OK, we moved out of California to Arkansas. My dad's family is from Little Rock so I am familiar with the state. We move north east of Little Rock, really "middle of nowhere". My kids and wife love it. We did alot of fishing when we moved....so now in all the rainy winter weather (not a surprise at all) I am still renovating. That is fine cuz I really enjoyed the fishing with my little girl.

Anyway this is about StarLink. We have NO CELL SERVICE for about 2 miles in any direction. We could get DSL and landline here though. It was $150 installation (they did nothing but flip a switch downtown and UPS'ed the the DSL modem to us. With all the services and fees it came to $135 a month. Like we had another choice.

A couple of weeks ago I started looking into StarLink. A neighbor about 1/2 mile away works for Oracle, she is working totally remote and was on the waiting list for StarLink for 3 months. It is still projected to provide full service in late 2023 so they offered to send her equipment if she accepted the fact that she would NOT get 1st tier service. She would be second tier which means no guaranteed min speed and her service would be throttle back during peak service hours. Now she sent screen shots of her speed test...now remember we are using DSL so 25 to 35 MBPS download and 3 MBPS uploat....her screen shots sold us...on tier 2 she was getting 85 to 195 MBPS and 5 to 40 MBPS upload. She talked with us and recommend we go with the RV service so we would get our equipment right away. However we would always be 2nd tier service, but we could take our dish camping, hunting or on vacation and have internet service no matter where we are in the USA.

So we ordered it, $750 once all paid for the equipment. A warning was on the screen we had to acknowledge before we paid. "Due to heavy world wide orders, you order will be shipped as available". Ok so we might have to wait. That is ok the DSL is doing OK but we can live with it for a while longer. Well we got notice it was shipped the next day and we had it two days later. Now everyone says it takes 5 to 10 minutes to set it up....well more like 30 minutes. What I had to do was about 5 minutes, then it erected and aimed itself, got a signal and download the latest update for my location. Then it started scanning for obstructions to its view. Now I had already done that with the phone app so I new we were good. However it does it and sets limits to travel and it takes about 6 hours. You can use it during that time but it goes offline and resets itself without notice during the process.

Well we went to bed, the next morning it was finished. Speed checked it and yep 115 MBPS download average the whole day. If fact ever since the system went online it keeps the stats every second for down time and reason for it, speed average when in use, latency....just every thing you want to know and don't want to know to tell how your system is doing. We have only been using it for the past 2 weeks, during that time we have had high winds of 25 mph, torrential downpours, flooding, thunderstorms and the worst from the system was 35 seconds of disconnect and that happened once. Our power went out and the back up DSL and hard line went down too. So I fired up the generator, Starlink, TV's, computers and our VOIP were back up and running. We did not miss a beat while the power was out.

I watch a lot of videos online of people rating the system. Now early on in the trial phase, yep there were problems but they fixed them. All the complaints from people were about the slow upload speeds.....hey when you are in the middle of nowhere, only have cellular modems and DSL and your best speed it 35 MBPS down and 3 MBPS up.....you can't complain when Starlink's worst is still 2 times faster and the same price. We are averaging 3 to 5 times faster all the time. I am very happy to say the least.

If you buy Starlink and don't like it, you can return it in 30 days for a full refund. After 30 days up to 1 year you can still return it for a 50% refund. Still a pretty good deal. The phone company did not give me squat for the equipment I bought from them and it has only been 6 months.

So the skinny is, I so far LIKE Starlink, it does a great job considering where I live and there is no real competition.

OH and Hughes Net sucks, everyone around here had tried it and the service sucks, the customer service sucks and the equipment sucks. When you call them it is always your fault the system is not working or working to its full potential so you need to figure it out yourself.

David