Why do you only get 15 min to decide whether you want or don't want this service? That would be a MAJOR red flag to me, you would think if this was a legit outfit an offer was an offer, even for Musk this is sleazy. Almost no time to investigate. How did they get your name/address for this "offer"?
They got my info because I requested to be notified when the Beta test of their service was available in my area. The people who make this request have already investigated. I have been watching this for maybe a year now, waiting for it's availability. I already knew the specifics. The price was actually a bit better than I had heard in my earlier research. The Beta testing is limited. They want people who know what they are getting into and recognize that there are issues until they expand their satellite coverage. The 15 minutes is basically take or we'll move on and make the offer to someone else. They are not in a sales and marketing phase, they are in the debugging phase as they roll out the infrastructure. As such, they only want to deal with people at this point who know what they are getting in to.
Sure, the 15 minutes bit was a bit over the top, but I already knew I wanted to jump on board. When you kid is stressed out and in tears because she cant participate in the online portion of her school classes, that's quite a motivator. Not having to sit in my car in the local elementary school's parking lot to make use of the highspeed public WiFi for all of my business meetings, starting the car every once in a while to charge the laptop battery and heat the car (or leaving the car running continually in our current cold weather) is another powerful reason to consider other options.
I'm not on here to try to convince other people to go to Starlink. There are lots of other, cheaper options
if they are available in your area. There is no choice in my neighborhood, and the existing 7/1 DSL lines are failing (there are currently NO spare, fully-functional copper pairs to switch to if another pair fails).
The folks who actually have other options, or don't need the higher bandwidth don't seem to get this: I work for a company that is 700 miles away. I need the higher speed to make a living. My kids need it to be able to go to school (our high school split the students: half go in person on Monday & Tuesday and have remote classes Thursday & Friday, with Wednesdays a day to fully disinfect the school, and catch up remotely with teachers if you have problems with a subject.)
Is your current phone/DSL provider Vtel? They seem to be quite proactive in running fiber, even to places that are relatively off the beaten path.
No. It's Consolidated Communications, who bought the landlines from Fairpoint, who bought them from Verizon (who was looking to shed themselves of their VT landline presence entirely). Fairpoint had no idea what poor condition the infrastructure was in when they bought it. They did make some efforts (including extending fiber just close enough that they could run DSL the rest of the way to us). Consolidated has done almost nothing in rural areas even for maintenance, let alone upgrades.
Consolidated says they are starting a big push to expand fiber optic using some state or federal grant money. They are touting their effort to run fiber direct to the home. Maybe we'll actually see some improvements this time. Last time they were crowing about this, they just put all the effort into improving the speeds in the larger cities (which already had much higher speeds than we do). I'll believe it's coming to our neighborhood when the installation crews are actually parked on our road. As noted in an earlier post: when fiber to the home comes to our area, I'll jump on it. It will undoubtedly be faster and cheaper than Starlink. In the mean time, Starlink is an order of magnitude better than our existing service, so I'm going with that. Yeah, the hardware costs a bit. To me it's worth it.
I don't really care one way or the other about Musk's personality - I'm not asking him over to dinner. What I care about is that it's a way out of the internet nightmare we are currently in. Judging from many comments from those who have already signed up, it's a way out that works well. Are there better ways? Sure. There are just none of them available to me right now.
