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I recently moved to a much more rural area, so getting Starlink set up was one of my top priorities. My area is an internet dead zone where you might get a bit of 4G on a nearby hill, but that’s about it. No cellular for phone calls, and the best I can hope from a landline connection is 3 Mbps. As a modern man with a modern family full of modern devices, I need fast internet—so I readied Starlink even before my kids’ beds. It worked pretty well, too. At first I heard a bunch of buzzing noises that I was not expecting, but that sort of coil whine is apparently pretty typical. A few minutes later, I was online! But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Having Starlink isn’t like having fiber internet, and I ran into several surprises along the way. Here are all the things I wish I’d known before getting Starlink at home. Further reading: Is Starlink right for you? Only if you answer ‘Yes’ to these questions Starlink is better when it’s mounted As soon as I had Starlink working, I messaged my friends saying “Space internet installed!” with the following image: Jon Martindale / Foundry That’s right. The Starlink dish is propped up in the cardboard box it came in, sitting on some steps leading to a lawn that was never intended as its permanent home. It worked well enough for the first night—but that’s as long as I would ever want it to be there. Turns out, Starlink performs best when the dish is mounted in a location that’s free from obstructions and oriented in a way that maintains a connection with as many Starlink satellites as possible. The Starlink app makes the whole process pretty straightforward, with dynamically adjusting on-screen graphics that help you rotate the dish into its optimal facing. My ground-mounted performance was (obviously) bad, so taking the time to get it into a better position was worthwhile. But I’m no handyman. I can build a PC, sure, but hoofing up a ladder and drilling into red brick isn’t something I’m super comfortable doing—so I brought in a local professional TV antenna installer. Within a couple of hours, he had the dish mounted by my roof. Performance jumped from 50 Mbps to nearly 200 Mbps downstream. A huge improvement with better coverage, less chance of someone just wandering into my yard and stealing the dish, and no chance of my kids riding their bikes over the cable. That’s a win-win-win. …but Starlink can be ugly when mounted Personally, I think the Starlink dish looks pretty cool. Its a unique sight compared to all those rounded satellite dishes that you’ve likely seen in urban centers over the last several decades. It’s more modern. Jon Martindale / Foundry But the makeshift pipe-mount system I used? Eh, that leaves a lot to be desired. There are more attractive first-party mounts you can buy at additional cost, but a giant pipe on an unpainted brace is cheaper. Unfortunately, my wife is even less of a fan. It’s not like I’m going to be looking at it much up there. But if the exterior aesthetics of your home are important to you, it’s probably worth spending some more time (and money) than I did to get it mounted in a way that gets you great performance while looking good. Starlink’s upload speed is still lacking One aspect of fiber internet that’s easy to overlook is that it isn’t just blazingly fast for downloads—you can get upload speeds that are often as fast as your download speeds. That makes quick work when uploading work documents, personal photos, YouTube videos, and more. Jon Martindale / Foundry As I said at the start, though, Starlink isn’t fiber. I’m getting around 150 Mbps average download speeds with peaks up to 300 Mbps, but my upload speeds are decidedly slower. I’ve seen some people post screenshots of 50 Mbps uploads, but I’ve yet to see mine break 30 Mbps. More often than not, it’s closer to 15 Mbps. To be fair, 15 Mbps is plenty for sending photos over messaging apps and streaming my webcam during Discord D&D sessions, but it’s a lot more noticeable when I’m trying to send long videos to friends and family. And I don’t think I’d get far trying to livestream my gaming on Twitch at anything over 1080p with this kind of internet. Starlink’s router is underwhelming This might sound like a humblebrag, but the bundled Starlink Gen 3 router—a tri-band Wi-Fi 6 router with a claimed coverage of just over 3,000 square feet—wasn’t enough for my new house. Truth is, my place is about half of that, yet I still had trouble getting signal everywhere due to walls, obstructions, and other sources of interference. Could I have place the Starlink router in a better spot for better coverage? Yeah, maybe. And there’s even a mesh system I could’ve employed if I was married to Starlink’s hardware. TP-Link But, fortunately, I have a much better TP-Link Archer GE800 Wi-Fi 7 router, so I didn’t need to bother. It’s complete overkill for a civilian gamer like myself, but it does offer fantastic coverage in my wonky-walled home, and I already know my way around it from the past year of faithful operation. (Lean more about why you should get your own router.) Props to Starlink for making the bridging process super simple, though. Just plug them in, switch the router to bypass mode in the app, a quick router reboot, and it was good to go in less than 10 minutes. There’s no planning for a global outage Two days after I got my Starlink dish mounted, my service went down. My wife had just left the house and closed the door the very second my PC connection dropped, so I thought it was her fault. Maybe she knocked the mount loose by slamming the door too hard? But as it turns out, it wasn’t anything so innocuous. In fact, the entire global Starlink network had gone down. Jon Martindale / Foundry I managed to text a few friends from my board game group to see if they could send me tips on how to get it working again. They sent me screengrabs from Reddit, Twitter, DownDetector. It confirmed that it wasn’t just my router or my dish. Indeed, all of Starlink was down. Apparently something like this has happened a few times before, but I also have friends who’ve had Starlink for years who claim there’s never been any outages as far as they know. So I’m not expecting this to happen again anytime soon, but tech is tech and it can fail. Even the magic of space internet can stop working from time to time. Your friends will judge you for Starlink Since November 2024, people around the world have been protesting against Elon Musk and those who support him. Many Tesla owners have added stickers to their vehicles, promising that their Teslas were bought before the CEO went crazy, all to fend off potential attacks. It hasn’t gotten that bad for Starlink, but I do have to put up with friends who ask if I couldn’t have found another way to get online. Indeed, if I could have, I would have! But while Amazon is working on Project Kuiper, its own low-Earth-orbit network of broadband satellites, that’s still years away from being fully operational and may take even longer to catch up to Starlink. Plus, as far as billionaire CEOs go, it’s more a lateral move than anything to go from Musk to Bezos. There are other providers with geostationary satellites that might have bandwidth, but the latency is poor. Eutelsat might be a legitimate option for me at some point, but not yet. Ultimately, the performance and viability of Starlink trumps my own misgivings about supporting a Musk-related company. Until that changes, I’ll have to swallow my pride and the condescension of a few friends. Starlink: Incredible tech, flawed execution There’s no denying it: Starlink feels like the kind of Jetsons-era future tech that has always captivated me. It just works, it’s nearly flawless, and it doesn’t have many real competitors. It’s really cool that I get super-fast, low-latency internet in a place that’s otherwise barely online. But I wish I’d paid more for a better-looking, less-obvious mounting system. I wish I’d had a better backup solution in place just in case it went down. I wish it wasn’t tied to one of the most odious CEOs in the world. For now, it’s the best solution available and a joy to use. It’s hard not to see how it could be even better, though. Read...

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I’ve had Starlink at home for over a month now and I’m impressed. It feels like magical space age tech, with a small white dish on my roof giving me high-speed internet even though I’m in the middle of nowhere. With huge hills blocking affordable fiber installation and vast hectares of trees surrounding me on all sides, I’d normally be cut off from modern civilization. Starlink gets me online and I’m grateful for that. But Starlink isn’t perfect and it certainly isn’t the right choice for most homes. Once you know all the “gotchas,” you might find that it isn’t so appealing after all—or maybe one of those gotchas is a deal-breaker. If you’re thinking of getting Starlink at home, here are several questions you need to consider before you do. If you can’t answer “Yes” to all of them, you might want to look into alternative solutions. Are you rural enough? Plenty of regions around the country still lack broadband internet, and the number one reason for that is they’re too rural. They’re too far from existing infrastructure with too few potential customers, meaning it just isn’t worth it for companies to dig and run that much cabling. If you live in a place that’s remote enough that your high-speed internet options are poor at best (or non-existent at worst), then Starlink can be a good last resort. Its coverage map is almost universal at this point, with availability throughout North America and Europe, as well as large sections of South America, Australasia, and Africa. In short, if you’re reading this article, you can probably get access to Starlink. Just make sure to check your other options first though, because even though Starlink is fast, it’s nowhere close to fiber. (Other satellite internet services exist, but they tend to have worse latency, making them ill-suited to tasks like video calling and gaming.) Are you okay with slow upload speeds? Starlink’s download speeds are pretty great. Despite recently moving to a remote corner of the country, my internet is faster now with Starlink. I went from a basic 70 Mbps fiber plan to a Starlink package that offers between 150 Mbps and 300 Mbps depending on the time of day and the weather (more on that below). That’s plenty fast for files, streaming, gaming, and anything else besides. What I do wish I had, though, was faster uploads. One of the core features of gigabit fiber broadband is that it’s usually fast across both download and upload rates. With Starlink, you might get 30 Mbps uploads if you’re lucky—the rest of the time, you’re stuck closer to 10 or 15 Mbps. That’s fine for sending photos or short videos to friends, but nowhere near fast enough for uploading lots of data to the cloud or streaming 4K footage over YouTube or Twitch. Can you afford it? Starlink is more expensive than standard broadband or fiber internet. Whereas most home internet providers are competing with each other—and thus keeping prices somewhat reasonable—Starlink holds a bit of a monopoly in the low-latency, high-bandwidth satellite internet market. That means Starlink can, for now, charge whatever it wants. The standard residential package with unlimited data and 150 to 300 Mbps downloads is $120/month. You also have to buy the dish and router, which costs $175 plus taxes (that’s with a 50% discount) as of this writing. And don’t forget installation costs if you don’t want to mount it yourself. Starlink sells that service for $185 through approved third-party contractors. (You might have a handy friend or family member who can do it for you more cheaply, but that comes with its own risks.) All in, that first month of Starlink will likely cost you around $400 if you pay for installation. Comparatively, you can grab a gigabit AT&T residential fiber package for $65/month plus taxes and $99 installation fee with no need to mount a dish on your roof. Is your sky clear enough? Whereas fiber internet needs an underground connection to a fiber network, Starlink connects to its network through the sky—a network that happens to be orbiting hundreds of miles above our heads. Other satellite internet companies have one or two satellites at extreme distances always in view, but Starlink satellites are zooming by in low-Earth orbit, so your dish is constantly switching satellites. That means you need a sky view that’s as clear as possible all the time. (Yes, the latest generation of Starlink satellites and dishes with “Beam Switching” are better at dealing with momentary obstructions like tree branches, but there’s no denying you’ll have a better experience with a clear sky.) Weather is a factor, too. Light rain is fine and thin cloud cover doesn’t make a huge difference. But thick clouds? Snow? Heavy rain? Sandstorms? Smog? All of that can limit Starlink performance and even cause connection drops at times. Are you okay giving your money to SpaceX and Elon Musk? Without delving too much into politics, it’s fair to say that the company behind Starlink (SpaceX) and its CEO (Elon Musk) have been controversial over the past few years. Some might even call them immoral. SpaceX has repeatedly been criticized for its pollution problems (with spacecraft breaking up in the atmosphere and washing up on shores) and Starlink satellites ruining astronomical images with their light pollution. Elon Musk involved himself in US elections and the US government, wreaking havoc with DOGE and other initiatives. The hard truth is that Starlink has no real competition right now. It may be the only option for you, but if you decide to go with it, you have to be aware of where your payments are ultimately going. I’d love to take my money elsewhere if I could. Unfortunately, there’s nowhere else I can take it… yet. Are you comfortable using a VPN? Starlink, like any ISP, can peek at your internet activity at any time. That’s no big deal if you aren’t up to anything nefarious or legally dubious. But if your internet habits do stray into gray areas, or if you care to maintain your privacy from CEOs like Elon Musk, then you’ll need to learn how to use a VPN and get comfortable with it real fast. There are many posts on the Starlink subreddit about people getting copyright strikes in the mail after torrenting files over Starlink. If that’s something you might be caught out by, make sure you know how to use a VPN before taking out a Starlink subscription. A virtual private network (VPN) is basically an app that encrypts your internet traffic so no one can snoop, and also shields your IP address so your web activity can’t be traced back to you. If you don’t have one, get started with one of our top pick VPNs depending on your needs. Read...