• Watch Out for Scammers!

    We've now added a color code for all accounts. Orange accounts are new members, Blue are full members, and Green are Supporters. If you get a message about a sale from an orange account, make sure you pay attention before sending any money!

Rural Internet Starlink

Nate60x

Carrying a C average
Full Member
Minuteman
Apr 3, 2018
194
218
My starlink satellite showed up last week. Love it, ive done a few speed tests download speeds have been between 85-100, upload 20-25.

Its only been one week but I have not had any downtime.

setup couldnt have been easier.

saves me $150 a month
 
I'm on the hunt for new internet but the options are very limited for my area out in the country. Read about starlink and got excited and then saw the start up fee! It's also not even in my area just yet. Hopefully it will be soon and the price comes down a little.
 
Buying the equipment is different for sure, but I was paying viasat $250 a month, im breaking even after 3 months or so.

for someone that has struggled with horrible overpriced almost unusable internet for years i was happy to pay it
 
My starlink satellite showed up last week. Love it, ive done a few speed tests download speeds have been between 85-100, upload 20-25.

Its only been one week but I have not had any downtime.

setup couldnt have been easier.

saves me $150 a month
I want to see what the speeds are when more people are using it.
 
  • Like
Reactions: 2ndamendfan
If it scales ok it will be a game changer for a bunch of people
 
Keep us posted. Right now it would be my only option other that cell data or sat systems like Hughes net.
Cell data can be a winner. Yahoo now has a plan that will give you a free phone and unlimited data with no slowdown if you use a lot. $40 bucks a month. Beats the shit out of paying ComCast twice as much for just internet.
 
Rural sucks, Hughes net sucks, mobile Hotspot sucks.
All this tech and no decent options!

As a funny part to this... I bought other properties that border mine. They are on a main road half a mile away. My wife needs and uses internet all day since travel restrictions for over seas. I keep threatening to have high-speed ran through the woods!
 
Cell data can be a winner. Yahoo now has a plan that will give you a free phone and unlimited data with no slowdown if you use a lot. $40 bucks a month. Beats the shit out of paying ComCast twice as much for just internet.
Yahoo is reselling visibles service. Visible (with a very easy to find group to join, message me if you need help getting one) is $25 per month, exact same service.

I'm also excited for starlink, not because my internet service is slow but because they have a monopoly in my area. I'm looking forward to saving a few bucks when they have to compete.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Maggot
Saw your satellite going up yesterday morning....

1615800680056.png
 
  • Like
Reactions: Maggot and Nate60x
Rural sucks, Hughes net sucks, mobile Hotspot sucks.
All this tech and no decent options!

As a funny part to this... I bought other properties that border mine. They are on a main road half a mile away. My wife needs and uses internet all day since travel restrictions for over seas. I keep threatening to have high-speed ran through the woods!
Until this month our only option was satellite. Cell service not great. Comcrapst stopped at the end of the road. One of the high dollar neighbors, who had to work from home, caught their engineer and got him to quote extending the line.

1 5 miles of main line was about 26000. Most of the neighbors were looking at 15000-25000 to bury the line from the road to their houses. We were one of the lucky ones that still have above ground power, so they are gonna make the run to the house for free.

I've been happy with Viasat for what I do and I hate Comcrapst, but I'll probably get their internet for a year while they are willing to pull the line to the house for free.
 
Similar situation here. Cable internet available 1/2 mile down the road, $6500 to have it run to my house. Struggled with wireless VHF and later a cellular plan that used a router with a SIM card in it. Was happy with that even though it was data capped they never noticeably throttled us. Just got T-Mobile home internet and it's pretty good. 75-100 mbs and $50/month. Starlink was my next choice.
 
Until this month our only option was satellite. Cell service not great. Comcrapst stopped at the end of the road. One of the high dollar neighbors, who had to work from home, caught their engineer and got him to quote extending the line.

1 5 miles of main line was about 26000. Most of the neighbors were looking at 15000-25000 to bury the line from the road to their houses. We were one of the lucky ones that still have above ground power, so they are gonna make the run to the house for free.

I've been happy with Viasat for what I do and I hate Comcrapst, but I'll probably get their internet for a year while they are willing to pull the line to the house for free.
Visat was ok for us until whatever point in the billing cycle that we hit our “unlimited” data cap and were throttled down to dial up speeds
 
Visat was ok for us until whatever point in the billing cycle that we hit our “unlimited” data cap and were throttled down to dial up speeds
Have mine at the last level before unlimited and haven't hit the cap since I raised the limit to that. I dont stream or game online.
 
I live in rural MD and Comcast quoted me $241k to get fiber run to my house. Had to get Hughes Net which works okay until 5pm, but my wife and I both work from home and need faster internet. I signed up for Starlink after looking into it. Would be 5x faster and half the price monthly. Hope the speeds being reported in the beta testing hold up. Should be available in my area mid to late 2021.
 
I've been happy with Viasat for what I do and I hate Comcrapst, but I'll probably get their internet for a year while they are willing to pull the line to the house for free.
You spelled it right. When I first go their service it was always going out and I had to pay to get a tech to come out and 'fix' it. I finally signed up for their $5 per month service insurance extortion fee and had no more problems.
 
Rural sucks, Hughes net sucks, mobile Hotspot sucks.
All this tech and no decent options!

As a funny part to this... I bought other properties that border mine. They are on a main road half a mile away. My wife needs and uses internet all day since travel restrictions for over seas. I keep threatening to have high-speed ran through the woods!

If there is internet at the road and you can get line of sight back to the house there are transmitter/ receivers that can easily cover that distance. Would need power and your own pole but might work. I currently transmit WiFi 400’ down the street to another property I own and to my main house that is off the road 300’. The transmitter/receivers that I use will cover your distance if you can get line I’d sight. Something to consider.
 
I live 10 miles from town, and 3 miles from the pavement. We currently have Centurylink 6mb DSL (fastest we can get), that I pay $103 per month for. However, out electric co-op is now installing fiber, I have the drop on my pole, just waiting on the install. Gigabit up and down $79 bucks per month...........fuck Centurylink!
 
  • Like
Reactions: myronman3
I live 10 miles from town, and 3 miles from the pavement. We currently have Centurylink 6mb DSL (fastest we can get), that I pay $103 per month for. However, out electric co-op is now installing fiber, I have the drop on my pole, just waiting on the install. Gigabit up and down $79 bucks per month...........fuck Centurylink!
where are you at, if i may ask?
 
Fulton County, AR. I've been reading that a lot of the Co-ops are now starting to install fiber to the rural areas. Ours is called NEXT, www.mynextfiber.com Another benefit is I can ditch the $100 per month satellite TV too.
 
  • Like
Reactions: myronman3
where i am at, for internet, centurylink charges about 45 bucks a month. some of the places have good facilities, other places dont. so it is hit and miss. the smaller surrounding companies have started to overbuild centurylink’s area and they are hemorrhaging customers in those areas. it’s not just the better service (fiber to the prem and 100up/100down) that they refuse to compete with, it’s their abysmal customer service and continual neglect for the last 15 years that really has angered people.

corporate refuses to care. my theory is that they are in bed with starlink and providing fiber transport service to musk. ever since the Level 3 “merger”, i see nothing but continued actions to point to my theory. also have seen a bit of physical evidence as well.
 
For right now, and in the past Century is the only game in town. Interestingly, a year or so ago I read a WSJ, or Forbes article on CL losing customers on a huge scale in other markets. IIRC, it was close to 90K customers per month.
 
Screenshot_20210409-085223.png


This is working better than Frontier's DSL service, to say the least.
 
frontier is the worst, i have no other option except for satellite. i signed up for starlink cant wait till it comes here.
 
I work for a co-op phone service and we are installing fiber internet up to a gig to homes that don't have running water. Live on frontiers service and just got done running trouble at my own house where "tech" said my drop was bad. It was fine.

Now gotta roll up 1300 ft of temp wire and hope power company hurries
up and gets fiber here. If we get a meg that's a hell of a speed test.
 
I guess I’m lucky. My ranch is in a county with a population density of one person per square mile but somehow I have cell service. Combined with a T-Mobile unlimited everything plan for $45 a month, I’ve got all I need.
 
I have no cell service at my house and no type of cable. Currently I have Hughes which sucks terribly and costs as much for the basic 10g a month as Starlink costs. I am definitely getting Starlink.
 
Cell service sucks at my house but I have fiberoptic cable that made it here last year. Now I can use a cell phone at my house on wifi calling. Don't much care of my cell works but I was happy to get cable out here for internet and suprised to get it.
 
If there is internet at the road and you can get line of sight back to the house there are transmitter/ receivers that can easily cover that distance. Would need power and your own pole but might work. I currently transmit WiFi 400’ down the street to another property I own and to my main house that is off the road 300’. The transmitter/receivers that I use will cover your distance if you can get line I’d sight. Something to consider.
Will you take a pic of your transmitter for us.
 
We had Viasat & Hughes. Florida summer thunderstorms wiped out signal almost every day for 20 minutes to two hours. We smoked through the 100g cap in under a week and throttled the remainder of the month. Would switch to our (bullshit) unlimited ATT. The hotspot gave us 22g and then throttled, then each phone 12g apiece before they throttled. Dumped some serious coin and got fiber run to the house and set up business service. They won’t do residential but the line we are on runs straight to the main hub in the center of our county with no one else on it. Cost is considerable a basic ATT business service is close to $300 a month. Upside is fully tax deductible and we also have a SLA which means service has a minimum speed, not an “up to” speed.
 
We have a cabin without highspeed service. The only way I can get highspeed unlimited, until the Co-op power company gets around to running fiber, is to enter into a business account with ATT. They want a 2 yr contract at $535/mo. Not doing that for a residential line. Verizon is the carrier of choice here and I get 2 bars most of the time, but sometimes just 1. I entered into a Visible account for unlimited data at $25/mo ($50 for wife and me combined) and installed a Cel Fi antenna/amplifier ($1000) and are now getting about 15 down average, sometimes peaking at 35, and about 12 to 15 average up, sometimes both are much faster and infrequently, slower. Latency is the biggest issue using cell for data. With the amp, we always have 4 bars (max).

With Visible, we can hotspot one device off each of our phones. This has given us a workable solution until the Co-op or Starlink gets here. I've put down a deposit on Starlink. We can stream Netflix and Amazon now with buffering once or never for a 2 hr movie. My wife's phone is 5G and she gets 5g through the Cel Fi. The biggest issue is hooking up the hotspot every time we turn on a computer and getting knocked off if a phone call comes in, but that is the fault of the Iphones we use.
 
66F66169-FEE2-4BB2-8683-12530A3BCACA.png

This the unit that I use. I have four of them, two transmitters and two receivers. One set goes a little over 200’ from my barn to the house. The picture below is the transmitter and the one below that is looking towards the house. Line of sight is slightly obscured by trees but that has never been an issue for my set up. If you were going to a thousand yards you would probably need a clear line of sight.

The only issue I have with is they do not come programmed. I am not an IT or network guy and it was difficult for me to program, but finally found a couple of good Utube videos to get them going.

The other pair shoots 300’ and works fine. Speeds at the receivers are comparable to speeds at the main router. You need a router at each receiver.
I am happy with these but I believe there are others on the market that come pre-programmed which might be worth considering.
1CF4B17A-5239-4369-9E3B-18D4EA980E79.jpeg
3DFF12A5-21EA-41E8-B1F5-0D76CF2B6E9C.jpeg
 
  • Like
Reactions: Sean the Nailer
Thanks, not an IT guy either, but I can get pissed off, frustrated, and muddle my way through..........usually.
 
I use TP link stuff to get signal to me shop and cow barn. It works really well but as said above I sat on the Mule feeding hay and scratched my head for a while figuring out how to get it going.
 
At what point will Starlink and other similar mass deployed sats have to go way of dodo as just another form of space debris?


Starlink, Elon Musk’s still-growing constellation made up of thousands of SpaceX satellites whizzing around the planet, is turning out to be something of a space menace. Especially to other satellite operators.

The satellites are responsible for half of the near-misses in orbit, according to research by Hugh Lewis, head of the University of Southampton’s Astronautics Research Group. Near misses happen when two spacecraft or satellites pass within 0.6 miles of one another. Lewis told Live Science that a near miss involving a Starlink satellite happens 1,600 times per week — a number that Lewis expects to grow as SpaceX continues to saturate the night sky.