So, I did a thing called “Buying a Starlink Beta Package.” About $600 in hardware, plus $99/mo for whatever they can pipe my way.
Expectations laid out are 50-150Mbit, 20-40ms latency (to… I have no idea), for $99/mo, with some service outages.
Comparing to my 25/3 that doesn’t for $75/mo, and the backup 5/1 (which does, mostly…) for $50/mo, seems a decent price.
My current plan is to keep the Starlink one as a backup/bulk transfer connection, replacing the 5/1 for a while, until it’s proven reliable - then cut over to it for primary connection and move my 25/3 to a bulk transfer connection, possibly dropping the bandwidth a bit on it.
The regional monopolies of Comcast and Time Warner have resulted in incredible profits for them, and really terrible customer service and offerings to consumers. Not to mention the lack of fiber being built in more rural areas.
Even if starlink is more expensive (although it sounds like there is a payback period for your investment), props for supporting alternatives to the “big” ISPs!
It’s just going to be more expensive. There’s no way around that. I’m not dropping back to one ISP, I need mostly-reliable connectivity for my income.
Reality is that it’s unlikely to make meaningful differences, as I’ve spent the past 4 years optimizing for “slow and crappy ISPs,” so I have a ton of stuff cached locally, don’t really need much bandwidth, etc. But faster is nicer, and if the upload is not horrible, I might be able to tunnel some hosting to my own server as well.
Yeah… it will be interesting. I’m still not 100% sure why I’m bothering, I get along fine with my slow connections most of the time. I’m hoping I can tunnel some stuff back in from my home server and have enough upload to route some traffic that way.
I know why you’re bothering, you’re hoping for better speeds and good latencies on something that ends up being consistent and reliable and rock solid. Which it’s not there yet, but from the bits I’ve seen around it’s getting more and more reliable as they get more satellites up there.
Oh, and not costing a fortune by paying to have fiber pulled to your house.
Yeah, but the point is that I don’t really need better speeds. I could live on the 5/1, if I really needed to. The 25/3 that doesn’t is nice, and I’m not sure what one uses 100Mbit+ for. However, I’ve also structured my life and IT infrastructure around not having very good connections, so… hard to tell. If I could get a 10/10 out here, that’d be more than enough to do a lot on. The upload limits are the annoying part of my WISPs.
As far as fiber to the house, I’d be more likely to start a local WISP, but I have more than enough projects as-is.
It just feels like the easy way out to pay my $100 and get a non-shit connection. I’m wondering what the catch is.
It seems to depend heavily on your sky view. As I can find a spot that has unobstructed views (thinking of mounting it on top of the shipping container, I’ll see what the mount looks like), I should have mostly reliable service with it. Or, at least, comparable to my current services, which are prone to random issues that resolve quickly enough.
Cost, not having a public IP, supporting industries that Kessler LEO, not supporting the local WISPs who provide… well, service, mostly.
It’s the lazy way out?
There’s fiber to the town 4 miles south, I’d just have to create a business, figure out how to get a connection somewhere in town, ideally get access to the water tower, and launch a small WISP with service up my area as an alternative, then be responsible for 24/7 maintenance and such. I’ve done it before, just as the backroom engineer.
More realistically, I’m just not sure what I need high speed service for. 25/3 is fine, the 5/1 is usable, etc.
I haven’t seen speeds like this at home in… oh… a long while… About 5 years, really, since we left Seattle. Staggering.
//EDIT: eeep And I’ve not seen power use like this in my office in… uh… well, we’ll see.
It looks like it’s pulling 100W just running, not “removing snow.” I can’t run this out here overnight without some problems in the winter. It’ll be on the house eventually, but… oof.
Whatever the power consumption is for, it’s rock solid stable. Overnight current draw on my office - red line is the discharge current, which more than doubles my typical overnight consumption (my office idles around 80W, Dishy adds another nearly 100W).
I believe the blip in the middle of the night was it rebooting - the link went down briefly on my router. Which brings up another weird quirk. If you’re using your own router, it assigns an unreal address before it gets a link to the network, but it has a very long DHCP lease time on it - so you have to renew the lease once the satellites are connected or you won’t have internet.
This will not route past your Dishy.
02:41:24 dhcp,info dhcp-client on ether4 got IP address 192.168.100.100
This will. But I had to manually renew to get it. I expect their router manages this sanely, but… still, a bit weird to have a long lease on the temp IP.
08:09:50 dhcp,info dhcp-client on ether4 got IP address 100.64.229.75
I’ll file a bug report with support on this once I gather a bit more data on it.
However, nothing says I can’t use a SSH tunnel to a cheap remote cloud box to provide access to locally hosted stuff! I actually have enough upload bandwidth to do that now!
