Starlink Satellite Internet 2 Year Review - Better Than I Thought!

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Filming Equipment

0:00 - Starlink is not for everyone
0:38 - Prices, different dishes, data caps
1:50 - Installation and instructions
5:00 - Speed
6:09 - Latency
7:00 - Reliability
8:19 - Precipitation
10:38 - Customer service, haven't needed them
11:22 - Got rid of our backup internet
12:18 - Gaming

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[BruceClifford]

The cruise line I work for uses Starlink to provide internet access onboard all of our ships. We switched over about a year ago. Starlink has been the best internet service I have ever had at sea.

[bronson]

My engineer daughter lives in an internet dead zone. Built a tower for slow rural service. I told her about Starlink just before the service became available for her area. She and husband have only good things to say about it since they installed.
Thanks for this update

[sjgoff]

I have been using Starlink since beta and still have the original dish. I would have small outages in the beginning but have had no issues at all for the last year or two. The one thing I love is being able to continue working even when the power goes out. I have my computer, monitors, router, and Starlink on big battery back-ups and barely even notice when the power goes out.

[Les_S]

3:38... You should attach some guide wires to the arm to help reduce sway in the mount. It may appear to be stable, but every time it experiences high winds it sways some little amount which weakens the screws over time. In other words, one day that arm could rip out of the eave where you have it attached. Attach the guide wire up where the arm ends and the dish begins, and then anchor that wire into the ridge line of your roof.

[robkeshav]

Great review Chris. I am on Google fiber with Gigabit speed but this is a useful 2-year review for people who don't have fiber or live in remote locations. It is always good to hear from real people who use the product on a daily basis.

[DorkmasterFlek]

I live in the city in Toronto so I have fiber at my home, and like you said you're never going to beat that. However my parents have a cottage a couple hours north of the city and we just got Starlink this past summer with the rural Canada 70% off sale on hardware, and it has been fantastic up there! The only option before that was satellite, we don't even have LTE service there. Starlink is leaps and bounds better than the satellite connection. My dad was shocked when he first tried it, he thinks it might even be better than the cable-based internet they have at their home in the city. 😂

[aaronb]

5:55
2 reasons.
There is only so much frequency bandwidth they are allowed to use. They have to divide that between transmit and receive, so like a cell phone that has the same wireless limit, they skew the allocation towards download.

The second consideration is RF exposure when transmitting to space. In space, there is no one to expose to High Level RF so they can put a lot of power out. On earth, there are people in proximity of the transmitter 'dishy', and the power must be limited to allowable transmit levels.

[CrumResearch]

same here, and we like using Starlink on our Jeeps, in remote areas where cell phone coverage is laughable or nonexistent. In mountain areas especially. Setup open source router and native IPv6 global address and routing is excellent with Starlink.

[luckyy]

Just adding to your review, have also had Starlink for 2 years now, and it's been a rock solid player for me. Previously could only get a 7mbit DSL with 128kbit upload for $130/mo. In my area due to low-population my Starlink is $90/mo. And as of this writing am testing 325mbit/13.50 up!

[suzannaj]

I live in rural south only 27 miles to town. No fiber optic’s coming our way anytime soon. I never tried to get HNet heard it was crap along with Dish. My nephew told me about Starlink. I want to work from home and deciding on paying the $600 for the dish. Heard it was $90-100 per month in my area which I’m okay with that price! I saw the link had no idea I can buy the sat through Home Depot. Thanks for the video. New sub.

[richyt]

It is amazing that your Dishy with the long pole has not been a victim of high winds!

[Ironsja]

Glad you said Michigan, that is really helpful! I'm here too (NWLP) and just started researching starlink to replace cell hotspot that has gone from OK to mostly unusable. Subbed to your channel and I'll be checking out your other starlink videos. Thank you!

[LeHoax]

I just got Starlink and I am very happy with the speeds. It depends on the time of day but I did a speedtest yesterday and it measured 340 mbit/s down, 30 mbit/s up. It is 7 times faster than the fastest DSL connection I can get in small town germany. I still have all devices connected to a the DSL connection but all the game launchers get routed through Starlink, so that I can make use of the faster speed for Steam downloads without switching the network I am connected to all the time.

[madrn]

Thanks so much. I live on the rural wet side of the Big island of Hawaii and i was going to get one, but

[zmarko]

I moved to extremely rural Southern Colorado 3 months ago and have been using Starlink since being here. Setup was fairly simple, and outside of a bad 'router-to-dishy-cable', my experience has been good (although pricey).

Would i stay with Starlink? If i had another option, and it was less expensive, I'd probably go to that service. But I'm also paying more than $110/mo for some reason. Lol

[modisworld]

I live in Mozambique Africa, and got Starlink 4 months ago . Believe it or not, we only pay $50 per month for Starlink residential and get consistent download speeds of 100 -150 -200 mbps and upload speeds of 15 mbps . I guess starlink in Africa is cheaper because Elon Musk has made it his mission to get poor countries connected worldwide !!! Excellent services !!

[DarrenDaoust]

I've had Starlink since the original beta program in Canada. The Gen 1 hardware is still working perfectly. Aside from the high monthly fee, I've been extremely happy with the service. Like you, Fiber is not an option here.

[johans]

Heavy rain sounds like an issue, we've been getting near tropical downpours in the UK. This is what university studies are showing too. More heat in the system

[BrianJoslyn]

Cost and precipitation are deal breakers from any satellite service. I've yet to know of any satellite service costing more than Starlink. I just moved from the snow belt of Erie County PA. I'm now in western/coastal OR. It rains here a 'lil' more often and snows much less if at all. Technically it doesn't matter where you go - there will be precipitation. As of now, if I were to ever get satellite then maybe it'd be Starlink - but I would have to know that no other satellite service has any connection issues during precipitation. So this would probably never happen. Unless, I decide to be an RV traveler.

[RubenKelevra]

Ping below 100 ms is usually not whats bad. Buffer bloat is what's killing the experience.

You can "see" a bit of buffer bloat issues on your speed test, as the ping jumps up over 300 ms at the time it's testing the upload bandwidth.

This shouldn't happen. Maximum might be 20-30 % higher than completely idle, but not higher. So the modem has buffer bloat issues, which is kind of an issue with most internet connections.