After 14 months, it arrived. I was expecting a set of big boxes but what arrived was a single box about 1’x1’x2’ dimension. The contents were immensely simple, perhaps too much, but clearly for the current generation who cannot be bothered with written language. There was the rectangular dish, a mount, PoE cable, a power cable, the router-modem, and a ginormous thick card with the setup instructions so simple making IKEA’s Poang chair assembly look like a Newton’s Principia. The components were white minimalistic and void of knobs, buttons, or perturbances like alien slabs from 2001 Space Odyssey.

I deployed the dish on the picnic table outside the sunroom on a day that was unusually wintery with slush, snow, rain, and clouds. The router-modem has no on/off switch (sad face) but I used a surge protector to supply one. The dish came to life, arching back to look straight up into the sky. The Starlink app installed on my android phone did not see the Wi-Fi access point which was a big hiccough. Fortunately, Kolleen had an iPhone which seem to see it without issue and were able to set the WIFI name and passphrase; then data started streaming in thereafter. Postscript: the Starlink app is a turd but maybe SpaceX will improve it over time.

We tested download speeds and latency with some test calls. The phone app has speed tests which I will redo but it indicated download speeds near 30Mbps and upload speeds around 5Gbps from device to satellite.  Speeds measured from router to satellite are an order of magnitude higher for each; not sure what end-to-end test is nominative. Will be experimenting with different days, times of day, locations around the house. Latencies were extremely short for satellite and sometime within terrestrial broadband levels.

The new generation of receiver does not have an ethernet port to install wired devices (double sad face); one must purchase this accessory, $25. The router has very few features: split the dual bands (not sure why), bypass Wi-Fi (which I will probably do effectively making it a modem) and not much more. No hiding SSID, no ACL, no IP assignment, no subnet defining, no default address for the router, no firmware updates that I can see and very Spartan in features one is accustomed to configuring. Certain changes require a clumsy factory reset by repeatedly injecting the power cable within 2-3 second intervals. I would have settled for a reset pin hole and a bent paper clip.

The speeds are better than what I am seeing now with my LTE based ISP with lower monthly cost that I hope will amortize the cost of the receiver. Speeds purport to get better as more satellites are launched. Still experimenting and optimizing.

It’s rather cool that one’s internet access is not bound to fibers/cables to the home or proximity to cell towers. If I wanted broadband internet on a boat in the ocean or camping in the woods, I could just bring it along I suppose.