TMobile/Starlink Internet

Cleffy

T-Mobile and Starlink just announced a deal on internet service. This should help alleviate internet issues rural areas. I have T Mobile hooked up right now. It's not nearly as reliable as cable in sub-urban and metro areas due to interference. In flat rural areas that tend to have poor internet service, it should be better.

Ridelynn

I don't know that this will be great for internet service - it's more meant to extend cellular coverage for calls. From what I read, it takes a different satellite than what Starlink has already deployed, and it's only supposed to do 2-4Mb downloads. Your phone will also need clear line of site to the sky, it won't work indoors or under trees or maybe in a car. Plenty well enough to place calls and do basic stuff in a pinch, but if you were looking for a full ISP for your home you'd go with Dishy.

Angrakhan

We have a couple of team members at work that are on Starlink due to being in rural areas. Their connection drops all the time. In an hour meeting they will disconnect a minimum of 3 times. I would find it incredibly frustrating to game like that in any online game. Line of sight issues such as thunderstorms make it even worse.

Ridelynn

Angrakhan said:

We have a couple of team members at work that are on Starlink due to being in rural areas. Their connection drops all the time. In an hour meeting they will disconnect a minimum of 3 times. I would find it incredibly frustrating to game like that in any online game. Line of sight issues such as thunderstorms make it even worse.

I've had Starlink for a year and a half now.

If you are rural, there aren't really many, if any, better options. So there's that.

It does require a pretty large patch of the sky to be clear with line of site - it isn't like Dish or DirectTV, where you can get a clear shot and call it a day: the dish tracks as the satellites move, and it needs a lot of open sky. I was able to find one spot on my roof where I'm able to peak between 2 treetops, the trees still occasionally will clip. Starlink tells you when your service is interrupted and why (line of site, service outage, technical issue, "unknown"), and I lose about 10 seconds of coverage over a 24-hour period. Now, that doesn't sound too bad -- but as you mention, it only takes 1 split second of lost coverage for a call or other "live stream" to drop. I don't see 3 per hour, maybe three times a day. But still, something to note.

Thunderstorms do affect it some. Snow a bit, if it's very heavy or very cold, but mostly it does ok unless the weather is really bad. 

As more people get on Starlink, the performance has gone down significantly. When I first signed up in April 2021, I would see peak speeds upwards of 300Mbps, with an average around 75. Now, the peaks are down around 180 and an average of closer to 25. Significant drop off, but still faster than the local DSL service or cellular, which are the only other options here.

During the 6-9pm hours everything slows to a crawl, and everything gets frustrating. It's like the old cable modem days, it just gets bogged down when everyone and their brother is on it at the same time.

To combat this, they have instituted a sort of data cap, which just went into effect this month. You only get 1TB/Mo of "Priority Access" during the day. Once you go over that, you get bumped to lower tier access. Your speed isn't permanently cut, but if the system gets congested, higher tier access is prioritized over lower tier access. Or supposedly you can pay extra to keep higher tier access. 

Access priority goes:
Business -> Residential -> RV/Mobile, high data use throttling, and "Best Effort"

I'm a bit sore about that, as it wasn't part of the contract when I signed up - but again, what could I jump to that is any better? 1TB is a decent chunk of data for my household, and even deprioritized it's still better than any of the alternatives. Data use between 11pm and 7am isn't counted toward any caps, so I just set up all the auto-update stuff to occur at night.

Another sore point -- they redid Dishy to the new square dish, which is fine. Installing it is still a pain in the rear: the attached cable can't be shortened, can't be detached from the dish, and has a big connector on the end that you have to route through your roof, walls, or anything else. It's way more difficult to install that Dish or DirectTV. And the new square dish is WiFi only coming out of the box. If you want to either use wired ethernet or use your own router - you have to buy a separate ethernet adapter.