Elon never delivered... SO I DID!

i bought starlink in early 2021 during the public beta i installed it on my roof and tested it against my cable internet my cousin has a farm in rural missouri and has to work a remote job with less than a megabit of upload bandwidth so my plan was to give starling to her but what wasn't clear early in the beta was the dish couldn't just be moved to another covered area and still work we tried last year and it didn't get a connection so i used it at my house for a while but eventually i took down dishy and it's been in a box waiting for the day when i could finally transfer it every few months i'd check starlink's website and i even asked support a couple times but they've always said i can't transfer it to her address yet she had even pre-ordered in march last year when she pre-ordered it said it would come in mid to late 2021 then in late 2021 it changed to 2022 now it says it could be 2023 before she gets starlink chip shortage or not at some point starlink should just be honest and say you you might get starling someday instead of giving these estimates but besides pre-order hell a lot has changed there's a new user kit with a lighter pizza box style terminal and a new router design that i frankly hate mostly because it dropped the ethernet and you have to buy an add-on now if you want something more reliable than wi-fi and apparently spacex can't even make enough of them because it's already being scalped on ebay for over 200 bucks and if you think that's a lot to pay starlink also bumped their prices in april i used to pay 99 bucks a month but it's 110 now and people buying a new kit will have to pay 5.99 instead of 4.99 even people who pre-ordered the 4.99 kit will have to pay 50 bucks more elon said he wanted the price for the terminal to come down not go up on top of that starlink announced a new premium plan that comes with a bigger antenna and faster speeds but that costs a whopping 2 500 bucks and the monthly cost jumps from 110 to 500 bucks per month but there are some more positive developments too spacex finally rolled out a coverage map and it shows that my cousin's area has service but no availability sadly that's the case in most populated areas but the best improvement came after news of spacex sending thousands of terminals to ukraine last month supposedly usaid helped facilitate the transfer to keep ukraine online while russia keeps taking out critical infrastructure while that was happening a new roaming feature started rolling out to starlink customers around the world and also in early march elon announced new firmware with better power consumption and mobile roaming enabled youtuber mike on space tested mobile roaming with his highly modified starlink dish stuck on top of his car he was able to get over 250 megabits at 80 miles per hour my plan today isn't quite that extravagant though i'm just gonna toss dishes in my car drive around st louis and see if roaming is working and if it is i'll see if i can finally move the dish to my cousin's farm and upgrade her one megabit dsl but first starlink uses 50 to 100 watts of power so to go mobile i need that power and that brings me to this video sponsor ecoflow ecoflow sent me two of these new 220 watt bifacial solar panels they have a new design that gets energy from both sides boosting output by up to 25 percent with two i can get over 400 watts of charge into my delta max power station that should be plenty for testing starling today and it looks like there might even be a chance of some rain but if there is the solar panels are also ip68 rated so i don't have to worry about water damage check out all of ecoflow's power solutions online at ecoflow.com i needed a baseline so i set everything up in my backyard first and it's a good thing i had the solar panels because i only had a few percent of battery when i started out in the morning right after starling connected the battery just ran out of juice that's weird once i got the battery plugged in i checked my dishes roaming status it should show false at my house since i'm at my service address and it does from what i've read it'll be true if i use it away from my service address i've monitored starlink at home for months using my internet pipe project and i generally get 140 megabits down 18 megabits up and 40 millisecond ping times i packed up starlink hopped in the car and drove to a park near my house there was a little rain shower that had just stopped when i got to the park so it was a little wet but not too bad but since the sun wasn't out and the parking lot was soaked i didn't want to try out the solar panel yet no use getting it soaking wet if it won't get much power but i set up the dish opened the app and noticed the roaming setting on the dish was still set to false so my guess is it's still close enough to the house to be considered at the service address for a speed test i got about a hundred megabits down but only five or so up but the speeds were fine for this quick test and i knew it was still working so it was time to move on before i threw dishy back in the car i also checked on the power consumption and it does seem lower than it was last year averaging around 70 watts still a bit high but a lot better than the 90 to 100 watts it was using before i hopped in the car and took a short trip to forest park forest park is one of those places we st louisians are proud of probably too proud we're always comparing it to central park in new york saying it's twice as big even though our city has like a tenth of the population but hey it is our park and this is my video so i took a detour to see destinations like art hill and the st louis art museum or the saint louis statue that sits up at the top there's also government hill with its pretty fountains the st louis history museum that was the welcome center for the 1904 world's fair the jewel box the muni and the st louis science center's planetarium complete with a blue angel chat in front while i was driving around it was actually kind of hard to find a good spot to test darling because well it's forest park there's a lot of trees everywhere but eventually i parked and set the dish on the road behind my car and finally the moment of truth when i opened the app and checked the debug data roaming was finally set to true so it works i switched over to a speed test and that was actually a bit disappointing after a few tests the best i could get was 88 megabits down and about five up but short term results aren't anything to go by and that's not really what i'm testing anyways so i tore it all down hopped in the car and headed further west towards my cousin's farm i still wanted to do one more test in the metro area so i chose faust park home to the butterfly house and an old 1800s era village i was setting up starlink in the parking lot and it looked like we might actually get a little sunlight so i also pulled out the solar panel and set it up even with an overcast sky and only a slight bit of sunlight i was able to get over 100 watts with the solar panel and the setup was easy enough for one person not at all like last time when i set up my 400 watt panels on a windy day anyways while starlink oriented itself i took a stroll through the historic village which was supposed to show what life was like back in the 1800s they definitely didn't have satellite internet back then so my dish was probably a little bit out of place but anyways i confirmed starlink was in roaming mode again then i did another speed test and was getting over a hundred megabits down and five or so up not too bad so i stowed starlink tore down the dish and solar panel and headed past the butterfly house to find lunch in the county now that we know that it works at a few different parks further away from my house we're gonna stop and grab lunch and then we're gonna go out to my cousin's farm and see if it works there ah st louis bread company home of the bread sliced bagel aka the best way to eat a cinnamon crunch bagel with the perfect ratio of cream cheese to bread surface area anyways so now with roaming definitely working it was time to head an hour west to my cousin's farm in jonesburg along the way there was a torrential downpour along with one really close lightning strike but we eventually made it safely there and of course when we got to the farm it started raining again so i set up the router inside where it was nice and dry i also spent some time untangling dishes cable waiting for a break in the rain but it didn't really matter much anyway since the ground was already soaked i popped back inside plugged in dishy and while it was booting up i told my cousin i thought starlink would finally work this time but she was having none of that so i'm getting your hopes up but i no you're not getting my hopes up because i'm not i don't believe a word you say i'm skeptical very skeptical sheesh maybe she should join in with some of the comments from my last starling video anyways we went inside and tested out starlink and what do you know it worked roaming was set to true and when i ran a speed test i got 130 megabits down and 20 megabits up but annie was still a little bit skeptical i think i want to connect with one of my devices and make sure this wasn't staged i mean this could all be um a deep fake you might not even be here right now i don't know so she pulled out her laptop and found i wasn't lying well either that or i hacked her laptop too anyways she got about 80 megabits down and nine up for one last comparison we switched to her dsl connection and it was like living in the early 2000s with four megabits down and less than 600 kilobits up so is she happy yes but was she also disappointed in some ways also yes she told me she didn't like how after pre-ordering a year ago the date just kept slipping over and over and when starling support says i can't transfer this dish to her even though it works fine at her house already that's just weird i know there are probably capacity concerns that limit what starling can do here but outside of the great support reps i've interacted with it feels like starlink is having a lot of growing pains and while it's not perfect there are still a lot of people in my cousin's shoes they're okay with these struggles they're glad they have 10 or 20 times faster internet access they can have more than one person watch youtube at a time someone can play an online game while someone else is in a meeting many of us can't even imagine what it's like taking turns using the internet now do i want starlink to fail no do i think starling can do better yes i'm on the fence about starlink's long-term prospects but while it's here it is providing new opportunities for a huge number of people and it's also nice seeing lower power consumption which is especially helpful to people traveling with starlink like in rvs or boats until next time i'm jeff gearling

Channel: Jeff Geerling

Views: 1,615,424

Keywords: spacex, starlink, internet, rural, farm, saint louis, stl, forest park, art museum, art hill, muny, satellite, isp, dsl, speed, test, comparison, setup, roaming, mobile, ukraine, mobility, rv, boat, camping, coverage, cell, covered, portability, portable, battery, ecoflow, solar, power, teardown, car, driving, rainy, bread company, st louis, panera, bagel, bread sliced, elon musk, launch, price, pricing, business, premium, iphone, speedtest, fast

Id: I9zqGeH8EIs

Length: 10min 33sec (633 seconds)

Published: Wed May 04 2022