I had almost forgotten that way back in February I had pre-ordered Starlink until I got an e-mail to say it was now available in Ireland and that I could pay the balance and they would ship Dishy to me. I completed the order. The following day I got an e-mail to say that Dishy had shipped from Los Angeles and just one day later a DHL driver was at my door handing over a very large box!
It all happened so fast that I didn’t really have time to consider where I was going to mount it. I live in the middle of a town at the bottom of a hill and I’ve a very small yard at the back of the house. Luckily I have very high walls and as fate would have it I had recently cleared the ivy off them as my neighbour had recently cleared his side of the wall so I had no choice but to reciprocate!
Above you can see dishy in his temporary mounting position. I’m waiting for a custom pole adapter to be made and soon dishy should be about 4m above its current position.
Dishy needs a 100° field of vision from the vertical. That is when it is powered up the flat front faces straight up and and if you visualise a 100° cone from the dish upwards then that’s all the clear sky it needs. It’s actually not a huge amount but absolutely no obstructions are essential for a decent service. There is a diagram of that field of view and some excellent installation advice on this page here.
Once dishy is placed and the 100ft cable is ready, all you need to do is plug the cable for the router and dishy into the supplied PoE block and then finish the setup using the Starlink app on your phone. It’s very straightforward and in no time at all your dishy will start searching for satellites.
It does take about 10 to 15 minutes for Dishy to connect and settle a bit. After a short while I ran a speed test and immediately got a speed around 180Mbps. So far so impressive. Latency is between 30ms and 40ms. But then after a few hours I saw peak speeds of around 290Mbps.
For your first day you can expect plenty of outages. The service is in Beta and when you sign up it is made clear that some outages are to be expected. In the statistics section of the App these take two forms. Beta outages which are to be expected some times and Other Outages which can be from obstructions or No satellites being visible.
For the first couple of days you will get outages as both Dishy and the router automatically update.
You can use your own router rather than the Starlink supplied router. This is actually what I have done and I’m using a spare Mikrotik RB750Gr3 into which the white cable from the PoE block is plugged. It will receive a CG-NAT IP address and works perfectly. However to access the stats on the app you need to make sure you setup a route to Dishy who has it’s own IP address of 192.168.100.1/24. In most routers this is fairly straightforward. Here is what it looks like for Mikrotik with ether1 being the interface that is plugged into the PoE block.
Within a day I noticed my speeds were rarely going above 100Mbps. The app was constantly warning of “Poor Ethernet Connection”. Naturally I checked all the connections and they all seemed fine so I rebooted everything and speeds hit over 200Mbps again. For about 10 minutes. Then the dreaded “Poor Ethernet Connection” error appeared again.
After several reboots and the same behaviour being observed I decided to open a support ticket. You can do this through the app. Within 40 minutes of opening the ticket I got a phone call from Starlink support who ultimately decided there was an issue with the Dish itself and that they would send me out an entire new kit. A few days later I got an e-mail notifying me that the replacement kit had shipped so I boxed up the original kit to be shipped back and one day later the new kit had arrived from LA! Absolutely stellar service from Starlink I must say.
With Dishy 2 installed there was an instant improvement. Over a week later and I haven’t seen a “Poor Ethernet Connection” error and speeds are consistently between 130 and 290Mbps.
For a few days there were quite a few “No Satellites” errors but it seems I wasn’t the only person in this part of the country to get them. In the last few days it appears Dishy has received another firmware upgrade and I have had absolutely no errors or downtime. Quickly checking the stats and I can see that it’s reporting 2 seconds downtime in the last 12 hours. I’ll happily take that!
From the get go Starlink made big claims as to what they expected from their service and personally I think it has already exceeded my expectations. There are more satellites being launched each month and the service will advance as a result. It’s a perfect solution for both rural and some urban locations alike. Particularly if you are being left out of the Fibre Rollouts underway in Ireland. It also for the moment at least has none of the contention issues of some LTE masts and also has no measly data cap.
There are some disadvantages though:
- You need a clear unobstructed field of view for the dish.
- It’s expensive at €500 to purchase the equipment and €99 per month.
- You also need to expect outages as the service is in Beta.
- It used CG-NAT so you won’t be able to host behind it. (Not an issue for most!)
- Latency might be too high for hardcore gamers.
Once you are aware of these issues and you still want to go ahead I would recommend it in a heartbeat.
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