Starlink – the rural internet game changer for your homestead

today i'm going to talk about a game changer in rural internet access we have seen speeds in this trial of up to 170 megabits per second it's definitely averaging down in the 30s or 40s megabits per second but this is beta [Music] hi folks welcome back today i'm going to talk about a game changer in rural internet access starlink this is the starlink dishy pointed at the north sky here in the pacific northwest where we're located it's tilted back at about 65 degree angle from the horizon and it's pointed at about a 345 degree asthma you need a view of the northern sky to be able to use starling they have a little app that you can download for your phone or tablet or whatever you don't need to sign up you don't need any commitment or anything to get the app you don't have to pay anything and with the app they have a little function on there that says check for obstructions and you can download that and start that check for obstructions and i'll put a little clip of it in here and you can basically scan the sky from the location that you think will work on your property this is a game changer where we live we're beyond the distance for any dsl or any cable we also live where there is no cell phone service so we can't do hot spotting we can't do anything like that some of our neighbors have been using hughes net or dish in past years there are inherent problems with those those are geostationary satellites so they hang out above the equator which would be the other direction to the south so because they're geostationary they're at about 22 000 miles above the earth the starlink uses a low earth orbit actually very low earth orbit satellite network i think it's only about 310 miles i think they have three different tiers and they're working on different ones this starlink is a beta test right now so we had to sign up to show interest in the beta i signed up in july of 2020. we got the invite in november of 2020 and we ordered it it's a 30-day money-back trial if it doesn't work for you in your area you can send it back as long as the kit's undamaged cost on this is 499 dollars for the equipment and it's 99 a month for the service for now no word on any guarantee of service this is beta but it is really bringing internet to rural areas even to areas that just are that last mile thing you could be in a city and just not have that last mile or in the suburbs and not have good internet because of your proximity to the central office or the cable company or whatever the kit comes with the two foot dish a pole a little tripod on the bottom i'll show you in a minute it's hard wired there's a cable that's connected here and you can't unplug it it's hardwired into the dish it's got a hundred feet of cable on it and our case runs down to the cabin and then inside it's got a power supply which supplies power over ethernet to this dish so the starlink dish with the people in starlink called dishy nickname uses about 110 watts i can feel a little warmth on this even though it's a 38 degree day i'm feeling just a little bit of warmth probably not a great idea put my hand right in there i think you're probably supposed to stay three feet away or whatever this is definitely microwave energy this is running at like 35 to 57 gigahertz something like that but yeah i wouldn't uh stand in front of it for too long just like anything that transmits microwaves not a great idea but having it 100 feet away from my house i'm not that worried about it this is a phased array and there have been some folks that have torn these apart already you can find other videos on youtube that show that i'll put a link below but it's powered over ethernet from the power supply that's in the house so the procedure is you find an area with the app that you think will be the best for the least amount of obstructions in your northern sky then you sight the dish and you make it stable then you run the cord get everything set in the house or cabin or whatever you've got and then plug it in and when you plug it in this dish actually has two motors in the back and it will the motor is of opposing it's like a differential the post itself has a gear on top and the two motors each have um gears and so it can spin the dish and it can tilt the dish it depends on if the motors turn in opposite directions or turn together right and so this thing will seek it just is flat and will look straight up and then it figures out where it is on earth and then it and it turns and it orients and then it stays in that position i haven't seen it move since then but maybe as they get more satellites up in the constellation it might track differently i'm sure they can talk to it remotely and tell it what to do and all sorts of stuff it's install yourself it's really easy to install but one thing about the install that you'll want to know is that the cord the heavy ethernet cord that goes between the power supply and the dish has these ferrite chokes on it they're about yay long and they're probably 5 8 of an inch in diameter so you need to have a hole on your house that's 5 8 of an inch in diameter because you can't take those things off the cord if you have a vent or something under the house that you could put it through or something that you could seal up i mean when we first first tried this for the first half a day i just slipped the cord under the door and there was enough room with our door sweep that i could just try it i tried it it worked and so then i already had a hole where our other ethernet went through and so i was able to route it through that same conduit and uh that worked out well limited to 100 foot cable between the power supply and this then there's a short little cable that comes with it maybe six feet 10 feet and that goes to an included starlink router you can use your own router you can use a longer cable between the power supply and the router but there definitely are people that are putting the dish say 400 feet away from where the wireless router is and i'm sure with a little bit of trickery and other power over ethernet injectors or switches or anything you could stretch it longer truthfully that's what we've been doing prior to starlink we were lucky enough unlike our neighbors who were using dish or hughesnet we have a local isp that we got in touch with who does wireless internet so a couple of miles away on a mountaintop to the west of us there's an access point and we are getting 900 megahertz wi-fi from there and we've been doing that for about 12 years the problem is that we're limited by the 900 megahertz by the hardware the access point and just the back backhaul and everything so that we only get about 1.4 megabits on that on our old system starlink here is talking about 100 megabits per second we have seen speeds in this trial of up to 170 megabits per second it's definitely averaging down in the 30s or 40s megabits per second but this is beta again and so starlink says that as they get more satellites up as they get more ground stations uh going speeds are going to increase i think they're hoping to guarantee 100 megabits per second the latency we're seeing is in the 30 millisecond range that's about the same as what we've been having with the wi-fi and truthfully when you're streaming something it doesn't matter you know you're not clicking and waiting for the signal to get there and waiting for the return you're just clicking and it buffers and you just see netflix or youtube or hulu or whatever the heck it is you're watching right during this beta period we have seen a bunch of 15 second sort of dropouts this morning in an hour we saw two of them we saw a bunch on the day after thanksgiving and some of them there were you know many 15 second ones right in a row i don't think it's that we're having obstructions i think it's details on the other end it's either the satellite or there's gaps in the satellites as they fly overhead or more likely they're putting new satellites in service and they're rebooting a bunch of stuff and they're doing that on certain days the one outage that we've seen of any length was in the middle of the night like 12 30 pacific time and so my guess on that one is also that they were rebooting systems or upgrading some software or something on the head end today marks two weeks that we've had this beta testing system we have noticed one anomaly with this in that time is that a couple of times with our son watching netflix he would have one show on it would play be playing fine and then when he would try to go for another episode it would say something an error like not available in your region what i think is actually happening is that it thinks for a short amount of time that we are in canada because my guess is that the satellite passing overhead we are so close to canada the satellite is picking up a canadian ground station or two but it is a weird little anomaly in two weeks we've only seen a couple of long outages with this we saw one in the middle of the night that was maybe 30 minutes long we've seen two others that i think were about 10 minutes long conversely our wi-fi and actually all the other providers here where we live you know so the telephone company the cable company a couple of others they all had outages that lasted a better part of a few hours in the meantime we still had internet with starlink their outages were related to wind and weather here and one was related to automobile wreck that took out a power pole that had fiberlink on it but it is interesting to see the difference yes there's outages with this but there are outages with those too so this thing is a game changer on our even on our old connection at 1.4 megabits per second i was not able to download any files of any real size and i was never able to upload any youtube videos or anything like that with the starlink now i have uploaded files of 800 megabytes i have downloaded files about the same size it takes a couple of minutes it's amazing to have internet of this speed so game changer i wanted to make people aware of it hopefully this means i'll be uploading more stuff because up until now when i have a video that i've edited i have to drive to town get on wi-fi and upload it for us it's over an hour round trip to town so this is definitely nice and you know i can upload in the middle of night i can do all sorts of things that um weren't possible before so wanted to make everybody aware of it if you're interested get on the starlink website and put in your your details again you have to be between certain latitudes so you put in your zip code and it'll tell you if the beta is available for you so all the short outages that we've seen these little 15 second intermittent things starlink is saying well hey this is beta testing and as they get more satellites up in the constellation and as they add ground stations all those things will go away and the speed will become more consistent the latency time will go down i think they're trying to target 20 milliseconds for latency they're just talking about you know it'll be much more consistent and i saw something about them launching 60 plus satellites a month and they have a schedule you can look it up online and it says on this rocket we're going to have these many satellites and so they're putting them up and they have it all planned out there's going to be 4 400 satellites up there that will service these i forget the number but it was a sizable number of satellites so they're really betting on this and hoping that this will be a good business for them and a good way to get internet to the billions of people around the world that don't have it so if you have any questions or comments leave them below give it a like if you like it if it's informative for you and don't forget to subscribe if you want to see more content for homestead videos thanks [Music] you

Channel: Normstead

Views: 600,132

Rating: 4.9398675 out of 5

Keywords: starlink, spacex, elon musk, satellite, internet, service, low, earth, orbit, isp, homesteading, rural, beta, tripod, dish, dishy, router, test, setup, speedtest, speed, installation, price, mbps, unboxing, kit, better than nothing, upload, download, trial, phased array, homestead, normstead, streaming, gaming, latency, satelite, sattelite, space-x, wifi, country, last mile, tesla, install, speed test, snow, heater

Id: igtN49I1CtM

Length: 11min 41sec (701 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/spcslacker]

Mods, feel free to delete if this is not of interest, but I had this suggestion come up on youtube, and found it interesting to see someone who is using it discuss Starlink.

Made it more real to me, thought others might be interested.

[u/scarlet_sage]

I'm in a training class. Anyone kind enough to TLDR?

[u/linuxhanja]

Wow is that expensive. I pay $12.99 for gigabit internet where I live. But I guess in the US that's probably not that bad. Hope they adjust prices for each market though...