Neat visualization of links.

Starlink.sx

Won’t work on a mobile browser.

Plunk down a location for your “station” and then watch how the constellation may be routing you to ground stations and Points of Presence.
 
I have had my Starlink order in for a long time and heard nothing. Until today, when an email prompted me to sign in, which told me they're expecting to be providing service to my area (just outside of Knoxville, TN) in March, 2022. I had expected much sooner, and Elon is infamous for optimistic predictions, but its still good to hear something. We're still stumbling along with a modified cellular solution, but its both expensive and pretty slow and unreliable.
 
Why are we spending billions to wire rural areas for broadband? If they waited a month or two, they could just get Starlink. It seems like there is corruption and kickbacks somewhere.
 
LesGawlik said:
Why are we spending billions to wire rural areas for broadband? If they waited a month or two, they could just get Starlink. It seems like there is corruption and kickbacks somewhere.
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Maybe.

But cable or fiber optic broadband is likely to be cheaper than the $500 equipment charge and $100/month that StarLink will cost. Remember that a significant number of Americans could not come up with $400 to cover an emergency, much less “find” $500 for StarLink equipment, unless financed.
 
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I doubt buying everyone in rural areas a Starlink box would cost nearly as much as stringing and maintaining tens of thousands of miles of fiber. Maintaining that system is a never ending process. I suspect if big.gov went to Elon with a RFP, he might give them a discount off of the sticker.
 
Sounds' like a much better solution to broadband in the country than the nonsense of sending it over the powerlines that the FCC pushed a number of years ago. The chairman's idea of "rural" and my idea of "rural" were entirely different. But, I grew up in eastern Washington state and I know "rural", he didn't.
 
Just 20 or so miles east of Knoxville, we’re kind of semi-rural. No easy internet access as I’ve complained before, but making do.

About a year ago, Spectrum announced service to our area. But when they came out for a survey, the cost to run cable from the main road to our house down a gravel road was $13,000. We will eventually have 3 or 4 more homes down our road, but even split 4 or 5 ways that’s a fair chuck of change. We may look into renting equipment and doing much of the grunt work, but it would be nice if the BBB plan could somehow subsidize situations like ours - but I don’t see that happening any time soon. So until then, StarLink seems like our best option. C’mon Elon!
 
FastEddieB said:
About a year ago, Spectrum announced service to our area. But when they came out for a survey, the cost to run cable from the main road to our house down a gravel road was $13,000. We will eventually have 3 or 4 more homes down our road, but even split 4 or 5 ways that’s a fair chuck of change. We may look into renting equipment and doing much of the grunt work, but it would be nice if the BBB plan could somehow subsidize situations like ours - but I don’t see that happening any time soon. So until then, StarLink seems like our best option. C’mon Elon!
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From a financial perspective, wired rural broadband will likely never make sense. The costs are too high and the return will always be negative, especially once you factor in system maintenance. If StarLink can make money at $100/month, that’s probably not a bad deal considering cable providers charge almost that much for bottom-tier Internet access in areas where there is no competition.

I love being rural, but the rural broadband problem needs to be solved in a way that is financially responsible and sustainable.
 
I live in Montana, and have paid $100/mo for 2 to 7 down and 0.5 up (only if on a good day). The signal source was microwave to a tower. But I finally got ‘selected’ to try the beta Starlink. I’ve had it now for about 3 months. I average about 40 down and 15 up, but have recently been getting 200+ down. It is truly revolutionary, and I hope everyone can get it soon.
 
Starlink sent out a mass email earlier this week to those of us who have pre-ordered. Mid-late 2021 has become mid 2022 due to supply chain issues. :mad:

I've lived in rural areas and had no option for good broadband for most of my adult life. I've heard promises of things "just around the corner" for most of that time. I've had 2mb wireless at my current place for the last 6 years, with "25mb service available soon" for that whole time. Don't care about the politics or the efficiency of it, I just want the option of decent internet. I've lost count of how many politicians have promised funding for rural broadband, how many great promising new technologies have been thought up, etc. This is most promising thing I've seen yet and I hate to say it but I'd probably have still be in for a much higher asking price(although I know for many that wouldn't be true).
 
I keep thinking about the similarities between electrifying the USA and getting broadband to rural areas...
 
Bob Noel said:
I keep thinking about the similarities between electrifying the USA and getting broadband to rural areas...
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And electrifying the highway system for EV charging.

Here in the Southern Appalachians we’re still benefiting from actions taken 90 or so years ago by FDR via the TVA. And every time you jump on an Interstate, thank Eisenhower for money spent starting in the 1950’s. I’m sure neither were backed unanimously, but hard to they’ve not been a net benefit.

Historically, money spent on infrastructure has generally been money well spent, politics notwithstanding.
 
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JGoodish said:
From a financial perspective, wired rural broadband will likely never make sense. The costs are too high and the return will always be negative, especially once you factor in system maintenance. If StarLink can make money at $100/month, that’s probably not a bad deal considering cable providers charge almost that much for bottom-tier Internet access in areas where there is no competition.

I love being rural, but the rural broadband problem needs to be solved in a way that is financially responsible and sustainable.
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I find the best way to look at it is that not having broadband is a feature rather than a problem.
 
FWIW, my telephone co-op simply replaced the copper telephone wires with fiber. I don't know the P/P ratio, but the second P, performance is fabulous. Gigabit internet, "cable TV" if you really want it, and superb phone service. All at a very reasonable cost to the consumer.

Edit: The power company does an incredible job of keeping the power lines free of trees. I doubt overhead fiber would work otherwise.
 
Tarheelpilot said:
I find the best way to look at it is that not having broadband is a feature rather than a problem.
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I definitely hear you. The flip side is that being connected has for years permitted me to earn an income with additional flexibility and family time versus being tied to a desk in an office every day. However, there is definitely a cost to it. Avoiding social media definitely helps to keep the experience more positive.
 
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