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Old 20th August 2021 | 12:18
  #89 (permalink)  
clareprop
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Joined: Aug 2008
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From: La Rochelle.
Let us know how it goes - and whether you get the old or new dish.
I'm not sure if it's a new or old dish but I suspect it's an 'old' one. It came direct from Starlink in California. Initial installation was simple, I just put the tripod on a convenient roof plugged everything in. On wifi I was getting 60/20 and on ethernet, 190/40 - result! After that, it was time to install properly so I used an old satellite dish wall support and attached the pipe adaptor I had purchased with the kit. Again, technically very simple but you need to think out two things. The dish location and the wiring route. Firstly, the dish should have a clear view of the Northern sky (in Northern Hemisphere) with no obstructions around it and secondly, the dish has 30 metres of cable which can't be cut or extended so if some extension is needed, you have to extend the ethernet to router cable from the power block. As I live in a typical Charentaise Longère in France, I knew wherever I placed the supplied router, it wouldn't be able to cover the house so initially, I just wired through to the study which is about in the middle of the property. The cable has a sealed suppressor or fuse near the end so, if you have to run through walls or doors, you'll need to make a hole of at least 1.5cm. The router does not seem to give a strong wifi signal. My PC was about 5m away and had trouble connecting at 5GHz so I was getting quite 'slow' speeds of 20mbps at 2.4GHz. Connected by ethernet cable, the PC was achieving 150+. My phone, when next to the router was fine.

However, as previously mentioned, I knew I would not be able to get proper coverage with just the router so I had already purchased a Google Mesh system. With four strategically placed Nest routers, I now have 80-90+mbps download speeds throughout and around the property on Wifi. The system easily handles all our devices as well as a gate bell/camera which is about 25 metres from the house. In terms of service availability and latency, I have seen a few outages but they haven't lasted very long. A slight concern for some rural users (who the system is actually aimed at) is they must have a clear view of the sky with no obstructions such as trees - so go high or be ready with the chainsaw. Latency seems to average 38-48 which is fine for us. I've read a number of comparisons of fibre and Starlink speeds but I'd stress again that Starlink is aimed at users who can't get fast broadband or fibre because of their location. Overall, we have a system that at the moment, is 40 times faster than the ADSL broadband we had. With more satellites and faster interlinking of them, the service will only get quicker.
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