SpaceX Starlink beta users are starting to share their experiences, confirming that the satellite service can provide faster broadband speeds and fewer delays in remote areas. The beta tester that goes by the reddit username wandering-coder brought its new Starlink devices and a portable power supply to the national jungle of Idaho, where it connected to the Internet with a download speed of 120 Mbps.
He wrote yesterday that Starlink “works beautifully”. “I made a real-time video call and did some tests. My power supply is a maximum of 300 W, and the drain for the entire system was around 116 W when activated.” Starlink dragged the location where the wandering-coder could not get any cellular service from Google Fi, which is based on T-Mobile and US cellular networks. He wrote, “There is no cell with no conductor here.
Wandering-Coder used Starlink connectivity in the jungle to make that post on Reddit and to upload a series of pictures to Imagur. The wanderer-coder told Arsen that he uses Starlink at home in North Idaho and that he tested it at the Hayden Creek shooting range in Idaho Pandal’s Core de le Lane National Forest.
Here are some pictures of the wandering-coder exam in the woods and shots of the user terminal outside his house:
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Starlink satellite dishes and equipment in the Core d’Allen National Forest in Idaho Panhadel.
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Second shot of satellite dish and portable battery supply.
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Starlink Satellite Dish in an area full of more trees.
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Another shot in the same tree-lined area.
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Wandering-coder yard dish outside the house.
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The Starlink dish on the car, with some nearby obstacles, partially blocks its view into the sky.
The Starlink User Terminal / Satellite Dish is placed on the ground in a relatively open part of the forest. He got bad results in a different, more wooded place where he placed the dish near a tree, as Starlink needed a clear line of sight to the SpaceX satellites. “As expected, the heavy canopy / tree does not work well in a straight line of sight,” wrote the wanderer-coder. “I’ll only connect for 5 seconds at a time. Make sure you have as clear a view of the sky as possible!”
The wandering-coder is not requesting other Starlink testers to complete the same experiment, in case SpaceX objects will use the beta testers using the service away from their registered location. “All things considered, [it’s] Best to keep [the user terminal] “Unless there is an official enlightenment on this issue,” he wrote. It is possible to know the dynamics, however, is nice. “
“Looks like it’s from the future”
The wandering-coder also shared an initial impression in another Reddit post and a series of pictures of the equipment at his home. Here are some shots from unboxing devices:
“Everything is of extreme build quality, and this works even better than I imagined,” Wandering-Coder wrote. “It looks like it’s the future. Looking at the top-level cell phone costs in the 1000 range, I’m surprised that the set 500 has my hands on this type of setup so I’m positively biased towards this service.”
As announced last week, the Starlink Beta is priced at $ 99 a month for a user terminal, mounting tripod and router, plus 4 9499.
At home, the wandering-coder says that when the dish was placed on a ground level spot with a “limited barrier” between the dish and the sky, it received 135 Mbps download speeds, 25 Mbps uploads and 21 MS latency. He tested the user terminal in a separate location with “significant obstruction” in the form of “bad weather, tritops, fences,”. [and] Homes, “he wrote. Even in that scene, he reported a download speed of 46 Mbps, a upload speed of 15 Mbps, and a latency of 41 Mbps. He did not place the antenna on his roof when he did the tests.
“Looking at all the hurdles for this connection at the moment, I was amazed at how well it works,” he wrote. “Streaming, less delayed video conferencing and gaming are fully accessible with this service. Even for the beta, it looks like they have estimated Starlink capabilities, so I’m excited to see it mature.”
Although it’s hard to mount a user terminal on someone’s roof, Wandering-Coder writes that everything else is pretty simple:
Bootup takes about 1 minute when plugged into power, then it takes anywhere from 1 minute to 15 minutes to be mechanically directed properly. Positioning is all done automatically, so it’s basically plug and play … there’s a single powered Ethernet wire from the antenna array to the power supply, and a single powered Ethernet wire from the power supply to the router. The supplied antenna is fixed in the wire antenna, but more than 100% (approximately, I did not measure the length). No setup is involved except physical placement and setting the name of the Wi-Fi network and password – all difficult content is automated.
Starlink is much faster than traditional satellites
New speed-test data collected by Ok Art and released last week by PCMag found an average Starlink download speed of 79.5.M Mbps and average upload speeds in Star October while the service was in a more limited beta. The same data found an average download speed of 24.75 Mbps for Vyasat’s AZ service and 19.84 Mbps for Husnet, which provides service to both geographic satellites. Upload speeds for Vayasat and Hughesnet were 3.25 Mbps and 2.64 Mbps, respectively.
Starlink’s lower Earth orbit satellites performed heavily on ten high-orbit satellites at a delay, with Starlink posting an average of 42 mm. According to PCMag, Viasat and Hughesnet came in at 3 643 and ms૨8 mm, respectively.
SpaceX’s invitations to new users last week told them to expect “data speeds vary[ing] M0 Mbps to 1 Mbps and in the next few months 30 mm to 40 mm. Delay until, as we extend the Starlink system … For delay, we expect to achieve 16mm to 19mm by summer 2021. “
A Montana resident posted a speed test result with 174 Mbps download speed, 33 Mbps upload speed and 39 ms delay. Beta Tester wrote on Reddit yesterday, “Find a way in rural Montana where our option is to pay by jig. Starlink will change the game forever,” Beta Tester wrote on Reddit yesterday.
The Starlink Reddit community has many resources for tracking beta progress, such as a list of user speed tests and a list of states where at least some people have received beta invitations. Those states are Idaho, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin. You can also test a user’s 10-second video to speed up the unboxing process.
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX Wrote on Twitter today It “invites several thousand more Starlink beta partnerships [are] Going out this week. “
List of images by wandering-coder
