*sigh*
Starlink is already suffering because it's oversold. Y'all aren't helping any.
) https://www.tweaktown.com/news/86320/in ... index.html
Fedex dropped my dish off a few hours ago. Got it up and running!
Several Dish firmware upgrades later, I think it's finally happy with that. Starlink speed tests showed 75 to 150 megabits down and 6 to 12 up. that's comparable to what my cable modem got when I lived in town. And it was the same monthly price Starlink RV is. However the starlink app warned me that I had bad wifi throughout the house, the SL router is the corner of a room on one end of the house not centrally located.
So I dusted off my Eero's (old gen 2 models) that haven't been used in 6 months or so since we moved. I plugged them in, thankful I went ahead and got the SL ethernet adaptor, and get them all up to date. Wifi throughout the house and very decent speed from Starlink. I guess one perk of living out in the middle of no where, I have zero neighboring wifi networks worry about. Where I lived before, there were 20 or so wifi networks I could pick up in my house and inference was an issue. The only problem here are interior walls and Eero has taken care of that. I even ran Cat6 when we remodeled, not sure if we'll need It or not but it's there if we want it.
As of right now, the starlink app reports 4 seconds of downtime in the last 2 hours. I can totally handle that. I guess now the question is do I leave Eero as a router and live the double NAT lifestyle, put Eero in bridge mode, or disable the routing of the SL router? Seems like if I disable the SL router, I lose all the neat tests and stats so I don't think I want to do that.
Still, very very good first impressions.
T-Mobile coverage is about to get a whole lot broader, too.
As it says right in that article it's using the laser mesh (and polar orbit sats they've been launching for a while). Has nothing to do with low pop, with a bent pipe they need a base within, I forget exactly, but 900km or something like that? They're not ready to bring the mesh up officially for commercial service everywhere, but they've been testing it for a while now. The reveal on the mesh being up officially in general is the launch date for blue water maritime service, since same thing, it's infeasible without it.
That will certainly be cool if they pull it off but I don't think it has anything to do with fixed service. Only way Starlink would improve that theoretically is if SpaceX made their ground station level links (or future FSO hybrid ones or something) available to carriers with appropriate sat coverage so they could have a gigabit+ backbone anywhere which would then get redistributed via cell towers. But for fixed service via Starlink I think SpaceX would generally prefer people just get, well, Starlink. The main possible advantage I can see of Internet<>Starlink<>Cell<>fixed-LTE/5G-CPE<>LAN vs Internet<>Starlink<>LAN would be that the cellular is much better at dealing with obstacles and doesn't have any sort of LOS requirement, plus CPE can be smaller and lower power. For that though it requires a bunch more infra and injects another middleman. Not sure how that will sugar out over the next decade. The cellular partnership right now sounds more about last resort emergency phone access, just texting or very minimal voice/data. Incredibly handy in a crisis or for key warning information or the far from anything, but not what anyone would want to depend on for regular use either.
It looks like the square dish has significant efficiency improvements. If I care only about daytime use, and can tolerate cloudy outages, it looks like I could get away with 100W.
Beats the bejezus out of the 750ms I used to see on Dish.
They were on sale for $299 CAD last year, and are currently selling refurbished units for $450 CAD. Convert that to USD and they're practically giving them away compared to the original price.
1. I'm pretty sure that, yes, you can cancel at any time. I have several Starlink accounts (business-related but using "cconsumer" accounts on Starlink) and have been able to cancel a few of them within a few months of opening accounts with no penalties.
Yes, you can cancel service at any time, with no penalties. It will continue to work until the end of your "service period", which is whatever day of the month you activated service. Service starts on the 17th, cancel it on the 18th, it works until the 16th of the next month, for example.
We ran ours from the backyard for almost 3 years.
Always planned to mount it on the roof "next weekend".Time of day doesn't really apply, it's the same service throughout the day, month, year. What matters is how many other active users are in your cell.
Depending on the exact version of the Starlink hardware you get, you can either replace the Starlink router completely (gen 1 round Dishy), purchase an Ethernet adapter and put the Starlink router into "bypass mode" (gen 2/3 square, motorised Dishy), or plug directly into the Starlink router in "bypass mode" (gen 3/4 square unmotorised Dishy). Connect the router to a switch and plug all your other devices into the swtich.
You can sell your Starlink equipment to anyone. The process for transferring the hardware between Starlink accounts has been simplified over the year to where it's basically a few mouse click on the website to complete the transfer.
Inaccurate. Most residential accounts are behind CG-NAT, yes. However, sometimes you can end up with a publically routable IPv4 address (we had 1 a handful of times over the past 3 years). And you can always pay for a commercial account which includes a publically routable IPv4 address.
It does not use 100W continuously. It's closer to 20-30W when idle with the heater is turned off, spiking to 50-60W when doing large transfers, and only hitting 100W when you turn on the heater to melt ice and snow off the dish. Depending on the generation of Dishy hardware, of course (some are more efficient than others).
Bullshit.
Notice the word "directly" that I wrote. Yes, you can spin up a VM somewhere to use as a tunnel, but that's not the definition of the word "directly".
IPv6 counts for external connectivity. You can't really buy hardware that doesn't support it anymore. You might have to learn some stuff to get your home network working with it, but if you have a public IPv6 allocation, the only thing blocking you from reaching your machines at home will usually be you.
Thanks for clearing this up, as I've been wondering about this forever. So if I have CentralOffice with a real, public, IPv4, static address, I should be able to establish a site-to-site IPSec tunnel from a RemoteOffice1 that's running traditional NAT behind Starling's CGNAT?
I can't remember what it was but I was shocked the other day to find some pretty mainstream product line that had zero IPv6 support at all. Wish I could remember what it was now. It was like, no... really?!
Yes to all of the above. Each LAN and each VPN would need it's own unique subnet, and then you create routes on the CentralOffice router that will pass traffic between the subnets. In the interest of conserving VPN bandwidth, you might want to take this up a notch and use split tunneling on your remote office routers so that that only traffic that needs to hit something internal goes through the tunnel, and traffic that goes out to the internet bypasses VPN and goes straight out. There are pros/cons to both approaches (full vs split) where you balance bandwidth, VPN overhead, latencies, and security and this decision is specific to the requirements.
There are a LOT of hotel networks, public Wi-Fi networks, office/corp networks, etc and large ISPs that don't yet have IPv6. It's nowhere nearly as ubiquitous as some people seem to think, not even close.
