Starlink is surprisingly good, actually
Haven't seen anyone mention that project in a few years, but now I'm in the unique position to talk about it. I live somewhere where I can't get any proper internet service - mobile broadband is slow, DSL or fibre lines are not brought out to where I live, and the only other option is cable internet access, which I've 1. had bad experiences with in the past and 2. where I live is operated by a company with laughably bad reviews at exorbitant prices for what they offer. We are talking about 60 USD (eq) a month for 100 megabit service.
So I shopped around to see what other options there are, and Starlink made me an offer. Free equipment, which is usually 400 bucks, delivered to my house, and then an unlimited data plan at whatever speeds I can get where I live for 50 a month, with a one month free trial. I said yes, paid with Apple Pay (seriously, did not have to fill out a single form or sign anything) and the dish arrived the next day.
Now, I know, Starlink is run by Musk, who is somewhere around the top 10 of my nightmare blunt rotation and also pretty likely to be an actual neo-Nazi, but I say whatever. It's not like the alternatives are much better, and at least SpaceX has some actual value for humanity, if you ask me. I might put a "I bought this before Elon went crazy" on my router, though.
I got the dish delivered and set it up on my roof. The app - which is excellent - tells you to orient it north if you're on the northern hemisphere, and to roughly point it up. I built my own mounting solution - a wooden board with mounting holes that snaps in place on my roof - and set everything up, not expecting much.
I was absolutely blown away. The app, once more, is stellar and incredibly easy to use, and a joy to play around with. I got a satellite connection in minutes, and did a speed test. I got 200 down and 50 up in the Starlink app, but independent speed tests as well as my own experience routinely hit 400 down and around 80 up. Genuinely impressive. Ping around 30, by the way. Consistent as well.
The next few days were a similar experience, although I did notice a drop in speeds if there was heavy rain. The speeds dropped however to around 150 over 30, which is still more than usable, and latency was not impacted at all as far as I can tell.
Honestly, it's a super compelling package. Setup was so simple my grandma could have done it, the hardware is beautifully made and very robust, and the designers really did think of a lot here. The cables are just weatherproofed Ethernet and you can bring your own (although they don't recommend it), the router is Wifi 6 and looks damn snazzy, the dish can even heat itself up to melt snow in winter.
If you're looking for reliable internet service, I really can't recommend Starlink enough. If where you're planning on running it is within the service area and you're fine with the 50 dollar a month price point (no speed or data caps, by the way) I'd say go for it.
Now, there are people who will say that it's a good option for remote places, but not that great for densely populated areas in buildings that could get for example cable service, and you shouldn't rely on it. But, well, I haven't been completely honest here:
The real sting in the tale is that I live in one a large European city with plenty of access to other internet methods (just unlucky in terms of my specific building, which is getting fibre next year), and mounted the dish on top of my townhouse in one of the most dense districts in town. It works flawlessly, and it's been the fastest internet service I've ever had, period.
Course, it can't compete with a fibre line, sure, but many people don't have those - and then, service or hardware might still add large costs on top of that. And with Starlink, I can just take it with me whenever I move, and don't need to ever worry about ISPs again.
I don't have many sufficiently nerdy friends to talk about this with, so if you're curious or have any questions, I'll do my best to answer them. If you have Starlink too and feel like I missed something, feel free to contribute to the conversation.
I live on a farm in a rural area of Australia. When I moved here, the property was serviced by a phone copper network. If we got a consistent 4mbps down, it was a good day.
Around 2020 or so, Starlink became available here just as Australia's NBN was preparing to roll out infrastructure to our area. NBN representatives told us that our area would be getting fixed wireless towers rather than fiber — but fixed wireless requires a clear line of sight to the tower, and we had a couple trees blocking the way. (Fixed wireless can penetrate foliage to some extent, but it's iffy.)
At the same time, Starlink had a really great, but temporary, introductory deal for our area (I assume to get a lot of sign ups at the same time to economize on installation), and we had to make a hard decision: either jump on the Starlink deal now, or sign up for fixed wireless and wait to see how it would work out — by which time the Starlink deal would have expired.
My partner and I talked about it, and we ultimately decided that, while going with Starlink probably made more sense on paper, we were hesitant to become enmeshed in any enterprise headed by such an impulsive and untrustworthy figure as Elon Musk.
I'm really glad we made that call. Fixed wireless turned out to work flawlessly for us (the only hiccup was that they initially gave us better upload speeds than download speeds, and it took a few months for them to reverse the ratio), and Elon Musk has only grown more impulsive and untrustworthy over time.
A lot of our neighbors (particularly those in gullies and in heavily wooded areas) didn't have the option, unfortunately. I really hope Elon Musk is severed from Starlink as soon as possible or that a comparable competitor shows up soon; the 3G network was controversially disabled a couple years ago, and 4G cannot penetrate these areas, so satellite access is potentially life-and-death. It's pretty messed up that an unstable sociopath on the other side of the world is the gatekeeper.
I used Starlink for about two years once it became available for me in rural Maine. My other options were dial-up, cell data (one or two bars at best, and heavily throttled by Verizon), or a significantly worse satellite option (Hughesnet).
I did appreciate the relatively higher speeds I could get through Starlink, but even with the dish mounted as high as I could on the roof I still experienced pretty regular service / signal interruption that would break any downloads or disrupt any streaming. I would estimate an interruption once every two or three minutes in the summer when all the trees have their leaves, and maybe 8 to 10 minutes in the winter when I had a clearer view of the southern sky.
That being said, it was clearly superior to my other available options, and despite my deep misgivings with Elon - dating back to long before his current rightward turn - and the satellite swarm powering Starlink I would have kept using it if a land-based broadband network hadn't (finally, after years of waiting) become available about 6 months ago. Land-based service has few to no interruptions and consistently higher speeds.
I live in a village area of a town of about 800 year-round residents, in the foothills, woods, and lakes of central-western Maine. Perhaps someone with a clearer view of the sky might have had better service than me. But for what it was I was grateful Starlink was available for the time I did need to use it.
Starlink is pretty excellent if you just want the internet at your house. It is a complete joke if you want to do literally anything else. Admittedly you can chuck it into bridge mode, but the fact that you can't even set DHCP reservations, let alone even something mildly annodyn like set a static route is hard to eat in 2025. You know it's running Linux! Just expose some functionality.
100%. I mentioned in my top-level comment in this thread that I had a coworker who got Starlink. We were fully remote, but because she often printed Tabloid/11x17" (roughly A3-sized) certificates, we sent one of the copiers that used to be in our office to her house. Which I had to set up on her home network. The first time I went to her house was before she got Starlink. She had a traditional ISP-provided home WiFi router. I connected the copier via ethernet to a WiFi bridge, signed-in to the router to see the subnet and DHCP range, then set the copier to a static outside the range. I think I was even able to reserve the IP in the router. Easy peasy.
When she got Starlink, I had to go back, since Starlink also comes with its own home router. And that thing is total garbage. It has barely any options in its network config. Couldn't tell the size of the IP space nor could I tell the DHCP range. Asking around online, people assumed--no one seem to know definitely--that the router used a /24 and that the range was the same. So I just ended up taking a guess that the Starlink router would increment the DHCP IPs by 1 address when a new device needed an IP. And that she and her family didn't have an insane number of WiFi devices. So set the copier to like a .240 static. And like you said, there's no IP reservation. I told her that I couldn't guarantee the copier wouldn't just stop working one day because the Starlink router just decided to hand out that "static" IP.
I thought about the bridge mode to like a cheap TP-Link home WiFi router...But I didn't want to set up and possibly have to "support" her home network. That's beyond the scope of my job. No thanks.
I've had home fiber service in two locations in the US, one East Coast one West Coast that has a zero config handoff. The device just hands out a public IP. If you want you can lease a Wi-Fi router from them, which is what I assume most folks do.
Honestly, I prefer that model because I just put in my own border device and configure things how I want internally anyway. I would say that is more like a DIA business handoff that gives you a /32 which I like coming from a background in network engineering and building private WANs. Just give my my /32 or /29 for a DIA, or peer with me and let announce my own /16.
So I don't see that as a knock against starlink exactly.
Sure, but starlink is charging you for a router. A router which is completely shit. Also if you switch to bridge you lose access to a bunch of stats relating to the uplink, unless you set your router up with a weird undocumented route.
If it were just a case of byo with DHCP for the upstream address I'd be fine with it. Instead it's the epitome of sleek silicon valley condescension. Which is a big shame because the quality of the link is great.
If they bundle the router cost in no matter what that does suck. That you lose their stats makes sense if you use your own border device makes sense.
Shame that they are the best option by far for remote rural areas.
$60 a month for 100mbps is on the high end but within reason, I would take that deal over starlink every time. The vast majority of people would be completely fine with those speeds- that's gaming, 4k streaming, video calls - all at the same time. What is pretty important, is low latency connections so games don't lag and video calls stay snappy. And no satellite connection, even starlink LEO ones, will perform as well as the average cable connection.
You did not though. You bought this after he went crazy knowing full well you'd be supporting a megalomaniac with entirely too much power already.
Assuming that you're getting the bandwidth paid for, maybe.
I'm stuck on a supposed "350mbps" plan that runs over $80 USD/month and never tests north of 100mbps, more typically around 90 and occasional "outages" of sub-10mbps.
But that's download speed. As for upload, its always under 10mbps, and that's a strict enough limitation that several activities I'd like to do, and in cases used to do when living in less of an internet black hole, won't work on that poor of an upload speed. Unfortunately, there's no viable non-satellite competitor in my area yet, with the one company attempting to do so being mired down in conflicts over the infrastructure.
While I would consider resorting to connecting my mobile plan's internet to PC before resorting to the awful options in stand-alone satellite, I also get why others would take the lower friction, more capable option. Everyone gets to draw their own lines in the sand when it comes to the oxymoron that is ethical capitalism. I have lines I draw and lines I'd like to draw but don't or can't, because being able to draw those lines is limited to the privilege experienced by those drawing them.
Replying to @delphi here too because I'm lazy and some of my comments are connected:
My point is for most people a high speed internet connection with low latency (Different sources say different things but anything 100Mbps+ is "high speed" in the US where I'm based so I'm going with that) will be more useful than a much higher speed with higher latency connection. If the only providers of ground based connection have outages or restrictions preventing you from using it how you need to then that changes things. Stable internet is a necessity in the modern world so I wouldnt shun anyone for using starlink in such case, nor water from nestle in a drought, etc. Do what you have to do.
I wouldnt say thats the case here though. It's $10 a month more for something arguably better and does not support someone who is "likely to be an actual neo-Nazi", their words. That calculus doesn't sit right with me. Maybe thats privilege, idk.
Also - "I'm sure my fifty bucks a month will turn the tide against fascism" - is like arguing your single vote doesn't count or your recycling efforts are pointless because they're small in isolation. I dont buy into that. Collective change, even from small consumer decisions, is a massive force when spread across a critical mass of people.
I'm sure my fifty bucks a month will turn the tide against fascism in fascism's favour.
Come on, hate the game, not the players. If I had better options, I would. And to me, 60 for 100 is absolutely not within reason, and is closer to 75 after taxes and EU conversion.
The only experience I’ve had with it was on a recent Hawaiian Airlines flight, since they’ve equipped their fleet with Starlink. It performed very well, much better than any other in-flight internet I’ve used, though that is a very low bar. It felt more or less like a typical decent 4G cell connection.
At home I have gigabit fiber which is clearly better, but there’s a lot of parts of the US that are well beyond the range of any cell towers where the best thing available is slow, unreliable ADSL or even 56k dial-up. For the people living in such areas good satellite internet must be a godsend.
I definitely have reservations paying for it given the associations involved (as you pointed out) but much of its clientel don’t have many other options.
That's an understatement if my mother's situation isn't unique. She isn't that far from a small city (in USA), but still has bad cell coverage and is currently having issues with her landline because, according to the people doing the repairs, they are being forced to use scavenged parts. Which means even when they repair it, the parts fail quickly. Her line has been basically unusable, full of static and dropping calls, for a few weeks now.
They started with a process of checking her home wiring, which alone took a week to get someone out there (not 5 miles from the city), and from the repairman's own mouth they know it's at the box down the road, but are being forced to check the house anyway (he was apparently not too happy with not being able to just fix it). The company, who sells fiber internet/voip in the city nearby, bought her previous provider not that long ago. We're thinking they are trying to get rid of their landline customers, but for some reason can't just drop them.
Safe to say she's working on getting satellite internet with voip. I'm hoping they get the landline repaired just in time for her to cancel her service. 😈
I'd recommend keeping the landline as backup. If you cancel, you likely won't be able to get it back.
My father was an early adopter of voip, so at my mother's house, when the cable goes out, so does the phone service.
That's a good point, I'll have to mention that to her. They have a lot of power outages due to all the trees in the area and an abnormal number of people hitting power lines. The phone line is underground so the only thing that seems to bother it is lack of proper maintenance and the one time someone ran into the box.
Where I used to work, I had a coworker who lived like 50mi outside of the metro in some small town. A village, really. The place literally had no traffic lights, it was that small. But we all worked fully remote. Which meant lots of Zoom and Teams meetings. But cable was awful. 5G home service was even worse. Fiber was slowly making its way to her house (and did come), but obviously that wasn't helpful while it wasn't there. So she got Starlink as soon as she could. And it really was a huge difference for her.
She went from regularly going pixelated and robot-y during Teams calls to excellent quality and rarely having connection problems. It was expensive, I don't think our company helped subsidize any of that, but it was worth it. Her family benefited too, from being able to game and stream Netflix better.
But she did drop Starlink less than a year later, once fiber arrived at her doorstep. I actually don't know if it was FTTH or FTTC, but didn't matter. Still the best terrestrial service she had. And I believe it was much cheaper than Starlink.
Up here in the boonies of northern Canada, I regularly see Starlink dishes on the back of pickup trucks and service trucks. Guys who work out in the middle of nowhere can still be connected. Beats the old days when they would come into town and rent 14 movies at the video store cause they knew they were going to be stuck in some remote location in their truck for two weeks with nothing much to do.
i’m glad you had a good experience. As a bleeding heart it’s always difficult to take service from someone like musk, but as you said, the head of Comcast AT&T, etc. are equally bad.
The issue with starlink in urban areas, is not the connectivity of anyone particular user. It’s if all the population in a dense area try to get online, there isn’t enough satellite bandwidth to support them all.
Our local hackerspace, which is in the middle of a city of a couple hundred thousand people, uses it. It's in an industrial area where only one provider offers fiber connectivity, and it's a shitty one who's unable to provide good enough service for our needs - which is that one of our members who runs a VPS non-profit has a couple testing servers in there and in return pays for our connectivity.
So at one point he became so pissed with the quality of the local provider's service that he decided to just pay for Starlink instead. It's not exactly perfect, it's especially spotty during bad weather, but it actually works better for his needs than what we had previously.
As soon as we can get fiber from someone else without paying 4k € for them digging and laying down the last 50 or so meters that are usually missing, we'll switch, but this is honestly fine.
Hard pass. I'd rather stay (and I actually did stay) with my shitty 8mbps/1mbps connection than directly give even 0.01€ to a ketamine-addicted buffoon who's quite literally trying to eradicate people like me.
I used to believe I could separate "the art from the artist," but Elon Musk changed my view. If I had to choose between no internet or using Starlink, I would choose no internet.
And I say this as I realize how much I rely on the internet and know it would be difficult, possibly for months or even a year or two, to go without it.
This may sound dramatic and empty bravado, but I mean it. Elon Musk has promoted far-right parties in Europe and poses a threat to our democracies and the EU. Like you, I will never purposely give him any money.