Starlink Internet Review- My experience, slow and unreliable

 With the promise of download speeds of 50 - 150Mbps I was very interested in trying out Starlink. I was mostly interested on it as a way to get high speed internet on a cruising sailboat and I have seen several posts that show people claiming to get reasonable results with Starlink.

So some time back I registered to get notified of service in my area (currently living outside Ottawa, Ontario, Canada). The Starlink service has been been available in my area for some time, but the set-up costs were very expensive, running close to $800 (CDN) A couple of weeks back I got an email from Starlink informing me that the prices had dropped by 50%, service costs also dropped to $140/month for residential and $170/month for roaming (All CDN). This was enough to push me over the edge, and give it a try. I thought that if I could get it working well on land, it would be a viable option for a cruising sailboat. So I purchased the roaming option.

Within two weeks the package arrived......

The unboxing experience was OK ,but not great. I had an issue with a "bad connection". I checked the cables and they all seemed to be ok. The Starlink instructions offered little help. I googled it and found a video showing a frequent issue where the connector at the dish end was not correctly seated. This cable comes pre-attached and it looks perfectly fine, but when I pushed on it it is clear that it was not fully inserted. if this is a frequent issue, it should be clearly documented in the instructions.

I found the  Starlink app that came is used to set thinks up to be very clunky and not very intuitive. An example of this is the obstruction check which takes about 8 hours to run and gives no feedback while running. 

For a test set-up I placed the dish out in the middle of my lawn, facing North (as instructed), with a clear and unobstructed view of the sky. Eight hours later the App also confirmed that I had a clear sky view:

Now, I did not expect I would get the 150Mb/s speed that is marketed , but I was hopeful that it would beat my current service of 20Mbps. We are in a rural location on Mississippi Lake, 40 minutes outside of Ottawa. Our internet service is with Storm Internet and is provided by a point to point wireless service across the lake. We have had this service for 3 years and it has been reliable delivering 20Mb/s service in all conditions. The support from Storm Internet is also exceptionally good. This service costs a little over $100 a month. Im very happy with Storm, but I could use some more speed as I am a networking engineer and work from home. Having moved from the city with Gb speed, I notice the difference, especially when the family is viewing Netflix!

I should also mention that I purchased DECO mesh Wifi Router with three access points to support my Storm service. The reality was that I only needed ONE of the the three units. IE no mesh required to cover the house and most of my 1 acre lot (pretty impressive).

So what did Starlink deliver? Well in summary a great disappointment!

The details:

Download speeds:

• The absolute best download speed I got was a little over 30 Mbps
• Typically see between 5 and 20 Mb/s
• Frequently see Zero, IE service drops out. When I say frequently, I mean totally unusable.

WiFi:

• Starlink comes with its own WiFi Router
• Could not get WiFi connection upstairs with the router downstairs

I have got a ticket logged with Starlink asking them if what I see is what I should expect. I'll update when that comes in, but as things stand it is being returned. It is simply not ready for prime time.

If you have had similar or different experience, I'd love to here from you.