Starlink Pilot

[dinny_g]

https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40231622.html

I know the Black Valley well, it’s very near where my Dad lives - actually my Aunt taught in the primary school there back in the 60’s.

It’s a great spot for the pilot because it really is remote. Only two ways in and this is one of them...

[Mito Man]

What does the antenna do then?

I know a family friend has in Surrey recently received their Starlink satellite and got it all set up. If this is as good as everyone makes out then BT aren't going to have a very good future!

[dinny_g]

No idea Mito

Probably something to do with an Underground Lair

[V8Granite]

I’m sure I read on Pistonheads that they wanted £80 a month or something for it ?

Dave!

[Beany]

I've haerd rumours abound of ~£100/month and ~£500 for the hardware to connect, which is quite high - anything more solid come out about that?

[Gavin]

It is about time we were rid of landlines tbf. Hopefully pricing will come down. I remember reading over a decade ago about how emerging Nations were able to embrace new tech straight away while we were still paying for landlines most of us do not use, other than for BB.

[Mito Man]

I've haerd rumours abound of ~£100/month and ~£500 for the hardware to connect, which is quite high - anything more solid come out about that?

The pricing is on the website once you enter your postcode but I think you’re about right.
It:
It’s about £40 a month more than BT once you remove line rental and BT is a paltry 20mbps in the countryside and they wanted £10,000 to upgrade the copper line to fibre here
I feel like £40 a month more is decent for the speed upgrade and more justifiable as this is something that needs to be maintained by constantly sending satellites to space whereas BT do fuck all.

[DeskJockey]

I've haerd rumours abound of ~£100/month and ~£500 for the hardware to connect, which is quite high - anything more solid come out about that?

That's high and will put them out of reach for many, I think. But compared to either rubbish connectivity through a long string of copper or the cost of having something better brought in outside of plan, may sway those that can afford it.

Also worth bearing in mind that with the retirement of the old systems, some of the inbuilt resilience is being lost as more and more infrastructure requires separate power to function (compared to copper that carries the power with it).

Day-to-day that might not make much difference, but in emergency situations it may be a deciding factor. Some of that can be mitigated by a battery backup/generator capacity, but does put more onus on the end-user.

[Simon]

A friend of mine has signed up for the trial. He also works in IT and finds his last mile copper is so poor that he's got no other choice. Really OpenReach should simply fix that as he 'should' get around 70mbps but even though Starlink is in beta it's still gotta be better than his copper connection.

[jamcg]

Is it just me who’s surprised there’s not more covid conspiracies around this, given the prevalence of the ludicrous 5g one?

[mik]

I’m sure there will be once it becomes more widely known. Each of the Starlink satellites has two independently firing Tesla Cannons, and a single Chemical Warfare Phaser already fitted (the latter can be loaded with virus, nerve agent, ultralaxatives etc).

[Mito Man]

I have one idiot on Facebook I’m only friends with to see what nonsense he comes up with. He did post a picture months ago of the star link satellites creating a type of shield around the earth which would somehow control people

[ZedLeg]

Is it just me who’s surprised there’s not more covid conspiracies around this, given the prevalence of the ludicrous 5g one?

The conspiracy theorists would never speak ill of daddy Elon. He’s one of them

[tim]

I've not properly looked into this but before my folks in rural France got FTTP they had a satellite system, which was shite at the best of times with a really really really bad ping. The latency was more annoying than the poor speed.

Have they found a way around the latency?

[Simon]

Yeah. Starlink satellites are much lower orbit so latency is so much better apparently.

[Beany]

I've not properly looked into this but before my folks in rural France got FTTP they had a satellite system, which was shite at the best of times with a really really really bad ping. The latency was more annoying than the poor speed.

Have they found a way around the latency?

Similar story for a few of the people I used to work with when I was a roving engineer in North Yorks - Sat links of a few meg down with dial up/256k ADSL uplinks (if that)

Very, very poor latency.

At least of them was quite well off, but not well off enough to dump £25k into getting BT to run a new cable on a whim, so I suppose the cost might be worth it for him...

[RobYob]

I've not properly looked into this but before my folks in rural France got FTTP they had a satellite system, which was shite at the best of times with a really really really bad ping. The latency was more annoying than the poor speed.

Have they found a way around the latency?

Linus tech tips did a pretty good video on gaming over Starlink. He was impressed by the latency, conlcuded it's obviously not as good as fibre but pretty amazing for anyone without access to fibre.

[Mito Man]

A family friend had their Starlink delivered but they’ve already got fibre broadband - its merely a backup for them for WFH purposes. However my parents have been without proper internet for 2 months (just a crap 4G router supplied by BT) so said family friend has donated their Starlink over in sympathy.

The initial set up was a bit of a problem as the app immediately replies with “service not available yet in your location”. Reading online it seems that Starlink assigns a virtual grid pattern and as long as your within something like 10 miles from one with service you can fool it. So I kept changing the dish location address randomly online until I found somewhere in Canterbury which worked. Fortunately that was just about 10 miles away so with Elon fooled we just plugged the dish into the socket and after whirring away it found some satellites and started working.

The BT internet here never got above 26 mbps and the upload was at 2 mbps so a definite improvement.

Need to order some adaptors to mount the dish to the wall. I was going just postcrete a fence post in the field - stick the dish on it and bury the wire as it really works optimally in a wide open space however decided against it as the Ethernet cable seems permanently attached to the dish and it can’t be buried and I’m worried about mice/squirrels damaging it. So house wall is safest. For now though it’s just on the drive - needs to be sandbagged down as it’s blowing about a lot in the wind already.

[DaveE]

I don't need any of this nonsense because I've had the Covid "vaccine", so I receive "the internets" directly

I'm also Bluetooth enabled now that I've had the booster too

Winning

[mik]

Won’t the dishes just get covered in shizzle and need constant cleaning?