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My parents want to change their satellite internet from Hughes to Starlink; I've been tasked to do it. They've been told its a lot faster. I know nothing about Starlink other than the entire hour I've poked around on their site. The Hughes transceiver is a model HT2000W. A couple of questions for the forum: Is it a noticeable upgrade in terms of connection speed and data allotments? Their Hughes says it has a monthly limit of 15 gigs/month before it throttles back, but its so slow I notice no difference when the limit is passed. I have no idea what their ping times are. The hardware is about 5 years old. Also, on the receiver, does it have a secondary port for an ethernet connection? There is a summer cabin on the property about 600' away and we've used a booster, Belkin, plugged into the Hughes to boost just for the house, and a second one, Cisco Lynksys, to get the signal up to the cabin for years. Works surprisingly well(not fast, but it works) considering there is a forest in the way. I can set it up, but could not find an answer on secondary ethernet ports on the Starlink. The elaborate website is incredibly useless, or too complicated for me. The main house has plenty of clear space around it, and on the covered decks for the transceiver.
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Jul 30, 2023 21:33
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| # ? May 3, 2024 11:17 |
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Before you go to starlink, check to see if any of the cellular companies offer fixed home wireless. The big three have been moving into more and more areas over the last few years, and if your tower isn't overloaded, I've seen people get very impressive numbers from them.
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Jul 30, 2023 22:19
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I have no idea what Hughes is, but Starlink will be tonnes better than traditional geostationary satellite internet. It may even be better than fixed wireless (although probably cost more too.) It does not have ethernet for some god-forsaken reason. They sell an "official" USB ethernet dongle for way too much money, and it goes out of stock!
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Jul 31, 2023 04:25
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I worked for a satellite company many years ago and we sold transponder slots to Hughes at the time. I managed the earth side network and peers. Typical ping to a website from the person's computer on their end of the link to the website and back was around 550ms to 1000ms depending on a lot of different factors. Web browsing it was a little laggy but tolerable and downloads sucked. The reason it was limited in bandwidth is the cost of using an entire transponder (in 2006 this was roughly US $100,000/month) so they oversubscribe the poo poo out of it. The reason for the high pings and latency is distance between the earth and the satellite, back and forth it is 500ms. Now Starlink is a mesh of low earth orbit almost mini satellites that perform very well in the realm of satellite internet. Latency is much lower, speeds are better, and it's a decent product if you can stomach the set up costs, Last I checked it was something like $800 to get the equipment which you then have to set up. Unless they do the set up, I really don't know. You also have to make sure it's available in your area as they are still launching satellites. From what I've read from customers that have the service they seem to really like it. It is far from typical satellite internet of the past.
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Jul 31, 2023 18:17
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Thanks all for the replies; exactly the type of insight I needed. There's neighbors on the road that use it, so I think we should be fine with signal. Cost is fine, what the heck are my 80 year old parents going to spend money on. : ) Edit: also cell reception up here is lousy at best, lucky to get a signal or maybe one bar, so unfortunately that is always a pass. Second edit: Hughes is a satellite internet provider as well, but may be aging compared to newer techs. Internetjack fucked around with this message at 19:51 on Jul 31, 2023 |
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Jul 31, 2023 19:42
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Nulldevice posted:I worked for a satellite company many years ago and we sold transponder slots to Hughes at the time. I managed the earth side network and peers. Typical ping to a website from the person's computer on their end of the link to the website and back was around 550ms to 1000ms depending on a lot of different factors. Web browsing it was a little laggy but tolerable and downloads sucked. The reason it was limited in bandwidth is the cost of using an entire transponder (in 2006 this was roughly US $100,000/month) so they oversubscribe the poo poo out of it. The reason for the high pings and latency is distance between the earth and the satellite, back and forth it is 500ms. Now Starlink is a mesh of low earth orbit almost mini satellites that perform very well in the realm of satellite internet. Latency is much lower, speeds are better, and it's a decent product if you can stomach the set up costs, Last I checked it was something like $800 to get the equipment which you then have to set up. Unless they do the set up, I really don't know. You also have to make sure it's available in your area as they are still launching satellites. From what I've read from customers that have the service they seem to really like it. It is far from typical satellite internet of the past. satellite tech in general has improved over the last 6 or 7 years. we went from using cell towers on gogo to K band satellites that provide better performance at a cheaper rate (i once paid 10 bucks for unlimited on qatar vs 24 bucks for 200 megs on a 12 hour flight). I have seen how expensive internet is in africa, star link would decimate those markets (ethiopia would probably make it illegal), and the applications would be endless mobile phone towers in the middle of the desert powered by solar or just having it in your ford ranger and use whatsapp if you need help.
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Jul 31, 2023 20:09
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I have starlink, its great if you have truely no other options (e.g. hughs net or dsl), but i wouldn't recommend it over cable. Make sure you have an unobstructed view of the sky wherever the diah is, you can download the app and use your camera to get an idea if you can use it, i think if you have a lot of trees in the way it wont work. The old models used to have a built in ethernet port but you have to buy a special adapter now to get any sort of ethernet connection to/from the router. You can put the router into bridge mode to use an existing router if you want. Its been fairly reliable for me and they could definitely stream 4k content on it, but its not so great for low latency stuff (e.g. online fps). Its fine for some other online gaming though. You still have to get on a waitlist i think to order it and it depends where you are, but i also heard you can order the more expensive "roaming" setup and get it immediately, but ymmv. I have dual providers, something else you could look into is seeing if any local providers do point to point stuff, thats not going to be as overall fast probably but 30-50 mbps and the latency and consistency will likely be better. Its usually something like a satellite dish pointed to the top of a mountain/hill where they have their infrastructure wired. Mr. Crow fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Aug 6, 2023 |
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Aug 6, 2023 18:39
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I lived in an area where Starlink was one of two options, with zero cell reception from anything. The other option was pretty bad, so we went with Starlink by default. There was no waitlist where I was at, so we got it within 2 weeks. Not a bad turnaround time, tbh. At first, we had the dish on the ground because we didn't have infrastructure set up yet, but even a little bit of tree cover obscuring it hosed with our connection. The app does a really good job of telling you where the issues are at. We eventually built a platform on the correct side of our largest building and anchored it there to get above the treelines. Basically, if you're not anchoring it to the roof (we didn't want to do that and cause potential leaks during Monsoon season), pay attention to the direction your dish is going, and get it as high in the air as possible if you have a lot of trees on the ground. Ping was 80-120ms, which is good enough for most anything, might run into issues where twitch gameplay is required. But MMOs (FFXIV for me) work more than fine. Download speeds are really good, though not as good as a quality cable provider. The provided router actually does a good job with normal tasks. We got a second one and the mesh system is drat good with basically no extra latency I could find on the second router. They're smart enough to swap devices around to the closest router, too. The second router also goes a pretty long distance since it's not obscured by much of anything. Wifi calling was fine, though it had the occasional dropped call. Not much else to say about that, tbh. Streaming was fine if you're with a known quantity like Netflix or similar. But lesser-known streams had constant problems. I don't know if that's an issue with the streams or Starlink, though. We'll find out when football season starts up again! The biggest problem I have is with the shitheel running SpaceX. At one point, we had to do some resetting of our Starlink system and it changed the name to 'STINKY'. Apparently Musk thought it was funny or something. I don't know but having my wifi setup disappear with a stupid-rear end name in its place with no warning, no explanation, wasn't loving funny to me. Yeah, I figured it out in short order, but it doesn't fill me with confidence knowing some dipshit with too much money can gently caress with my stuff like that. Right now it isn't anywhere close to a dealbreaker because no one else is anywhere near what Starlink is doing right now. The next problem is that it didn't work worth a poo poo when a major monsoon hit. Small rains, even with heavy cloud cover, don't compromise it that bad; but heavy rain and cover basically killed it until it all passed on by. It might be pretty obvious for a satellite-based system, but it bears mentioning. Lastly, the price. Because I was in a 'low service area', they charged the higher rate of $120/mo. It wasn't great, but wasn't bad either. And the simple fact is that the area is so sparsely populated that none of the phone companies have any real incentive to build a cell tower in that area, so it's likely that Starlink is going to remain the default go-to there for the foreseeable future. It'd be easy to gouge the poo poo out of customers in regions like that hard, but the truth is that the price really is not bad at all for something that straight-up just loving works. The app is well put-together and gives you quite a bit of information if you need it, including if there's problems with obscurity.
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Aug 6, 2023 22:25
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Is the upload speed as good as the download?
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Aug 8, 2023 21:44
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No, its like 5-15 up
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Aug 8, 2023 22:15
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I manage and arranged the installation of many Starlinks for work at field locations, with a Cradlepoint router for cellular failover and managment. They've often replaced Hughes or Xplore (basically the same), depending on whether the location is in the US or CA. Cellular is okay, but congestion can be extremely gross in the summer, depending on where you live. Starlink is a massive improvement over what those two have available now, flat out. Some of the locations I work with are very remote, and Starlink has been a godsend. Second-generation kits need an extra adapter if you want to add in your own router or ethernet connectivity. I prefer the Gen one mostly because bypassing the Starlink router and going right to a Cradlepoint is a lot easier and worked out of the box. Both companies (Hughes and Xplore) are working on launching their own similar system called Jupiter 3; I haven't heard anything about availability yet. I dislike these companies, but the advantage they have over Starlink at the moment is support, even if it's known to be terrible. Onsite technicians are contracted by them, with Starlink; if you want someone to install it, will need to be done by some third-party guy, there are a lot of companies out there right now fleecing people for installs, so your mileage will vary by region. If you're proficient with a drill, self-install is easy, and a lot of the mounting hardware is available online all over the place for a decent price. Support with SpaceX is done through email unless you pay a stupid amount per month for business support. For what it's worth, for all the connections I deal with, I have not had to contact support once since deploying our first kit two years ago. https://satellitemap.space/ is a pretty good link to determine coverage where you're intending to put it Sixfools fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Aug 9, 2023 |
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Aug 9, 2023 23:14
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| # ? May 3, 2024 11:17 |
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Hah, you're not wrong. I work for a major mining company and they implement starlink via a small ISP/telco, more or less only because they can issue POs to that telco who then pays the starlink bill on credit card.
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Aug 10, 2023 01:31
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