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  #11  
Old 02-08-2021, 06:32 PM
shockwaveriderz shockwaveriderz is offline
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if you goto starlink.com right now you might just get lucky. Reddit users are reporting that they are able to deposit $99 as a down payment for Starlink service while others are reporting they are actually ordeing Starlink...from all other the country... high initial price tag: almost $600
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  #12  
Old 02-09-2021, 01:17 AM
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Just signed up and let them charge the $99. In my case they say that service in my area is set to begin mid to late 2021. That'll give me time to figure out how to get the cable into the house and prepare to jettison some other subscriptions. This may be the end of my landline....on which our current DSL service comes.

Added: of course right at the moment, fairly late at night, I'm getting pretty good DSL performance: 8ms ping, 24 Mbps down and 5 Mbps up (over 2.4 GHz WiFi with the modem/router in the next room). But that's probably on the upper edges of what I've ever seen with this....
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  #13  
Old 02-09-2021, 08:59 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BEC
Just signed up and let them charge the $99. In my case they say that service in my area is set to begin mid to late 2021. That'll give me time to figure out how to get the cable into the house and prepare to jettison some other subscriptions. This may be the end of my landline....on which our current DSL service comes.

Added: of course right at the moment, fairly late at night, I'm getting pretty good DSL performance: 8ms ping, 24 Mbps down and 5 Mbps up (over 2.4 GHz WiFi with the modem/router in the next room). But that's probably on the upper edges of what I've ever seen with this....

Congratulations! I think you'll find that it will be well worth the wait... although I gotta say that those DSL speed results you quoted are pretty impressive too, and if I were a really hard core gamer I would find just that low latency ping alone to be of particular interest because even down the road and at it's best I imagine Starlink would be hard pressed to match or beat 8ms (prove me wrong please, Elon!) That being said, there are some very informative posts on Reddit that you'll likely find to be helpful in planning your install, and some good videos on YouTube as well. Enjoy!
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  #14  
Old 02-23-2021, 04:25 PM
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Since they say that a picture is worth a thousand words, I thought that for my latest Starlink Beta Program thread update I would TRY to include a couple of photos of my installation, if for no other reasons than it might help some of you plan for your own install... or at the very least give you something hilarious to laugh at.

The first photo should give some idea of the general installation of the Starlink satellite dish ("Dishy") on a commonly available satellite TV dish mount called a "J-mount", in this case a Winegard DS-3000 Pipe Mount Kit. I ordered mine on Amazon because it was convenient for me to do so during the Covid lockdown; but you can likely find it or something quite similar at any big box building centre, or you may already have one of your own from a previous satellite TV setup. Note that unlike a conventional satellite dish mounting installation where the upper section must be aligned precisely vertically (to allow for the appropriate altitude, azimuth and sway adjustments to be accurately made on the accompanying directional bracket), as long as the upper part of the pipe mount is within 40 degrees of vertical Dishy is able to use its gimballed array to locate itself and over time lock on to the optimal position for signal strength and duration. In my case I chose the longer type of J-mount because I wanted to install it in such a way that Dishy could hang just below and just beyond the eaves of my cabin; but you might find that the shorter model might work just as well for your particular install, depending on where you are mounting Dishy.

The second photo should give some idea of how I routed Dishy's cable through the basement wall. As I noted in a previous post, Dishy's RJ45 cable connector and the accompanying ferrite core required that I bore a larger hole than would normally be required; but since I was drilling through aged exterior grade plywood this was not a problem. Astute observers will note that I actually remembered to "drill upwards" AND provide a "drip loop" to reduce rainwater incursion via the cable through the access hole, and did the same thing for the (hopefully code-compliant) #12 stranded grounding wire that I ran from the base of the J-mount to a grounding block just inside the basement (which in turn is connected via a #10 solid grounding wire that runs back to connect to the main ground of the building at an intersystem bonding connector). And yep, you may also notice as well an entirely redundant exterior "service loop" for the main cable. I mean, I've probably got at least an extra 50 feet or so of the cable available, loosely bundled up just on the other side of that plywood access panel; but I wanted the install to look at least somewhat "typical" and maybe even "professional" to a casual observer.

Finally, to give a quick update on the performance side of things, we really couldn't be much happier with the Starlink service. My wife and I have streamed untold hours of movies and TV shows, the "kids" have played countless hours of console and smartphone games online and we've all surfed and emailed to our hearts' content, all without having to worry about going over a preset data/speed/price limit. And just FYI, Starlink's website is now showing the message "Starlink is available to a limited number of users per coverage area at this time. Orders will be fulfilled on a first-come, first-served basis.", So, if you're interested, I can certainly highly recommend it!
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  #15  
Old 06-16-2022, 06:49 PM
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Originally Posted by BEC
Just signed up and let them charge the $99. In my case they say that service in my area is set to begin mid to late 2021. That'll give me time to figure out how to get the cable into the house and prepare to jettison some other subscriptions. This may be the end of my landline....on which our current DSL service comes.

Added: of course right at the moment, fairly late at night, I'm getting pretty good DSL performance: 8ms ping, 24 Mbps down and 5 Mbps up (over 2.4 GHz WiFi with the modem/router in the next room). But that's probably on the upper edges of what I've ever seen with this....

Today I received the “your Starlink is ready” email. I have seven days to either order it or lose my place in line.

Now I have to get serious about how I’d get that cable into the house somewhere near where I’d want the router to be.
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  #16  
Old 06-17-2022, 09:07 AM
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While I don't need Starlink, it's awesome that it is becoming available to my more rural YORF friends and, of course, many of my local friends and neighbors. In a lot of cases, they are doomed to dialup because they don't have reliable cell service either. Old style hybrid dialup/satellite is pretty bad as well, at least the few that I've had the displeasure to fool with.

I'm sort of in the best of both worlds. I live at the edge of a small rural town, which means I get city water, trash pickup, and cable/internet. I also have plenty of acreage that normal city folks don't have, including a bovine rocket recovery team. Folks love to hammer on Charter/Spectrum, but I'm getting higher bandwidth than I paid for, both up and down, and what few outages I've had are directly attributed to storm damage. Usually I'm called in to the FD in those same instances, so I don't need internet then anyway!
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  #17  
Old 06-17-2022, 11:22 PM
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We don't need Starlink either. We have mostly-tolerable dual DSL through Century Link now and could get Comcast cable <shiver> if we were willing to get it connected to the house. We are, after all, in the greater Seattle/Tacoma metro area, really...though heaven only knows (and isn't saying) when we'll ever have access to fiber-based internet from someone.

But Starlink is appealing in its own right, and has much greater potential to usable during those occasional longer-than-a-few-hours power outages we get here from time to time, with performance much better than our current setup.

So while I don't want to deprive someone in greater real need for satellite-based service with decent bandwidth and relatively low latency, I'd like to get in on it when I can.
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  #18  
Old 06-18-2022, 09:06 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BEC
We don't need Starlink either. We have mostly-tolerable dual DSL through Century Link now and could get Comcast cable <shiver> if we were willing to get it connected to the house. We are, after all, in the greater Seattle/Tacoma metro area, really...though heaven only knows (and isn't saying) when we'll ever have access to fiber-based internet from someone.


With your cabin and the trees, I assumed you were in a rural setting. As rural as we are, I could get gigabit service, but my 200/10 mbps easily handles everyone in the household streaming at the same time, and when my son is home for Christmas, it handles his and his wife's gaming while others are streaming. When I do a test, I usually get about 212/11 mbps. It's never below 200. I see no need to upgrade to 400 mbps or gigabit.

I had DSL from ATT years ago. It was horrible. At the DSLAM they say it maxed out around 5 mbps. I never got more than 2 mbps and as time went on, it got slower and slower to the point it was worse than my previous 56k dialup. ATT refused to admit it was their problem. They claimed it was my house wiring without sending a tech out. I hooked the modem up at the box outside and still got around 35-40k at best. They refused to check it.

The only reason I hadn't already switched was because my wife was adamant to keep it (I guess to keep her email address). I slipped off to Charter (now Spectrum) and set up a new internet account with them before cutting off DSL. The wife asked what I had done cause the internet was sooooo much better! I told her I switched to cable. She finally agreed to shut down ATT. Because they were such jerks about it, we shut down our phone landline as well.

As I said earlier, Charter almost never down, and I've never noticed any speed throttling issues. When it is down, they send a text with an ETA on restoration. They normally beat it. Charter used to suck big time as a cable tv provider back in the 90's, but now they are pretty good overall and their internet is excellent, at least for me.

BTW, I just checked on Starlink. It costs $650 plus tax to set up and $110 a month. The website says I should expect 50 to 250 mbps with about a 20ms latency. That's considerably higher than my cost and I get a guaranteed 200 mbps. One of these days Starlink will become much more competitive and I might very well be able to wean myself of cable completely!
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  #19  
Old 06-18-2022, 12:46 PM
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I'm not in a cabin in the woods....that's the fellow who started the thread.

I'd be tickled with 200/10 that's reliable. Right now my DSL is running pretty fast. I just got 67/13 running CenturyLink's own version of Speedtest. If it was consistent like this, I'd be happy. But it isn't and there doesn't seem to be a pattern for when it's slow or when it drops out.

I'm a little bummed about the recent Starlink monthly price increase. But I still think I'm going to at least give it a try, now that I'm eligible. I need to do a serious survey with their app as to where to put the antenna today so I can decide if it truly makes sense.
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Last edited by BEC : 06-18-2022 at 01:02 PM.
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  #20  
Old 06-18-2022, 06:07 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BEC
I'm not in a cabin in the woods....that's the fellow who started the thread.

I'd be tickled with 200/10 that's reliable. Right now my DSL is running pretty fast. I just got 67/13 running CenturyLink's own version of Speedtest. If it was consistent like this, I'd be happy. But it isn't and there doesn't seem to be a pattern for when it's slow or when it drops out.

I'm a little bummed about the recent Starlink monthly price increase. But I still think I'm going to at least give it a try, now that I'm eligible. I need to do a serious survey with their app as to where to put the antenna today so I can decide if it truly makes sense.


Woops! I wasn't keeping up with who said what.

That's weird about your DSL's crappy consistency. For years it was advertised as having solid, consistent performance 24/7, where cable internet would drop considerably at peak hours due the the "party line" approach.

It was my original understanding that it wouldn't be allowed to compete in urban areas. Hopefully, that will change and the additional customer potential might help drop prices on Starlink and the competition.
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