Starlink for typical household service. Anybody use it?

You’ll get a solid 150 down and 15 up for $100-$150/mo, after ~ $500 investment in equipment.

Enough to make a rural house able to run devices like a normal house in the city. 3-4 tv streaming 4k, some cameras, some whole home audio, even a home automation system.

You will get better for cheaper in the city with ATAT / Rev / Cox though

quote:

---

~ $500 investment in equipment

---

Pretty sure it's on sale for $299 through early October

I'm thinking about putting in Starlink at our lake house because we can't get broadband down there.

Is the SL constellation equatorial like SXM/Dish/DirecTv so you have to have a pretty good open view to the southern sky? Our best open sky view is west/northwest.

quote:

---

No, Starlink wants to point toward the north (assuming you are in Atlanta or similar latitude).

---

Awesome, thanks. Lake house is slightly south of Atlanta, rough latitude of 33° 20' 20.349"

Have had it for 2 years. Early on it was around 50 down and 15 up. Now it’s consistently between 100-120 down with 15 up. It’s a game changer for my location. I would rather have fiber but I cannot complain about Starlink. We could never stream before we got it. Nor could my son use his Xbox to its fullest potential.

One of my employees is RVing as of this summer and on our teams calls I'm noticing she drops frequently. She was using some service I'm not familiar with.
She said she was getting starling to change to and picked it up last week. Our next call wasn't much better and she commented to me that she has to manually move whatever dish she has according to the app.
A neighbor close to me has her starling dish on her roof.
I thought newer technology satellite didn't require you to move the dish, but you still do with starlink?

quote:

---

I thought newer technology satellite didn't require you to move the dish, but you still do with starlink?

---

It prefers a certain orientation and the app will tell you to move it, but it works regardless.

People use starlink while driving their RV. Some of them mount the dish flat which is not optimal, but if you're moving and always changing direction then it's the best thing to do.

At long as she's in an open area teams calls should work fine. Might have another problem. The end device possibly?

quote:

---

~ $500 investment in equipment


Pretty sure it's on sale for $299 through early October

---

What generation will this be? I am checking into getting this for my RV and the 50gb for $50 plan that I can start and stop.

quote:

---

We're testing Starlink at a remote site (through a prospective vendor) and the results are mixed. Speeds are good, but we've noticed a brief but distinct dip (if you're monitoring it) when the signal is passed off to the next satellite. I haven't been that involved in the testing, so no idea if it's something noticeable when streaming movies (due to buffering) or just browsing the web.

---

I switched us from Cox to Starlink a few months ago at my day job. We are on the residential plan (so no priority data) and it supports ~12 users every day. We are not data-heavy, maybe 1TB/month of usage but concentrated during the 8 working hours m-f. And honestly most of that data is probably youtube, facebook, tiktok, and porn.

I also switched us to VoIP phones at the same time, and afaik we haven't dropped any calls due to an issue with Starlink. I haven't seen any video buffering nor heard any complaints from others. I am able to view our surveillance cameras remotely with no issues whatsoever.

Speeds do of course vary by the minute, and latency varies by the second (typically "spiky" pings 30-45ms vs. the steady ~25ms we had with Cox), but this is not in any way noticeable for anything we do. Internet protocols were designed with varying latency and transfer speeds, and even dropped packets in mind, so pretty much everything we do via Starlink just works without issue.

I haven't done much deep or active monitoring, mainly relying on the bit of insight that our UniFi gateway provides (and the starlink app). I can tell you that updates have been frequent (like a couple per week I guess) and it will reboot itself ~3am quite often. I don't see where this is configurable, and I'm not sure if it will wait for a quiet period if you are actively using the service. Latency tends to spike the most in the evening (probably when people are settling in at home and using the service) which is not a problem for us during the day.

We had Cox for internet and phone service before, and while the service was usually solid, the speed was faster and more consistent, and the latency was better, we just couldn't stay with Cox due to the frequency and duration of outages. We would lose all communication for a week after every hurricane, very often for a day or two after a regular storm, and sometimes for a few hours for no weather-related reason at all. It was just awful.

With Starlink and VoIP phones, everything around us can be totally demolished, power and cable lines down everywhere, and as long as we keep the generator fueled up we have power, internet, and phone service.

Oh, and Starlink + VoIP service is half the price we were paying to Cox for internet and phones.