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.