Starlink - Anyone get it yet?

You would wonder if it was part of Starlinks business plan.

Granted I'm not a Starlink user but is this not a massive downgrade from how it worked before? You used to be able to pause your subscription as you pleased and pick up whenever. I knew people who'd keep it paused and when a storm came and inevitably knocked out their fibre they'd unpause the Starlink sub and away they went. But now it seems you've to pay a fiver for the privilege?

This is interesting, id paused ours and had a power cut the other day, connected back up and it downloaded an update and applied but I had no data on mobile or anything else so wasn't able to activate the sub again. With this you are basically paying a fiver a month to have it good to go in case as backup? If I have no internet via my phone this would be enough to let me manage the starlink account and reactivate I guess?

I don't know, if for a fiver a month I can keep my setup and reactivate in a power cut where I've no access to any internet mobiles or otherwise then I think it's interesting. Like I said the other day I was paused but during power cut I'd no way to reactivate the service. Fiver is only a pint of Guinness a month. The speed is capped at 500kbps so I'm curious if it will even work to allow me browse to the starlink website, manage my account and activate

For anyone considering the €5 low speed standby plan with the residential kit as either a fail-over connection or to isolate low data IoT devices or a VoIP line from their main Internet connection, just beware of the hidden energy cost, especially if using a UPS. My Starlink Gen 3 kit which I use as my main Internet connection uses roughly 1.2kWh a day and only dips to about 1.15kWh when left idle for an entire day. With an Eaton 800VA UPS which provides this kit about 1 hour of battery runtime, the daily usage is about 1.4kWh a day. The following graph from an energy monitoring plug shows the Starlink usage without and with the UPS from the 8th June:

To work out the monthly electricity cost with a 24-Hour fixed tarriff, multiply 37kWh (or 44kWh with UPS) by your kWh rate. For example, with my tarriff (22.5c/kWh inc. VAT), my Starlink and UPS uses roughly €10 per month of electricity. This will be different from a Gen 1 or 2 Starlink kit and a lot less for the Starlink Mini.

Anyone have an issue with geo blocking things that shouldn’t be in Ireland? Put on Talksport on TuneIn as I do every Saturday afternoon to listen to the commentary and it’s coming up as not available in your region? Keeping in mind for those that don’t know there is a specific Irish feed of Talksport on Saturdays presented by Trevor Welch and it works fine on my mobile network? IP location is showing as Ireland when I check.

is that a Gen3 router and Starlink . Getting nowhere near that on Gen 2?. Wired connection about 280-320Mb download and 20-35 upload . Hard to tell as depending on what browser or app you run on it can be wildly varied .

Nice! Those speeds look solid, especially for Gen-1. I finally got Starlink set up at my place a couple of months ago, and it’s made all the difference. Not perfect, but way better than the DSL I was stuck with before. Curious to see how consistent it stays for you over the free month.

We got SL last month and find it great. We were on a really slow and unreliable DSL connection due to living out in the sticks for a few years. Don't ask why we never made the switch sooner. I forget when I last looked up the price of SL but if my memory serves me right it cost a lot more than it does now. Anyone with a better brain able to confirm?

I also believe you used to have to pay a few hundred up front as well for the kit. We got that for free which was another reason we switched. And just to add we are glad we did as there is three of us using the internet in the house and now Facebook videos play at a clearer resolution and Netflix plays better as well even with other people also using the internet while Netflix or RTE player is on.