Finally got starlink working.at.our remote lakehouse. Actually cheaper than the 20 Meg DSL we were paying for. (Not counting startup of course ) Pain though had to put a.chimney. mount on rather than start taking down trees.
Luckily still had my rappelling gear here.
Willing to answer any questions
There are some great reviews of Starlink on YouTube, CrossTalk solutions has a whole series. I whish this was around when we had the farm in Michigan, had to go with 12 mbps DSL (on a good day) for $100/month.
How do you find the increase in latency? Maybe too soon to really comment on this.
We bought land last month and will be building next spring. My options at the new location will be starlink or dual cellular connections.
Both my son and I work from home plus he is a gamer. Right now I have a 1gbps down / 30mbps through Rogers cable. I had to increase from the 500mbps/15mbps because we were experiencing limits on the upload side being at only 15mbps.
If 15 was too little you probably are going to have issues because the upload is rarely over 15.
Upload does go higher but avg seems to be around 12-16.
I have not switched over to my own router and wifi yet. Probably will do that today. Latency has not been a problem but not gaming.
It does fluctuate however.
Here is another statistic shot showing. Latency.
Thank you for the info.
We've had Starlink since 2/21 here on our lake island location in Maine. Your speeds match ours (typically 100-150 down, 12-20 up), and I can report that reliability has continued to improve steadily. Micro drops of 3-20 seconds were very common when we first installed, but are now rare, and we have a small area of obstructions in the summer due to a little cluster of trees to the east (3 seconds of reported obstruction over past 12 hours, that we didn't notice). Latency ranges between about 25-50 ms, with heavy clustering around mid-high 30s based on my observations. I don't game but have heard that under 50ms is workable unless you're a hard core gamer (or need an excuse for losing).
All this said, we do still maintain a connection to a fixed wireless ISP as well. Using a Peplink router and their SpeedFusion service, we bond that and Starlink together. That creates a level of reliability that far exceeds that of my employees and customers around the country (based on outages and interruptions they experience on Zoom/Teams calls). Most of them are using fiber or cable in suburbs of larger cities (and the ISP-supplied modems and routers of those companies). If you need a very high level of reliability and lack of interruptions (I do, for client and employee calls and meetings), I highly recommend a similar system.
The only thing that worries me about Starlink is the impulsiveness of their CEO, who, while admittedly brilliant, can be a bit hasty in some decisions. So, I just hope that impulsiveness doesn't one day affect the availability of this otherwise fantastic service.
If you do get starlink you will discover the fiasco which is cgnat (carrier grade nat).. i assumed my pptp vpn and port mapping rules for various equipment would work once i canned their router and switch over to my own network equipment.
sadly no....
cgnat in a nutshell is where you share a pseudo public ip address on the other end of your starlink with multiple people.. not a true public ip.
So there is no way for any services that remotely opens a port to you to work..
Everything has to come out from you!!!
Even pptp doesnt work..
I got openvpns to work but only outgoing again so at least i can get into my other locations..
But to get access internally to my router in case i need to reconfigure it when the house is empty .. I eventually got ngrok work and open an ssl tunnel from my ddwrt router that loops back to my interface on port 80...
If anyone wants more info or help hit me back privately.
Even fricking ftp doesnt work as the data channel is opened from the server to you.
I have Viasat at my cabin, $60 per month, latency sucks and I hit the data cap about 3/4 of every billing cycle and they throttle it down. Biggest use is the security cam motion images that get emailed to me everyday of various stuff. I applied and got approved for Starlink mid last year but was worried about the reliability so didnt bite, plus the $100 month cost.
So....
IPv6, the biggest let down? Why not starlink just going with it. Everything has it included for past 10 years, why it not take? Maybe a different topic..
i think you are right they are planning on keeping the cgnat and have a private ipv6 ip along with it.. but not done yet..
Your questions have already been answered by @kahn-hubitat, and I generally agree except I haven't noticed throttling that has a meaningful effect on our typical use. I can tell you that going from Hughesnet (very similar to Viasat) to Starlink was like going from a skateboard to a very solid sedan. It's not a Ferrari, but it'll "get you there and back" in a significantly better way compared to what you have, IF you have enough open sky to the north (not south), assuming you're in North America.
Several people in my little part of the world have made the switch from Hughesnet to Starlink. I don't know any who would even consider switching back. It's a true game changer. The only people unhappy that ai know are those comparing it to something like fiber or cable. It's not designed to compete with that, but it's waaaaay better than what you have.
CGNAT is everywhere, was working at a friends house and they had the new T-Mobile wireless internet and went to open a VPN port and no joy, may have to go with a VPS in the cloud that I can relay though so he can use self hosted services. I dont like the idea of spending another $10 / month for the VPS when they can do IPv6 native with a firewall.
take a look at localhost.run
i am using ddwrt as my main router but any router with ssh will work.
i have some registered domains and for 3.50 a month you can link a name on your domain
to any port on your router ..
i got it linked so that http://somename.yourdoman.com will open up the web interface on my ddwrt router.. even if it is behind all the cgnat crap..
you can do it for free with either them or ngrok as well but the url to goto the web interface would change regularly.. it worth it to me for 3.50 a month to have a static url..
ngrok is like 20 bucks a month .
to get localhost.run to work with your own domain you need to add 2 records to the domains dns file
a cname and a txt record.. i can help anyone if need be.
localhost.run is hosted on google.
Maybe something like this would work using a Cloudflare Tunnel - this is specifically for Home Assistant but sure there are other possibilities.
Nice. That must have bee a fun installation.
ya dd-wrt doesnt have cloudfare and not wireguard is most builds..
that is the beauty of the above solution it only needs stock ssh which is basically on any unix machine..
Loved me some DD-WRT back in the day! Is it hard to find modern WiFi routers that support it?
Also have used and like OpenWRT/LuCI. Looks like there is a cloudflare service for that..
Amazing how things just time perfectly, I was just watching a Lawrence Tech series on Tailscale and CGNAT. Looks like overlay networking vs. VPS would be the way to go for those that are behind CGNAT. This has visions of the old Hamachi build your own "network" model for overlaying subnets into your own private VPN. It's wireguard at it's base but managed much easier:
Download the Hubitat app
