SpaceX sorry, FedEx just dropped the starlink in front of my house.
It's big.
It's 30 freaking pounds.
But let's take a look inside and see what it's like using Starling and how fast it really is.
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So a few weeks ago, SpaceX sent me a special email that a spot opened up for me to join the Starlink beta program.
I mean, if Papa Elon is asking you to join his pet project, of course, it's a yes.
But what the hell Starlink, pretty much is the internet from the sky.
And you might know it as, satellite internet.
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The $499 Starlink kit, comes with an antennae dish, WiFi router, power supply, cables, and a mounting tripod.
And for $99 a month You can expect to see data speeds anywhere between 50 to 150 megabits a second at low latency.
And the kicker, no data caps.
[UNKNOWN] really isn't meant for people like me who are out in suburb or city places, just cuz we're dealing with a lot of other external factors that may disrupt the service such as network congestion
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Obstructions, you name it, but really for those in remote areas that have lack of ISP choices, so keep that in mind.
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Since 2018, SpaceX has launched these tiny satellites to provide high speed internet to anyone in the world.
But unlike regular satellite internet.
Starlink is in low orbit and that provides faster download speeds and low latency.
And at the time of this recording space X has launched about 1,200 of these out of 12,000.
So there's still more work to do.
If you want an in depth look of Starling, make sure to check out Jesse's video, available on the description below.
All right.
Now that you know what it does, let's take this outside and, go for a test drive.
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On the quick start guide, in three easy steps, I should be connected to the internet.
Sounds pretty simple enough.
But before I do any of that I need to download the app first.
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In the starlink App, there is an AR experience that will help guide you where to align your dish.
To the sky.
As you can see, this clear area is the path of the satellites.
And in my case, my dish is a little too low.
I'm gonna bring it up higher.
Alright, I use moving boxes to bring up the dish a little higher and above the fence line.
But there are trees in delay.
So we'll see if that's going to be any problems when we try to connect.
Last up is pretty much plugging everything in.
Everything is color coded, so it's pretty easy.
As it powers up.
It's gonna take about 15 to 30 minutes for the antenna dish to start looking for the starlink satellites overhead.
During this time the app is gonna ask you to rename your wi fi and password so now they give it a fancy new name and a difficult password so i've given about 30 minutes for the antenna dish to start looking for satellites.
In the app, you can see a live look of your network's health.
And here you can see the pink success was pretty much shows you if you're connected to the Internet or not the latency of that connection download and upload usage.
The SNR is the strength of your starlings connection to the satellites.
I'm gonna go back up to the ping success right now during the last 39 minutes, my internet has been going up and down 4 minutes of those downtime was caused by obstructions and 8 minutes was caused by beta downtime.
And Starling does warn you that you're expected to see some downtime because this is still in beta and as they are improving and maturing.
Launching more satellites, that beta downtime should be coming down in the later weeks and months to come.
I have about 100% connection.
And I'm gonna go ahead and run some speed test.
So here we go, connected to the starlink and I'm getting about 27 Whoa.
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27 millisecond latency at about 120 megabits a second right now with the current connection.
That's pretty good right now.
My upload is hovering at about 20 megabits a second.
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Living up to his promise right now, that's pretty good but because i live in inside an apartment and my patio has his fence and the trees, the obstructions might be an issue so I'm gonna take starling out to my car out in the parking lot to make sure that the dish is looking nothing but the sky.
To see if my connection is better out there.
My friends from Oculus kind enough to send me their power paying for me to power up the entire system.
Now that is assault and I gave about an hour for starling to connect and calibrate itself.
Let's go ahead and see what my connection is like.
And as you saw when I installed it I use the ar app to make sure there were no obstructions so let's go ahead and see what my connection is like on the app.
According to the stats The connection has been dipping out every 510 minutes so that's not great it still looks like there are some issues but i'm gonna go ahead and run some speed tests to see what my speeds are like.
So i am getting a latency of 39 milliseconds at a download speed of 80 megabits a second.
With an upload speed about 13 so it's great this is decent i think the speeds are fine so i'm gonna go ahead and do some streaming on YouTube metal when claire is inside a tsunami ball
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Only so far streaming looks good i think that's great here's some buffering might have lost connection at this point
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Check my starlink up and yes i did lose it but it's color coding it that i'm losing connection because of obstruction so i don't know what that really means You saw when I was installing it there was no trees though I don't know why it's keep losing internet.
But it looks like I'm back online I'm gonna try to log into my starling account to see if they have any messages or any outages.
It looks like I have a message on my account says your areas currently experiencing intermittent service Our team is investigating.
So it looks like I am going through an outage and I don't know how long this message has been on my account, nor do I know when they'll have this fixed so I'll reach out to Starlink to see if they have an ETA.
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Spent about 48 hours since the test in my car and I reached out to support service to see if the hours would clear anytime soon.
But I haven't heard back from them just yet.
So I went ahead and checked starlink subreddit page to see if this is affecting more users than just myself and found that more users were going through the same intermittent service outage.
When they did have a good connection, I was able to run multiple speed tests.
I was averaging a download speed about 78 megabits a second at a latency around 36 milliseconds, meaning I was able to run some gains.
So I download a call of duty on my phone and it was performing well for a few minutes until I lost connection.
Overall though stalling lives up to his expectation you're getting the download speeds and latency that was promised plus ilan tweeted in february that they plan on doubling the speed By end of 2021.
For right now because of network is going through some service outage.
Going to be checking my account daily until the outage gets resolved.
Last night i checked my throttling account and it looks like that intermittent service outage has been resolved Which screen?
Took about four days for them to resolve this for me in my case, but I'm glad it's done.
Now I'm gonna take starlink with me to Mount Diablo for my final beta test.
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Starlink is all set up on top of my roof and it's been about 25 minutes for it to calibrate and to connect to the satellites overhead let's take a look with my connections are light and it says i'm online and my connections are good.
And according to the stats, my connection has been connected for a 100 percent.
Okay.
I'm gonna run a speed test to see how fast the connection is.
There we go.
Okay.
Latency off 30 mil, my gosh latency, a 30 milliseconds.
Downhill speed about 138 megabits a second.
And the upload speed about 14 this is this is a great start I'm getting zero dropouts might as well try to stream Netflix right now let's see if we can stream in 4k.
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Can we go I got Netflix all ready to go.
And I'm gonna run always be my maybe.
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And this is awesome and I'm connected to starlink right now.
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That's crazy.
I am streaming Netflix on top of the mountains.
Alright, this time, I'm going to try to call my friend Mitch on the starlink network using FaceTime.
So right now I am in airplane mode and just connected to the Wi Fi.
Mitch.
Hey, john, can you see me hear me Hey, I can't see you and hear you.
It looks like you're outside.
I am.
I am on top of Mount Diablo as we speak and I am walking around.
You can see Starling on top of my car.
Say, you look clear, no buffering and you sound really good too.
Nice.
That's all I needed to know!
Now all I need is for you to just keep that on top of your car forever and drive around.
[LAUGH].
You know what?
Just expect I don't expect to be in the office anytime soon at this point [LAUGH]
For my final test I'm gonna attempt to play cisco on the starlink network on my macbook I know don't just I can bring up pc desktop so there we go
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So far i'm able to game on the family network this is fantastic
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Well the third time is to turn waiting for any outages to clear and bringing up Starling to the mountains where there's little to no obstructions.
Also right call I was able to stream games.
FaceTime, and experience almost no dropouts right now.
starlink is still in beta, but they are opening it up to more users every day.
But let me know what you think.
Do you plan on getting Starling and if you're able to travel with it like I did, is that a game changer.
Let me all hear your thoughts and i'll catch you next time.
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