Starlink Update: Changing Your Own Service Address - Satellite Internet Mobility for RVers?

spacex has enabled starlink customers to edit their own service address potentially letting them take starlink on the road easier than ever before hi i'm chris with the mobile internet resource center here to give you an update on spacex's starlink this is spacex's massive satellite broadband internet constellation that is slowly rolling out in this beta form right now now one of the big catches for starling for anybody who is nomadic in any fashion is that when you sign up for starlink you give them a service address and your service is pretty much locked to that address people have been testing this trying to take their startling service on the road and have discovered that starlink will drop off sometimes as little as 11 miles or so from your home service address because of just the way the network is set up when you are assigned to starlink you are assigned a home service cell and the satellites only pay attention to your dish if you are inside that cell you leave the cell no connection even if you're someplace else where there's plenty of active starlink service now up until recently to take starlink anywhere outside of your home cell you actually had to go contact starlink customer service via email and request a new address and if they approve your new address a couple days later it'll flip off where you're currently at and flip on at that new location you know great if you're moving someplace for a season but not at all suitable for rvers who want to travel from place to place to place and have any sort of capability to actually enjoy that traveling so what's new is spacex has taken that customer service rep out of the equation and just over the past week they have um quietly rolled out on the starling customer portal the ability to edit your own service address you can put in an address just by you know typing it out as you normally would you can use plus codes which is a google's kind of shortcut to enter gps coordinates with an easy way to look them up on google maps you could actually enter gps coordinates or you can even bring up a satellite map zoom out and find where you want to be zoom in and put drop the starlight service right onto your favorite remote boondocking sites wow this is great you know the you've tested this the change takes effect in just about 20 minutes your current location turns off and presumably the service in the new location comes on this is wonderful finally you could take starlink on the road at least for our viewers it's a portable system you can take it wherever you want to go but there is a very very big catch um first off starling doesn't have any work close to 100 coverage of the united states yet they are only offering service and have coverage in parts of um the northern states you know they haven't even begun to drop you know further south in colorado or kansas yet um so there's only certain areas where the system will accept your address as having coverage otherwise it will just reject the change and well even more critically is they have major capacity issues right now starlink is in early beta form and quite a few of the places you might think hey i know this area this town this this national forest has startling service i know somebody else up there who's already using starlink if you try to change your address to that location the system will in our testing so many places will come up as saying sorry cannot change your address we do not have capacity so in theory starlink is a lot more nomad friendly mobile friendly right now you can take it with you wherever you want to go adjust the address and well assuming that the address is accepted you can get online from a lot more places so we have been actually testing the turning on and off and moving uh startling service and we've discovered it is when you do find a place that is marked as having coverage and not over capacity um while you don't have a map you can't check this out and scout in advance you can just submit new addresses and if it goes through the service at your current address will then you know turn off within 10 or 20 minutes so keep this in mind if you're experimenting trying to scout out where you're next going to take your starlink if starling is your only away online where you're currently at you might be about to pull the plug on yourself so and also because of the capacity concerns keep in mind that if you take starlight out on a trip and you successfully take it to a few new locations when you return to your home address your your previous home address your fixed base maybe the cell that you started in is now at capacity somebody else might have claimed your slot and you might not be able to come home and reactivate your service at least not without getting startling customer service involved this is still beta service this is still surface focused on residential users they are still launching lots of satellites and even once they launch the satellites it takes months for them to reach their final orbits so there is a lot more coverage a lot more capacity a lot more other things coming down the road right now starlink is not practically very nomad friendly but they're making some major strides in that direction now one other thing people will be asking us is well okay that's that's great for rvers it's portable you can take it to places and set it up now what about on boats like like where we are right now floating in a lake in our testing and this current starlink receivers will turn off and they'll shut themselves down and require a full power cycle reboot if they detect any physical motion so you can take them to new locations set them up on the ground you know solid firm ground turn them on and with the address matches their assigned cell they will work but if you were to assign your cell out here to the middle of the lake set it up it might work for a little while but as the boat starts to rotate or rock the dish will detect motion it will shut down starlink is not boat friendly yet um boat friendliness mobility that will require them to have a new fcc license potentially new hardware entirely and potentially even new service plans this is something that we covered last month spacex has applied with the fcc for this appropriate license they've talked about future hardware that will be real mobile and in motion compatible but that is not here today what is new today is the ability to change your fixed terrestrial service address this is still not boat appropriate but a lot closer to being a mobile solution for our rvers or portable solution for our viewers mine this is still beta this is still early and um there are a lot of gotchas to potentially you know white might hit you if you take this surface on on the road with you so we tracked some of the gotchas in the article that goes along with this video check it out and again there's a lot of people who are sharing their experiences as they try this out it's an exciting future for this but keep in mind all the limitations these videos are brought to you by our premium members or mobile internet aficionados they make it possible for us to track this news and create these videos if you like this video please give it a thumbs up leave a comment subscribe to our channel or better yet consider becoming a member yourself

Channel: Mobile Internet Resource Center

Views: 26,197

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Id: JGZUr65EoD0

Length: 7min 13sec (433 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 05 2021