Another good day…

I feel like I accomplished a lot Monday, as I started writing this at 12:40am on Tuesday. I wrote 3,704 words, but more than that, three friends (who are also neighbors and two of them family) helped me put the mounting post for Starlink in place. The dish is now between 20 and 21 feet in the air.

And I still have obstructions…

Don’t get me wrong; the uptime of the connection is exponentially better than it was, even when the dish was four feet off the ground. But I’m beginning to think I need a 40-foot tower or to invest in some tree trimming.

Here are a couple pictures:

Now… like I said, even where I am now with obstructions and their associated outages, Starlink is so, so much better than the “traditional” satellite internet services. The major point of comparison is the latency. On our previous satellite ISP, I routinely had a ping of anywhere from 1100 millliseconds (ms)–which is 1.1 seconds–to 1500 ms. The highest I can remember seeing off the top of my head was over 1700. That’s almost two seconds for me to send a request for data and actually get the response… which is frankly insane in this modern world.

Especially when you consider I left a 200 megabit (mbps) cable connection when I moved back here…

I do not regret moving back in the slightest, but the most significant thing that I miss is that cable internet connection. In the area where I used to live, there’s a company now offering a 3-gigabit connection. As Sylvester the cat would say, “Drool… drool…”

But I digress…

The Starlink app provides data on uptime within a window of something like an hour, I think. It colors the outages due to obstructions red, and I have had progressively less red on my graph the closer I get the dish to the sky.

And no… I assure you that I am not considering building Earth’s first space elevator, just to get better reception from Starlink. I really promise I’m not. Seriously.

😝

In short, do I think Starlink is worth it? Absolutely. Without a doubt. As long as you don’t have a better option available. People in cities have no need of Starlink… unless the available services are so horrible that they shouldn’t be in business.

For people like me, who prefer a more rural life, it is probably the best thing since computers… or maybe electricity. If you like or enjoy a quality internet connection, that is.

I will never go back to “traditional” satellite internet service. Never.