Anyone using Musk's "Starlink" for inet?

MMacD

MMacD

I want to find a less-expensive ISP since I'm living on my social-security pension, which isn't enough that I can continue paying Spectrum's extortionate rate, which increases every month and is currently US$130 for vanilla cable internet and a VOIP service.

Starlink offers vanilla satellite internet for US$60/month. I'd strongly prefer not to support Musk for political reasons, but choices are very few at my particular location, which is one of the few affordable flats in an urban area.

Reactions and suggestions are most welcome !
 
drhowarddrfine said:
Every month? I just had a $5 increase last week for the first time in who knows how long. At least two years.

I don't use it but over the past year I've seen a significant number of the flat antennas popping up in rural areas.
Click to expand...
Yes, every month. Last month it was US$120, the month before $115, $110 before that, ad nauseam. Are you perhaps paying for their most expensive (fiber) service?
 
Just for what it's worth, I've found whenever I've called Spectrum to complain about price, they have worked with me to lower it.
I actually called them a few days ago, as my price had gone up again, and, as I told them, had they not gotten greedy, I wouldn't have noticed and they could have continued ripping me off for however long they wanted--I said this in case the call really is monitored for customer satisfaction, as it's obviously not the fault of the person who answered the phone. Anyway, I cancelled all TV related services and they wound up readjusting my plan and throwing in a free mobile line in an effort to get me to switch mobile carriers. (I told them, that I don't trust Spectrum, but I'd consider it, depending upon what a pain it is to switch).
I'm sorry, I'm digressing. Anyway, point is, when all was said and done, I was able to cut over $100 off of my monthly bill. I suspect that if you call them and complain about the price, they'll try to work with you.

In my experience, with over 30 years with them (well, first they were Roadrunner, then Time Warner, now Spectrum) the people you get in customer support are often surprisingly helpful--and in the few cases it was a technical issue, surprisingly knowledgeable.
 
MMacD said:
Spectrum's extortionate rate, which increases every month and is currently US$130 for vanilla cable internet and a VOIP service.
Click to expand...
You don't have to use Spectrum's VoIP service. We get very inexpensive and functional VoIP from voip.ms, for about $2 per month. It might be possible to get Spectrum down much further.

MMacD said:
Starlink offers vanilla satellite internet for US$60/month.
Click to expand...
Several neighbors use it, because in our area (rural and remote, while being 20 minutes from the center of Silicon Valley) there really are no functional wired options. The real cost seems to be about $500 up front, plus $150 a month. But newer plans and promotions may make that much better.

In terms of functionality: Starlink has had no or very few long outages. Our current provider (which uses 802.11 through the air to several base stations around the mountains) has had a handful of outages lasting from an hour to a day in the last year. On the other hand, Starlink regularly has 1 second or 5 second outages, which make gaming or video conferences a little annoying.

MMacD said:
I'd strongly prefer not to support Musk for political reasons,
Click to expand...
It's not just politics. He uses Starlink as a blackmail mechanism, turning it off and on depending on his most recent attack of insanity. What if he decides (perfectly plausible) that your city has voted the wrong way for his taste, and turns all Starlink for your city off?
 
Are you able to use 4G or 5G cellular? Any android phone can be configured as a hotspot, or you can tether it to a particular device. Over here it's a pretty cheap way of getting a basic connection. Of course it's not going to be as good as your cable link, but it will get you the basics. Sometimes if I'm away from home I use the phone to get me an internet connection to use with the laptop, eg in the car.

In the UK some providers actually sell 4G/5G routers, for example see https://www.three.co.uk/broadband/home-broadband . It can be quite useful in areas where there's no fibre or broadband but where wifi is available, and relatively low cost, generally cheaper than starlink or other satellite download options. It might be worth exploring whether something like that is available.
 
What about other satellite internet providers? A friend a while back had Hughesnet that early 2000s was kind-of slow and had bandwidth limits, but during a small window around 3AM it was fast no limits :p

Even if the speeds were still slow though I'd go for that before Starlink. 4G LTE on my phone works pretty good, but there's something about using a cellular connection for home internet I'm not a big fan of.
 
ralphbsz said:
What if he decides (perfectly plausible) that your city has voted the wrong way for his taste, and turns all Starlink for your city off?
Click to expand...
One of the very possibilities I'm thinking about (and one of the things I consider "political" because of the way he uses it) !
 
blackbird9 said:
Are you able to use 4G or 5G cellular? Any android phone can be configured as a hotspot, or you can tether it to a particular device. Over here it's a pretty cheap way of getting a basic connection. Of course it's not going to be as good as your cable link, but it will get you the basics. Sometimes if I'm away from home I use the phone to get me an internet connection to use with the laptop, eg in the car.

In the UK some providers actually sell 4G/5G routers, for example see https://www.three.co.uk/broadband/home-broadband . It can be quite useful in areas where there's no fibre or broadband but where wifi is available, and relatively low cost, generally cheaper than starlink or other satellite download options. It might be worth exploring whether something like that is available.
Click to expand...
Cellular is what I'm looking at because I doubt there's any chance of fiber. But I want to plug my pfsense firewall into the gateway box, and I'm still trying to discover where the ethernet-to-radio piece gets installed. I for sure can't use my phone for any serious work, so whatever I pick must be willing to handle traffic to and from my whole (small) LAN.
 
Espionage724 said:
What about other satellite internet providers? A friend a while back had Hughesnet that early 2000s was kind-of slow and had bandwidth limits, but during a small window around 3AM it was fast no limits :p

Even if the speeds were still slow though I'd go for that before Starlink. 4G LTE on my phone works pretty good, but there's something about using a cellular connection for home internet I'm not a big fan of.
Click to expand...
I heard that about Hughesnet too. When I was moving here from Mass, I tried to choose motels that had "WiFi" connects. None of them were anything I'd call usable - constant drops - so I agree completely with "not a big fan".
 
covacat said:
starlink is much better than geo stationary sats. ssh over a geosat link is crap :)
Click to expand...
The old Hughes satellite internet is an example. The latency of that is awful for ssh access or video meetings, and makes online gaming de-facto impossible.

I like the idea of using 4G o4 5G cell phone, if an inexpensive plan can be found. For a while I had a good 5G cell phone (with a corporate plan, using Google's Fi network and the Google-internal employee plan that was completely unlimited), and when we had power outages, I used it as a access point for the house. Faster than 3Mbit DSL, and more reliable. Alas, I stopped being a Google employee.

On the other hand, I've heard horror stories from friends who used their cell phones as data, and had multi-hundred-$ bills every month. Or got their bandwidth cut off.

MMacD said:
But I want to plug my pfsense firewall into the gateway box, and I'm still trying to discover where the ethernet-to-radio piece gets installed. I for sure can't use my phone for any serious work, so whatever I pick must be willing to handle traffic to and from my whole (small) LAN.
Click to expand...
Theoretically: Set up your FreeBSD (=pfsense) box as a WiFi client which connects to the cell phone's access point, and then configure it as a router to the internal (wired) LAN network. Why am I saying "theoretically"? Because to do this you will need a WiFi card or USB device on your FreeBSD server. And FreeBSD's WiFi stack is less bad today than it used to be 10 years ago, but I don't know whether it's good enough (latency, reliability) for anything other than desktop use.

Also, this requires quite a bit of network setup knowledge. Including how to deal with frequent service outages, for example whenever you leave the house with your cell phone the LAN will become disconnected.
 
MMacD said:
I want to find a less-expensive ISP since I'm living on my social-security pension, which isn't enough that I can continue paying Spectrum's extortionate rate, which increases every month and is currently US$130 for vanilla cable internet and a VOIP service.

Starlink offers vanilla satellite internet for US$60/month. I'd strongly prefer not to support Musk for political reasons, but choices are very few at my particular location, which is one of the few affordable flats in an urban area.

Reactions and suggestions are most welcome !
Click to expand...
If you dealt only with people based on their good politics you would have to grow your own food and milk your own cow.
And he is not so bad. He returned sort of (a lot of throttling) free speech to the twatter. Doge was nice albeit naive attempt to stop the many fleecing of the taxpayer. He was annoying with the H1B issue but hey, he is out now anyway.

And he delivers - Starlink is solid service as far as I heard. Hell, even Ukrainian military uses it. Grok is fine. Tesla FSD is very good. And the rockets are real deal. Not sure about the robots but looks promising.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top