Starlink: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Its been 3 months of having Starlink, here is my assessment. FYI, I am at a 38.6 degree latitude.

In case you don’t know what Starlink is, it is SpaceX’s system which gives you internet access via satellite receiver. The stated ambition of the company is to provide high-speed internet access anywhere in the world. They plan to do this by deploying 10,000 small low Earth orbit satellites, which receive your signals and transmit them to many ground-based transceivers. At the time of this writing, SpaceX has already deployed some 2300 satellites, and keep adding more on an almost weekly basis.

The service isn’t the least expensive, if you have any other alternatives. My startup costs were $500 and my monthly costs are $110. If I want to add roaming capability and take my antenna with me, I can enable this feature on the Starlink website and pay an extra $25/month. Regular travelers and RV users love this feature.

There are other satellite internet services, such as Hughes or ViaSat, but they are so 90’s in their poor bandwidth and service aspirations. The bandwidth I am able to get now is adequate, but more on that later.

I first reserved my system back in February of 2021. I paid $100 deposit, got an email confirming I had placed my order… and that was it. For months. I finally received an update November of 2021, blaming delays on chip shortages and supply chain failures, which, I believe. I finally received an email saying my order was ready to complete in mid April of 2022. My receiver was shipped the next day, and arrived two days later.

The antenna comes with a wifi station and a small stand. The cable is 75 feet long. The wifi station is good, for what it is, but I have all wired internet in my home, so I had to order an ethernet dongle in addition to a J mount for outside setup of my antenna on the peak of my roof. From that point it has a clear view of the sky. The order for the dongle took an extra month to fulfill… while I could use Starlink with the receiver on the ground, it really wants to be high and free of obstruction.

Once I got the receiver mounted, I attached my own router, set up the connection via a mobile app, and with a bit of fiddling had internet access throughout the house. Our land-based legacy provider was temporarily disconnected while we tested Starlink out.

I did all the setup; my roommate didnt even notice that our provider had changed. She used her computer, and watched Netflix and youtube without trouble. I noticed some difference, however, as I obsessed over Speedtest.Net statistics. Our previous provider was giving us 200 megabit/sec down and 6 up, and Starlink was giving us maybe 30 mbits/sec down and 8 up. I worried that the antenna location wasn’t as good as I thought it would be.

Over the next few days though, the service improved. I tried all sorts of stress tests, and only once did my downloads buffer, when getting some 4K youtube demo video at peak usage. I have not experienced a single outage, although I have seen a couple wireless pauses on a system which is at the far end of the house. All other access, except for phones, are wired. Today when I got home, I was getting 105 mbits down and 50 mbits up. We’ve not had heavy storms or snowy weather, so I don’t know how Starlink will perform under those conditions.

Having tested in various ways, I am convinced that my antenna can receive and send 200-300 mbits to the satellite network, but that congestion on the ground is the primary limiting factor now. Once SpaceX is using its bigger rockets to launch version 2.0 satellites, I could easily see my service approach 1 gigabit/sec of bandwidth.

Just like other Elon Musk company offerings, his products get better over time, and I think that Starlink will too, as they continue to put more satellites in orbit and establish more base stations on the ground.

Starlink isn’t for everyone; the more densely populated your location is, the more traffic you are contending with, and the longer wait you will have before you can order the service.

Why did I switch when the legacy provider is clearly delivering more bandwidth? Because I relish the opportunity for competition. I am an early adopter, and I am in part supporting a company who wants to expand the free communications of all people. Ask someone in an active war zone, where their internet access is being blocked, how they like Starlink?

UPDATE: we had a lightning storm this morning… I checked bandwidth. Starlink was down about 20% during the storm, but still very functional. We’ll see about that when it is heavy snow! Also, I was asked about gaming on it. What games I have played have been fine; I am not super-latency-sensitive! And I regularly video and audio conference over the system with no trouble.