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.
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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.
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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.
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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,
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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. Its good enough to read emails, browse the web, stream videos at lower resolutions (just don't try 4K), etc. It's definitely good enough when you're on the move. Dont know if it would be good enough for zoom or teams.

In the UK some providers sell actual 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 cellular 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.
 
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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.
 
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.
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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.
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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 :)
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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.
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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 !
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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.
 
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 !
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We got Starlink at our rural location in Oregon around August 2022. It was a nice upgrade from our miserable 5 Mbps
service. It was very reliable; I noticed they did the software updates typically at 0300 local time so it rarely went down
at all. I was running my own router at the time, and that required an additional piece of hardware ( probably less than
$50 ). That allowed me to NOT use the built in WiFi router in the Starlink hardware. Snow did not bother the service,
and that model of antenna had a heater to melt snow.

We have since moved, and left the system at the house in Oregon. But it was a reliable service for us.
 
In Australia, I use a 4G cellular mobile data service. 200GB/mo for about US$30/mo. Download speed is variable, usually ranging from 1MB/sec to 6MB/sec. I don't upload. I can watch high definition video on YouTube most of the time. However, it's almost useless during periods of school holidays.

A 5G cellular data service would be nice, but there's no coverage to anywhere I want to live.

I could have fiber to the house, but I move around a lot and static services can not meet my needs at affordable cost.

I hear enthusiastically positive reports of Starlink. My best option is very likely Starlink Mini which has a primary portable antenna. I just can't bring myself to support the man behind it. So I just grumble during the holiday season.

Note 1: Not so long ago, when I lived on a farm, I was delighted with 800KB/sec on a 3G link with a directional antenna atop a 6m mast.

Note 2: Band 28 (700 MHz) is used by 4G is Australia to achieve distance coverage, comparable to 3G, and allowed the retirement of the ~850MHz 3G service. Band 28 was re-purposed from the old analog TV spectrum.
 
Tieks said:
When and where did Musk switch Starlink off? Do you have any examples of such things or is this just your sort of US politics?
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Firstly he shut it down in the Ukraine costing them valuable momentum aiding his Russian buddies then now for some reason he has turned on the Russian cutting them off finally. No politics involved just them pesky things called facts.


www.reuters.com

Musk ordered shutdown of Starlink satellite service as Ukraine retook territory from Russia

Soldiers panicked and drones surveilling Russian forces went dark.
www.reuters.com www.reuters.com
www.bbc.com

Musk cuts Starlink access for Russian forces, giving Ukraine an edge at the front

Ukrainian troops say Russian forces are suffering setbacks without access to Elon Musk's system.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com
 
RedGreen925 said:
Firstly he shut it down in the Ukraine costing them valuable momentum aiding his Russian buddies then now for some reason he has turned on the Russian cutting them off finally. No politics involved just them pesky things called facts.


www.reuters.com

Musk ordered shutdown of Starlink satellite service as Ukraine retook territory from Russia

Soldiers panicked and drones surveilling Russian forces went dark.
www.reuters.com www.reuters.com
www.bbc.com

Musk cuts Starlink access for Russian forces, giving Ukraine an edge at the front

Ukrainian troops say Russian forces are suffering setbacks without access to Elon Musk's system.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com
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To be fair, they (UA) threatened him with assassination. And of course politics is involved, when your product is used for purposes of war with nuclear and space superpower threatening to knock down your billions of investments from the orbit.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
Well, there are two sides there. You call them his "Russian buddies" but forgetting that he was helping the Russian enemies at the time.
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I certainly do call them his buddies he has shown that he is a fascist piece of excrement and enemy of freedom/human rights in this world who fully supports them type of people. Going out of his way to promote extremists in Europe with the same goals of destroying their democracies/human rights. At this point in time I classify anyone who rushes to his defense as the same scumbag type of person as they have clearly made their choice to support these anti-human rights objectives. BTW the murdering Russian scum attacked without provocation a peaceful country minding their own business not once but twice in the last decade that is classified as a war crime/crimes against humanity according to international law for the things they have done. The people of the Ukraine have every right to defend themselves from such heinous acts. Oh there is no both sideisms here you are either on the side of the rule of law and respecting people/countries right to exist of you are slimy no good piece of dung.
 
RedGreen925 If the Russians are his buddies, why did he help Ukraine by giving them access to Starlink? That's my question and point to what you said earlier.

In no way am I defending what Russia has done. This is also political commentary and I will not continue this.
 
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.
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Depending on income level, there's free cellular plans and cheaper internet (Safelink iirc mentions a data limit but afaik doesn't enforce or slow past it; Xfinity has Essentials plan for like $10/month internet but iirc it's on a separate dedicated page/not advertised on the main plans; they list requirements and have a form upload validation process)

If the cellular uses Tracfone MVNO (Safelink, StraightTalk, etc) you can (or used to) choose any of ATT/VZW/TMO towers depending on SIM, and can bring-your-own-device (I like TMO for no hotspot restrictions :p)
 
I had it on for 2 years (20-22) when I was camping in the Calizona deserts with my RV during winters.
It was $60 for the first 6 months, and then $90 after. It's in the original box now because I don't travel much with my RV. Tho, SpaceX keeps spamming my Inbox with all kinds of offers to get me back on.
Few months ago they offered me a deal - 50% OFF with 2 years contract - just like the rest of wire and wireless ISP hustlers - "We have special deal for you with a discount" 😁
That said, SpaceX was very reliable back then, with my 1-Gen round dishy. If one has no other Internet access options and can afford to pay the price, then it will do.
 
ralphbsz said:
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.
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My friend and 3 other ppl in the same house played WoW and Runescape daily with it (iirc RS had a slight delay with clicking tiles and moving, but seemed comparable latency like SEA players connecting to US servers maybe ~200ms)

That's kind-of interesting with game network code though; compensating for latency/loss with a slower MMORPG seems easy, but fast-tick Quake/UT probably isn't happening :p
 
Espionage724 said:
My friend and 3 other ppl in the same house played WoW and Runescape daily with it (iirc RS had a slight delay with clicking tiles and moving, but seemed comparable latency like SEA players connecting to US servers maybe ~200ms)
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Amazing. Our neighbors had the opposite experience: the dad had bought the Hughes dish (partly because he himself works for a space and rocket company, although not for Hughes), but their teenage kid was unable to play games on it, so it got replaced by an 802.11 internet hookup.
 
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