Starlink

[sodamo]

Mobley would be a nice backup that I would love to have, but the AT&T signal here is somewhere below 130, well below completely unusable.

What else are folks using to backup Starlink, just in case?

All the best,

Peter

You might find this interesting. My AT&T signal sux. Phone service terrible, but strangely up on my roof I get a good LTE signal which with help from a Yagi antenna I get decent signal to Mobley. With WiFi my phone works

 

[ponytug]

You might find this interesting. My AT&T signal sux. Phone service terrible, but strangely up on my roof I get a good LTE signal which with help from a Yagi antenna I get decent signal to Mobley. With WiFi my phone works

To be honest, I hiked to the top of a hill close to the house and got up very high and had less than 120dBi. From the direction, I guessed that the signal was refracting/reflecting along the hillsides to get to me, and I guessed that would make the signal unstable to cell tower tuning and weather. I also figured that by the time I put in a yogi or parabolic, amplifier, enclosure, and power, it was not going to be inexpensive. The other hilltop (yes we are in a ravine/holler) has better signal, but no power, and no reasonable way to get the signal to the house, as in $20k, with me doing a lot of the work.

Did I mention that Starlink has been a game changer?

It just makes me nervous not to have a backup, because as we all know stuff happens.

All the best,

Peter

 

[sodamo]

Same here. SL may not be 100% but soooo much better than anything else.

We have a tower almost within sight just up the hill, but blocked by terrain/trees. It has Verizon & TMobile. I was attempting to get that via a 3rd party Mofi setup when I found by accident that I could get the ATT LTE by accident. That tower is about mile away different direction.

 

[BigBlue1]

I have my Mobley plan as a backup to Starlink. No longer use the Mobely device... I upgraded to a Netgear Nighthawk M1. Much faster than the Mobley. That said, I hardly ever have to fall back to that source of Internet. Starlink has been very stable for me. Only during hard rains or electrical storms do I get drop-out.

 

[ponytug]

The Starlink router here is reporting frequent (4-5/hr) 0.5-15s drops 8n service characterized as "network issue"s, or "obstructions" (there are no obstructions). This has been going for weeks, but is a new issue.

I put in a support request, which was closed out by them due to poor WiFi connection by some devices, but that isn't the issue (and I told them so in the ticket). The poor WiFi "issue" is devices passing through the Starlink WiFi router's range, but that is not the problem. The problem appears either to be a firmware update/hardware issue, or a failing cable, as it is reported by the Starlink router itself (I.e. no WiFi), and apparent through the use of Ethernet devices. A reboot doesn't fix it. The last time we had these issues, Starlink replaced the router and cable and the issue was resolved. I'm wondering if the dish end of the Ethernet is now dying.

Anyone else having these issues?

My bet is failing equipment, but reinstalling the cable is a pain for a dish 20' in the air.

All the best,

Peter

 

[dmccarty]

The Starlink router here is reporting frequent (4-5/hr) 0.5-15s drops 8n service characterized as "network issue"s, or "obstructions" (there are no obstructions)....

Anyone else having these issues?

....

Due to this conversation and one's on other websites about Starlink, I just checked our outages. I see similar outages, especially if one toggles on the .1s+. Flip side, I don't notice any service disruptions downloading, surfing, remote access, streaming, video meetings, etc.
We did not have the ability to see service status on our other internet service providers so who knows how many outages were going on. We do know that DSL was getting a large number of errors that would fill up the DSL router and require almost daily reboots. Sometimes multiple reboots a day.

There are outages but we have never noticed them when accessing the Internet which we do with multiple devices as long as we are awake.

 

[ponytug]

Due to this conversation and one's on other websites about Starlink, I just checked our outages. I see similar outages, especially if one toggles on the .1s+. Flip side, I don't notice any service disruptions downloading, surfing, remote access, streaming, video meetings, etc.
We did not have the ability to see service status on our other internet service providers so who knows how many outages were going on. We do know that DSL was getting a large number of errors that would fill up the DSL router and require almost daily reboots. Sometimes multiple reboots a day.

There are outages but we have never noticed them when accessing the Internet which we do with multiple devices as long as we are awake.

We do notice the lags, which is why I started digging around. Originally, I thought it might be weather related, or a mild system loading issue somewhere in Starlink land, but when it persisted for a month, I decided that I had enough. I suspect that the recorded outages are actually just the tip of the iceberg so to speak, and packets back up for longer. It can take many seconds to load a web page that normally loads in under a second.

I did monitor our DSL. When our DSL got bad, I would run continuous pings to monitor the link performance, and those logs were quite useful for leaning on the AT&T technical support team to prove that there were issues, and the issues weren't me, or my equipment. It is pretty easy to tell the difference between a 9ms ping and a 500ms ping, especially when the latter occur in long stretches. I used traceroute to find and ping servers inside AT&T, as well as outside. Starlink, at least so far, is better buttoned down, and the internal links aren't as visible, at least to me when I have looked.

Starlink has closed two tickets now, and is looking into a third with me, and has asked for photos of the dish and router multiple times. I have rebooted several times and killed the power to it as well to do a hard cycle. Stay tuned...

All the best,

Peter

 

[buckeyefarmer]

I call my mobley my internet in a box. I took it on a trip this weekend. I have power strip, modem with the mobley sim, and router all in a box.

 

[ponytug]

Starlink tech support sent this;

Hey Peter,​

Thank you for your patience! These outages are being caused by what we call handoffs. When a satellite and your dish need to switch, the time in between is called a handoff. These handoffs can happen roughly every 90 seconds and will not impact most user applications. Short outages less than 1 second long are generally too short to be noticeable in most cases, and shouldn't interrupt service. We try to be as transparent as possible which is why that information is included in the outage report. The app shares that these are most noticeable in online video games or video calls.

This is something that can vary as we make changes to our constellation, which is why you may not have experienced these before, and currently do. It is not uncommon to see these, and have them go away after some time has passed. We do not have any sort of time frame on when the handoff related outages will go away. We are always striving to make improvements to our overall network, whether it's more satellite launches, or making updates for our ground infrastructure!​

Do you have any additional questions that we could help with at this time?​

All I can comment is that it is a new behavior, it does impact service, and it is noticeable, which is why I looked into it. From the middle paragraph, it sounds like they know they have equipment issues on their end.

​

All the best,

Peter

 

[sd455dan]

You might find this interesting. My AT&T signal sux. Phone service terrible, but strangely up on my roof I get a good LTE signal which with help from a Yagi antenna I get decent signal to Mobley. With WiFi my phone works

That is what I had to do as well.
Antenna on a pole and a powered booster for the Mobley.
Only needed the Mobley a few times when Starlink drops out, plus it is nice to have mobile wifi in the older vehicles by just plugging into the obd2 port and using the Mobley like it was designed.

 

[sodamo]

I call my mobley my internet in a box. I took it on a trip this weekend. I have power strip, modem with the mobley sim, and router all in a box.

I think Netgear makes something similar.

 

[BigBlue1]

Starlink tech support sent this;

Hey Peter,​

Thank you for your patience! These outages are being caused by what we call handoffs. When a satellite and your dish need to switch, the time in between is called a handoff. These handoffs can happen roughly every 90 seconds and will not impact most user applications. Short outages less than 1 second long are generally too short to be noticeable in most cases, and shouldn't interrupt service. We try to be as transparent as possible which is why that information is included in the outage report. The app shares that these are most noticeable in online video games or video calls.​

​

This is something that can vary as we make changes to our constellation, which is why you may not have experienced these before, and currently do. It is not uncommon to see these, and have them go away after some time has passed. We do not have any sort of time frame on when the handoff related outages will go away. We are always striving to make improvements to our overall network, whether it's more satellite launches, or making updates for our ground infrastructure!​

Do you have any additional questions that we could help with at this time?​

All I can comment is that it is a new behavior, it does impact service, and it is noticeable, which is why I looked into it. From the middle paragraph, it sounds like they know they have equipment issues on their end.

​

All the best,

Peter

I have those same sub-second 'outages' listed for my system. I'm on VPN all day, every workday. Probably half of my time on Teams/Zoom/WebEx meetings with audio & video. Two kids who do a fair amount of connected video games. I have no noticeable disruptions to any of these services. Things have been rock solid since the beta program ended in summer 2021.

Not saying these things aren't affecting your service, but just suggesting that you consider that they might not be the root cause.

I'm just impressed that Starlink makes stats like these visible to customers. I can't think of any other ISP that would provide a outage tracker that revealed the guts of their systems.

 

[ponytug]

I have those same sub-second 'outages' listed for my system. I'm on VPN all day, every workday. Probably half of my time on Teams/Zoom/WebEx meetings with audio & video. Two kids who do a fair amount of connected video games. I have no noticeable disruptions to any of these services. Things have been rock solid since the beta program ended in summer 2021.

Not saying these things aren't affecting your service, but just suggesting that you consider that they might not be the root cause.

I'm just impressed that Starlink makes stats like these visible to customers. I can't think of any other ISP that would provide an outage tracker that revealed the guts of their systems.

Thanks! That is helpful on both counts.

I think it is a reasonable thought, and one that I am still poking around to explore. Our network is extremely lightly loaded most of the time with background uploads of a few kilobytes of data each minute. Downloads go up with streams and videos of course, but even without those uses, we see noticeable (5-10 second) delays opening simple web pages on relatively fast devices. The delays aren't reproducibly slow, and are not limited to certain sites. Checking my bandwidth logs on my router doesn't show anything, and shows something like 2-13% utilization of the link capacity.

I'm still exploring, but I am running out of rocks to look under here.

All the best,

Peter

 

[BigBlue1]

I guess there is always the possibility that the congestion or disruption is outside of the scope of the connection from your Starlink to the Starlink network (i.e. the satellite) but within the portion of Starlink from the sat to the ground station and its path to the Internet backbone. Perhaps your local area has high usage (in your cell or the ground station that serves your geography) and the bottlenecks are there. Probably not something you can really learn more about or affect, unfortunately.

 

[ponytug]

I guess there is always the possibility that the congestion or disruption is outside of the scope of the connection from your Starlink to the Starlink network (i.e. the satellite) but within the portion of Starlink from the sat to the ground station and its path to the Internet backbone. Perhaps your local area has high usage (in your cell or the ground station that serves your geography) and the bottlenecks are there. Probably not something you can really learn more about or affect, unfortunately.

I suspect that a) yes, we are in a high demand area (just due to the length of time it took to get a dish here, and we are adjacent to suburbia not well served by traditional providers), and b) I think that the behavior seems to be part of their dynamic bandwidth allocation scheme, and the latest version penalizes us because our usage is low and then when we request data, it takes their scheme a few seconds to allocate additional bandwidth our way. I know if I run several speed tests back to back that the first one is always lousy, and the subsequent ones are 2-5 times better. That suggests to me a certain inertia in bandwidth allocation... YMMV!

Packet loss to know sites is running 1-2% which is new behavior. It used to be near zero.

All the best,

Peter

 

[WoodChuckDad]

We had a recent Starlink software upgrade. I didn’t bother to check stats after the upgrade because I didn’t see any performance issues. About two weeks ago we experienced several periods of outage that lasted several minutes each, in the middle of the day. I didnt check speeds, when it came back just statistics for outage. I checked speed this morning when I first logged on to work and was shocked that it came back at 179 mbps. Usually a good result for us has been 70 or above. Some times dipping down to mid to low 20’s.
I checked again in an hour and it was over 200. Advanced test was over 200. But by 930 it dropped to just over 100. Still quite an improvement.

And this last one just now, at 1:30 on a friday came in at 195

 

[Torvy]

Finally got up on the ladder to mount the dishy on top of the shop (16' at shoulder).

Ran the cable under my lean-to, then inside shop and across the trusses where I have the Starlink router and Ethernet adapter in my loft. From there I have Cat 6A cable (shielded and outdoor rated) down the north end of my shop (near the house) and across the 15' (will bury, soon) to the house ethernet box I installed. That line runs to a switch with 7 rooms wired (installed during build). Then I ran one of those lines into a DLink dual band wifi router I had on hand. So far so good. Everything works OK. The bottleneck seems to be my old wifi router. (Getting 50-75 Mbps Up and 12-20 down) The TVs and Desktop will be wired all of the time. I have Jacks in places I commonly use my laptop, so I will be wired at least half of the time. Wifi bandwidth should not be a problem.

Any suggestions for an upgrade router that will not break the bank?

 

[newbury]

Finally got up on the ladder to mount the dishy on top of the shop (16' at shoulder).

Did you put something inline to catch lightning?

 

[ponytug]

FWIW: Outdoor rated cable is not the same as burial rated.

As @newbury points out, getting a gas tube and MOV surge protector on your Ethernet as soon as it comes out of Starlink is prudent, plus, of course, having starlink on its own surge protector as well.

Lots of modern routers should be able to handle 100-200Mbit connections. I would put some effort into moving slow, older devices to a different 2.4GHz WiFi network, and reserving a separate one for faster devices.

I'm a personal fan of a main / guest / IoT / printer network setup to get the easily hacked devices off into networks that can't access your main network. Way too many places have been hacked by printers and IoT gizmos.

All the best,

Peter

 

[Torvy]

Says it is burial rated.

Our whole electric system has a surge protector/conditioner on it. I know that does not cover the ethernet. I'll have to take a look at that. Right now, my lightning diversion is having a lot of trees that are taller than our buildings. Haha