Instapundit<\/a> fame) experience with Starlink in Knoxville.\u00a0 He was pretty happy with it.\u00a0 I went to the Starlink site and signed up.\u00a0 Unfortunately, there was a waiting list of about a year, but I plonked down my $99 and waited.<\/p>\nA couple of weeks ago, I checked my status and found out that I was elevated to “Best Effort” status, which apparently meant that I could order the equipment and they would try to give me service without a guarantee of any given bandwidth.\u00a0 The equipment cost me $599, but I plonked that down, too.<\/p>\n
A few days later, it arrived.\u00a0 The box contained a flat satellite receiver, a four-legged table top stand, 75 feet of cable, and a router.\u00a0 \u00a0To set it up, you have to use a Starlink app on your phone, but the intructions are easy.\u00a0 First, you wave your phone around to identify where the the receiver should look for satellites, then you set up the receiver.\u00a0 I took the receiver outside and set it on my emergency generator, strung the cable into my garage, and plugged in the router, which also powers the revceiver.\u00a0 \u00a0The receiver rapidly found the optimum exposure.\u00a0 In a couple of minutes I had “some” connectivity, and in about 30 minutes I was getting download speeds of 96-100 Mbps.\u00a0 \u00a0Over the course of the next few days, the speed was mostly between 60-120 Mbps, with a few short stretches of 15-20 Mbps.<\/p>\n
My placement of the receiver isn’t the best.\u00a0 \u00a0Since my place is in a forest, the field the receiver views has about 20-30% obstruction.\u00a0 This shows up by signal dropping for a few seconds every once in awhile.\u00a0 \u00a0I have a call in to a guy who will put the thing on my roof (you normally have to buy the mount for that, but I hope to strap it to the mount that the cantenna is on).\u00a0 I’m 67 years old, weigh 270 lbs, and have bad legs; my days of scrambling around on roofs is over.\u00a0 But I have little doubt that once it’s up there, I’ll have fewer drops, if any.<\/p>\n
The drops are barely noticeable.\u00a0 \u00a0I *have* noticed it — things will stop for a few seconds and pick up again.\u00a0 But since the bandwith is 60-100 times more than I get with my MiFi, I’m a very happy camper.\u00a0 And, as I said, once I mount the receiver properly, I am confident that will get fixed.\u00a0 \u00a0I’ve been through one major storm since I’ve gotten it.\u00a0 Speed dropped to about 20 – 40 Mbps during the worst of it – which included torrential rain, dense cloud cover, high winds, and trees waving all over the place.<\/p>\n
The cost of Starlink is $110\/month after the first $599 equipment fee.\u00a0 I think my $99 deposit will be applied to my first month’s bill, but I haven’t gotten it yet.<\/p>\n
A couple of days ago, I got an email saying that I had been upgraded from best effort to Residential service.\u00a0 The “best effort” service was about what I was expecting for Residential, so I don’t really expect much difference.<\/p>\n
The bottom line, though, is that I now have what “feels” like real high speed bandwidth after seven years of 600 Kbps-1Mbps on a good day.<\/p>\n
I’m going to keep MiFi from ATT.\u00a0 It’s not as fast as Starlink, but it’s very portable, and I travel a bit.\u00a0 I like to have my own dependable internet access when I’m on the road.\u00a0 ATT MiFi is dependable, if not as fast, and ATT has served me well (if not cheaply) for seven years.\u00a0 I will likely cut back on the data plans of my other phones, though.<\/p>\n
I will probably now drop DirecTV.\u00a0 I don’t have all that much against it, but I resent paying buckets of money for channels I don’t watch.\u00a0 The primary advantage of streaming is that it is about as a la carte as you want to be.\u00a0 With DirectTV, I pay for hundreds of channels I will never watch in order to get four or five that I do watch.\u00a0 Plus, a lot of content I watch simply isn’t available except by streaming.\u00a0 \u00a0By cutting back on my phone service a bit, dropping DirectTV,\u00a0 and picking up anothing streaming channel, I think I’m going to get a net savings of about $60\/month.<\/p>\n
The biggest things to me are simply not having to wait for 10-15 seconds to have web pages load, not having videos pause for buffering all the time, and not having to count my bandwidth usage all the time.\u00a0 My brother-in-law lives nearby, and has fiberoptic service for something like $65 a month.\u00a0 He loves it.\u00a0 I probably would, too, if I didn’t have to pay $10,000 to get it.<\/p>\n
But for me, Starlink is a delight.\u00a0 It’s cheap compared to my other options.\u00a0 It has worked like a charm for weeks, now.\u00a0 I can now have “real” streaming internet service.<\/p>\n
Thank you, Elon Musk and the Starlink\/SpaceX team.<\/p>\n
Update:<\/p>\n
It’s been a couple of weeks and Spring has moved into full swing. I haven’t gotten the receiver up on the roof yet.\u00a0 It’s still sitting near the ground on my emergeny generator.\u00a0 As the trees start showing leaves the amount of obstruction is slowly increasing.\u00a0 It’s now well over 30% of the sky.<\/p>\n
It’s actually pretty cool.\u00a0 The receiver scans the sky and maps the obstructions, and you can see the map of the sky on the Android app.\u00a0 \u00a0When I first set it up, you could see exactly where the large trees by the driveway were, and the treeline on the hill beside me.\u00a0 Now as Spring as progressed, I can actually see the branches of the trees fill out as obstructions.\u00a0 Instead of one line of obstruction where a major branch is, there’s now a dense obstruction and feathery obstructions branching off of it.\u00a0 Last night, I had about 10 minutes where it couldn’t find a satelllite.\u00a0 But it finally reconnected and everything was fine.\u00a0 I am confident this will stop once I get the receiver up where it can see more of the sky.<\/p>\n
Someone asked me, so I’ll say it here.\u00a0 No, Starlink isn’t paying me anything for this review.<\/p>\n
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