After ten years of begging every internet provider in the business to bring the world of web to our home, and hearing nothing but crickets, I will receive my beta unit from Starlink on Friday.
Gone will be the overpriced and nearly worthless Viasat, Wild Blue, Hughs Net, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and others. I even offered $1 leasing to them all to put a tower on my property that they could then use to sell service to the hundred or so homes within reach that was in the same situation as me.
I may just spend the evening streaming video… I hear its pretty cool.
I’m signed up – I can’t wait!!! I might spend the first week going back and looking at every video posted here in the forum that I’ve had to skip over in the past year+. And all the posts with more than 3 photos in them, too!
Good idea. My wife and I are almost giddy thinking about it. It’s hard to run a couple of business from home if you have to rely on hotspots and spotty service like what we have been offered in the past.
Yeah, I tried Hotspots and USB modems, too. They’re capable devices, just not meant for 24/7 connectivity. They would always lock up or disconnect after a few hours. I ended up using four Netgear 4G external modems with a USB modem as a backup. The five lines together cost $100 a month at Verizon. It’s been a rock solid network, so far. It runs my internet, security cameras, Netflix, Fire Stick without any problem. I certainly wouldn’t trade it for any satellite setup I’ve seen.
I look forward to reports as a large group of us are looking to retire with good internet somewhere other than the Bay Area, and in most cases that may require bringing our internet with us!
Fingers crossed it’s as good as promised, and continues to get better
They don’t have mobile starlink yet, but I am told it is coming. Right now I believe it is very closely tied to the address it’s purchased for. I even read in the documentation that you had to make SURE you had the right address plugged in because it couldn’t be changed after the equipment was sent to you. Not sure how they are tying it that closely or why it would need to be done like that… but here’s hoping they get the mobile, stick-it-on-an-rv dish ready for those on the move.
Oh yeah, we’re picking a specific spot - we just haven’t picked it yet. Literally the plans currently vary as wildly as Santa Rosa, CA and somewhere in the north of Spain…so we’ve got some variety
Please post again when you have formed an opinion. I am on the preorder list, but was told it would be later this year. (I have already paid the deposit)
That’s great. I live waaay out in the country and our community was given fiberoptics! It is lightening fast, especially after using a card and dial up before that!
I wish I had that opportunity. Spectrum is literally 0.4 miles from my house. But since the line goes toward the house on the other side of the property first, they decided I am 3200 feet from the access point so they will never be offering service to my address.
Our new house is being built in a community like that. In CT where we’re from we have Comcast, 100mbps for $100.
The new place, the provider doesn’t offer anything slower than 300mbps and 1000mbps is $99 (600mbos is like $70 and 300 is $50). So I get 10x on fiber for the price I’m paying for slow Comcast. But the locals complain about the cost and speed
That’s good news. Comcast in CT it’s preparing to institute caps. Of course they say that only the most egregious data users who are only 3 or 4% of the users will exceed the cap. Unfortunately, there isn’t any way for us to verify that statement.
You can set up monitoring of your usage in any good cable modem. My netgear does it. Also with comcast, they do a reasonable good job of monitoring it and reporting it on your account page. I pay for unlimited with comcast as they’ve had a 1TB/month cap here for quite a while. I always go well over 1TB. I think once I broke 3TB. Usually it’s between 1.5 and 2.5TB.
We can’t get cable, phone or fiber where we are, 50% of the time we have no cell coverage. I seriously got a better cell signal in Alaska and Israel than I get 6 miles out of town. We are in a weird dead spot between cell towers and wireless broadband coverage and Viasat is just plain unreliable. Even when it is working the speeds are anywhere from .5-20 meg.
It is really interesting here in Middle Georgia – there are a lot of communities with no high speed internet, which means they completely miss out on new people moving in (especially work-from-home types). So the electric coops have got together to build the broadband backbone out there. I get coop magazines each month, and it is always neat to see the progression – first a survey of people, then a survey of what lines and offerings exist, now the go-ahead to start building that infrastructure. I’m sure the push of all the kids at home trying to do homework and having to go to the local McDonalds to access the internet to turn in their assignments may have a helped a bit!
