Starlink Review

[Temp]

Bit expensive but fast enough to share with a few neighbours if that's allowed..

 

 

[jack]

It'll be interesting to see what happens when the price eventually comes down. At the moment, there isn't a lot of contention, but if the price falls enough to make it a viable alternative to ADSL, that will change.

[ProDave]

At £82 per month the price has to come down a LOT before I will be interested.

 

But given the speed I wonder if there is scope for 2 or 3 neighbours sharing a connection?  That would bring the price down enough.

[jack]

1 hour ago, ProDave said:

At £82 per month the price has to come down a LOT before I will be interested.

 

I think the main application at the moment is those who live in places where broadband bandwidth is still very poor. 

[ProDave]

2 minutes ago, jack said:

 

I think the main application at the moment is those who live in places where broadband bandwidth is still very poor. 

If it was cheaper, and the "dish" was smaller it might start getting attractive, to have decent internet wherever you are.  When they can get it small enough to fit into a dongle like a GPS or 4G router it will become more attractive.

 

These are low earth orbit satellites, so not geostationary, so is that dish constantly tracking a satellite as it moves over?  If so is there a pause while it moves onto the next one?

[jack]

28 minutes ago, ProDave said:

When they can get it small enough to fit into a dongle like a GPS or 4G router it will become more attractive.

 

I suspect that isn't going to happen. Signals from these satellites are not going to be strong enough to be received with a small non-directional antenna like you'd find in a dongle.

 

29 minutes ago, ProDave said:

These are low earth orbit satellites, so not geostationary, so is that dish constantly tracking a satellite as it moves over?  If so is there a pause while it moves onto the next one?

 

There's overlap, so it's continuous.

 

[SteamyTea]

I am waiting for a review from a non bearded, non self promoting, YouTuber.

 

I did like the way the dish moves, can it be made into a bird and cat scarer.

[Bitpipe]

We live 800m from a FTTC cabinet but have very slow speeds, peak of 22Mbps and can be as crap as 1-2Mbps. House cabling is new as is the connection to the pole opposite so something between the two is not good.

 

Our neighbour had OR out for the 4th time last week - they remade his connection at the pole and it improved his speed somewhat but it's still much lower than we'd expect. 

 

I had a good chat with the OR guys, they agreed that the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) I was experiencing was too high (11db vs target of 6db, db are logarithmic) but did not have any good suggestions other than to keep on at my service provider (Vodafone) to reset the link. They admitted that much of the local loop cabling is just not fit for purpose and is riddled with faults, broken pairs, crosstalk, flooded chambers etc.

 

We have a local 'exec development' (they would die to have it called an estate) built in the 90s and they have aluminium wiring so have really poor speeds as ADSL is designed for copper.

 

Rumours abound though that FTTH is on the way and slowly creeping in our direction.

 

Starlink may force the legacy providers to up their game but realistically it will never be able to offer the same urban coverage & performance, more targeted at rural areas I fear.

 

 

[ProDave]

23 minutes ago, Bitpipe said:

We live 800m from a FTTC cabinet but have very slow speeds, peak of 22Mbps and can be as crap as 1-2Mbps. House cabling is new as is the connection to the pole opposite so something between the two is not good.

How the other half live.

 

We were pleased to get our BB up to 3MBPS from an initial 1.  If I could get 22 I would be extatic.

 

3MBPS is enough for streaming live tv as long as two of you in the house don't try at the same time, and good enough for general browsing.

 

I agree the existing copper network is barely fit for voice calls.  When we had OR round after our connection and initial slow speed, most of the issues were poor rusted joints in flooded junction pits.  Just to get from our house to the top of the road there are 4 underground joints, with two of those being 1 metre apart in two adjacent junction pits.

 

We know fibre passes the top of our road but can't understand why they don't put a fibre cabinet there and offer us FTTC which would be a vast improvement over being 3 miles from the exchange and rubbish ADSL.

 

 

[Bitpipe]

2 minutes ago, ProDave said:

How the other half live.

 

We were pleased to get out BB up to 3MBPS from an initial 1.  If I could get 22 I would be extatic.

 

3MBPS is enough for streaming live tv as long as two of you in the house don't try at the same time, and good enough for general browsing.

 

My challenge is doing Zoom calls for work when the wife is doing the same, kids are on their phones after school etc.

[epsilonGreedy]

40 minutes ago, Bitpipe said:

My challenge is doing Zoom calls for work when the wife is doing the same, kids are on their phones after school etc.

 

 

There must be additional latency in the StarLink system, I wonder how that will affect a Zoom call?

[jack]

28 minutes ago, epsilonGreedy said:

There must be additional latency in the StarLink system, I wonder how that will affect a Zoom call?

 

Massive pinch of salt, but according to Elon, you can play online games requiring low latency. Whether you can play them well...?

The video above did show some latency numbers when he first connected, but I don't remember what they were. 

[severnside]

2 hours ago, Bitpipe said:

We live 800m from a FTTC cabinet but have very slow speeds, peak of 22Mbps and can be as crap as 1-2Mbps. House cabling is new as is the connection to the pole opposite so something between the two is not good.

 

Our neighbour had OR out for the 4th time last week - they remade his connection at the pole and it improved his speed somewhat but it's still much lower than we'd expect. 

 

I had a good chat with the OR guys, they agreed that the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) I was experiencing was too high (11db vs target of 6db, db are logarithmic) but did not have any good suggestions other than to keep on at my service provider (Vodafone) to reset the link. They admitted that much of the local loop cabling is just not fit for purpose and is riddled with faults, broken pairs, crosstalk, flooded chambers etc.

 

We have a local 'exec development' (they would die to have it called an estate) built in the 90s and they have aluminium wiring so have really poor speeds as ADSL is designed for copper.

 

Rumours abound though that FTTH is on the way and slowly creeping in our direction.

 

Starlink may force the legacy providers to up their game but realistically it will never be able to offer the same urban coverage & performance, more targeted at rural areas I fear.

 

 

One of my colleague moved to 4G broadband from ADSL. He is getting 40+Mbps consistently. 4G modem with external antenna might provide a much better alternative to broadband these days.

[epsilonGreedy]

2 hours ago, jack said:

Massive pinch of salt, but according to Elon, you can play online games requiring low latency. Whether you can play them well...?

The video above did show some latency numbers when he first connected, but I don't remember what they were. 

 

After skipping the unboxing intro in the video I saw some latency numbers, 30 something and 170ms. East Coast US is 90 ms away so the 170 figure looked plausible, however all other tests indicate the 33ms is the actual figure which is excellent. Earlier generation internet via satellite was awful for latency, we must be seeing the benefit of the low earth orbit cluster. Even so to achieve 33ms the downlink into the StarLink backbone must be close by in the UK or northern europe.

[ProDave]

13 minutes ago, epsilonGreedy said:

 Earlier generation internet via satellite was awful for latency, we must be seeing the benefit of the low earth orbit cluster. Even so to achieve 33ms the downlink into the StarLink backbone must be close by in the UK or northern europe.

Yes the earlier satellite internet is geostationary satellites with a fixed dish so very much further away.