Starlink - anyone have it?

I had Starlink from when it first available until this year when Gigabit fiber was installed.
I went from Hughesnet(horrible) to Starlink and then just this year we had Gigabit Fiber installed on the power poles.
I live in a rural area with no other options and there is no cell signal at my house.

Starlink was AWESOME compared Hugesnet. IT allowed me to do some work from home and hold teams meetings that were not possible on Hughesnet.

Problems with Starlink were that the prices went up multiple times.
I am paying less for Gigabit fiber and phone service than I did for the $120 Starlink.

Heavy rain DID interfere with my Starlink signal. It was no where as bad as Hughesnet but I did have slow downs and few times where we lost service during storms.

Starlink tended to slow down at peak usage times similar to Cable modems. In the evenings when everyone was home and online it tended to slow down.

Starlink needs a clear view of the North Sky from where I live. Luckily I have an open acre of land in front of my house.

I used a PFSENSE router behind the Starlink modem and put the Starlink modem in bridge mode.

Starlink uses CGNAT or double NAT. (at least for the regular consumers)
For remote access I resorted to teamviewer. I could VPN out of it the Starlink but was not able to get anything into it.

I was going to keep my Starlink antenna as a backup in case the fiber ever went out but a friend needed service in a remote area so sold it to him cheap.
 
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Have it up here in Canada (Southern Ontario) because no fiber down our rural road and beats anything wireless available around here. It's a bit expensive ($150 CDN/mo) but very reliable. It went down once a few years back when we had a bad blizzard white-out for a day.

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On the topic of CGNAT, what I do is have a site-to-site Wireguard tunnel to a VPS, and use that for inbound access and hosting services. This lets me switch to any one of my three WAN's and have no change in connectivity, it "just works"

Since my firewall is the client, I need no inbound ports for it to work
 
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As for obstructions, its not too bad. I have a lot of trees around and I'm 100% blue (Clear) on the map, took a few tries to position it

View of the dish and trees around - Ever see your house from a helicopter?
 
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I know you asked about Starlink as a backup but I use a Peplink Balance 20x router and it has dual SIM cards. Comcast is my main ISP and I have the $15/month TMobile 30GB hotspot plan as backup. The router will automatically failover to TMobile when it senses Comcast is out. You could add another provider like Att or Verizon in the 2nd sim slot to give double redundancy.

It’s wonderful. I know it’s still terrestrial based so it’s still subject to being knocked out. When we had Hurricane Michael come through, everyone here lost Verizon. Att and TMobile were the only ones that were still up. If you already have TMobile then you will get a multi line discount as well. I have two of those $15/month plans but they only charge me $22.50/month with the discount for two lines.
 
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I'd be interested if anyone has any experience with the Starlink Mini. I am considering having Santa deliver one to my sister and BnL, who spend a lot of time on the road in their Class A Thor motor coach.
 
I would have loved the mini, but it was double the price at $599, pretty crazy

For a home backup, the Mini would be perfect. Less surface area to catch wind too
 
IReallyLikePizza2 said:
As for speeds, expect around 150-200 down and 20 up at most, usually like 10

People will run endless speed tests to get the "best" one and then post it, but its short lived

I actually completely bypass their gateway entirely. I have a 200w PoE Injector, and I plug it directly into my equipment

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I've got a Rev2 system and I thought that the wireless router was required to talk to the dish. Do I understand you correctly when you say you do not have yours installed? Your system is 3rd party router--> power injector-->starlink antenna and their equipment is still in the box?
 
fergenheimer said:
I've got a Rev2 system and I thought that the wireless router was required to talk to the dish. Do I understand you correctly when you say you do not have yours installed? Your system is 3rd party router--> power injector-->starlink antenna and their equipment is still in the box?
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Correct. Gateway is sitting in the box unused

With the Gen3 Dish it is regular old T-568B pinout on the Ethernet cable which makes things easier, Gen 2 may require an adapter or different injector, however YAOSHENG will have you covered.
 
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IReallyLikePizza2 said:
Correct. Gateway is sitting in the box unused

With the Gen3 Dish it is regular old T-568B pinout on the Ethernet cable which makes things easier, Gen 2 may require an adapter or different injector, however YAOSHENG will have you covered.
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Thanks, I looked Yaosheng up on amazon and will order the adapter and injector to give it a try!
 
dudemaar said:
I like how you mounted this. Should I try this at home? Im a bit nervous though:nervous:
And mind if I ask where you got the pole mount bracket?
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Yeah, the utility might not like it, but whatever

I wanted to get it up there and use it for a while without making more holes in my roof. This was kind of "free" since it just clamps on

Here is the J-Pole, the pipe adapter and the U-Bolts I used. I did have to make new holes for the U-Bolts



 
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If anyone in the Houston area wants one of those J-Poles, you can have one, I bought the 4 pack, so I have 3 spare
 
My home is Fibre to the Curb on a 100 Mbps down and 30 Mbps up. I have a remote BI on Starlink. I manage this with ZeroTier and Rustdesk. I live stream the remote setup back to home about 16hrs per day and only shut Rustdesk at night.. It has been rock solid for the months I have had it, am about to install a similar setup on another property. Attached is speedtest from remote property.

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