Starlink Internet

[Johnoly]

My neighbor installed a 2-way radio antenna on his wooded property with a typical wooden power pole. He bought a 'curved-2nd' 75 foot tall pole from Southern Lumber who has distribution all over Florida. He paid $200>delivered, because he told them they could wait til they were in the area for another delivery (took 3 wks). Dropped it on his driveway. He used a simple Home depot post hole hand digger and made a 5 ft deep hole. Then used a pulley block attached to a nearby tree with the rope tied to his bumper. I was amazed how easy he set it up and it just slid right down into the hole. When he had the tall end about 5 ft off the ground and the butt partially in the hole, he drilled & installed the antenna, a yard light, & a CC camera with wires zipped to the pole. Then lifted it the rest of the way. It's solid, it's not coming down even in a hurricane. If all the cave divers who are engineers and built steps and tank benches, your pole and some beer/pizza will be done in under an hour !!

 

[-JD-]

My neighbor installed a 2-way radio antenna on his wooded property with a typical wooden power pole. He bought a 'curved-2nd' 75 foot tall pole from Southern Lumber who has distribution all over Florida. He paid $200>delivered, because he told them they could wait til they were in the area for another delivery (took 3 wks). Dropped it on his driveway. He used a simple Home depot post hole hand digger and made a 5 ft deep hole. Then used a pulley block attached to a nearby tree with the rope tied to his bumper. I was amazed how easy he set it up and it just slid right down into the hole. When he had the tall end about 5 ft off the ground and the butt partially in the hole, he drilled & installed the antenna, a yard light, & a CC camera with wires zipped to the pole. Then lifted it the rest of the way. It's solid, it's not coming down even in a hurricane. If all the cave divers who are engineers and built steps and tank benches, your pole and some beer/pizza will be done in under an hour !!

5' depth for a 75' pole. Remind me to avoid that area. Maybe with triangulated guys ...
Depth should be around 10' for that tall a pole.

We've done shorter poles with no available anchors by using a pivoting A-frame with the winch cable run over the peak to lift and steady the pole.

 

[crofrog]

Yea, I don't have that degree of an opening.

looking at your photos it'll mostly work. I'd be fine with that for general internet access or temporary stays but if you're planning on a lot of video conferences it'll not be great, but just get an antenna mast and raise it up.

 

[NW Dive Dawg]

Make sure that you consider and evaluate the 800 mile round trip signal latency.... When I tried Hughs Net, it was a big problem and a no go with my companies VPN.

 

[Manatee Diver]

Make sure that you consider and evaluate the 800 mile round trip signal latency.... When I tried Hughs Net, it was a big problem and a no go with my companies VPN.

You've said this twice.

Hughes Net and other GEO based satcoms have a latency of up to a second, and 500ms being average. Starlink are LEO, and have average latency under 50ms throughout much of the Western World. While 50ms isn't great if you are doing something like playing a multiplayer game, but is good enough for most other consumer applications.

Heck I remember when having a ping, the tool we use to measure latency, under 100ms was considered to be great.

ETA: I looked up Windstream and it seems that their ping times average at 30ms per a speedtest site, unfortunately they don't collect latency from Starlink so I don't have a direct comparison. So even Windstream doesn't have great latency.

 

[Capt Jim Wyatt]

looking at your photos it'll mostly work. I'd be fine with that for general internet access or temporary stays but if you're planning on a lot of video conferences it'll not be great, but just get an antenna mast and raise it up.

I do Zoom Meetings once a month for a couple of hours at a time. The rest is streaming TV & light web surfing. No gaming. I will likely give Starlink a try based on @crofrog assessment.

In the meantime I'm thinking about Getting this setup to share the internet up to where my 94 year old father-in-law will be in the cottage 50 yards away.

================================================================

That is what I get now. It works fine for me when it works.
I get the same at the other house. I pay $240/month total for the two.
For the last 20 years we were lucky to get 75 down - Windstream Techs came out and did something a couple of months ago to increase it to 110.

 

[kelemvor]

You've said this twice.

Hughes Net and other GEO based satcoms have a latency of up to a second, and 500ms being average. Starlink are LEO, and have average latency under 50ms throughout much of the Western World. While 50ms isn't great if you are doing something like playing a multiplayer game, but is good enough for most other consumer applications.

Heck I remember when having a ping, the tool we use to measure latency, under 100ms was considered to be great.

ETA: I looked up Windstream and it seems that their ping times average at 30ms per a speedtest site, unfortunately they don't collect latency from Starlink so I don't have a direct comparison. So even Windstream doesn't have great latency.

The difference in latency between starlink and other sat internet systems is because starlink sats are in low earth orbit (approximately 342 miles from the surface) and hughesnet/other are in high earth orbit (approximately 22,000 miles from the surface). If the signal didn't take any time at all to process, it takes 250ms to travel to and from a hughes satellite. Of course, it does take time to process (at your end, the satellite end, and the uplink end) so you get a latency of around 500ms instead of 250. With starlink, the travel time is around 3ms, then you have some processing time.

Also, the starlink system is much newer, so I'd expect the "processing time" portion to be much quicker than hughes.

Latency and processing with a wired system should be better than both (except with DSL/Analog modems), and depending on your provider can be greater or lesser in bandwidth than starlink.

If you live in an area that has frontier fiber (or other brand fiber) service, get it. Here's what I'm getting from Frontier right now:

C:\Users\kelem>speedtest
Frontier - Miami, FL (id: 14237)

   Speedtest by Ookla

      Server: Frontier - Miami, FL (id: 14237)
         ISP: Frontier Communications
Idle Latency:     8.08 ms   (jitter: 0.60ms, low: 7.60ms, high: 8.73ms)
    Download:  5070.87 Mbps (data used: 5.4 GB)
                 13.24 ms   (jitter: 0.96ms, low: 6.94ms, high: 19.16ms)
      Upload:  2660.23 Mbps (data used: 4.7 GB)
                  7.95 ms   (jitter: 0.59ms, low: 7.55ms, high: 14.79ms)
 Packet Loss:     0.0%
  Result URL: https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/68d8917c-4140-4a70-b04a-1c38198ce344

 

[Manatee Diver]

Also, the starlink system is much newer, so I'd expect the "processing time" portion to be much quicker than hughes.

True, but you also have the question of capacity. Hughes Net has three birds to cover North America (though their newest bird has a much wider reach). With a half a dozen ground gateways IIRC. So you are going to have collisions and queue times to deal with.

While Starlink is very localized, with thousands of birds in orbit and thousands of more planned. And they have dozens of ground stations in the US, with the current plan to have about a hundred in the US in the near term.

Similar to deploying WiFi, you can use one AP to cover a football stadium, but putting a dozen down in small segments will result in better capacity.

It is a pretty exciting time when it comes to networks. Though I am most looking forward to orbital LTE.

Yes I know some people like to disconnect, but I have a job that often precludes that. I've done client support at a picnic table at a dive site. Taken calls while I was on vacation on the other side of the world. It sucks I can never disconnect, but I was never really good at the traditional nine to five office job.

 

[Johnoly]

I've done client support at a picnic table at a dive site.

Thank god for 'fake' backgrounds inserted by Zoom calls. But I've been busted on conference calls 3 miles off the coast with tanks dinging and VHF radio trash talk chatter. Chilled lobster chunks served at the next in-person meeting usually melts those infractions away.

 

[crofrog]

Thank god for 'fake' backgrounds inserted by Zoom calls. But I've been busted on conference calls 3 miles off the coast with tanks dinging and VHF radio trash talk chatter. Chilled lobster chunks served at the next in-person meeting usually melts those infractions away.

I just turn on my video on and make everyone else sea sick lol