Having a reliable and fast internet connection has always been an issue for me. With the NBN rollout taking quite sometime to complete - especially the infrastructure upgrades - I decided to sign up for the Starlink beta, hoping that the claimed speeds, coverage and reliability were true and not just “hype”. After 6 months I can say that not only were my expectations met, they have so far been exceeded. Over the following paragraphs I’ll give my opinion about the product, specifically outages, installation, performance and cost.
Installation
When installing the dish its recommended the location be free from obstructions as blocking the dishes’ view of the sky might reduce performance. Luckily for myself our house already had a satellite dish installed. The old dish was mounted using a pipe attachment which is literally a pipe welded onto a bracket, which in turn is fed through the spouting and bolted onto the houses’ frame. So installation was quite simple, remove then old dish, fit the pipe adaptor and install the new dish. The tricky part was feeding the cable into the roof and routing it into the master bedroom where the router was placed. There was more then enough length to the cable to run the entire length of the house (from memory I think the cable was 10 meters in length).
The Starlink dish and pipe adaptor after installation.
After installing the dish the only thing left to do was to install the Starlink app on my phone, turn on the router (supplied with the dish) and connect to the Wifi. Working through the setup wizard on the app was quite simple, it’s really self explanatory. Once setup, the dish will automatically start to search for satellites. During this phase the dish will orient itself so the face of the dish will be pointing directly up at the sky. Once a signal has been received and tracking begins the dish will move and re-orient to a 30-45 degree angle. During this phase an alert popped up on my Starlink app telling me that a motor malfunction had occurred. After checking the debugging/help section of the application, this was apparently common. After a power cycle everything was working as expected.
Dish orientation after searching has completed.
Performance and Outages
So how’s the performance I hear you asking? Well, its excellent. Download speeds are consistently averaging greater than 150Mbps and max out at about 250Mbps which is a massive improvement over the previous NBN connection (FttN, Fibre to the Node, copper to premises) which only achieved a measly 24-30 Mbps. These speeds out compete FttP (Fibre to the Premises) connections I’ve used in the past. I’m truly impressed. Upload speeds - which aren’t exactly that great - seem to top out at about 20Mbps, average speed is 10Mbps. Still a lot better then the 2Mbps we were getting before. With my wife and I working from home, having a decent upload speed is very important. Previously we weren’t able to upload files at the same time. Now, we don’t have a problem. Same goes for downloading, both my wife and I are able to have meetings over Zoom and my daughter can watch videos on her tablet at the same time without any buffering issues.
What’s the downside then? The latency is definitely higher with Starlink then my old wired connection. When loading a website that is making a lot of requests, you do notice things taking a little bit longer to load then usual. After pinging google for a few minutes I can see the average latency is 60ms with a minimum of 27ms. A little bit higher than what is advertised (not by a lot though). This might be a problem for some applications - playing games for example - however it’s not a problem when watching videos on Netflix or Youtube though. So it doesn’t bother me.
Outages do happen from time to time. Most of the outages I’ve experienced only last for a few seconds and are barely noticeable. Most modern applications can easily deal with this. Longer outages seem to caused by bad weather - storms - which tend to last for a few minutes. Outage information (and service status) can be viewed on your phone via the Starlink app.
Cost
How much does it cost? At $139 per month it’s a bit expensive, a little bit more expensive then Superloop’s 250/25 ($120 recurring). However I think the additional cost is worth the increased performance and better quality of life. I don’t have a problem with paying a little bit more for a service that is significantly better than my older service. The satellite dish wasn’t exactly cheap either, at $700 it’s an investment.
Conclusion
I’m very happy with Starlink so far. I can only hope that SpaceX can continue to deliver and put more satellites up to increase coverage and minimise outages. Will I ever switch back to NBN? (fixed line internet) … perhaps. It really depends on when infrastructure can be upgraded to support FttP. I can definitely say I wont be switching any time soon.