I don’t actually have Starlink. I was just considering it for a hot second and figured I’d write down the thoughts.
I was getting annoyed at our home internet service the other week and started looking into other options. In the end, I called our service provider (TDS) and they were like (1) your modem is very old so we’ll just mail you a new one (2) you’re on a grandfathered plan that is 600 megabit1 @ $140/month, we’ll put you on a plan for 1 gigabit @ $80/month. It’s annoying I had to call and complain to get that as it seems like the base deal now, but for now, I’m going to keep it.
While I was looking at other options, Starlink of course came up. Despite being an Elon Musk enterprise (don’t like the guy, myself), Starlink is a good idea executed well and I’m glad it exists. Particularly because it keeps the fantasy alive of one day living in a more remote area.
Here’s my own “research” (light use of that term) I was doing to see if it would really be viable for us.
Is it available where we live?
Totally. I was surprised it’s so widely available. There is a decent chunk of the Pacific Northwest that is “Sold Out” though, and I don’t know what the deal is there.
Do people who have it here seem to like it?
They really seem to. I see people recommending it and speaking highly of it regularly.
Will it work at our house specifically?
Bit of a yellow flag here.
You need a clear line of sight to the sky. We have a lot of trees in our yard. We’d need to verify this. The official Starlink app has a free built-in tool to check this out, so we’d just do that and see. My best guess is that we’d mount it on top of our house and hope for a way we can point it that is clear enough to work.
How do you install it?
You do it yourself which is kind of nice. Nice in the sense that it avoids the scheduling an appointment weeks out for 4-hour blocks of time and all that.
It comes with a “ground mount” and a lot of people just stick that thing in their yard and call it good. I don’t think I like that, and with the trees situation, I think the roof mount is the way to go, and I’m sure that will be easy enough to do.
The hard part, I’d say, is the fact that you have this 75ft cable (which can never be any shorter or longer) needs to run from the outside thingy to the inside modem/router. So you basically have to find or make a hole in your house. I don’t think I’m particularly qualified for that nor do I think most are. They make it seem easy but kinda gloss over this aspect.
What does it cost?
$120/Month for the basic unlimited service, plus a $349 “Standard Kit” for the equipment.
We could upgrade to “Fixed Site” plans with higher priority service if we wanted to.
What are the speeds like?
They cap out at 200 megabit. Which is OK? Not amazing. I have no idea what we’d pull down on average and I doubt there is any perfectly reliable way to know until it’s installed and going at our house.
That is one fifth of the speed of the plan we have now for 50% more money so that’s a bit of a hard sell.
What if we don’t like it?
They’ve got a 30-day full refund policy.
Does it do that thing where we have internet everywhere we go?
Sort of. There is an add-on called “Roam” ($50/month for 50GB or $165/month for Unlimited) that does that. We’d also need a “Mini Kit”, which is a portable panel thing which is $599. We’d have to install/position the panel thing everywhere we go, so it’s not exactly just mindless good internet. Generally I find the tethering option with our current AT&T mobile plan quite good for travel internet.
- I still think megabits is a ridiculous metric to use ( “Mbps”/”Megabits per second”). It’s an eighth of a megabyte. Nobody knows what a megabits are, they know what megabytes are, because it’s a size metric that is actually used. It’s a trick to make it seem like a bigger number. ↩︎
Delete this comment after you’ve read and acted on it.
“They cap out at 200 gigabit.”
I think you mean 200 megabit.
I agree though, megabits are a shit way of measuring speeds any more.
Out of curiosity, what do you (and your friends and readers) do when you see a product from a company headed by someone you have concerns about? Do you ever say “heck no”? Do you factor it into the decision? Or do you try to keep different spheres of your life separate?
It certainly factors in, but I don’t have a coherent system to explain. Sometimes it’s simple, sometimes it’s not.
We lived in a rural place where Starlink was our best option for internet. For the most part it worked great, and we were grateful to have it after having no internet or very slow internet. The one problem we had was there were a ton of intermittent disconnects so if you were on a video call it would drop like once an hour, sometimes more. If you do a lot of video conferencing, I’d avoid it, unless they have fixed this. I’d add we lived in the middle of a field with no obstructions.
Oooof. That would be hard.
Starlink works great for us in Australia. We’re in an area where we cannot get access to fibre internet, and the Australian Government’s solution is their “satellite” internet which gives us 12mbps/2mbps
Starlink has been great for us, as we get unlimited internet (not all plans in Australia give you unlimited usage) at a consistent 250/20.