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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

I'm using Starlink right now. AMA.

I'm in East Idaho. Currently my dish angles itself to the north. It rarely moves itself north/south, and slightly moves east/west throughout the day. I've read that right now it locks onto a single satellite, although they're adding multi-satellite support later.

My speeds are inconsistent, and interestingly they start slow (around 60 Mbps) but after a couple seconds they'll get to 150-200 Mbps (which is awesome for downloads). Latency is consistently in the low 30ms. I get some downtime every day, so it really is a "beta" like they say. I have a backup WISP.

Setup was literally take dish out of the box, insert into tripod (included), plug in cables, connect to the wireless routers SSID and activate with the starlink app. After that I put the included router into storage and plugged in my Protectli[1] running CentOS. Everything works great. My only complaint is the CGNAT, but given the difficulty associated with procuring IPv4 addresses, it's understandable.

[1] I love this thing. Highly recommend: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B0741F634J/ref=ppx_yo_dt...

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This is OT but can you share a little bit more about what it's like living in East Idaho? I grew up in Boise and now live in Chicago but with the way things have been going lately I've been considering moving back, and there's a real appeal to living in a smaller town in the eastern part of the state (my dad was from Twin Falls). Internet access is always a bit of a concern though, which maybe Starlink ameliorates? Sorry to be so off-topic but you're the first person I've seen on HN from eastern Idaho!

Sure! I love living here. The only thing is the airports are small. You have to drive to SLC or Boise for good selection of flights. Other than that though, I love it. Population density is much nicer. All the stores and restaurants you want, but traffic isn't too bad.

There's a lot of fiber out here, but you'll need to either be near a city center of in a new enough area. The homes that are 10 to 15 years old are underserved and you're mostly stuck with a wireless ISP. But ... Starlink is about to negate that in my opinion!

I know a few people from the Seattle area who do part time work there - unless you enjoy and agree with religious fundamentalists, die-hard MAGA anti maskers or people whose personality revolves around owning 35 guns, you might want to spend some time there first... Boise by comparison is much more secular and liberal than some of those areas.

I’m sure the generalization earned the downvotes but candid opinions good and bad help paint a more well rounded picture, thanks.

Eh. They aren't wrong per se, but there are a lot of folks that might look like the fit the picture, but are just from a different cultural background. A little tolerance goes a long way in any direction.

As you specify people from Seattle, and these people went out of their way to point out that the people are religious, republicans who like guns, I have a feeling they aren't particularly open minded or tolerant people. Religious or secular, blue team or red team, basic politics shouldn't color your ability to get along with people. Fundamentally people are pretty similar, and American culture is quite homogeneous.

Well, particularly in the current situation where masks somehow became a political hill to die on, I think you are underselling the matter some.

It's a bit difficult to feel all that neighborly or friendly with people adamant that they won't even wear a mask to help protect your own health.

And all the topics listed - religion, political affiliation, guns - are all infamous for causing strife. Even the most tolerant person can easily wish to simply minimize the chances of a conflict. Tensions over these matters also only seem to be intensifying, which further exacerbates the matter.

While anti-maskers are definitely more likely to be politically right, due to weird behavior of the last administration, the reality is, the majority of Americans are fine wearing masks in public. Polling i have seen showed 75%+ were fine with masks.

I think that likely shows the problem, rather than anything else.

(I'm going to assume you mean that number nationwide)

75%, or roughly so, nationwide would be one thing if it was evenly distributed. But as you noted, the issue is tied to politics (I think more than you imply, but doesn't matter). We also know political affiliation is not evenly distributed.

So, a number like 75% mask compliance makes it possible, and frankly very likely, that there are areas with substantially lower rates.

I would encourage you to listen to, and believe, the very real experiences of people of color, same-sex couples, and transgender or nonbinary people who have spent time in locations like Eastern Idaho.

I don't disagree, but I would caution heavily about stereotyping an entire geographic area based on anecdotal experiences. Different neighborhoods around here can be radically different. One street up is "the Mormon street" where everyone is LDS, but a few streets past that is the polar opposite.

I think when we blanket stereotype people based on geographic location, the error rate is quite high. In my opinion, unacceptably, but then I've always value tolerance, acceptance, and open mindedness (although for people that don't offer that to others I admit little patience, and I don't want to be around them).

> Different neighborhoods around here can be radically different.

Having lived in places with similar ideological demographics, I caution that living in a place means you're going to visit all sorts of neighborhoods there, and it would be (not saying you're recommending this) untenable to recommend that certain people would do just fine if they keep to the neighborhoods where they are welcome.

If a particular neighborhood in an area is hostile to certain people for no good reason, it makes the entire area hostile because all of the people involved can and do operate outside of the geofence.

Here I am trying to read about satellite internet and you have to pollute the discussion with toxic partisan cliches and irrelevant divisive anecdotes.

I wish you’d quarantine yourself to social networks like Reddit where the discourses are already sufficiently poisoned.

The person asked "what's it like living in east idaho" - and I answered based on some very detailed descriptions provided to me by people who've spent a lot of time there. I consider it an unavoidable fact that unless you are an ideological match with the majority of the persons who already live there, it's going to be a very miserable experience. Some of the social attributes that I described are statistically documented for that region in poll data.

Considering that probably 40% of your hn comments seem to be some variety of partisan axe grinding on American-specific political issues, maybe you might want to take a look in the mirror first.

My family and I spend a lot of time in the northern Idaho handle near Coeur d'Alene. We love it up here. My wife is Asian (matters to the story), we are liberals, but the folks are generally* terrific and kind. I star “generally” because I would say that the average person is much, much nicer than the folks we meet on the west coast, but the not so great people are much more open with racist, hateful, and frankly scary confrontations. We are invited into peoples homes, have made fast friends with many locals, love the pure beauty of the place, but the lows are much lower when they happen.

I agree completely. There are tons of wonderful, tolerant people here. There are a few gross people too that tend to be a lot more gross than on the west coast, but overall it's not too bad.

> live in Chicago but with the way things have been going lately I've been considering moving back,

I live in chicago( south loop/pilsen ) too. What has been going on lately that is making you consider the move?

FWIW I lived and worked in Chicago for 10 years. Never liked it. Expensive, and life just seemed really complicated. I always felt stressed out. If you grew up in a rural or small town lifestyle, it's a big adjustment.

Eventually moved back to my hometown and wouldn't care if I never saw Chicago again.

We actually launched a service that provides you with a public IPv4 address and a /56 IPv6 block over WireGuard. It bypasses CGNAT and provides unblocked ports, including port 25. The cheapest plan starts at $8/month. Here's a link!

https://hoppy.network

Looks pricey, whats the advantage of that vs setting up wireguard on your own vps for less money?

We are a managed service meaning you can sign up, download the WireGuard configuration, and forget about it. For a few extra dollars, you get reliability (we use BGP so we can failover to different datacenters), and clean IP addresses that aren't associated with spam or other cloud providers.

FWIW and since this is HN, I don’t think it’s pricey at all, it seems to very much match what I would expect a service like this to cost.

I wonder if I somehow can set up my Mikrotik routers to tunnel through you and transparently provide IPv6 for my whole LAN, that would be swell.

If you just want public IPv6 for your LAN, you could get address space for free from TunnelBroker.net and the setup for your router is well documented.

The Mikrotik RouterOS v7 beta does include Wireguard support, though I haven't tested it yet.

can by pass Chinese GFW reliably?

We would be glad to test it out with you, no contacts in China unfortunately.

FWIW, from my limited experience with the firewall there--they do less banning protocols, and more banning specific endpoints people are using to bypass the firewall.

I never tested WireGuard, but, for instance, I had no issue connecting via OpenVPN to personal and work VPNs from China (on standard ports with no effort to hide). If you try and use OpenVPN to connect to any of the well-known VPN providers with it though, it will be blocked.

Even if you find it works initially, as soon as someone catches wind of it being used to bypass the firewall and/or they see a surge of traffic to your services, you're likely to end up blackholed.

Especially for a paid service, it's probably more of a support headache than it's worth.

Unless you're looking to make a stand, I'd probably just steer clear of the whole situation. It's illegal in China to operate an internet services without a license and it could come back to bite you in the ass down the road if you ever intend to do business there or travel there.

According to the story it's locked to a designated "cell" with a diameter of something less than 60 miles, so it would be just a nice modern end-table in China. The fact that it depends on accurate GPS and phones home continuously makes the geofence hard to hack.

I think they're asking about the Hoppy network, not Starlink.

Wheres the IPv4 address from? Because if it's AWS, that's gonna be rather useless.

We lease IPv4 /24 and IPv6 /48 blocks from a reputable IP address broker, check it against spam blacklists, and finally announce the clean IP addresses at a datacenter of our choice. We are not tied down to any hosting company. We tested a datacenter failover scenario and switched the BGP route from Chicago to Toronto, while a YouTube video was playing, and it didn't even stutter!

Do streaming services work? Anyway to make the IP appear residential?

google 'residential proxies for sale' if you really want to do this, the big content sources are getting pretty good at distinguishing between last mile ISP blocks of dhcp customers and IP blocks that are announced in a colocation/datacenter environment.

Netflix works with just the "global" range. Their business vs. residential classification accuracy is probably near perfect.

For most services that distinguish between residential and commercial IPs, your traffic is outbound so CGNAT shouldn't be much of a problem to route normally.

The whois for the ip's in the screenshot say they are reassigned from OVH, and geolocate to Quebec.

That's the prototype version.

I am curious about your wire-guard setup. Have you been able to automate the setup or is it still a manual process to set up a new customer connection? I have been waiting for wg-dynamic to be ready because I dont feel like using static assignments. It looks like it could be a while until wg-dynamic is ready. What has you experience been?

Yes, it is fully automated. I don't think wg-dynamic will be ready in the next few years, or even remotely cross-platform when compared to the current wireguard implementation and popularity. Our code for choosing an IP address from our pool is really short, just a quick SQL query and a round robin selection.

> interestingly they start slow (around 60 Mbps)

For many of us that's reasonably fast ;). In the UK, FTTC provided over POTS (often BT or some form of unbundle), the top end is 80Mbs/20Mbs.

I don't know what you'd expect with cable provisioned areas supplied by the likes of Virgin (DOCSIS).

Virgin provide up to 300 or 500 Mbps depending on area

They have trial areas where they do 1Gbps lines as well, and when I was using one it would reliably hit that.

We’ve got that. We were on 200 and it wouldn’t go above 60. Since they finished the upgrade for docsis 3.1 and we switched to 1gbps it’s been what we wanted 200 to be - reliable and invisible. I hate them with a passion, but hate the UK gov more for its incompetent handling of fibre incentives and coordination nationally.

Wow that's nice. Virgin. I never seen any cable in the houses I lived in London. Maybe it's not common in Zone 1?

They provided underlying connectivity to the premises at my prior built-to-rent apartment building in zone 2. The building had its own routers, Ethernet and WiFi infrastructure, and the management of everything was contracted out to an IT consultancy.

200 Mbps to each apartment was offered so I assume they had fibre and not DOCSIS.

I imagine the issue in zone 1 is having to tear up the roads to get cable installed. In new builds you have to do that anyway, so it's good business to get in on the action.

Oh 60 is fast around here too. I mostly meant that I've never seen a download start slow and progressively get faster. If anything it usually bursts at the begihning and then throttles back (comcast did that to me the most)

I've observed download starting slow and getting faster on all connection types: dialup, DSL, fibre, mobile wireless from 2g to 4g. It's just how TCP operates. Interesting that your experience on Comcast is different.

I'm not sure that bursting at the beginning has much to do with the underlying tech but more with marketing.

I wouldn't be surprised if it had something to do with trying to trick speed tests into reading higher speeds before it slows down.

It's usually quite common over e.g. 4g. You first have to wake up the radio and attach to a cell tower, which can take 50ms or so. Once you've done that latency for subsequent packets can be much lower (e.g. 5ms).

Downloads are expected to speed up over time. Google TCP window scaling to learn more.

138/20 down/up for me on Virgin (Google speed test, Manchester to London, using wifi). Was sold 200/20, and have got that in the past using Ethernet.

FTTH seems to be fairly prevalent in new builds in the UK now; my house is 5 years old and FTTH is the only option here. This does rather limit your ISP choices somewhat, but you can get pretty decent speeds. BT upgraded me to 950/140 just last week.

FTTH with asynchronous speeds? Thats bullshit. The only reason for that is that they use cable or dsl somewhere in the path from you into their core network

I take it you mean asymmetric speeds.

It is done for market segmentation purposes, not because there is a technical requirement for it. Asymmetric vs symmetric is used to separate residential from business customers, and charge the later category higher prices.

If they offer symmetric speeds to home users, they worry that business customers will try to switch to residential plans in order to save money.

> If they offer symmetric speeds to home users, they worry that business customers will try to switch to residential plans in order to save money.

If their key differentiator between the two connection types are upload speeds then they should adjust the pricing and/or clarify (or actually add some) the value add for the business line. That is just unfortunate

As another user commented, it's about market segmentation and not equipment limitations. I can get near-symmetric speeds from other FTTH ISPs but it was significantly more expensive than I was willing to pay, and I don't really need it anyway.

Besides Starlink, I'm curious to hear more about your Protectli. Why do you like it so much? What can it do, that you can't do on your own computer with some scripting and such?

Not OP, but the Protectli is just hardware and you install your own OS. So it is running your own computer with "scripting and such", just a separate low-power, small footprint computer with dual NICs. This is good for managing network for your entire house/office/remote site.

I've got some PC-based firewalls like the Protecli. Mini-ITX, atom-based, 8gb ram. I can often find these for <$50 on auction sites. If it's one I'll be the main "owner" of, I like to run VyOS for firewall and routing. This is the open-source fork of Vyatta, and Ubiquiti's EdgeOS is a commercial sibling (granted, EdgeOS has or at least had some advantages over IPv6 PD). VyOS is debian arm based, so lots of packages like ZeroTier VPN can be added easily. I like VyOS/EdgeOS because of the full CLI/scriptable config.

I recently setup 3 of these for a radio club. These will live in mountaintop tower locations and provide VPN+NAT. Since these might get modified by others, I went with OPNSense. OPNSense is a fork of PFSense with a nice Web UI and community support.

> VyOS is debian arm based

not to quibble too much but I think the bulk of vyos development takes place on x86-64 and the standard build-your-own-install ISO guide is for x86-64. Though it certainly can be compiled for various types of arm CPU.

this is because if you want things like eight or ten 10GbE interfaces, or eight 10GbE and four 100GbE in one server, the only economically viable and fully stable platform for vyos right now is x86-64.

Right you are. In fact, I was thinking of the EdgeOS on EdgeRouter, and I was wrong there as well, since that is actually mips64.

https://www.debian.org/ports/mips/

Like the other respondent said it's just a small general purpose computer: you still need to load an OS like Linux. Mine is currently a PFSense firewall mostly out of laziness and a desire for speed. If I had to do it again I'd buy something else because the model I have (FW4B) struggles with gigabit internet speeds and the next model up is too expensive to consider vs just buying a small form factor computer instead.

Sorry I missed this question earlier!

I love that it runs vanilla Linux/BSDs and is a complete white box. I'm able to configure it exactly the way I want it, and I can even run non-trivial services on it. These days I mostly just port forward as I like to keep things as separate as possible so that when one thing goes down I don't lose everything, but it's great to have options.

Especially while I've got two ISPs, the ability to bond and use both at the same time is super neat.

These have not been prettied up for public consumption, but this is how I have it configured if you're interested: https://gist.github.com/FreedomBen/f8a50c7a98c07171a99c419a5...

Can you compare with T-Mobile’s 5G home Internet plan? Similar numbers advertised, $60 a month, no caps.

I can't compare but I think one of the selling points is going to be the satellite coverage for Starlink versus T-Mobile's cell towers.

I do like T-Mobile's offering as an alternative to these crappy cable companies.

Thinking about it, they may complement each other.

t-mobile will probably have cell towers/coverage where people live vs starlink which grants coverage where people do not live.

I can't because the nearest city to me with 5G is several hours away. The 4G at my house is super spotty. I've used it for Webex calls when my home internet went down and it will mostly handle that, but I would never want to rely on it for my primary connection.

Have you tried T-Mobile? I don't know what they have configured, but they certainly own a lot of midband 2.5mhz spectrum in east idaho. They have 140mhz in Idaho Falls and Twin Falls, and 180mhz in Pocatello, and at least 60mhz everywhere else in east idaho. It looks like they have a decent amount of sites too. I'd have to dig a bit more but if you don't have access to 5g on T-Mobile today, it's not gonna be more than a couple months away.

Fascinating! I go to Idaho Falls fairly often. My phone is Verizon but my wife's in T-Mobile (MVNO). I don't think her phone is 5G capable though.

"no caps" - but watch what happens if you move 200 or 300GB downstream on a LTE based last mile residential connection in a month. you'll either get shut off, throttled to a few Mbps, or billed extra. Look at the fine print in the terms of service. If you have a household with multiple people that watch netflix, download movies, or even want to download a single xbox one or PS4/PS5 game (they can be 120-180GB now), watch out.

Um how do you expect Starlink to treat you once it’s GA?

A whole lot better than the quotas and caps enforced on consumer grade geostationary satellite stuff right now (hughesnet, viasat) that is available in the same price tier of $85-130/month. And also better than 90% of WISPs.

Relative to the helpful details on LTE you posted, though? (Obviously Starlink is incomparably better than the status quo satellite options...)

Why do you expect better than LTE?

And would you say more about WISP behavior? I know WISPs are all over the place, but in my small experience, a technically competent WISP will not look at your usage unless there’s contention impacting other customers.

Like, Starlink has said they won’t service urban areas, to prevent degradation due to contention. So I expect them to use the usual TOS and technical controls... to prevent contention. I don’t see what makes them special here. If they had some special sauce to provide more cumulative bandwidth to subscribers than LTE and WISPs, I’d expect them to open up to urban areas stuck with Comcast, and profit massively.

Typical WISP last mile: Something like a ubiquiti rocket 5ac gen2 on an RF elements 60 degree horn antenna, in a 40 MHz TDD channel somewhere in the 5.x GHz band, aggregate capacity of the entire AP might be around 240 Mbps. Shared between 20 to 30 customers. I'm regularly seeing 250-330 Mbps down on Starlink right now with beta equipment, and very, very few WISPs except those who are doing 60 GHz based PtMP micro-POP setups can match that. It's a real challenge for a WISP to have a few dozen houses all trying to download the latest 180GB Call of Duty update connected to one AP.

I'm not nearly as optimistic about WISPs in the long run, compared to my views 8-10 years ago. Really difficult to reach locations will go to starlink or similar (as a replacement for consumer grade geostationary), other places where the customers per square km density is sufficient will eventually get overbuilt with GPON last mile that provides vastly more throughput and capacity.

The most clueful and forward thinking WISPs I know are all making every effort possible, within whatever capital resources are available to them, to develop in house capacity for doing rural aerial FTTH. Buying bucket trucks, getting training, learning how to splice fiber, design GPON architecture, working with state PUCs for pole access, etc.

WISP and Musk are ruled by the same Shannon, so I'm skeptical that there will be a significant advantage over the long term, but satellite has a big advantage it terms of coverage -- the difference between "can you see that tiny hilltop in the distance over the trees?" and "can you see the sky?"

Same Shannon limit, but very different bands and channel sizes as well. Most WISPs are limited by the unlicensed frequency bands that exist in FCC part 15, and things like 3.5 and 3.65 GHz. One of the things that can go wrong with that is many WISPs in the same area fighting over the same bands from 5100-5900 MHz.

By comparison LTE fixed last mile services in some places (where expensive spectrum is owned by entities like tmobile) have some of the prime tree-penetrating frequencies in the 600 and 700 MHz bands, and 2.5 GHz band. One of the reasons why clearwire was acquired by sprint was for their 2500 band.

Replying to your reply, I don’t buy it. Your experience now on Starlink is analogous to being the first WISP subscriber on a newly deployed AP. Time will tell anyway. (And I will still be a grateful Starlink customer at my off-grid cabin, even with the throttling and caps. Starlink is a game changer!)

My perspective is informed by having been in locations previously dependent on geostationary based satellite services, as a comparison.

For people who have budgeted, procured and installed 'serious' two way geostationary stuff in the past (one example of which would be a 2.4m two port linear compact cassegrain antenna, NJR PLL LNB, a 40W BUC, a Comtech CDM760 modem and a 1U sized Cisco router), for 1:1 SCPC dedicated transponder capacity based services, starlink is atonishingly fast.

I could pull out a check book and spend $45,000 on buying terminal hardware and $30,000 a month in transponder space and not be able to achieve the speeds that starlink can do right now. Even if starlink was only 20 Mbps down and 4 Mbps up, go price what 20x4 service will cost by traditional geostationary right now (hint: start looking at $1200 per Mbps per month and multiply by N number of Mbps).

It is indeed a good theory that I'm seeing unreasonably higher than normal speeds right now and better latency, jitter and packet loss because I'm in a similar situation to being the first customer on a new WISP PtMP AP sector. But I also have a great deal more confidence that spacex's continued paces of launches and satellite deployment will keep up with providing at least a 100 Mbps down x 15 Mbps up service. I do not think that they will let it degrade into a contended-service-hell where customers see a very poor end user experience.

My perspective on starlink is also informed by knowing the price right now for Inmarsat and Iridium based offshore and aviation data services (sub 2 Mbps) and the $ per megabyte costs. There's already starlink aviation terminals in beta, and terminals for maritime and offshore use. It'll be a game changer there. The market for a globe-covering LEO high throughput satellite network is much larger than just the US48 state consumer residential internet/small business last mile internet market.

If your cabin is off-grid, why do you want to be online? Doesn't that sort of defeat the point?

Sometimes there's not an option to be on the grid.

Not the person you replied to, but off-grid doesn't mean no power. I have an off-grid cabin with enough solar capacity to run my laptop, as well as quite a few other things. I'm looking forward to getting Starlink there myself. It's a fantastic, quiet place to work with no opportunity for interruptions.

photovoltaic power systems are a lot less costly than they used to be - if you're fully off grid and won't be connecting to it, having absolute fidelity to electrical code might not be a high priority. If you have some technical ability and can follow documentation and instructions, big 360W panels are like $0.45/watt now, and the setup process for a charge controller and battery bank isn't excessively difficult.

T-mobile doesn’t apply a traditional throttle but instead they deprioritize you on the towers. So as long as you're on a tower that doesn't typically get congested (typical in residential areas since people use their home Wi-Fi instead) you're fine.

Correct.

Typical is to quietly throttle you into oblivion.

Above average users are not and never welcome.

I have the Tmobile service. I use at least 500 Gb/mo without problems. Others on the reddit forum use over a Tb without problems. The terms of service say Tmobile will deprioritize us when there is congestion, but I haven't experienced it. Also, it appears that Tmobile is limiting the number of subscribers in a given area to prevent degraded service. Overall, I like it (full disclosure: I have a dual Wan setup with xfinity being the other provider)

At first I thought “30s” meant “30 seconds” rather than “thirties (ms).”

My opinion of Starlink and what it means for the world was being completely reshapen until I read your comment again!

Ah yes, thanks! I did mean thirties but I changed it to `ms` to avoid confusion :-)

I have never heard of adding 'ies' onto the end of numbers to mean 'ms'. I'm (probably) not alone, fyi!

What industry is that lexicon from?

That just means 30-39. Probably would be clearer if written 30's. The ms is implied, due to the context.

That would be a greengrocer's apostrophe.

what is clearer about implying the 30 posseses something? the post said 'low 30s', so to me that would imple 30-35, or even 30-33 if one wanted to call 34-36 mid 30s and 37-39 high 30s.

I don't think it meant "ms" specifically, it meant in the range of 30-40 ms; the milliseconds was implied from the context.

Internet connection speeds, in context. Latencies faster than milliseconds are not found in home internet connections (or anywhere maybe?) and 30 second latencies in Starlink would have prevented the product from even existing or would imply faulty hardware.

Can you setup Starlink without the app, i.e: no cell phone? I'm getting real tired of devices that have no management/setup UI of their own.

Their router uses OpenWRT and supposedly you can hit it at 192.168.1.1, but when I try that I get a redirect to www.starlink.com

I did the same thing and got the same redirect. I haven't experimented with anything except GET / but it would be interesting to try throwing some params in there and trying other paths.

Yeah, after another week or so to get my initial impressions with the router as-is, I'm going to do some more experiments and also swap out a couple other routers to see what I can do.

Sweet man, would you be interested in teaming up a bit? I'm fairly busy the next couple of weeks but I can find a little time to do some hacking. I'm FreedomBen on Keybase, or if you want to email me freedomben <at> proton mail dot com I can give you a real email address. Totally fine if not though!

It's not the official place where I'm working on this particular project, but if you have any notes or feedback you'd want to track/share through my internet-monitoring project, please feel free! Email is a bit tough, as the volumes right now mean I sometimes see a message quickly, other times after days or weeks :)

https://github.com/geerlingguy/internet-monitoring/issues

Awesome, will do! And that project looks great by the way. Thanks for the link

all of the interesting data is served from the phased array antenna unit itself, not the router...

https://github.com/sparky8512/starlink-grpc-tools

https://pythonrepo.com/repo/sparky8512-starlink-grpc-tools

I do not believe so. I hate it as well but decided to tolerate it because at least once it is setup, I don't have to continue using it.

I do think you need the app and a phone for at least 5 minutes. I did the initial power up and setup with that, and after 5 minutes of verifying it worked, replaced the starlink provided router with my own. Anything that is an ordinary 1000BaseT 1500mtu DHCP client will get an address when connected to the PoE injector.

The weird angled router they had out is just a convenience for non technical consumers who want an all in one 802.11ac box. The app on the phone also does the very basic first time setup step of defining an SSID and WPA2-PSK key.

I setup without use of the router or app.

Yes. I’m not even using their wifi box.

Hows the gimble, I read its auto stabilizing is that true? And how well built is the dish, do you think it can handle long periods of constant wind exposure of 15+ knots

I've been contemplating putting one on my boat for use while at anchor. There is constant movement but its horrible

The dish basically locks into an orientation after it links up with the satellites, so it's not really a "gimbal" in that it's not constantly moving around.

The dish is heavy and feels tough; I'd be more worried about your mount than the dish itself with regard to wind; we're having 40 mph gusts today in St. Louis and dishy's working fine.

I'm more worried about hail, though... hopefully we can avoid the golf ball variety this spring.

It's not a gimbal, it's a set of stepper motors and gears. It's not designed for constant movement or tracking. The current starlink terminal is a dual beamforming phased array that will align itself to have its flat face oriented towards the area above you that has the highest simultaneous density of satellites at any given point in time. Beta terminals in north WA state, for example, are angled about 10 degrees off flat, looking slightly north.

In fact a current starlink terminal (which has a 6-axis sensor and GPS receiver built into it) will turn itself off if it detects movement. The terminals for things like yachts are not available to the public yet, though I have no doubt they're in the works.

I’ve had 80km/h winds and it’s just sitting on the bare ground without being fastened. Also had -25C temp and knee high snow drifts. No issues.

I use pfsense with the Protectli -- what exactly are you doing with CentOS just manually configuring as a FW for your LAN?

Is the upload/download speed the same? Does your public IP frequently change?

EDIT: Ah -- CGNAT. Missed that part.

Yep, I just enable IPv4 packet forwarding and use firewalld to manage ports. I use dnsmasq to provide DHCP and DNS services.

Here are my config files if you're interested. I've redacted my domain and some of the mac addresses. One of these is a shell script that sets up the firewall: https://gist.github.com/FreedomBen/f8a50c7a98c07171a99c419a5...

Thanks for taking the time to post the files. I actually learned a few things and like the setup. Might give it a shot. I haven’t been happy lately with the business behind pfsense, this might push me to configure my own.

How is the power consumption compared to a regular router + fiber/ADSL dongle ?

I can answer that I've been monitoring the full setup (dish + router) through a Kill-A-Watt for a few days, and it never goes below 94W, and averages a little over 100W.

I don't have numbers for just the starlink stuff since I have other things plugged in to my UPS, but that sounds about right. The power brick is always warm to the touch.

My other ISP also uses PoE to power a wireless dish (line of sight) and uses a little less power but not a ton less.

I see report of 5-10w on ubiquiti gear.

the power consumed for a WISP PtMP last mile CPE radio is considerably less than starlink. Typical CPE for a ubiquiti, cambium or similar antenna will be 8-12W at the AC wall power side of the PoE injector. Starlink is more like 100W constant.

How much of that is dumped into the antenna? It’s LOS so it shouldn’t need too many watts for TX.

From the article the author suggests 100W continuous using POE++.

ISPReview have a good article on this. It's more than I expect. https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2021/03/electricity-co...

Thank you for this! I was going to sign my parents up. They live closer to Boise.

Are the speeds symmetrical? In other words upload is the same as download?

no, I've had a beta terminal for months, upstream averages 15-18 Mbps with brief bursts to 30.

15-30mbps is about what I get for my upstream “gigabit” cable service.

that's typical on DOCSIS3 cable since they intentionally allocate and bond a much greater number of channels for downstream capacity, to match the usage patterns of hundreds of users in aggregate. The actual amount of RF available for upstream is quite small in a typical configuration.

I hope they can change that, we all need more upload these days working at home

You can get a modem with 32 down and 8 up channels. 8 up channels can support over 200 Mbps. But Comcast will still limit you to 5-10 Mbps.

Then there's DOCSIS 3.1, which actually supports up to 1 Gbit/s up, but Comcast still only gives you 35 Mbps on their gigabit plan.

IMO it just comes down to Comcast and other cable providers being cheap and not investing in their infrastructure to provide better upload speeds, even though the tech itself is capable of it.

just because the modem is capable of 8 channels up does not mean that it's likely your local segment to the CMTS is configured that way.

Nearly all cable networks use a low split, cutting off around 42Mhz for upstream bandwidth. Not all bandwidth from 0 to 42Mhz is usable due to external interference, most cable systems are able to get 4 full sized 8Mhz Docsis 3.0 channels into this space and one partial channel of 3 to 4Mhz.

Certain ISPs like Cox have started using OFDMA (Docsis 3.1) upstream channels as it is 50% more efficient than classic Docsis channels and you can operate it closer to spectrum with interference since it can run subchannels at lower modulation

So, how do you use these devices in an SD-WAN active/active configuration? What is your unified VPN solution that lets you use both upstream channels simultaneously?

Have you been using ssh at all? How's that experience? That's my main use case.

How about video/audio calls? does Wi-Fi calling work well?

Not OP but I've setup a continuous reverse SSH from a farm in the South to a Comcast residential service in the Bay area.

SSH works but there's enough latency and other general network variation that makes me think it's not quite good enough an experience to spend a day remotely editting files.

For anything not requiring really low-latency, Starlink absolutely shines. Watching the local news from my childhood farm on the other side of the country via satellite internet feels like the future.

Ahh, kids of today.

I'm on traditional satellite for one week out of every two - at 600ms RTT. I'm either SSH'ing into hosts over that link, or worse, using a Citrix VDI to access (mostly) SSH terminals at the far end.

It's tolerable but far from enjoyable.

30ms latency would be an utter delight, not just compared to geostationary, but also compared to what we had in the late 20th century in terms of terrestrial connections.

Yes I SSH all day every day, and it has been totally fine (at least while the service is up. There is daily down time currently). Video calls the same. No issues (when it's up).

That said, when I'm on my own machines or ones that I can install things on, I can't recommend mosh highly enough. I've literally gotten on a plane and had the shell pick up thousands of miles away without missing a beat once the laptop was back online at the hotel.

I’m on MS Teams video calls a lot. It’s fine for speed, except sometimes the connection drops for a minute. I assume because a satellite is not overhead at that time. Supposed to improve as more satellites are sent up.

I the app absolutely required?

I wish I had 60 mbps :( That would be a big upgrade for a lot of people.

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