Starlink Gen 3 is here. And I mean, literally, like it's right here, right? So what's new with this third generation dish and router? And is it worth upgrading if you've already got one of the previous models? In this video, we're gonna talk all about the new specs of the Starlink third generation equipment. I'm gonna set it up in my backyard and then we are going to test it out. We've got a lot to cover, so let's get started. We've helped a ton of people with their Starlink satellite dishes at Rogue Support. Whether you're looking to set up Starlink as your primary source of internet, or use it as a failover, or maybe it's just not working at all, the friendly network technicians at Rogue Support can help get you sorted. One of the things that we've seen a lot is that the Starlink router uses a very common network subnet for its own LAN. So when you then plug it into the WAN port of a router that also uses the same subnet for its LAN, you aren't able to route any traffic out to the internet. Now if you didn't understand a thing I just said, then don't even worry about it. Let Rogue Support help you out and you'll be surfing the web from the stars in no time. Check us out on the web at rogue.support for all of your computer networking, wireless, and yes, even Starlink support needs. You won't be disappointed. It was almost exactly three years ago that I set up my first Gen 1 Starlink satellite dish and it was absolutely amazing. The fact that we could get solid broadband internet from satellites anywhere in the world was an absolute game changer. Now the wonder of that moment has since passed and Starlink has gone through a bunch of growing pains. They came out with a second generation dish that required you to buy a separate ethernet accessory. They've had all kinds of crazy pricing and plan changes. Their support services have gone from pretty good to almost non-existent and they've had trouble maintaining solid speeds as they bounce between adding more satellites to their constellation and adding more customers to their user base. This led them to start pushing data caps on customers that had originally signed up for unlimited service plans. Now I started on Starlink at 99 bucks a month with unlimited data, but I canceled about two years later when my plan had slowly crept up to $120 a month with a one terabyte data cap. But I canceled because I really didn't need Starlink, right? I'm not in a rural location. I've got easy access to not only standard terrestrial internet but also much cheaper 5G LTE internet options. I pay like 30 bucks a month for T-Mobile home internet and I get about 400 megabits with that service. Others aren't so lucky. For some folks, Starlink is the only real option for broadband internet speeds and they're happy to pay 120 or 150 bucks a month for the service, right? They're gonna put up with those fluctuations because it's still heads and tails better than anything else available. So while I had canceled the service that I was using with my gen one dish over a year ago, when I received notice that the gen three dish was available, I dropped 599 bucks on this new version and I opted for the mobile roaming plan, which allows me to turn the service off during the months that I'm not using it. Okay, so now let's get this new dish out of the box and talk about some of the features. First off, compared to the gen one dish, this is obviously a lot smaller, right? Compared to the gen two dish, the gen three dish is actually a little bit bigger, but it doesn't come with a motorized actuated stand. Let me get rid of this thing. Okay, it's also a lot lighter. Now, the gen three dish just has a manual kickstand, but you can still purchase all of the standard mounting accessory options. All right, here is the dish itself. See that kickstand right here? Woo, very nice. All right, we've got our instructions. Here's the gen three router. We'll talk about that in a moment. Power brick, power cable, and Starlink dish cable. All right, so the Starlink dish comes with a 50 foot cable, but you can optionally buy a 150 foot cable if you need to. Now, I actually really like this option since the 50 foot cable should be fine for most installs, but you do have the option of a longer cable if you actually need it. The gen one dish had a, I think it was a 75 or 100 foot cable, but it was attached. Like you couldn't actually change it or remove it, which was kind of a pain in the butt. The gen three dish itself is now IP67 rated, meaning that it's even better at standing up to dirt, dust, and water than the previous version, which was only IP54 rated. It does, however, draw more power, stating an average of 75 to 100 watts, whereas the gen two dish had a 75 watt maximum. I'm gonna be measuring the wattage later in this video. That higher wattage could be an issue for some folks, especially if you're using Starlink in an RV or if you're off the grid and trying to power it with solar. 75 watts is gonna drain your batteries very quickly, so it would be best to only have the dish on while you're actually using the internet. Now for my own RV, this is one of the main reasons why I prefer the T-Mobile home internet router. It only draws about 10 watts of power, but of course you do have to be within range of an LTE tower to use it. Now let's talk about this gen three router because this is one of the biggest improvements to the overall package. The gen three router is now four by four multi-user MIMO WiFi six, meaning that it has a lot more bandwidth, wireless bandwidth, than the previous generation, which only had WiFi five. But what does that really mean here? Starlink non-prioritized internet speeds are typically around 100 megabits per second, maybe up to 200 megabits per second. That's well below the speeds that you'd get with either WiFi five or WiFi six. So devices connecting out to the internet won't really be able to take advantage of these enhanced wireless capabilities. But if you have devices that need to talk to each other internally, then you may see some benefit with WiFi six versus WiFi five. Like for example, if you do a lot of copying of files between your WiFi six laptop and a network attached storage device or something like that. One huge improvement, however, is the inclusion of not just one, but two external ethernet ports. These can be used to plug wired devices directly into the Starlink router, or they can be used to plug into the WAN side of your own router if you wanna use Starlink internet service with your own equipment. Now I've done a number of videos on how to use Starlink with your own router. You can find them if you search Starlink on my channel. With the first generation router, Starlink gave you one ethernet port, which is great. Gen two, however, completely removed the ethernet port and required you to purchase a separate ethernet dongle for wired connectivity. Now, not only did this piss a lot of people off, right? But these ethernet dongles weren't always in stock. So people were stuck wanting to use Starlink as the WAN source for their own equipment, but they couldn't until that ethernet dongle arrived. Now plus, logistically for Starlink, I'm sure this caused no small amount of trouble tickets and support issues, not to mention the extra order processing. So with the Gen three router, we now have two ethernet ports built right in. So you could plug in up to two wired devices or perhaps even use Starlink as the WAN source for two completely different networks. I'm gonna have to test that out. Another feature of the Gen three router is that you can now mesh together up to three of these routers to increase your wireless coverage area. Though, frankly, if you really wanted a wireless mesh network in your home, I wouldn't use Starlink stuff. I would buy one of the many mesh wireless products on the market and then just use Starlink for the WAN side of those products. Or better yet, get into like a Unifier TP-Linko modest style network, which is much more reliable and flexible than wireless mesh. Now, I believe that you could also do wireless mesh with the Gen two router, but of course that's gonna be Wi-Fi five, so slower connectivity between the mesh endpoints. And with the Gen three router, I believe it is backwards compatible. So you can mesh to other Gen three routers and you can also mesh to Gen two routers if you have one of those. All right, so without further ado, let's get this Starlink Gen three dish outside and get it all set up. Starlink setup is really simple and straightforward. You take everything out of the box, you plug it together like so, where the dish goes into the router and the power supply goes into the router. And of course you wanna position the dish so that it has a really clear view of the sky like this and not like this. Finally, you use the app to orient the dish and then it connects to Starlink and does its thing. All right, let's get started. Okay, so I have the Starlink app logged in and ready to go. We're gonna say start setup and we're gonna pick the Gen three dish and confirm, find a clear view of the sky. I have a location, install mount, continue with kickstand, position Starlink will align it in a moment, place your Starlink outside with a clear view of the sky. Great, and it's got a little compass down the bottom. It's actually telling me North is that way, which is a little bit different than my phone compass told me. So let's give it a quick pivot there. Starlink is set up. All right, plug in Starlink and router. My Starlink is powered. Connect to the Starlink wifi. Okay, here we go, open settings. All right, we're connected. Establishing connection to your Starlink network. Starlink paired successfully, wonderful, continue. Starlink offline, router not configured. Tap to finish setting up your Starlink router. All right, let's do that. Starman. So first it wanted me to give it a wireless SSID and password, which I have done. All right, it says offline Starlink unplugged or rebooting. Ensure your Starlink is plugged in. Your Starlink appears to be unplugged or rebooting. Please check the following. All connections are secure and fully seated. Let's try that first. This one's good. Oh, and that one was not good. All right, initializing. Now it says searching for satellites. Now, if you are installing this onto the pole mount or one of the other types of mounts, this is where you're really gonna wanna try to dial it in to get the best alignment possible and the clearest view of the sky possible. Starlink found a satellite and is attempting to join the Starlink network. This app has actually come a long way since I last used it well over a year ago. Calculating orientation. All right, Starlink is talking to satellites to determine which way it's pointing. All right, so Starlink is misaligned by 12 degrees. Tap to align for better performance. Rotate your Starlink to match the outline. Oh, look at that. Starlink is aligned. Your Starlink is pointed in the correct direction. Done. Downloading update. All right, I'm gonna let it download its update and then we're gonna come back and we will start doing some speed testing. All right, it started to rain pretty good, so I shuffled everything around and moved the router inside. I still have the Starlink dish outside, as you can see right outside this door here. Total setup of the Starlink was about five minutes to unbox and actually physically plug everything in, and then it took about 20 to 30 minutes to boot up and connect with satellites and it ran through a couple of updates and then it was finally fully online. Looking at the app here, we can see that we're online. If I click on statistics, we can see uptime, we can check outages, we can see latency and throughput. Right now there's absolutely nothing going on in this network. Clicking on network is going to show us devices connected to the wireless as well as wireless mesh nodes if we have any of those set up. I'm gonna skip speed test for now. Let's take a look at the settings. So within the settings itself, we have router settings or Starlink settings. For router settings, we can change our wireless network, including splitting out the 2.4 and 5 gigahertz if we want. If we don't do that, by default, they're combined and your device gets to choose which frequency it connects to. We can also completely hide the SSID if we want. We also have content filtering, which I assume uses DNS to filter out either malware or malware and adult content. There's a link for more information on that if you wanna check it out. We can reboot the router. We can put in custom DNS settings. For instance, if we're running a pie hole on the network, or if we just wanna use our own DNS for like Windows Active Directory or something like that, we can use custom DNS settings, or we can do bypass mode, which completely turns off the wifi in the Starlink router. Now that's what you would wanna do if you are using the Starlink router just for a WAN connection into your own equipment. All right, so I'm actually really impressed with the improvements that this app has gone through since the last time I looked at it, which has been well over a year, especially the alignment stuff where it actually shows you how to position the dish is really nice. It kinda does it in real time. It gives you a box. It says, no, tilt it this way or tilt it that way. That works really, really well, and I was happy to see that in here. All right, let's go ahead and run a speed test and see how we do. ["Starlink Theme Song"] All right, so Starlink speed test gave us 155 megabits. That's really good, and it had also sort of, bounced up even higher than that at the start of the test. So it's ended up being 155 megabits down by 9.3 megabits up. Let's do another speed test, but let's not use Starlink's app. Let's use speedtest.net. ["Starlink Theme Song"] And speedtest.net got a really nice result of 308 megabits down by 31.2 up. I mean, if you're in the middle of nowhere and Starlink is your only option for internet, those are really, really good speeds. All right, let's now take a look at the power. In terms of power draw, here you can see that the Starlink satellite dish is not plugged in. The only thing currently powered is the Gen 3 router, which is pulling just around 10 watts of power. So let's go ahead and plug the Starlink dish in and see how that changes. There, it jumped up to 105 watts, 108 watts now. And after the dish boots up, we can see that it settles in just between, usually I'm seeing this between like 35 up to maybe 48 watts or so. And when it's idle, it's right in that same range with fluctuations that obviously go up a little bit higher. It is still booting, so it's probably why it jumped up there. But yeah, when it's idle, it's between 35 to 45 watts on average. To me, the power draw is the biggest downside to Starlink satellite internet. I mean, not an issue if you're using it at home or when your RV's plugged into shore power, but if you're boondocking or if you're living off the grid with a solar system, this is a big problem. So other than the power issue, I pretty much love everything about this new dish. It's super small and portable compared to the Gen 1, and even when compared to the Gen 2, sure, the dish itself is slightly bigger, but without that articulating stand, the overall footprint of Gen 3 is much smaller. Starlink setup is as simple as ever, and I really loved how the app helps you actually orient the dish graphically in real time. Speed testing was about what I expected it to be, and actually even up here in my office, with the Starlink router downstairs in my garage on the other side of the house, I'm still getting some really nice download speeds, typically between 150 to 300 megabits per second. The built-in content filtering is a nice added bonus as well. I wanted to test it out and do some research, right? So I enabled the content filtering, and then I tried to surf to some adult sites, and I was completely blocked. So that's a very helpful feature for those with kids that are on the internet. And finally, while I didn't actually try plugging the Gen 3 router into the WAN side of a third-party firewall, I love that you can disable the onboard Wi-Fi so that you don't have competing SSIDs cluttering up the airwaves. Now I'm gonna be testing Starlink Gen 3 as an internet source for other equipment in another video, so be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss out on any new content. My final thoughts on the Gen 3, I mean, I like it, right? I actually like it more than I was expecting to like it, but I do still feel that it's not for everyone. If it's the only broadband internet available to you, then it's really like a miracle product, right? But if you're like me and you live in a neighborhood, in a populated area, there are certainly more cost-effective and reliable options such as cable internet or fiber. Now, if you're looking to use Starlink as a backup internet service, I would actually still argue that if you're in a populated area, some of the 5G LTE internet options are faster and cheaper than Starlink. Personally, I am now going to pause my Starlink service, one of the added benefits. I'm gonna throw this thing back in the box and I'm gonna stash it in my RV. That way, if I go camping in an area that has zero LTE connectivity for my normal T-Mobile internet service, I'll have Starlink ready to go and I simply have to unpause the service. And it's so much more compact than my Gen 1 Starlink dish. I can easily find a place to store it. Now, just keep in mind that when you unpause, you do get charged for your entire month's billing cycle, even if you only have a few days left in the month. If you have any questions about Starlink or if you'd like to see me test something, leave a comment down below. And if you'd like to keep this party going, I have hand-selected two videos for you to watch next. The top video is my recent review of Ubiquiti's new Wi-Fi 7 access point, the U7 Pro. And the bottom video is my full review of T-Mobile 5G LTE home internet.
