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One of Starlink’s early public beta testers has shared his experience of taking his new UFO-on-a-stick terminal satellite dish to a remote area to find out if the satellite service lives up to the SpaceX CEO’s claims, Elon Musk.
Reddit user Wandering-coder shared his account and a series of photos of Starlink in action with a 300W battery power supply while in a remote national forest this week.
The roving coder told Ars Technica that the national forest was in Idaho, where it was getting 120Mbps download speeds at a location that Google Fi’s T-Mobile and US Cellular-based service can’t reach.
“It works wonderfully,” wrote Wondering-coder. “I did a real-time video call and some testing. My power supply is 300W maximum, and the consumption of the whole system while it was active was 116W.”
Wandering-scrambler’s forestry experiments prove Musk’s statements in July about how easy it is to install the satellite dishes at end-user terminals and the conditions they needed (a wide view of the sky) to receive internet from orbiting Starlink satellites about 550 km, or 342 miles, higher. Earth.
“[The] The Starlink terminal has motors that self-orient for optimal viewing angle. ” Musk wrote. “No expert installer required. Just plug it in and give you a clear view of the sky. It can be in the garden, on the roof, on the table, pretty much anywhere, as long as you have a wide view of the sky.”
Wondering-coder confirmed this requirement after placing the terminal under a heavy tree canopy.
“It did not perform well with a heavy tree / tree canopy directly in line of sight, as expected,” he wrote. “It would only be connected for about five seconds at a time. Make sure you have as clear a view of the sky as possible!”
Starlink’s public beta service, as it is today, costs $ 100 per month plus a $ 499 setup fee for the user terminal, tripod, and Wi-Fi router. Wondering-coder was surprised by the low cost of the user terminal given its quality.
While $ 499 is high compared to standard equipment for fixed line broadband end-user equipment, the beta terminal may be offered below cost. Musk said in May that the biggest challenge is making the cost of the user’s terminal affordable.
According to Wondering-Coder, the Starlink antenna alone should cost thousands of dollars.
“Everything is of extreme build quality, and this works significantly better than I ever imagined. It looks like it’s from the future. Given that a top-tier cell phone costs in the $ 1,000 range, I’m completely amazed at getting my hands on a setup like this for ~ $ 500, so I’m positively biased towards this service, “he wrote.
“The antenna itself looks like it should cost many thousands of dollars, so I just want to share how lucky I am to have access to this.”
Wondering-coder’s experience with Starlink aligns with claims made by the SpaceX division, as well as other public beta testers in remote areas who have posted accounts of the service on Reddit. Starlink told users that expected data rates range from 50 Mbps to 150 Mbps and latency from 20 ms to 40 ms.
The fastest speed test Wondering-Encoder got during testing was 135 Mbps on download, 25 Mbps upload speeds, with around 21 ms latency. With “significant obstruction” such as bad weather, tree canopies, fences, or houses, the service delivered 46 Mbps down, 15 Mbps up, and 41 ms latency.
The beta tester confirmed that the end-user terminal dishes need a wide view of the sky to perform well.
Image: Wondering-encoder / Imgur
More about Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Starlink and Internet satellites
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