3 Reasons Starlink Internet is Not for You | 2 Month Starlink Review

hello everyone and welcome to the next video in our series of starlink videos where we cover real use scenarios of the starlink system in today's video i'm going to cover three big reasons why you may not want to get starlink now to put some context to the situation my wife and i are full-time rvers and we've had starlink for about two months now we first picked it up in tennessee we have then since traveled to florida and now into the east coast here in georgia and south carolina now we move sites pretty much every week or so so in an entire year we'll probably have this in 50 or 60 different locations across the united states about once a month i'm trying to just do a quick update and let everybody know how the system is working for us now the three topics we're going to cover today are obstructions incomplete satellite coverage and of course the big one everybody likes to talk about price okay first off we're going to start off with obstructions and trees this is a really big one the last video i did was actually all about the trees and the problems we're having here on the east coast with trees and obstructions not giving us very good service with starlink so i believe trees are actually going to be the biggest problem for most people with starlink especially rvers and today we're at skidaway island state park here in georgia and it is very covered in trees as you can see all around but the site we have here actually has a fairly open section of the sky where you can see to the north and northeast now i also want to mention since the rv starlink has just recently come out we have the standard starlink service so i'm able to move my service address around and not pay the portability or the roaming now we've been using our verizon hotspot mostly here on the east coast because it works so well but yesterday we had a conference call on zoom that we wanted to have a little bit better coverage because the verizon was kind of slow so i busted out the starlink and plugged it in which only takes a little bit of time to hook up and i was actually having trouble getting the satellite dish to connect so i put it out in an area where i thought it had the best open clear view of the sky and i waited for about 45 minutes to an hour and nothing it could not find any satellites it just sat there looking up so then i moved it one more time waited another 15-20 minutes still didn't get anything so i decided to move it a third time and that's where in about five minutes it connected up right away now as you can see behind me there's you know a decent amount of clear sky that you can see but the trees are very tall here so i was hoping the dish would be able to connect but as it turns out that conference call continued to have dropped service and that's really the biggest issue that i'm running into with starlink is that it will have a second to maybe five seconds of dropped service and when you're on a zoom call or microsoft teams call or something like that that's really where you're gonna run into these big issues the screen's going to freeze and perhaps you'll even drop the call that you're on so in the handful of places that we've used starlink it's really only worked well in one location and that was in central florida where we had zero obstruction to the sky and the system actually worked very very well there we did not have any of those service drops like we did pretty much everywhere else we've used it and yes if you do read about starlink it does clearly say your starlink needs a clear view of the sky so it can stay connected with satellites as they move overhead objects that obstruct the connection between starlink and the satellite such as tree branches poles or roofs will cause service interruptions and that is very very true but just reading that that doesn't always mean everything to everybody now i've gotten a lot of snarky comments on the last couple videos about the obstructions and trees and duh it's not gonna work didn't you read the owner's manual well honestly a lot of us don't know how this is gonna work and everybody's situation is gonna be quite different there are gonna be a lot of people that do not have that exact clear view to the sky and i just want to share what it looks like in different situations and show how much you you really do need to have a very clear view of the sky if you want to see more on trees and obstructions check out the last video i made otherwise we are gonna move on to the satellite map and starlinks coverage so if you go on to starlink.com in the upper left corner is the little map icon and if you click on that you'll be able to see the availability map and it's pretty clear by looking at the map itself that the western half of the states has great coverage all available and if you look on the eastern half of the map you see a lot more of that darker blue section which is the wait list now this brings us all the way down to the bottom of the united states here in the florida keys which is where we were just a short couple weeks ago and we were in between key west and marathon down in sugarloaf key so here i want to share a little bit about using starlink in the areas where it says wait list now looking at the map today this section of the florida keys it does say that it is available but a few weeks ago it was actually on the waitlist section and you can see parts of the keys key west and marathon are still in the wait list so it's kind of very spotty down there in that southern part of florida so we were at the koa in sugarloaf key and we put starlink on top of our roof and we had zero obstructions into the sky now what was very interesting down there is i still had that same spotty up and down time it was not a consistent up time like it was in orlando where i had a clear view to the sky and i had 100 uptime here i was still getting down and up offline online and i didn't quite understand what was going on but what i think it is is there's not enough satellite coverage in the sky in this part of the area and so it was actually searching for different satellites and i didn't get a screen grab of this but one time i looked at my phone and it actually said waiting for the next satellite to come into view i've never seen it say that before if anybody else has seen their starlink mention that it was pretty interesting now with this being on our rv roof i also woke up one time in the middle of the night to the starlink dish rotating around you can kind of hear the motors move as it actually tracks these uh satellites in the sky you can hear this thing move you may not notice if it's on a pole or if it's out in your yard or something like that but when it's right above your head only covered by about five inches of rv roof you can actually hear this satellite dish move around and try to track the satellites in the sky so according to what i'm reading online starlink has about half of its total satellites in the sky for the first generation network it looks like there's about 2 200 satellites of the 4 400 that would be in that so that kind of gives you a good idea that it's only working at 50 coverage and that's probably why all some of us or maybe a lot of us are running into some of these service issues especially on the east coast where you can see the map is more incomplete as opposed to the west coast where i think it's working much better so supposedly elon wants tens of thousands of these satellites in the sky and so it's going to continue to get better and better each month as they launch more and more of these satellites up so if you have starlink and you're on the west coast or you're on the east coast let me know how it's working for you in the past couple months it has just not been really something that's that usable for us now that brings me up to the third point today which is price and in just over two months we've spent almost one thousand dollars on the initial hardware as well as a couple months worth of service we're paying the 110 per month and not the rv service 135 per month we haven't had to turn on portability yet because they're still allowing that to be free use and i believe that's going to change here in early june so part of the reason i'm sharing these videos and it sounds like most of them are negative and i'm not happy with the service and partially i'm not happy with the service like i said almost a thousand dollars for just a couple months worth of service here and we haven't really been able to use it besides one location where it really did uh save us for what we do now my wife and i do run our own business from the road as well as create videos like this so we do need to have consistent and good connectivity so that's why we have a redundant system with our verizon unlimited hotspot as well as this starlink now most of you are also saying things like the pep wave and having some type of router to bond the two together and i don't know that much about this but i definitely do know that it would be nice to have a redundant system where it connects the two together you don't have to have that up and down on or off it can have more of a consistent speed so now that starlink has released its version for rvs and you have that 135 per month fee along with the 5.99 for your hardware and that's something you can order today and probably get within a week or so and i think there's two big things to think about that rv service one is you're going to get that degraded service or de-prioritized service and i think for a lot of people it's going to be good enough if you're still getting a hundred down and 510 up that's pretty good if you're just on vacation or you're camping or even just for work that's still plenty plenty fast speed but what i think appeals to a lot of people is is that you can turn on and off or pause this service now for our situation we actually travel quite a bit like i mentioned so within a month we're gonna go to you know two three four plus different locations so even if we don't use it for one location we're most likely gonna try it at the next location or even if we don't use it for a few uh that month pause for us isn't probably gonna be that big of a deal even if i don't use it for three weeks most likely within that month i'm trying to use it again but for a lot of you that are just going on vacation or perhaps you're using it for the summer months it would be really nice to turn it on for a month or two and just be done with it turn it back off and not have to pay that because each month a hundred and ten dollars 135 dollars it really does add up and of course price can be relative from one person to another 100 plus dollars per month might not be a big deal to them for other people that are paying half of that for home service that they're completely satisfied with this system is way too expensive so i think for a lot of people that travel like we do and work full-time from the road um it's just uh the cost of doing business it's something that uh we need and having this combined with our verizon we're paying under 200 for monthly internet service and when you need it full time that price isn't too bad so i'll be interested to see if they allow you to switch between the residential service and the rv service because that might be something that i might think about wanting to do you know we go back home for a month we can turn it off if we're over on the east coast for two three four months maybe we do want to turn that off and wait till we get out to the west coast to use starlink but then again service is going to continue to get better and better and we'll just kind of have to wait and see how this unfolds so i hope some of this information was valuable to you guys to just let you know a little bit how it's working for us i'd love to hear your comments and thoughts on the situation if you already have starling or thinking about getting it and i'll keep these videos coming about once a month or so i appreciate you watching and we'll see you on the next one you

Channel: Irene Iron Travels

Views: 44,632

Keywords: starlink, starlink internet, starlink rv, starlink for rvers, starlink internet for rvers, starlink rv use, starlink rv internet, starlink rv install, rv starlink, starlink setup, starlink for rv, starlink rv tree, rv starlink internet, starlink for rv users, starlink for rv 2022, starlink for rv update, starlink for rving, starlink rv secrets, starlink rving, starlink roaming, starlink roaming true, starlink roaming enabled, rv internet, starlink review

Id: G_qgeSt5SBs

Length: 12min 59sec (779 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 09 2022