Starlink

[grsthegreat]

I just found out that Zipley fiber is building a new substation out by us. hopefully fiber isn’t too far behind.

 

[rekees4300]

Elon Musk will host Saturday Night Live on May 8.

No joke: Elon Musk to host Saturday Night Live on May 8

IMHO he did a good SNL job.

 

[Citydude]

I got a notification that my Starlink hardware is being shipped to me. Should be here tomorrow.

 

[Fallon]

They are limiting the number of subscribers in a given grid location (10 square miles I believe). Mostly due to a limited number of downwind stations, but due to a limited number of birds as well. Current birds are only setup for up & down traffic I believe. They were still working on the peering systems to send traffic from 1 bird to another. Once they get that routing sorted out traffic can get routed to an uncongested or non-local downlink station.

For now you are artificially locked to a given grid location. They are talking about mobile applications like RVs, planes & the like, even while they are moving. But that option won't be around until the network has more birds, ground stations & a feature upgrade or 2. I heard they were wanting to get mobile stations out the end of this year, but that may be optimistic Elon time.

 

[Elvenhome21]

I've been on the wait list for a couple months. Hoping it finally comes soon

 

[rekees4300]

They are limiting the number of subscribers in a given grid location (10 square miles I believe).

Apparently that explains why I've heard nothing but crickets from them for 9 months? location...location...location

 

[Fallon]

Apparently that explains why I've heard nothing but crickets from them for 9 months? location...location...location

Ya, I've been on the list a while & know of a few who signed up adree me who got gear shipped already. I'm reasonably close to Denver, but farcenough to live off a dirt road. Higher population density here. But friends in the mountains with much lower density have gear.

 

[ponytug]

Ya, I've been on the list a while & know of a few who signed up adree me who got gear shipped already. I'm reasonably close to Denver, but farcenough to live off a dirt road. Higher population density here. But friends in the mountains with much lower density have gear.

I have been on the beta list within 48 hours of it opening, and on the preorder list within a couple of hours of it opening.

I agree with you; I think rural density has a lot to do with it, once you move beyond the extreme north. They seem to be choosing beta sites within good range of uplink stations with low population densities. We are like you, quite rural, (no cell or broadband) but close to a population center. There seem to be more than a few that have gone to those with large social media followings.

I keep hoping that we "win the lottery" and get to try out the Starlink service. I expect it to be transformational. Fingers are still crossed.

All the best,

Peter

 

[forgeblast]

Thats what we call it too...winning the lottery. It would just be a huge order of magnitude improvement over what we have. I cannot wait to dump frontier.

 

[BigBlue1]

My 2 month update:

Service seems to be notably improved since I got the dish in March. Very few disruptions now, except for one desktop that seems to be unhappy with the Starlink router. According to the stats page, 11 min of beta downtime in the last 24 hours. But none of it was visible to me. I've currently got the Starlink router feeding my Deco mesh system but I think I'm going to pull the router and just hook the mesh direct to the Starlink controller and try that. I've been using Starlink for my work, which is on VPN all day long and often involves lots of meetings over WebEx/Zoom/Teams, and it has been pretty smooth.

Also got my dish up on the roof now (was just sitting in the lawn). Cable is run but I haven't mounted the dish permanently since I have one big maple tree that I was worried might obstruct. The Starlink obstruction app showed its top branches just barely peeking into the cone of sightline in the spot I want to mount the dish. Zero obstructions reported for 2 days though, so I think I'm good to install the mount. Using the 'Flashing Mount' to properly install it under the shingles.

Strangely, even though Starlink download speeds are dramatically better than the LTE modem I have used as my primary Internet for years (often 170-200Mb/s vs. 30-60Mb/s) video streaming via things like YouTube TV/Netflix/Prime Video seems to not be as happy. The video is less crisp and more pixelated through Starlink. Not a dealbreaker but unexpected.

Rob

 

[ponytug]

Thanks for sharing. Real world experience is very helpful, and informative.

Can I ask what sort of ping times are you getting via up your Deco mesh network, vs just Starlink?

The pixelation suggest wayward packets to me, but whether the cause is a few maple branches, or something else in the line of sight, or Starlink routing issues, I don't know. Can you manually force YouTube / Netflix into a high resolution mode to see if it might be an artifact of an auto speed algorithm with them?

All the best,

Peter

 

[BigBlue1]

I haven't paid much attention to latency between the setups. In general, it isn't spectacular, at 35-75 ms, but it isn't much different than my LTE connection and that never gave me any issues.

I'll have to do some playing with the video streaming to see what I can find.

Rob

 

[Fallon]

I haven't paid much attention to latency between the setups. In general, it isn't spectacular, at 35-75 ms, but it isn't much different than my LTE connection and that never gave me any issues.

I'll have to do some playing with the video streaming to see what I can find.

Rob

41ms of latency between Denver & New York at the speed of light. Real world anything under 100ms is OK, under 60ms is good, under 40ms is really good (even for hard-core gamers). A lot of real world latency comes down to where the gear on the other end is you are testing against. From here in Denver 45ms to a server in NY is amazing. 44ms to a server in Denver is ok or good.

 

[grsthegreat]

Than why can’t bigblue1 stream movies. That’s the man reason I want fast internet. Here I’m waiting to hear how soon we can get fiber. I checked into Verizon lte and it’s not available in my area. Strange since we’re not far from the tower.

 

[Oaktree]

The included router seems decent but not anything exceptional. The good thing is that you have options. You can plug your mesh system into the Starlink router for better home coverage or you can omit the Starlink router entirely and just use your own setup.

Can you change the settings in this router or at least make it run in bridge mode and use your own router? While I don't care about wifi, I do like to be able to control which addresses are DHCP so I can assign static IPs if needed, set up port forwarding, etc.

Just the other day I noticed one of their uplink sites in Gilman, Vt. About a 15 x 15 foot fenced off area (with slats so you can't easily see inside). There were some white radomes visible over the top. Must have just put it in sometime in the last month or so, don't remember seeing it last time I was down that way. Seemed to be kind of an out-of-the-way location for something like that.

 

[Oaktree]

By the time the various governments make any real progress, StarLink will have solve the problem.

Now to make it affordable....

 

[Oaktree]

Don't Try to Pirate Movies on SpaceX's Starlink

Interesting.

A better word would be "creepy".

Orwell was wrong, it's not government big brotherism we need to worry about, looks like Space-X is just as bad as Facebook, Apple, Google and the rest of big tech. Who knows what other content you're accessing that they're monitoring.

 

[ponytug]

Can you change the settings in this router or at least make it run in bridge mode and use your own router? While I don't care about wifi, I do like to be able to control which addresses are DHCP so I can assign static IPs if needed, set up port forwarding, etc.

Just the other day I noticed one of their uplink sites in Gilman, Vt. About a 15 x 15 foot fenced off area (with slats so you can't easily see inside). There were some white radomes visible over the top. Must have just put it in sometime in the last month or so, don't remember seeing it last time I was down that way. Seemed to be kind of an out-of-the-way location for something like that.

They sprouting like mushrooms around the country. Looking at the map, it looks like they are in remote-ish areas with fiber to get the data out.

I think of Starlink like an umbrella, with the satellite at the tip of the umbrella; the signal gets bounced from you up to the satellite and down again, somewhere under the umbrella. While future satellites are supposed to have inter-satellite lasers to transmit data, the current ones have to hand the data off to somewhere more or less under them.

Since the speed of light in space is faster than light in a fiber, the future laser satellite version might have the ability to get data from Denver to New York faster than you can do it on the ground, which becomes very, very valuable to certain customers. e.g. "Flash Boys"

All the best,

Peter

 

[BigBlue1]

41ms of latency between Denver & New York at the speed of light. Real world anything under 100ms is OK, under 60ms is good, under 40ms is really good (even for hard-core gamers). A lot of real world latency comes down to where the gear on the other end is you are testing against. From here in Denver 45ms to a server in NY is amazing. 44ms to a server in Denver is ok or good.

Interesting. I was under the impression that sub-30ms was what folks considered 'good'. Never really paid much attention to it though since I've never had issues.

Rob

 

[BigBlue1]

Can you change the settings in this router or at least make it run in bridge mode and use your own router? While I don't care about wifi, I do like to be able to control which addresses are DHCP so I can assign static IPs if needed, set up port forwarding, etc.

Just the other day I noticed one of their uplink sites in Gilman, Vt. About a 15 x 15 foot fenced off area (with slats so you can't easily see inside). There were some white radomes visible over the top. Must have just put it in sometime in the last month or so, don't remember seeing it last time I was down that way. Seemed to be kind of an out-of-the-way location for something like that.

There is zero control of the Starlink router but the good thing is that you don't have to use it. You can just plug the Starlink controller's (i.e. the 'modem') into your own router. I'm trying mine that way today to see how it works.

I did find that my speeds were better connected directly to the Starlink router than either with Starlink-->Deco or just Deco system direct. I'd never experienced a speed difference between my Deco and the Netgear Nighthawk LTE modem I used as my primary for years prior.

Rob