I took SpaceX's Starlink 'Dishy' to my cousin's farm!

[Music] [Music] stop what are you doing this isn't a tear-down video someone else already did that this strangely flat satellite dish nicknamed dishy is supposedly able to provide a relatively fast internet connection from the stars not from the literal giant balls of superheated plasma light years away from us but from a giant man-made constellation thousands of starling satellites orbiting all around the planet so what is starlink are these new satellites going to crash into each other or cause some giant cataclysm and why do i have a dish i live in st louis watch on and find out starlink is a new internet service from the company spacex which you may know from its historic rocket launches in recent years starlink promises high speeds and low latency broadband all over the earth no matter where you are and if i'm reading their terms of service correctly they possibly might serve the moon and mars too but what makes starlink special well if you live in a modern city you probably have decent internet access already but most isps or internet service providers are universally despised no matter where you are even if an isp offers faster service like mine did recently it's only one way today i pay almost 150 bucks a month for a gigabit of downstream bandwidth which is pretty good i'm not gonna lie but i can only get 30 megabits up and sometimes i think i have it bad but do you have any friends living outside a city on the outer edge of a town or in a rural part of town ask them to do a speed test the results will probably shock you plenty of people around the globe and even in the u.s have internet speeds of fewer than 10 megabits and it's pretty spotty when it actually works if you're old enough to remember dial up internet [Music] remember that old sound or if you remember early dsl well a lot of people are still on that level of internet service to demonstrate just how slow it is even on a good day i set my mac to limit its speed to 5 megabits and i'll load youtube [Music] not so pretty and some websites and apps completely fail to load if you have a spotty internet connection people living in more rural locations sometimes also pay for expensive satellite internet service to bypass terrible wired options but the latency how long it takes for their computer to talk to other computers and to do things like play games or scrub through a youtube video is even higher so it's a pricey trade-off that's where starlink comes in spacex bets that by launching thousands of tiny satellites into low earth orbit instead of a few massive satellites into a very high geostationary orbit they can provide faster low latency internet and this new attempt to provide internet doesn't just benefit rural communities people who travel in rvs live or work on boats or manage remote facilities are all looking for what starlink claims to provide reliable fast internet even well outside city limits to build their network spacex has been launching satellites into orbit since 2019. launch after launch they increase coverage 60 satellites at a time right now as i'm recording this there are already over a thousand starling satellites whizzing around the earth over 12 000 more are still planned to be launched and if that number makes you worry that we're about to create a wall-e-like ring of trash orbiting our planet don't worry these satellites are all orbiting low enough that they'll deorbit and fall towards the earth at the end of their life and burn up in the atmosphere on their way back down and if you're worried about astronomers and stargazers seeing too many satellites in the sky well there are some serious concerns there spacex appears to be working with astronomers to find ways to mitigate that problem and we'll see how that plays out in the coming years anyways enough about what it is the big question now is why do i have a dishy i already explained it's not meant for city dwellers with good enough internet so that's why i'm out here at harman farms in jonesburg missouri population 621 at my cousin's house i'm gonna go and see how fast her current internet is hi annie mind if i come in and check your internet speed well i guess we can settle our decades-long feud come on in cousin so a week or so ago i was asking you about your internet speed and it sounded pretty slow can you actually do a test on your phone and check how fast your wi-fi is right now sure i just so happened to be on an internet speed test website when you got here this is with nothing else running on the internet right now so is that like the average or like does it get faster ever it never gets faster it gets much slower if we are watching a streaming service or if i'm on a zoom call so it's been a challenge a lot of times i switch over to my wireless hotspot because it it gets a more reliable signal and your husband is here too like can you do things like watch two youtube things at the same time or does that is that too much you can definitely tell when we're both on uh some sort of streaming site at the same time because it slows things down one thing that is um a challenge is if if i'm trying to work and he's trying to play video games or i'm trying to watch a movie it's really a struggle to get good signal out here it sounds like it's also sometimes not reliable do you have to pay then for a mobile hotspot and your wired internet yeah i pay uh the maximum plan for our dsl and i'm also buying a an extra several gigs of mobile service for my hotspot every month just so i can stay connected and i have a reliable backup so what do you use the internet for here yeah so i work for a technology company i work for reputation they're based in the bay area but we've got teams spread all over the place so whenever we need to collaborate i've got to be connected and if my service goes down for a little bit it makes it more difficult to do my job all right so i have addishi which is starlink's satellite let's get it set up and see if it could be an answer to your internet problems i haven't been this excited since publishers clearinghouse right so here is the starling box here scoot back just a little bit that's pretty big and we'll take a look at what's inside it has an instruction sheet it says don't touch it so i don't know how we're going to put it outside and then it says that you plug it into something and then your phone will automatically pick it up we'll see how easy that actually is it comes with this tripod which will let us set it somewhere outside i also bought a volcano mount that lets you mount it on a roof or the side of a building or something like that a couple times a year it's not it's not like the volcano that's erupting in ireland right now everything in the box is connected together but we're going to disconnect it because you can't really take everything out at the same time so i guess that's nice of them to do that for us but we're going to undo all of that and it looks like it comes with this router which has wireless and an aux jack i guess that's for mic input or something let's see no it's actually an ethernet jack so you can plug in other devices hardwired so that's nice of them to include that and then it has hopefully that didn't break it also has this power supply which i guess injects power for the starlink's motor and it comes with regulatory notices that nobody cares about except for the fcc and it comes with this nice long cable which hopefully is long enough for your house we'll see if it's long enough for here and under all that is the actual dish which we've seen earlier in this video but it's flat which is interesting most satellite dishes are not flat but that's because inside is a phased array which is a bunch of little antennas that can interact with satellites without having the dish move as it's going along anyways i'm going to stick this into the tripod and we're going to go outside and see where we can put this facing north all right so i talked to annie and it sounds like that direction is north and the sky is pretty clear so i'm just going to set down dishy here for now she can mount it more permanently at some point probably should at some point but i'm going to set it down facing north and we'll run the cable inside and we'll see how it works out all right so dishi is set up and the next thing that we need to do is set up the router and power this is like a power brick that powers both the router and dishi using power over ethernet i guess but everything is nicely color coded which is kind of startling to make it easy the one thing i noticed is this this router is not it's not very stable so maybe you'd put some sticky tape on the back anyways i'm going to plug in the router if i would plug it in the right orientation that would work well okay so the routers should be powering up at this point and i'm going to plug in dishy and dishy at sub-point should once it gets connected orient itself in the right direction for seeing satellites looks like the power light on here is on it's flashing so the next step is to open up the starlink app and see if we can get everything else set up so go ahead and start the setup and i'm having annie do this just to show that it doesn't even take a techie like me to do this setup process are you saying i'm stupid darling y'all okay so go ahead and start set up you don't have to be too uh sarcastic about this that wasn't sarcastic even when i'm not being sarcastic i'm sarcastic okay start setup plug everything in did that open wi-fi settings uh starlink look at that starlink how cute rafi approved so it wants you to set up your wi-fi so go ahead and put in a network name that you want to use uh oh god this is so much pressure you will now be disconnected from the router reconnect using your new wi-fi network name and password okay hey there it is harman sterling okay go back to starlink at the top go back to the app okay all right uh press ok i guess wait while you're starling connects to the satellites it looks like starlink is right now pointed straight up i don't know uh if that's a good thing or a bad thing well that's where the satellites are jeff i don't know if you know a lot about satellites i'm a technology person satellites are actually above us you ever look at a map north 15 minutes later so we got everything connected but this router keeps doing its little flashy white light thing and in the app sometimes it says it's connected sometimes not and it's been a little spotty so what we're going to do is we're going to let it sit for a while and see if the connection gets more stable one difficulty is this location is a few miles outside the city where i actually have the service address so the app even said you're not in the current service address and things might be flaky here so maybe it's my own fault i don't know yeah so it was my fault sorry for cutting in but here's what's in the starlink beta terms of service if you move your starlink outside of its assigned cell a satellite will not be scheduled to serve your starlink and you will not receive internet thanks samantha and yeah annie pointed that out to me too so my dishy is currently locked into one cell of coverage and i don't know exactly how big the cell is but it's definitely not big enough to include annie who lives a hundred kilometers or 60 miles away from me so i drove back to jonesburg said sorry to annie for getting her hopes up and brought dishy back here and before i wrap up this video i did temporarily set up dishy in my backyard for one afternoon and it connected within five minutes i'll have an in-depth review later but i'm gonna go climb up on my roof and permanently install this sheet in the next video so subscribe to see how many osha violations i can rack up until next time i'm jeff gearling i can't talk because i'm wearing a three-quarter length shirt these throw me off hey mind if i come in and check your internet speed i mean you're already stepping in why not it's jeff yearling from youtube you come with an allen wrench are you recording can we get it done facing north so glad i could help and the sanitization wipes that's very coveted y'all come back now

Channel: Jeff Geerling

Views: 53,061

Rating: 4.7531071 out of 5

Keywords: spacex, starlink, dishy, satellite, rural, broadband, fcc, constellation, astronomy, internet, isp, cable, hughesnet, dsl, dial-up, service, access, poor, urban, farm, suburbs, bandwidth, testing, country, dish, pots, space, rocket, launch, sats, tos, terms of service, app, setup, install, installation, guide, tutorial, how-to, funny, cell, coverage, ground station, red shirt jeff

Id: U-VfAFj4jYw

Length: 14min 38sec (878 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/geerlingguy]

I'm posting this here mostly because I'm not sure many are aware that Starlink (SpaceX's new satellite Internet service) is available in a large(ish) portion of the St. Louis metro area now.

I got my dish a month or so ago, and I've seen a number of friends in the area are now eligible (though many don't take the plunge—honestly for $500 in equipment plus $99/month, if you have okay Spectrum Internet or some other good option for less, it would be more reliable at this point to stick with that).

I mostly got Starlink for testing purposes, to help some friends who are in more rural parts figure out if they might be good candidates once it's ready in their area (SpaceX is rolling out service in 'cells' of coverage, and it looks like most of the country is still not covered, but more cells are opening up every month).

[u/gangbusters_dela]

I looked into this not too long and it appears to be very promising, especially for more rural areas with traditional satellite service. Latency doesn't appear to be much of an issue considering it is a satellite connection. Unfortunately, it's not worth the money to give Charter the middle finger right now.

[u/bk553]

I'm in west county and I signed up and paid, but haven't gotten the hardware yet. I have somewhat solid service from Charter, but I'd like it as a backup ISP for outages. If it gets good enough, I can say F Charter and just stay with Starlink.

[u/rabbidplatypus21]

I noticed on their website it says “service address cannot be changed after placing order.” Does anyone know if this is a temporary measure for the initial rollout? Or will I have to fork over another $500+ equipment fee if/when I move in about a year?

[u/fuzzusmaximus]

Didn't think I would ever see Jonesburg mentioned in here. My grandma used to live there and pretty much all of Mom's side of the family is from that general area.