Anyone tried Starlink?

BigMonka

I'm getting increasingly annoyed with my 4G based broadband so am thinking of giving Starlink a try. Only issue is its really expensive! I'm currently paying £15/month for my broadband whereas Starlink is £75/month and the hardware starts at £199 for refurbished ones!
I'm reticent to start forking out a load of money without hearing some real-life experience. Anyone tried it?

robgilmo

BigMonka said:

I'm getting increasingly annoyed with my 4G based broadband so am thinking of giving Starlink a try. Only issue is its really expensive! I'm currently paying £15/month for my broadband whereas Starlink is £75/month and the hardware starts at £199 for refurbished ones!
I'm reticent to start forking out a load of money without hearing some real-life experience. Anyone tried it?

Do you have a 4g router? I have the 4g BT Mini hub and with a good signal its every bit as good as my home connection.

TTony

Starlink is brilliant.  I've been using it since it became available in the UK (2-3 years?) and I've had a rock solid connection, reliable 200mbps speeds, no noticeable lag, at least not for Teams (etc) calls - I've not tried it for online gaming purposes.

You have to position the antenna where it has an unobstructed view of the "correct" part of the sky - mine is on a front wall of the house.  And, if you want to "mesh" the connection around the house, you need to add the separate ethernet adapter to connect to your internal system.

Had the same problems with previous 4G connection.  Even with a specialist Microtik antenna, mounted externally and pointing right at the mast, the signal would disappear completely at times, and the speed fluctuated regularly.   

BigMonka

robgilmo said:

BigMonka said:

I'm getting increasingly annoyed with my 4G based broadband so am thinking of giving Starlink a try. Only issue is its really expensive! I'm currently paying £15/month for my broadband whereas Starlink is £75/month and the hardware starts at £199 for refurbished ones!
I'm reticent to start forking out a load of money without hearing some real-life experience. Anyone tried it?

Do you have a 4g router? I have the 4g BT Mini hub and with a good signal its every bit as good as my home connection.

Yes I've got a top-end 4G router and then that's connected to a mesh system. Current speed is 45Mbps compared to the 2-3Mbps that we had with ADSL.
The main problem is that its on the 3 Network which is a bit pants and only connects to a single tower. When it works then its great but its just not quite consistent enough for when we have critical meetings for work.

BigMonka

TTony said:

Starlink is brilliant.  I've been using it since it became available in the UK (2-3 years?) and I've had a rock solid connection, reliable 200mbps speeds, no noticeable lag, at least not for Teams (etc) calls - I've not tried it for online gaming purposes.

You have to position the antenna where it has an unobstructed view of the "correct" part of the sky - mine is on a front wall of the house.  And, if you want to "mesh" the connection around the house, you need to add the separate ethernet adapter to connect to your internal system.

Had the same problems with previous 4G connection.  Even with a specialist Microtik antenna, mounted externally and pointing right at the mast, the signal would disappear completely at times, and the speed fluctuated regularly.   

Thanks Tony, so you had similar consistency issue with 4G as I have! And you've not suffered that with Starlink? How much does the weather affect it?

LooseMoose

Yep, Starlink is great - I work for an ISP and we supply them to more rural customers that can't get FTTP.

VERY good indeed.  Yes there are blips, but these are mostly small and only once have we had total failure of hardware and that was a bit of a faff to sort, but got dealt with in the end.

Far superior to 4/5G

TTony

BigMonka said:

Thanks Tony, so you had similar consistency issue with 4G as I have! And you've not suffered that with Starlink? How much does the weather affect it?

Baking heat?  Fine.
Pouring rain?  Fine.
Thunderstorms?  Fine.
Misty or Foggy?  Fine

I've seriously got zero regrets.  When I installed it, there was no refurb kit, so the hardware was £500ish, and the monthly cost was £90 (reduced last year, IIRC, to the current £75).  Even at those prices, I have zero regrets.

You will need the separate ethernet adapter though, to be able to connect to your mesh system.  Starlink sell their own, but I've no issues connecting to a BT WholeHome mesh system.

stickyfiddle

[comment about not wanting to give Musk money]

Sporky

stickyfiddle said:

[comment about not wanting to give Musk money]

I don't disagree with the sentiment, but equally I don't think he'll notice another £75 a month. 

TTony

Sporky said:

stickyfiddle said:

[comment about not wanting to give Musk money]

I don't disagree with the sentiment, but equally I don't think he'll notice another £75 a month. 

It's easy to have principles and take your business elsewhere, when there's a viable alternative.

But when you've got no other viable option ... it'd be like turning off your water supply (and blocking your sewage outflows) because you don't like Thames Water's dividend strategy.

Sporky

That too! 

BigMonka

@TTony that's good to hear that the price has gone down! I was wondering whether there were any loyalty discounts over time, like with most phone/broadband you can renegotiate when you're contract is up? I haven't seen any reference to that sort of thing but that might be due to it not being a 12/24month contract.

mrkb

stickyfiddle said:

[comment about not wanting to give Musk money]

It’s ok, he invests the money in technology to improve humanity. His cave diving Sub was instrumental in saving those kids……

BigMonka

LooseMoose said:

Yep, Starlink is great - I work for an ISP and we supply them to more rural customers that can't get FTTP.

VERY good indeed.  Yes there are blips, but these are mostly small and only once have we had total failure of hardware and that was a bit of a faff to sort, but got dealt with in the end.

Far superior to 4/5G

@LooseMoose should I be looking at going through an ISP like you or does it make more sense to go direct?

exocet

I'm certainly going to use this option should BT Openreach decide that they can't be arsed to run fibre to my house or any house that exists on my housing estate - at the moment it very much looks like it'll be too much trouble for them; all because they (GPO) didn't install the underground ducting properly some 50 years ago when the estate was originally built. FTTC service is rather crap here (6 Mb/s upload maximum)- and 4G performance is very up and down.

stickyfiddle

TTony said:

Sporky said:

stickyfiddle said:

[comment about not wanting to give Musk money]

I don't disagree with the sentiment, but equally I don't think he'll notice another £75 a month. 

It's easy to have principles and take your business elsewhere, when there's a viable alternative.

But when you've got no other viable option ... it'd be like turning off your water supply (and blocking your sewage outflows) because you don't like Thames Water's dividend strategy.

Yes that is certainly fair. And I'm certainly not going to try and argue an internet connection isn't fundamentally important in the modern world

LooseMoose

BigMonka said:

LooseMoose said:

Yep, Starlink is great - I work for an ISP and we supply them to more rural customers that can't get FTTP.

VERY good indeed.  Yes there are blips, but these are mostly small and only once have we had total failure of hardware and that was a bit of a faff to sort, but got dealt with in the end.

Far superior to 4/5G

@LooseMoose should I be looking at going through an ISP like you or does it make more sense to go direct?

For home/SMB I'd just go direct - we only add value to connections going into sites that require full packet inspection (schools, colleges etc.) - below that you're grand.

Lonewolff

I installed it at home in Ireland  just before Christmas.
 I ordered the refurb kit which looked brand new.
 Have gone from 8mb max download speeds from my old satellite provider to constant 250-300mb with Starlink. 
The only gripe I'd have with Starlink is that the router is very weak so you'd probably have to buy a better router or a mesh system like I did.
I'm still very happy I went with them, it's been an absolute game changer in my home.
We can use phones, laptops, firesticks and game online on the xbox seamlessly now without any problems.
I'd never go back to the way it was before.
I't very very expensive here compared to what I'm paying, 50 euro pm vs £75 pm.

m_c

I've worked at a few big events who've used Starlinks to provide internet access, and it is largely flawless, although those events did have dedicated IT guys to setup the network around the event villages.
Biggest issue was people sharing wifi access codes to those who shouldn't have had wifi access, but the IT guys were savvy enough to already have different access groups, so the key people who needed web access got priority allocation, and everybody just had to suffer slow speeds.

I've also done some events where the Starlink was just dumped outside the door/marquee/easyup, and relied on it's own wifi hotspot for access.

I was on the verge of buying one, until I found out that Openreach had started fibre installation in the area, and it would only be another couple months until it was available for installation.

TTony said:

Had the same problems with previous 4G connection.  Even with a specialist Microtik antenna, mounted externally and pointing right at the mast, the signal would disappear completely at times, and the speed fluctuated regularly.   

There is no guarantee you'll be connected to the nearest mast, which is why directional antennas are not usually recommended.
Using a more sensitive antenna can result in a slower speed, as there is the possibility that you'll end up being connected to a weaker signal due to all the load shedding/splitting that mobile operators do.

I ran 4G access for a few years with a Teltonika RUT modem, and a fairly sensitive antenna. Nearest masts were about 1.5miiles away, and if you monitored the connection, it would often switch between masts.

CavemanGrogg

We've been seriously looking into getting it since January this year.  The standard line based internet has been absolutely shit these last 2 almost 3 months now, for close to 3 months now out of every 7 days 3 or 4 of them we've had no internet connection, and to get the connection restored it's either been a case of wait and hope it reestablishes itself or an engineer is sent out, and it's not just due to bad weather, not to mention that 4/5g isn't really an option for us either, if our internet goes down due to the weather, 9 times out of 10 we lose mobile/4g/5g connection as well.  We've - the village that is not just my household, have supposedly had this issue solved last Thursday, it was a huge job, that took most of February to solve - we'll know if it's been solved in due time, but to quote several of the engineers involved in the repairs, ''the council and infrastructure maps bare no resemblance to reality'', ''according to the map we're - the entire village, is supplied it's internet via infrastructure not capable of doing so it's that old'', ''the boxes - the ones that are usually green, are so old in the village that they not only no longer have the ability to access them, but that they we also installed and out of date before every engineer involved in fixing the issue was born'' - no joke according to the infrastructure map that the engineers use our village was being supplied high speed internet via telephone infrastructure installed in the late 1800's. 

I'm not joking, over the last few weeks, the entire village that I live in, has not only had to have it's telephone and internet infrastructure reinstalled from scratch, but also proper maps of this infrastructure and phone lines had to made as well.  We've decided that we're going to give it until June of this year, when our current ISP contract ends, and if there has not been a massive, and I mean seriously massive improvement - we're paying for over 60mbs yet on the best of days when our internet was working we'd be lucky to get 3mbs since the repair we're averaging a tad over 70mbs, we're just going to bite the bullet and go with Starlink.  Is it pricey, yes, however if you share the cost between a few neighbours it becomes very comparable to ISPs like EE, Sky, Vodafone and all the others, and even if you don't share the connection with neighbours, it still works out cheaper getting the Starlink connection, than it is for me at least to have a contract with a standard iSP as well as a backup ISP contract with a 4g/5g ISP, especially since when we lose 1 due to the weather, on most occasions we lose the 4g/5g connections too.

I also do think that the price of the service is going to tank one day in the not to distant future.

koneguitarist

Yep we use it at work, been very good in the office.