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Setting up Starlink

jeffgeerling.com

131–140 of 340 posts

Re: Setting up Starlink

#131

I'm using Starlink right now. AMA. I'm in East Idaho. Currently my dish angles itself to the north. It rarely moves itself north/south, and slightly moves east/west throughout the day. I've read that right now it locks onto a single satellite, although they're adding multi-satellite support later. My speeds are inconsistent, and interestingly they start slow (around 60 Mbps) but after a couple seconds they'll get to…

> interestingly they start slow (around 60 Mbps) For many of us that's reasonably fast ;). In the UK, FTTC provided over POTS (often BT or some form of unbundle), the top end is 80Mbs/20Mbs. I don't know what you'd expect with cable provisioned areas supplied by the likes of Virgin (DOCSIS).

Oh 60 is fast around here too. I mostly meant that I've never seen a download start slow and progressively get faster. If anything it usually bursts at the begihning and then throttles back (comcast did that to me the most)

Re: Setting up Starlink

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can answer that I've been monitoring the full setup (dish + router) through a Kill-A-Watt for a few days, and it never goes below 94W, and averages a little over 100W.

I don't have numbers for just the starlink stuff since I have other things plugged in to my UPS, but that sounds about right. The power brick is always warm to the touch. My other ISP also uses PoE to power a wireless dish (line of sight) and uses a little less power but not a ton less.

I see report of 5-10w on ubiquiti gear.

Re: Setting up Starlink

#133
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the power consumption compared to a regular router + fiber/ADSL dongle ?

I can answer that I've been monitoring the full setup (dish + router) through a Kill-A-Watt for a few days, and it never goes below 94W, and averages a little over 100W.

How much of that is dumped into the antenna? It’s LOS so it shouldn’t need too many watts for TX.

Re: Setting up Starlink

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did the same thing and got the same redirect. I haven't experimented with anything except GET / but it would be interesting to try throwing some params in there and trying other paths.

Yeah, after another week or so to get my initial impressions with the router as-is, I'm going to do some more experiments and also swap out a couple other routers to see what I can do.

Sweet man, would you be interested in teaming up a bit? I'm fairly busy the next couple of weeks but I can find a little time to do some hacking. I'm FreedomBen on Keybase, or if you want to email me freedomben proton mail dot com I can give you a real email address. Totally fine if not though!

Re: Setting up Starlink

#135
post #2

Wow, I'm impressed! I thought it would take more than a decade to implement when it was announced, but it's here and it works. Just amazing. 100/16 Mbps is pretty decent I guess, hopefully it doesn't go down as the number of users goes up. The latency is great imo, 40ms using satellites? I don't think anyone has achieved that before. Would a bigger dish work better or not?

> 100/16 Mbps is pretty decent I guess Its fantastic, can't wait until this is available where I live. Currently paying $200+ a month for 20Mbps from local wireless company. 2 miles North from here there is AT&T fiber and Comcast available, 5 miles South there is Comcast (150Mbps) but I'm in a small community of homes where only options are satellite or fixed wireless.

Make friends with someone on fibre 2mi away with an old TV tower or at the top of a hill. Set up your own link.

Re: Setting up Starlink

#136
post #97
post #10

The cell grouping is interesting. A colleague likes the outdoors, so he's preordered one for his Suzuki Jimny, to mount on it. I wonder if Starlink are considering this use case. I haven't been able to preorder mine, because we're planning on moving out from the city to a small village next year, but the Starlink website requires a street address. Our villages are quite primitive, no street names (I think it's cos no…

Starlink has said that they're planning on offering a roaming use-case, but they aren't there yet ( https://www.slashgear.com/spacex-starlink-cell-location-limi... ). Part of the issue is that Starlink cells are going to be very limited in capacity for the foreseeable future: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2020/09/analyst-probes... . Cowen suggests that Starlink "should eventually be able to serve 485,000 simu…

> Imagine people going to Burning Man with lots of Starlinks or bringing their Starlink when they go on vacation.

I deeply hope people aren’t going to those to download OS updates and watch Netflix. Might have some crazies that feel the need to livestream the whole thing, but should be okay if only a handful at a time.

Re: Setting up Starlink

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, after another week or so to get my initial impressions with the router as-is, I'm going to do some more experiments and also swap out a couple other routers to see what I can do.

Sweet man, would you be interested in teaming up a bit? I'm fairly busy the next couple of weeks but I can find a little time to do some hacking. I'm FreedomBen on Keybase, or if you want to email me freedomben proton mail dot com I can give you a real email address. Totally fine if not though!

It's not the official place where I'm working on this particular project, but if you have any notes or feedback you'd want to track/share through my internet-monitoring project, please feel free! Email is a bit tough, as the volumes right now mean I sometimes see a message quickly, other times after days or weeks :)

https://github.com/geerlingguy/internet-monitoring/issues

Re: Setting up Starlink

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other users have measured power consumption around 100W constant in operation. https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/l22f1u/power_cons... Power consumption could probably be a bit lower, but there are limits. Keep in mind that this is a phased array maintaining a relatively high bandwidth and high SNR link with the satellite. This is complicated microwave electronics design, a whole different ball game than old…

And it has 2 motors for dynamic aiming

[deleted]

Re: Setting up Starlink

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other users have measured power consumption around 100W constant in operation. https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/l22f1u/power_cons... Power consumption could probably be a bit lower, but there are limits. Keep in mind that this is a phased array maintaining a relatively high bandwidth and high SNR link with the satellite. This is complicated microwave electronics design, a whole different ball game than old…

More like $10/month, not a penny.

That's assuming that you could get the power consumption down to zero, which is impossible. While a penny was an exaggeration, a 5W power savings over a month is about 50 cents savings on someone's power bill.

Re: Setting up Starlink

#140
post #97
post #10

The cell grouping is interesting. A colleague likes the outdoors, so he's preordered one for his Suzuki Jimny, to mount on it. I wonder if Starlink are considering this use case. I haven't been able to preorder mine, because we're planning on moving out from the city to a small village next year, but the Starlink website requires a street address. Our villages are quite primitive, no street names (I think it's cos no…

Starlink has said that they're planning on offering a roaming use-case, but they aren't there yet ( https://www.slashgear.com/spacex-starlink-cell-location-limi... ). Part of the issue is that Starlink cells are going to be very limited in capacity for the foreseeable future: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2020/09/analyst-probes... . Cowen suggests that Starlink "should eventually be able to serve 485,000 simu…

> they only guarantee that you'll be able to use the $500 dish (plus $50 shipping) for 12 months

I would guess that if they disconnect your dish from the network, they'll give you a new one for free. I know that isn't what their terms and conditions state, but it would be bad business to do anything else.

They'll hope that most users choose to upgrade first (for more speed or other features).

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