SpaceX's Starlink Reviewed: How is it after 4 months?

too long didn't watch spacex's starlink internet service uses satellites in low-earth orbit to provide high-speed internet to under-served parts of the world especially places without easy access to cable or fiber spacex's starlink beta opened up in my area so i installed dishi that's this white flat thing on my roof and i've been comparing it to my cable internet for a few months now a lot of the existing reviews out there are based on opinion and feelings but that's just not how i do things around here i have raspberry pi's continuously monitoring my internet one for starlink and one on spectrum and i also have a power monitor measuring power usage and i've tracked everything since day one trying to figure out how weather like snow and thunderstorms affect service or whether thick clouds make any difference and i had my laptop ipad and iphone all set to connect to dishy by default and only switch to my cable internet if absolutely necessary and here's the bottom line most of the time i couldn't tell i was using starlink and that's good everything felt just the same but that was most of the time you see i have eight trees around my house and there's literally nowhere i could put dishy that allows it a full view of the sky i'll talk more about that later reality hits every now and then when i notice a page not loading i'd open up the starlink app and see obstructed at my house that happens for a minute or two a few times per hour because those darn trees and in a recent update the app started showing exactly where those obstructions are and hey look the app is pretty much spot on that maple tree is taunting me with its evil internet blocking leaves now before i get into the review there are three major caveats first i live in a suburb outside a large city yes i know starlink isn't made for people like me who already have good internet my plan is to give starlink to my cousin once it's available at her farm since her rural dsl is slower than molasses second i'd trim up my tree for more reliable starlink if i had no other options but since it might not be staying here for the long term i'll let the tree keep those precious limbs third starlink is currently in beta so reviews like mine should be taken with a grain of salt that means there are no guarantees and a lot may change before it becomes a stable public service as with all my videos check out the table of contents in the description or by hovering over the play bar now let's start by talking about dishy that's this big flat white thing that has to see the sky if you look at the guts of the dish it's a lot different than a normal passive satellite in fact dishi is more of a computer with an array of tiny antenna than just a satellite dish and that's the reason why the hardware currently costs 500 bucks and spacex is actually losing money on every dish in an interview at mobile world congress elon musk said the terminal costs spacex over a thousand bucks but they're working on a new version that should be sold a little bit closer to 300 bucks inside the dish dozens of antenna use sophisticated math to do beam forming targeting on a tiny satellite whizzing by in the sky and then it locks onto another one and another and so on so you already have the complexity of the antenna control but there's also a full modem and basically an entire little computer inside kossik a research group in belgium extracted the firmware from the dish and found it runs linux on a four core system on a chip and on top of all that it also has a self aiming mechanism that orients the dish at the right angle when you first turn it on i talked about this during my roof install video but the dish for all its technical marvels does have some shortcomings first of all it has a hardwired 100 foot cat6 ethernet cable attached and technically you're not supposed to cut and re-terminate the wire so installation and cable routing can be annoying especially if you need more than 100 foot of cable second the thing gets fairly hot in use because it houses a computer and a lot of electronics it has thermal limits that can cause issues in areas with extreme cold or extreme heat the recent heat wave in the u.s resulted in some dishes shutting down after they reach 122 degrees fahrenheit and yes i'm using fahrenheit because that's just what we do here in the states some users watered dishy to keep it cool or raised it off the ground more but luckily i haven't run into that issue yet here in st louis going from one extreme to the other what happens in winter in the cold when it snows i'll mention more about power consumption later but the dish does have a mode it can go into during snowstorms where it heats up to melt off ice and snow and in one snowstorm that we got here in st louis that's exactly what happened with no internet dropouts the dish also survived three months of every type of weather st louis has to offer two weeks of a record-breaking heat wave four severe thunderstorms with pea-sized hail and winds over 60 miles per hour a freak spring snowstorm with a couple inches of snow in less than an hour and a few heavy rainfalls with more than one inch of rain per hour and you know the craziest thing about our weather here in st louis a few of those extremes happen in the same 24 hour period some people say the st louis arch that big old thing behind me is actually a weather deflector and maybe there's something to that but none of the weather st louis had this year seemed to phase the dish dishi stayed strong and i'd say it's pretty durable dishy comes with a small tripod stand you could stake into the ground or onto a flat roof but as i showed in my starlink install video i mounted it directly on my asphalt shingle roof using the volcano mount there's also a flashing mount and pull adapters available so you can mount it most anywhere most people should hire a professional installer since getting dishi safely affixed to a roof or truss can be a bit tricky especially if you want to do everything up to code a lot of people also ask how easy it is to move dishy and that's a slightly complicated question right now starlink is being rolled out slowly by geographical cells around select parts of the world there are a few reasons for this most notably to spread system usage across all the limited number of satellites in the sky so far but also because every satellite is independent right now there aren't any satellite to satellite links the satellite needs to see both your house and the ground station that connects to the internet and there just aren't enough ground stations everywhere yet what this means is you couldn't just pick up dishy and drop it anywhere and get service in fact each dishie is tied to a service address and if you go more than a few miles away you might not get a connection at all i tested this at my cousin's farm and while the dish could get a few bites here and there it wasn't giving any reliable signal but spacex does allow you to change the service address assuming the new address is in a covered cell i tested this process by contacting support and it took a day or so to get a response so it's possible but it's not quick and the cell-based coverage is kind of random right now when you do want to move dishi it's best to put it in stow mode in the app and be careful the thing's heavy but the current dish is definitely not designed for truly mobile use on things like boats or rvs moving on from dishy the other main piece of hardware you get with starlink is this router the router isn't anything to write home about but at least it's a halfway decent wireless and wired router i learned from turtle hurting's teardown that the router runs on qualcomm's ipq418 system on a chip which is another 4 core arm cpu in addition to the one inside dishi and it runs a custom build of open wrt and you can even see the code spacex uses to build that at least most of it on github yay open source and while i haven't tried too hard to hack my way into it it was fun to see an ascii art version of spacex's logo when i tried logging in over ssh it even had this fun little quote as the banner for the astute viewer that's a variation on a line from b movie while i was in that deep i checked one hop further and tried to access what's presumably the starlink base station and got this lovely rendition of the nian cat jokes aside the best way to configure starlink is through the mobile app if you visit starlinkrouter.lan in your browser you can access some things like stowingdishi restarting the router and seeing connection stats but that's about it the app is where it's at in terms of managing the router the app has all the functionality on the web and then some once you sign in you can manage the wifi network name separate the 2.4 and 5 gigahertz networks and access all the starlink support faqs the router isn't complicated which is a blessing and a curse you can't get a static ipv4 address if that's something you care about since starlink uses something called cgnat but vpns do work and you technically can get a static routable ipv6 address if you use your own router and toss out starlinks but that's not something the average user would care about i should also note that a lot of these things have changed since i first started using the beta that's kind of why it's called a beta i'm happy with the router's overall simplicity and also happy you can use your own if you really want that advanced usage but from a hardware standpoint there are two major downsides first there's only one gigabit network port on the back so you need a switch to plug in more than one wired device and the big one the thing that really had me scratching my head and the reason i have this ridiculous looking black base on the bottom is how top heavy the router is i don't know how many times i've accidentally knocked over the router it's annoying i had to 3d print a base just to keep it standing up i seriously hope the next version of the router has a lower center of gravity now the power supply it's not going to have that problem inside this beefy black box is an interesting type of power supply it supplies power over ethernet something i've talked about on this channel before but uses the maximum rated standard at least as far as i can tell supplying over a hundred watts to dishi it also powers the router via poe so you don't have to have an extra wall wart ac adapter plugged in just for the router but this also means it's doubly important to use the right cabling especially for dishy if you're one of the crazy ones splicing dishes wire use cat6a or better cable and keep the run less than 100 foot otherwise the power to the dish might not be adequate or you could even overheat dishes cable i wanted to see just how much power starlink uses especially since people have asked how well it would work off grid with solar or battery power and the results were surprising i popped a shelley plug into my eps that sends power usage data over my network then set up my raspberry pi to track starling's power consumption and i've been monitoring since day one the dish plus the router consumes almost 100 watts of power all day long i'm not going to lie that's a lot compare that to the 5 to 10 watts my cable modem and asus router consume and it's definitely something you have to consider the other thing that surprised me was what happened on april 21 this year apparently the stainless arch weather deflector went haywire and we had a freak late spring snowstorm and a few inches of snow falling in a short period of time during the heavy snowfall dishy quickly spiked up to 125 watts peaking at 175 watts towards the end of the snowstorm according to support dishi has a kind of snow mode where it heats itself up enough to melt snow off the top and it seems like it automatically goes into that mode when snow starts obstructing the sky the heat is pretty apparent even when it's not snowing though after i set up dishe at my cousin's farm clusterfly started swarming on it maybe that's not the heat though maybe it's just a sign that spacex is still working out the bugs anyways the bottom line is dishi consumes a lot of power if you want to run off solar power adding an extra 90 plus watts to your load isn't nothing other satellite-based internet providers use a bit of energy too but starlink is in a league of its own but starlink might be worth that extra energy consumption if it performs and that's probably why you're watching this review right well i'm going to split the performance part of my review into two sections subjective and objective if you're like me go ahead and just skip to the objective part because you can see 50 other reviewers telling you how starlink feels to them you don't need me to tell you that i can make facetime calls play halo manage my open source projects and watch youtube all day because that's about it subjectively speaking it's boring because starlink is basically what i'm used to a pretty solid high-speed internet connection but what's boring to me is revolutionary to some people my cousin whose house i visited earlier this year gets less than five megabits of download bandwidth and less than a megabit hub having 20 times faster internet is life changing for someone with a low quality internet connection the one thing that wasn't always pleasant was how some software handled dropouts especially some streaming platforms and video conferencing apps since that happens a couple times an hour mostly because of my big tree i would have to call someone back or refresh a page and watch an ad again to get back into a stream most well-known apps like netflix facetime and zoom handled things well without any incident it was really the apps and services that are obviously outsourced like poorly made tv network apps that would have weird issues requiring a refresh or relaunch but subjectively i really like starlink even with this big honking tree at my house blocking out a quarter of the sky i'm able to leave my iphone and ipad connected only through starlink and i hardly ever noticed the one or two minute long obstructions and those dropouts due to obstructions have gotten even less frequent because spacex is launching more satellites which means more sky coverage and making dishes software smarter about picking satellites to use but how does starlink really perform i covered in detail how i use raspberry pi's to monitor my internet connection in a previous video click the fancy little card above me if you want to see that and it's all open source available on github if you want to try on your own i liked professor actual factual as a kid and by golly i need raw numbers before i form an opinion on something as important as my internet connection and sure you could just run a few speed tests and average out those readings but can you do that day and night for weeks i'm only human i need sleep so i've been running this raspberry pi since the day i installed starlink and every 30 minutes it runs a speed test and charts the result it also checks for latency and tracks all of starlink's own statistics thanks to some code from dan wilcox and on average over the past few months i've gotten about 150 megabits down and 20 megabits up with 40 milliseconds of latency i could get peak download speeds just over 300 megabits and peak upload of around 30 and according to elon ping times could someday be as low as 20 milliseconds but i'm more interested in what i can measure right now any estimate elon musk posts has to be interpreted with elon time that is take the estimate he posts and multiply it by at least four so how does starlink do against my cable connection well it's not a fair fight but then again i do pay 1.5 times more for cable and while it gives me a lot faster downloads it's only a little faster on the upload speeds the best measure of how it feels though is jitter and using the request duration graph it's easy to see there's more jitter or variation in the response times from starlink but it's not as bad as i thought it would be if i were a competitive gamer or was trying to live stream something important i don't think i'd want to rely on starlink just yet but for most internet uses it's perfectly adequate objectively speaking but if you do want to live stream and that's something i do from time to time i should note that i tried it out even on my unstable prone to obstruction connection and it worked but there were some blank spots and times when youtube knocked down the bit rate but think about it from the other angle how about comparing starlink to my cousin's dsl on the farm starlink comes out way better there since the dsl connection is a paltry 6 megabits down and .5 up 150 down with 15 up it's not even a competition the last thing is the price and contract right now the basic starlink kit is 500 bucks and the service costs 99 a month but unless you want to drop starlink on the ground somewhere you'll also need to buy another one or two hundred dollars worth of mounting gear and if you want it professionally installed expect to pay a few hundred more but the contract is nice and straightforward which is usually not the case with isps at least in america unlimited data with supposedly no plans to add data caps and no hidden fees or early termination charges here's a history of my payments you can see it's just 99 bucks every month you can cancel any time with a support ticket and the main catch with the service right now is the fact that it's a beta so spacex doesn't really have to guarantee any level of service and the network can temporarily go offline at any time for any reason and it does for maybe 10 to 20 minutes on a given day but yeah it's in beta that's kind of how it works before i wrap up though there are two major issues some people have with starlink and really any low earth constellation like it and that's its impact on astrophotography and its potential to increase the risk of the kessler syndrome a catastrophic increase in space debris but for both issues spacex has been working to mitigate the risks as much as they can see my first starlink video for a deeper discussion of both issues and follow the news for updates on both it seems like every month there's a new development in these areas and with the potential of amazon launching their own low earth orbit kuiper system these issues must be dealt with because even if the risk is managed things that happen in orbit affect the entire planet not just the us anyways i hope my review has highlighted objective measures of how good starlink is and what you could expect from it if you're considering signing up as of this video the service is still in beta but it's slowly expanding to more regions around the world like ireland just a week or two ago my hope is that any satellite-based internet can be as open and inexpensive as possible to give people equal access to high-speed internet no matter where they live or work to sum up my review i really like but don't love startling at the beginning i had thoughts of switching to starlink and ditching my own cable isp just because how poorly they've treated me as a customer over the years and starlink performed well and their support's been great but the performance just isn't where i need it for what i do if i didn't have decent cable internet like my cousin that'd be a different story and judging by many people's reaction to getting starlink it can be life-changing just not for me at least not yet the nice thing is for now i have two internet connections at my house and i'm going to aggregate them so i can get more than 50 megabits of upload speed at least when this big old maple tree isn't standing in the way until next time i'm jeff gearling in addition to the one inside disney disney no all right then oh there's an ant oh i think i'm concentrating more on staying on the roof and not dying spacex is okay that'll work stop you don't there's no cars you don't need to honk oh shoot until next time i'm jeff gearling i forgot that

Channel: Jeff Geerling

Views: 393,906

Rating: 4.8883843 out of 5

Keywords: spacex, starlink, satellite, internet, dishy, mcflatface, dish, hughesnet, isp, cable, spectrum, compare, raspberry pi, monitor, laser link, sky, launch, st. louis, arch, stl, stlwx, riverfront, illinois, malcolm martin, memorial park, outside, flannel shirt jeff, roof, volcano, mount, install, setup, teardown, unboxing, rural, city, urban, comparison, router, modem, grafana, tracking, broadband, falcon, rocket, viasat, constellation, kuiper, kessler syndrome, astrophotography, results, experience

Id: spD4FLfi2a4

Length: 18min 40sec (1120 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 22 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/geerlingguy]

I've learned so much about Starlink from this community—both before I got it, and after I had it set up and had questions about it.

I also posted a blog post for the review: SpaceX's Starlink Review - Four months in (I know many people don't like trying to digest a video; easier to scan through written text.)

To be clear, I'm in St. Louis, MO (an inner-ring suburb) and have had Starlink for about four months now. I'll hopefully be transferring Dishy to my cousin who's stuck with 5/0.5 Mbps rural DSL, once Starlink opens up her coverage cell!

I hope this review seems fair and covers all the main points of interest people normally raise on this sub. I tried to base it on data and facts, and also really hammer home how some issues, like the obstructions from my trees, are self-induced. But I'm sure some commenters will be like "wow Starlink is always dropping connection, what terrible service!" :P — haters gonna hate.

[u/OrganicPrinciple130]

Next to flawless in my view.

[u/nvucinic]

Great review u/geerlingguy!