Starlink Broadband

[Northernboy]

Has anyone else signed up for Starlink Broadband?

I placed an order for it yesterday, as I want a backup for when my wired connection isn’t working well. They estimate delivery round the middle of the year.

[Northernboy]

We don’t have 5G here, unfortunately, and the 4G signal is iffy.

I’m tempted to buy one of the booster boxes with an external antenna but I’m hesitant as they all seem to be sold by iffy companies with poor websites.

I get a very steady 250Mb/s at my flat in Amsterdam, and a quite unsteady 14Mb in London suburbia, which drives us mad, as both the wife and I remote in to the company’s machines from home, and between zoom meetings and trying to use Excel with a one second lag it’s doing our heads in.

[Northernboy]

clarkey said:

I've registered for beta and will certainly buy it. Fixed broadband barely works here, and we currently use an external 4G receiver and router for the house (max 35mb down, 2mb up) which is OK but unstable, especially upload.
Starlink will be expensive but a game changer for people living in rural locations but working at home.

It pisses me off that I need it here inside the M25, but I can’t put up with my existing service indefinitely.

[Northernboy]

Thanks.

I like the idea of the new technology, and of talking to satellites, so it does have that in its favour.

[Northernboy]

Gman20 said:

I suspect they are heavily vetting beta testers by looking at people's social media and other digital foot print, particularly early on.
You tweeted your isp's modem was a piece of st in 2009? sorry you're on the st list, you're not getting an invite till its well out of beta.

There wasn’t any mention of beta testing when I signed up, it looked to be just a normal order for the equipment and the service.

[Northernboy]

AJB88 said:

£89 a month no thanks.

My wife and I both work from home and need to use remote access to the bank’s computers, so it’s worth us paying for it.

[Northernboy]

Mr Whippy said:

What is it like in snow/heavy rain/clouds?
My satellite TV can be off hours at a time.

Also what is the upload speed/latency like? Same as download?


All considered it sounds very very good considering it was designed for places hundreds of miles away from anything like wired or 4G mobile masts in decent range etc.

I’m not sure it was designed to out-compete traditionally good connections like wired or 4/5G in local range was it?

Supposedly fine in bad weather, and the dish melts snow that lands on it.

Claimed latency is 50ms, upload speeds something like 40Mb/s.

[Northernboy]

El stovey said:

Looks amazing.

Can you take your dish with you when you move about like on a second home or RV/caravan or something?

Pricier and slower than my current Wi-fi though so hard to justify despite it all looking very cool.

At the moment no. The satellites “assigned” to you at any one time only cover your home area, so if you move outside that you lose cover.

I think you’ve over 100 miles of radius, but no good if you are going from the UK to Spain, for example.

[Northernboy]

BrettMRC said:

Will give it a week to see if the mobile providers come good on the infrastructure, then see if I can get on the bandwagon.
Thanks for the advice

The deposit is refundable if you decide to change your mind.

[Northernboy]

The kit will arrive this week, so I need to think properly about whether it will work or not in my house.

It’s a tall building, five stories, so neither garden is going to have an unobscured view both North and South, which means I’ll need to put it on the roof, which in turn means running power to it.

If it can handle a South view only then it’s easier, as it can go on a roof terrace.

Does anyone know if I’m going to need to rely on the satellites in Polar orbits from London?

[Northernboy]

MrDan said:

didnt know this - mine reports - "hardwareVersion": "v1".

To the other question im using a draytek 2862 router to manage the failover, I work as an IT consultant for a living so its easy enough, using SW Defined WAN you could make it even smoother.

Iv seen over 200mb down at points today, try to test it at random at the moment.

I tend to avoid this subforum as every thread title sounds like my work day, I was pointed here from Homes Gardens and DIY.

I’m only getting 50Mb, which is disappointing, but it’s not in the best location.

I need to decide now whether to install a mast and try again, or whether to stick with my ~15Mb wired connection.

[Northernboy]

My dish is now sitting on top of a pole, giving it a clear view of the sky, and has suffered 7 seconds of down-time in the last 24 hours due to blockages. Speeds are varying between 80Mb and 200.

The pinch-point now is getting the signal piped into my main ethernet switch and onwards from there to my access points.

The ethernet socket on the top flor, where the cable enters from Starlink is not working, and until I have time to investigate I am using a wireless extender in the main switch cupboard to bring the signal in, which is throttling it to about 30Mbps.

I then run it through a multi-WAN TP-link switch, which I am trying to use to default to Starlink when that's up, but to fail over to my wired PlusNet ADSL broadband when it fails, but despite my best efforts the switch keeps selecting plusnet al the time.

So, still some work needed.

[Northernboy]

eharding said:

I'm doing the same - using a TL-R650 Gigabit Multi Wan router as the main interface between my BT WholeHome Mesh and Starlink, a TL-SG1005P POE Gigabit switch so that the Starlink wireless router can stay connected as a backup, and then a TL-R470T Multi Wan router as a loopback on the second WAN and LAN of the TL-R650 to provide failover, routing back to my existing BT FTTC connection. A bit Heath Robinson, complicated by the fact the BT line and the Starlink connection are in different parts of the house. Changing the default gateway for hosts I want to use Starlink to the TL-R650 works fine (I may change the default gatway that DHCP server hands out at some stage as well), and if I turn off the Starlink it fails over to BT FTTC as expected.

Make sure you have the Starlink WAN set up to use DHCP - whilst the dish exposes 192.68.100.1 for diagnostics, it expects clients to use DHCP and uses a 255.192.0.0 subnet mask, and for me at least a default gateway on the dish of 100.127.255.4.

The other thing I did was to set an 192.168.100.1/32/0.0.0.0 route on the primary Starlink WAN on the TL-R650 so that I can still access the dish diagnostics page. Finally, both TL-SG1005P and the Starlink POE injector are running from a UPS, so if the power goes down I'll still have internet (for a while at least).

Edited by eharding on Wednesday 24th March 12:22

Thanks. This is a bit beynd my networking level of understanding now, could you explain how I can do that. I suspect it explains why my Starlink Analytics don't work unless I reconnect to the Starlink wireless network drectly, but don;t know how to make the changes that I need.

I'm using DHCP on all of my WAN ports (I'd tried to use PPOE via my Vigor 130 to do away with needing my other router providing the login details), but couldn't get it to work.

I also suspect that I have set up the primary / failover WAN setip poorly; the switch now shows that only the primary is live, which is Starlink, but then is clearly giving me access to Plusnet.

[Northernboy]

That’s very much appreciated, thanks.

I’m starting to see why my wife told me to get someone in who knows what they are doing.

[Northernboy]

njmchase said:

Rarely a visitor to the site these days, but also a Starlink fan, currently setting up to use BT alongside - BT offer me only a very basic service and like others on here no options for anything else beyond 4G which has kept us going in lockdown, so Starlink and BT are now connected to a new Draytek 2927 router, now to move my Sophos Firewall into the mix which will sit between the Draytek and my core network.

Loving what some people have done here - really helpful guidance, but you do need to have a good understanding of networking and take it step at a time.

I’ve given up on my switch now, and just using StarLink as my primary provider.

I still can’t work out why despite StarLink being the primary WAN, mad the switch being set up to only switch when it failed, it was continuously defaulting to my slow wired broadband, so I’ve given up.

[Northernboy]

celestequattro said:

Just got my Starlink dish after a tip off from one of the tech guys at work. Used to getting 0.2 to 0.7M from BT, and very poor mobile coverage. We live in a wood so the Starlink app said "no" but I plonked it on a wall on the tripod and got 150M so all good.

The only "issue" is that I need to run the cable across our driveway, and from the FAQs you are not supposed to bury it?

Provided that I can find something strong enough to survive an Amazon delivery driver hooning over it, is there any reason why I cannot bury the cable?

Thanks.

It seems a strange restriction. It’s just an Ethernet cable, albeit a chunky one to deliver the power that the dish needs.

I can’t see why burying it in a conduit would be any problem at all.

[Northernboy]

essayer said:

90W is massive, why does it consume so much power?

It contains a heater, in case of snow, so maybe that’s the power when it’s running that.

[Northernboy]

eharding said:

I don't recall any of the dish teardowns showing dedicated heater elements? I think they just have the dish electronics do some additional 'unnecessary' idle-time processing to increased the heat dissipation if required. Conversely, iterations of the dish firmware seem to reduce general the power consumption, so I'd guess the power provision in the system was designed for the worst case scenario. One update last December seemed to reduce the power required quite markedly, as captured by someone running a long term power monitoring application:



Also, the dish has motors so that it can slew itself around, and it's not particularly light (about 5 kilos), so they would need to allow for the current draw for those motors (it only seems to slew when setting itself up though).

Yes, I've not noticed mine ever pointing in any other directions, and I think that the heating is just running the processor to warm things up.

[Northernboy]

theboss said:

Just paid for my order to be fulfilled... how are people getting on with this?

Still very well. The down time is now only a few seconds per day, and not noticeable. It seems to be over 100mb/s all the time.

[Northernboy]

theboss said:

Brilliant to hear. I'll be very interested to see how well it works. Does anyone have a measure of latency in particular how consistent it is?

Will also need to look into roof or pole mounted options that will survive in a windswept location.

40ms on average.

Mine’s stuck into the end of a scaffold pole sticking a couple of mètres above the ridge if the house which is at the top of a hill. It seems to be completely solid