Why did we return our Starlink?

it's true after much anticipation we finally received our starlink dish and promptly returned it we'll answer why this unboxing video quickly turned into a re-boxing video but first let's have a closer look at what starlink is how it works and why it didn't work for us [Music] well i just got a notification and could it be let's see yep this is what i was looking for starlink is a division of spacex elon musk's company whose primary objective is to establish a human colony on mars yes you heard that right along the way they've developed some pretty astounding rocket technology and now they're using that to deploy thousands of small satellites with the aim of bringing high-speed internet to everyone on earth it's got a bit of a gaping hole on the side it's not good even benny's excited about getting starlink all right here we go let's open this sucker up fingers crossed there's no damage [Music] it comes with some very simple looking instructions so what have we got here looks like we've got a little stand a metal box i guess this is actually the router pretty space age looking and this here must just be the power supply but i guess it's a power supply slash switch and then we've got a short cable for the router and a massively long cable for dishi itself which is uh actually bigger than i imagined it's not a small dish so next we'll just get everything out of the box here [Music] one thing i find a bit surprising is the size and the weight of this dish in the pictures it looks kind of small you know i can hold it with one hand but it's got some weight behind it for sure it's not that small so it looks like the dish just kind of snaps into the little stand i feel like they've kept everything just really simple so i'm gonna go and put the dish on the top of the trailer plug in all the cables and see what happens [Music] so finding number one that thing is a bit heavy and cumbersome to be pulling up that ladder with just one hand now i'm just gonna go and hook up the power supply and the modem inside it's nice how they make the two sides different colors so you know which one plugs into which so one thing i have to say is that this super long cord is a little bit difficult to manage still have to figure out the best way to get it you know in and out of the actual rv i think i can get it through this little slot it looks like we've got some lights lights are always good and now i've just got to fire up the starlink app but first i'm going to go and check what the satellite looks like and which way it's pointing definitely going to have to figure out this cable situation well the dish is now pointing right up vertical so i'm firing up the app now this is where a lot of hardware tends to fail when people implement software and apps they're often not that good so let's hope that starlink has done a good job here so that's pretty good it's letting me set up a new network and now it says it is booting 12 hours it's quite a while i wasn't expecting that so i got slightly interrupted by some chickens on the loose not our chickens our neighbors how are you doing we're gonna take you back to where you belong but now i'm back to the starlink and hey it looks like we are online now that we're connected what's the first thing you have to do a speed test so i'm seeing about 35 down and about 15 up which is quite a lot less than some of the speeds i've seen so it looks like even though it's connected it's still collecting data on obstructions and that kind of thing that's what's going to take 12 hours after it had finished scanning i ran another test directly on the device and saw much better numbers so far the uptime looks good and the latency is not terrible either 30 milliseconds wouldn't necessarily want to do like you know twitchy kind of gaming but uh for the kind of stuff we do perfect for now i'm going to run the cable through this little window slot just so i can close up and lock up the trailer in terms of power probably drawing about 70 to 75 watts just the starlink itself pretty much what we expected with our solar i think this is going to be amazing absolutely amazing to have high speed internet anywhere like we're talking the middle of nowhere where there's no cell phone coverage and you can have high speed internet how cool is that so here's dishy up on the trailer i guess now it's just set up to kind of scan the sky and look for obstructions and figure out the optimal positioning for itself and yeah now we have high speed internet for the trailer this is super exciting this sounds amazing doesn't it so why are we returning it well starlink does make it clear that they don't officially support using the dish in multiple locations however we watched and read about many rvers that had great success using it as they travel the problem is they were all americans let me explain we primarily want starlink for high-speed internet while we're boondocking in the california and arizona deserts this winter there are many places with poor or no cell coverage so unlimited high-speed satellite internet would be a total game changer for remote camp spots although starlank is only officially supported in one location they do offer an online feature to change your location at any time this is how rvers move it from campsite to campsite so after we got ours set up i tested changing our location to a spot in washington state we were planning to visit to my dismay i got this message so i went to reddit and quickly confirmed that was indeed the case starlink customer service further confirmed that we would not be able to use our canadian dish in the states the most annoying thing is that it's not a technical limitation of the hardware it's a bureaucratic issue units shipped in canada are only certified by the canadian government and units shipped in the states are only certified by the american government so starlink had to disable address switching between the two countries of course this is all very disappointing to us but at this stage we have no choice but to return the dish and continue to rely on 4g cell service for our internet while we're traveling starlink is actively working on a mobile solution but there's currently no eta we'll just have to wait patiently stay tuned now i'm just gonna go and hook up the power supply now i'm just gonna go in now i'm just gonna go and hook up the power supply so if you're setting up your starlink and you get impatient just go chase some chickens for a while that doesn't sound right you can actually hear a little bit of a buzz coming from it and i don't know how good it is to be like right by it right now hopefully i'm not getting huge amounts of electromagnetic radiation you might need that's heavy i can't hold that with one hand make sure you don't miss the next video by liking subscribing and turning on notifications thanks for joining us and we'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Home A Roam

Views: 118,674

Keywords: starlink returned, starlink reviews 2021, starlink canada review, starlink rv use, starlink for rv users, starlink unboxing, starlink reboxing

Id: ym0uR4CelmE

Length: 7min 43sec (463 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 28 2021