Starlink Starts to Deliver on Its Promise

[ergophobe]

I have my dish 60 feet away from my house with clear views of the sky, and it is still obstructed for two hours a day

In my week of testing, Starlink was perfectly fine for anything that buffers — I was able to stream Netflix and Disney Plus in 4K and jump around YouTube videos without significant issues — but doing something faster-paced, like quickly scrolling through TikTok videos, would run into delays. Services that require a sustained, real-time connection, like Slack, Zoom, or gaming, simply weren't usable for me,

[ergophobe]

>>The Verge

Nilay Patel should take down his Starlink review - He would NEVER allow a phone review that is so poorly done
https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/nd6e2f/nilay_patel_should_take_down_his_starlink_review/

The thing is, for me it is the only journalist review of Starlink worth anything at all - I *want* to know how it behaves with obstructions. It is precisely his "incorrect" setup which has everyone so outraged and is the one redeeming feature and new information from that review.

[rcjordan]

Starlink dishes go into "thermal shutdown" once they hit 122° Fahrenheit | Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/06/starlink-dish-overheats-in-arizona-sun-knocking-user-offline-for-7-hours/

[ergophobe]

What is the most viral combination on the web? Starlink + Cats

If you have crappy internet and your friends know it, I guarantee you have gotten this sent to you at least twice. I have. Everyone I sent it to had already seen it. I stopped sending it.

https://twitter.com/Tippen22/status/1476985855981993984?t=ctrq1PRP9H0w9ED-g9QFng&s=19

[rcjordan]

>Satellite Dish

very remotely related:

At This Armenian Restaurant, the Ovens Are es Satellite Dish
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/solar-energy-cooking-armenia

[buckworks]

also remotely related:

I once saw instructions for making a solar oven out of cardboard and aluminum foil by making a parabola shape.

[ergophobe]

Yes... and part of the promise is filling LE orbit with junk...

The satellites from Starlink Internet Services, a division of Musk's SpaceX aerospace company, had two "close encounters" with the Chinese space station on July 1 and Oct. 21, according to a document submitted by China earlier this month to the U.N.'s space agency.

"For safety reasons, the China Space Station implemented preventive collision avoidance control," China said in a document published on the website of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/chinese-citizens-slam-musk-online-space-station-misses-rcna10055

That said, we're back in the queue. People here are having decent success, getting 50 to 58 minutes of connection per hour. I know that sounds horrible, but around here, people are generally thrilled with the coverage.

[rcjordan]

Geomagnetic storm fries 40 new Starlink sats.

https://www.spacex.com/updates/

[ergophobe]

Actually, we're not back in the queue.

It seems that there is no way if you have cancelled your order to get back in the queue without opening a new account or something. And, since it is Starlink, there is no email, chat, phone number, postal address or another other means of contact. It's actually, if you can believe it, worse than Google.

[rcjordan]

Starlink hikes prices for monthly service and starter kit, even if you put down a deposit - The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/22/22991841/spacex-starlink-price-hike-inflation-user-terminal

[ergophobe]

Yup, we got the email yesterday. The price hike is half as much for people with a deposit. I don't have a problem with this. The deposit is 100% refundable at my choice at any time. It's not like I have a contract for delivery. I have a place in line that I can relinquish if I think the new prices are too high.

[rcjordan]

SpaceX Starlink has 150,000 daily users in Ukraine 5 weeks after being activated, government official says (businessinsider.com)

[ergophobe]

Well, they need it more than we do! I'm happy to keep waiting if that's where all the dishes are going.

[ergophobe]

Starlink has landed! Not only did we get a unit, a week later we got a second one (long story).

Initial impressions - in our highly obstructed situation, it works way better than expected, but then I was expecting it to be unusable.

I often hear people complain about how bad hotel internet is. That is our standard for good internet. Starlink is not as good as hotel internet.

Because of all the obstructions, it's not like we could do a Zoom call on it. Starlink only tracks interruptions of longer than two seconds. We average an interruption in service every 46 seconds. Interruptions range from 2 seconds (again, because that is the shortest tracked) up to about 36 seconds and very very rarely more than that. Zoom seems to hold the connection as long as the interruption is less than 30 seconds. At 30 seconds it kicks you out of the meeting and you have to log back in. Right now it has been 44 minutes since a 30+-second outage.

The app says that in the last 12 hours, I have had 1h15 of outage. Since they average every 46 seconds, that's roughly 960 outages.

For context - the Starlink app shows between 10% and 20% obstruction in our location. It predicted outages roughly every 30 seconds to one minute, which has been correct. For small differences in obstruction, the app is not really accurate and so you have to try locations and let it sit there for 12 hours until you get the report.

For web pages, it's less bothersome than you might think. If you click a link when you have a long obstruction, the page load fails, but in general, loading a web page is tolerant of the shorter outages. So to the eye it feels like high latency rather than an outage. So the low-latency that Starlink offers compared to geosynchronous satellite isn't really apparent because of all the outages appearing as latency.

For video, it's generally much much better. As long as there is not an outage at the moment you click Play, once the video buffers ahead, the outages are not a problem.

For logging into a terminal... that remains to be seen. I use mosh, which is fault-tolerant, so it should be fine. The thing is, you can only use mosh on your own server because you have to install the daemon. So in other cases, where I'm logged in via SSH, I'm assuming longer outages will kick me out of my session. Haven't tried that.

In general, I would say it is an improvement over geosync satellite, but if I could get "hotel" internet, I would still take that.  But since Theresa has quite a few Zoom meetings for her consulting, I think we'll end up keeping a bottom-end Hughesnet plan for that and doing everything else on Starlink. That will still be about $90 cheaper per month than what we pay now ($180/mo vs $270).

[rcjordan]

Debbie thinks you might be able to use tampermonkey to remove page elements before loading.  Guessing it wouldn't do much for Zoom, but for your frequently visited sites it might improve speeds.

Tampermonkey script run before page load - Stack Overflow
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39346747/tampermonkey-script-run-before-page-load

Caution! Page ripping is *highly* addictive. (Frankly, I don't see how you all put up with current eye-candy, ad-infested layouts.)