Once again, thanks for these comments Peter. They will help to formulate a plan developing in my head how to tackle this with the current LAN infrastructure.
I’ll pull a schematic together now.
If I understand it correctly, the dish has to be capable of viewing the sky unhindered to the North-East and that can be checked on your mobile phone (without a Starlink account)?
Correct, just install the Starlink app and from that you can check for obstructions without having a starlink account.
The Starlink system is very easy to install.
How do I know this without having seen one?
Because Americans can do it.
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There’s actually a separate Starlink satellite finder app in the playstore…
The Starlink app itself requires you to go through the order process…
Strange - when I did the test from the app it was before I had created an Account or placed an order
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an alternative view on the service provided (US perspective) which could just impact users in France…
Reasons not to get Starlink
- Musk
- Musk
- Musk
- Musk
- Musk
- Musk
- Musk
- Musk
- Musk
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I got bored listening to him ramble and closed it 
Can you summarise his 17 minutes into a paragraph for those, like me, with a short attention span?
of course…
- 08:22 The kit cost
- 09:57 Weather
- 10:29 Thermal Shutdown
- 11.10 Problem wit the Ethernet dongle
- 12.19 Starlink Customer Service
- 13:16 Opinion: should you wait or not?
- 15:27 Focus on Customer Service (or lack of).
In your use case Gareth, as you now have Fibre, the view is that it’s probably not worth the change but in rural areas where fibre may not be possible or available (our use case currently) there is an argument which favours it but I still have doubts about reliability/sustainability and the lack of an RJ45 port on the router and precious little information about the ability to configure it in a wired environment successfully casts doubt - for the time being at least.
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precis:
Oh dear oh dear. You might have thought Elon Musk’s take over of Twitter would be disastrous - but did you think it would be this bad? There’s now every chance that a medium which, whatever its flaws, has become a critical plank of our social and democratic infrastructure could collapse. Here’s the story of the catastrophe - and why it has very, very serious implications for all of us.
You could add
- very small %age of the planned satellites in service
- questions over whether Space-X will get the rest into orbit
- connection speed if the user base expands as much as projected
- long term viability if not.
- expensive
- unreliable
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Thanks, @graham.
Yes, I agree with you that it doesn’t make sense in my case to switch from fibre for now. It could be an option to consider though when we look to buy somewhere in the future… A fast internet connection was going to be one of my criteria which would rule out some lovely but rural properties I’ve seen locally.
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both of those, whilst valid, are subjective of course. I believe the monthly cost in France is 50€/month which is not too terrible when compared to other players but you do have to invest in the equipment which is around 500€ (more with other options) plus the cost of a secure external installation and routing of the cable internally.
The thing is though, this sort of thing is aimed at the US market, obviously, where people seem happy to pay 150 dollars per month for broadband, which may only ammount to 100/50 speeds at best. Meanwhile … out in the real world, it’s verry different.
To be fair the US has vast areas where the population density is very low and something like Starlink is the only option for high speed Internet access - if you are the only game in town then you can charge a premium (and US broadband packages seem to be expensive anyway).
Dear SF folks ,
Has anyone direct experience of Elon Musk Internet system Starlink and if so, how simple to set up is it??
Heard some good reports from users in France, but after my disaster with Sky I’m somewhat nervous of Satellite systems, but this one appears to be awesome 
Happy New Year to you all !!!
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The Starlink stellar network is much closer than the satellites used for TV and don’t seem to be troubled in the same way with weather issues See the video posted on Nov 11 
which explains why.
As @billybutcher suggested, one of the (many) reasons why not to consider Starlink is Musk himself but if reports are true, that may be about to change (in the future) since Amazon is going up against Musk with a plan for 3000 satellites so there may be some competition in the future in this very much developing market.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/amazon-secures-83-rocket-launches-its-satellite-broadband-network-2022-04-05/
For those in a rural area with poor Fibre opportunity, this could extend options quite significantly with other players joining in the fun.
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Its going to get even more crowded up there, they will be playing dodgems😀
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I decided to try Starlink in October and so far i am impressed. The cost was 480 EUR for the equipment and 50 EUR per month. You get a 30 day trial period and its monthly billing / contract.
Currently every where except the USA and Canada is uncapped - USA/Canada will start their capped 1TB per month from February (delayed from January for some reason / probably unrest from the users) Capped service is just that, not a limit but after 1TB it will be ‘best efforts’ - In parts of the USA they are suffering congestion so speeds can be low at peak times for them.
Fairly unpopulated France on the other hand has some of the highest rates at the moment.
I am still achieving (satellite to dish) 180/220 Mb/s, upload averaging 20 Mb/s, this results in some parts of my house a reasonable 50/100 Mb/s. We have installed a mesh repeater due to the construction of the house to enable a good signal upstairs at the farthest point from the Starlink router that is in a cupboard (not recommended for any broadband Wifi equipment).
In terms of installation, the dish comes with a stand for ground positioning. There are plenty of other mountings available - we have mounted our dish onto the end of the satellite dish pole. The standard cable supplied is 75feet long - we ended up drilling a hole through a back wall of the house to locate the router in the cupboard where all the other tech is. The router does not have an ethernet port as standard, you have to purchase an additional ethernet adapter (about 40 EUR). From that i have connected to an eight port switch to make things easy for all other connections.
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The sky, as they say, is a big place - I’m sure that they will find an unoccupied corner for Amazon’s service.
Bad news for Earth-bound astronomers though 
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