We are a few months out. It would be a great solution for us as our only choices are Verizon MiFi or Hughesnet. We are very remote.

No cable, small phone lines.

Before we had a cell tower in range we had Hughesnet..by far the worst company we’ve ever dealt with. We’d go without before we returned to HN.

We are currently using a grandfathered Verizon plan but I’m sure they will yank that at some point.

Our daughter and her husband have ordered it. Coverage is represented to be very good in NW Montana. We'll see when he gets in installed.

I am waiting for coverage updates.

Being in the same boat as you with internet here in the middle of nowhere, we were using the MiFi solution until we found out about the Verizon LTE Home Internet service. Unlike the MiFi, this is unlimited and less expensive.

https://www.verizon.com/home/lte-home-internet/

Being a tech nerd, I've been following the Starlink roll out and testing really closely. So far the testing results (search YouTube for dozens of people doing initial reviews) have been pretty good with few issues noted. If only they would release the Geofencing restrictions so people could install and use it in their RV's. I'm sure that will come later.

quote:

Originally posted by bigdeal:
Being a tech nerd, I've been following the Starlink roll out and testing really closely. So far the testing results (search YouTube for dozens of people doing initial reviews) have been pretty good with few issues noted. If only they would release the Geofencing restrictions so people could install and use it in their RV's. I'm sure that will come later.

Musk announced last week the 'Mobile' will be offered next year. The stationary dishes are 24 inches across. Wonder what he has planned for RV's...

https://www.theverge.com/2021/...vehicles-trucks-2021

One of the guys on my team at work is on the list to get it when it comes available. Which according to him is "sometime in the next year or so". He lives in the hills about 20 miles east of downtown Seattle, and only has DSL for internet service now.

I paid the $99 to get on the list and supposedly it will roll out here in Central Va. this summer.

Until then all we have is mifi with 4glte.

I wish Verizon would let us add the home option but they say it is not available in the area for some reason.

Someone in my local area signed up for it the day it became available here in my area (north-northwest of Chicago...just south of the Wisconsin border). They posted a couple of weeks ago that the speeds vary from around 10 mbps to upwards 250 mbps with latencies from 20ms or so to over 100ms. Intermittent signal drops as well that last from a few seconds to several minutes or more, on basically a daily basis.

My wife really wants to sign up for it so we can get away from Mediacom for our internet, and while I agree that we need something else besides Mediacom (we get outages some days that last for 8-12 hours when fiber lines get cut...always the same excuse) I would rather wait until Starlink is more reliable before I make the switch. Especially for how much it’s going to cost.

But if I didn’t already have a somewhat reliable and fast internet option then I’d likely jump on the Starlink bandwagon. It’s gotta be better than regular satellite internet or dial up.

I am in the queue for my area, but don't expect to see the dish until maybe October. My main interest is for my IT customers, whether it would be suitable for an emergency backup should their links go down. One of them in particular has had multiple occurrences of "backhoe fade" over the past ten years that has greatly impacted their business and they are very cautious when it comes to matters of Internet access.

We signed up for the Starlink Beta test a while back and we have now been using the service in rural north central Kentucky for about 3 months.

It's not quite ready for prime time in our area.

We've got a wire-line ADSL account with AT&T with a maximum of 13 megabits/second download which is somewhat frustrating since I frequently download large images (e.g. RedHat Linux distros) for work. The Starlink connection has already aided in that by changing some downloads from hours to minutes.

However, I cannot use it for work voice conferences since we have dropouts which last sometimes up to a minute or more. 'ssh' sessions over my corporate VPN (Cisco) drop-out and have to be re-established. (thank goodness for the old-school Unix/Linux 'screen' utility).

We'll be maintaining both ISP services until Starlink becomes more reliable.

All that having been said, video streaming via Netflix, Prime, YouTube etc. thru Roku, TiVo, Amazon FireTV and WindBlows desktops and laptops seem to be unaffected by the drop-outs. I'm assuming that this is due to a large amount of buffering.

I'll be sticking with Starlink as Musk adds more and more sats...He's a game-changer and I don't mind supporting SpaceX over Bezo's/Amazon's Blue Origins.

I hate paying money to the traditional Telcos and cable and satellite providers with their don't care service attitudes.

On another note, we had DirecTV and service was great, but we got tired of paying so much for TV services (channels we never used) and went with a TiVo OTA DVR (Roamio) and internet streaming (Prime, Netflix, One America News, Newsmax, etc.). The Starlink connection seems to work just fine with the ancient TiVo Roamio, Amazon FireTV and Roku boxes.

Following.

Wife is nagging me to get internet in our far southeast weekend place in Bisbee, AZ so she can work remote during the week. The few providers there have horrible reliability reputations and service issues. She needs it to work remotely which requires zoom calls.

Uh Oh...

quote:

"Thermal Shutdown" - Heat Wave Knocks Beta Starlink Users Offline

Zero Hedge
Friday June 18, 2021

While a massive heat wave and megadrought plague tens of millions of Americans, beta users of SpaceX's broadband service called Starlink are reporting their dishes are overheating, which knocks them offline.

Earlier this week, a Redditor posted an error message that reads "Offline Thermal Shutdown." The dish "overheated" and "Starlink will reconnect after cooling down," the error message continued.

According to Ars Technica, the Redditor, Martin, reached out to Starlink support team, which told him, "Dishy will go into thermal shutdown at 122F and restart when it reaches 104F." He tried to cool down the dish with water in the hot Arizona heat, though the "fix was temporary."

"When I stopped the sprinkler, [the dish] heated back up and would cycle back on for a few minutes and go back down for thermal shutdown. The overheating started that day about 11:30 am and came back for good about 7 pm... I'm currently headed to a hardware store to get materials to build a solar shade/sail around the dish to see if it doesn't impact connection and speed," he said.

One of the drawbacks of Starlink appears to be thermal issues where the user cannot access satellite internet until the dish cools down. Other users have reported the same problem.

About two months ago, another Redditor said their dish shut down for 30 minutes after being exposed to "low 80s and sun."

To all beta testers using Starlink this summer, better come up with a dish heat management system or else face no connectivity. Not surprising, considering this is a company owned by Elon Musk.

Link

$500 bucks for the dish and a hondo per month, it's amazing what we'll pay to get on Sig Forum, order pizza and search for gidgets on Amazon...

I have family that works for the company. I've tried every angle I can think of to get the service. Lack of modern telecom, outside of the villages that are heavily subsidized, and outside the liberal shithole of Los Anchorage, is the largest thing holding Alaska back from growth and success. Worse than alcoholism and sexual predation. I live where I hate out of necessity of internet, and pay $200 a month for 15 mbps that I never receive. I paid the $99 deposit the second they started accepting deposits here. Starlink is going to change my life. I can't wait. Alaska will be sometime in 2022. My bags are packed...