My sporting club is out in the boondocks and we have poor internet service. We are using Excede for club business, but it’s not too fast and somewhat expensive.
The club president just received a StarLink unit made for RVs. Set it on the ground facing North and it’s supposed to find the satellites on it’s own.
We hope to set it up this weekend for a test. Because it’s made for RV’s it can work world wide. Can also be turned off with no payments due. Like if the RV was in storage I guess.
I’d like to hear from any users. Is it good, or not so good.
Starlink is great. We have it at our cabin in an area without cell service or fiber - and surrounded by 80-100 ft tall trees. Starlink is the only way I can have a high speed connection that I know of. Only issue I have is those trees - I get a brief service interruption about every minute (I have a Starlink App that tracks each interruption). Because of that it is hard to have a lengthy phone call or facetime because it can time out. However buffered videos are no problem and general internet browsing works well. It is super fast - often beating speeds I get with my fiber optic service at home.
I’m hoping my tree-interruption issue with diminish as they keep launching thousands of more satellite presumably providing better coverage - and I’ve been contemplating installing a utility pole to mount the dish on top of.
We used to use DirecTV dish for TV and had a hughes.net dish for internet. They where great at first. I was an early adopter. There was no other choice if you wanted TV and internet.
Starlink was a complete game changer.
The hughes was was too limited on bandwidth and speed to stream any entertainment, we gave up trying to do that. COVID put many of us in home offices. I’m one of them. The hughes.net connection worked, but the ping/lag was paiiinnnfulllly slooooow. That’s not a problem with the Starlink connection.
You have to be careful with obstructions that prevent the dish from communicating with the satellites. Big tall trees seem to be the biggest problem. I lose internet a couple times a day for 5-10 seconds. Not an issue really.
As I said, we live rural mountains. We get a ridiculous amount of snow. It’s never been a problem. I used to have to brush snow off other satellite dishes. The Starlink dish is heated (or just produces heat as a by-product. Don’t know)
We purchased the Chromecast dongle that you can plug into the back of Smart TV’s. That talks to our router. Bingo. Stream anything. Of course you have to subscribe to some things. Works great though. We are now getting good high definition TV. I’m not sure if we can get the local stations out of Denver though. Probably, since I’m sure they are streamed. Don’t really care though.
We spend a little more than what we use to. But that’s pretty adjustable depending on what services you sign up to for streaming. Some are free. We’ve signed up for 4 or 5 of them. I really don’t even think about it.
I have a friend living nearby that also has Starlink. He is also in Information Systems/Tech. He also works from home. No complaints from him.
We plan to mount the antenna on the roof of our building, and there’s no trees over 30’ anywhere to the north for at least a 120 degree arc. I’m thinking we’ll be good so far as interference goes.
We’ve ordered an adapter to allow an either net connection to our wired network. The basic unit only has WiFi as shown in the video above.
We’ve lived in a very rural area of Ohio since 2001. Our DSL internet has always been crap: extremely slow and very, very unreliable. It’s so slow that we’ve never been able to stream video, and (I am not exaggerating) it is down most of the time. In fact, it’s down so often that I installed a cell phone repeater, and we use Hotspot from a cell phone most of the time. It’s more reliable, but still very slow.
Starlink hardware arrived today. I have the antenna sitting in the front yard for now. The speed is incredible. I am not used to this. Bravo to Starlink.
