SpaceX Starlink beta users are starting to share their experiences, confirming that the satellite service can provide fast broadband speeds and low latencies in remote areas. A beta tester who goes by the Reddit username Wandering-coder brought his new Starlink equipment and a portable power supply to a national forest in Idaho, where he connected to the Internet with 120Mbps download speeds.
Starlink “works beautifully,” he wrote yesterday. “I did a real-time video call and some tests. My power supply is max 300w, and the drain for the whole system while active was around 116w.” Starlink pulled that off in a place where Wandering-coder couldn’t get any cellular service from Google Fi, which relies on the T-Mobile and US Cellular networks. “There is no cell here with any carrier,” he wrote.
Wandering-coder used Starlink connectivity in the forest to make that post on Reddit and to upload a series of pictures to Imgur. Wandering-coder told Ars that he uses Starlink at home in North Idaho and that he conducted his test at the Hayden Creek Shooting Range in the Idaho panhandle’s Coeur d’Alene National Forest.
Here are some pictures from Wandering-coder’s test in the forest and shots of the user terminal outside his home:
Starlink satellite dish and equipment in the Idaho panhandle’s Coeur d’Alene National Forest. Wandering-coder
With the Starlink user terminal/satellite dish placed on the ground in a relatively open part of the forest, Wandering-coder did a speed test that measured downloads of 120Mbps, uploads of 12Mbps, and latency of 37ms. He got worse results in a different, more heavily forested location where he placed the dish closer to the trees because Starlink needs a clear line of sight to SpaceX satellites. “It didn’t work well with a heavy tree canopy/trees directly in the line of sight, as expected,” Wandering-coder wrote. “I would be connected only for about 5 seconds at a time. Make sure you have as clear a view of the sky as possible!”
Wandering-coder is not urging other Starlink testers to complete the same experiment, in case SpaceX objects to beta testers using the service away from their registered location. “All things considered, [it’s] probably best to keep [the user terminal] where registered until there is official illumination on the topic,” he wrote. “Just knowing mobility is possible, though, is nice.”
“It feels like it’s from the future”
Wandering-coder also shared initial impressions in another Reddit post and a series of pictures of the equipment at his home. Here are some shots from unboxing the equipment:
“Everything is of an extreme build quality, and this works significantly better than I had ever imagined,” Wandering-coder wrote. “It feels like it’s from the future. Given a top-tier cell phone costs in the $1,000 range, I am completely amazed I have my hands on a setup like this for ~$500, so I am biased positively towards this service.”
As revealed last week, the Starlink beta costs $99 a month plus $499 upfront for the user terminal, mounting tripod, and router.
At home, Wandering-coder says he got 135Mbps download speeds, 25Mbps uploads, and 21ms latency when the dish was placed in a ground-level spot with “limited obstruction” between the dish and sky. He also tested the user terminal in a different spot with “significant obstruction” in the form of “bad weather, treetops, fences, [and] houses,” he wrote. Even in that scenario, he reported download speeds of 46Mbps, upload speeds of 15Mbps, and 41ms latency. He hadn’t placed the antenna on his roof yet when he conducted the tests.