Thoughts from a Network Engineer after having Starlink for five days

[afacc123]

The setup is brain dead simple. It comes in the box fully hooked up, all you have to do is place it with a view of the sky and plug it into electrical power. It is the dish with a temporary use stand, a two port PoE injector (that sends PoE both towards the dish and towards the router), and the router. Note that anyone can install the Starlink app and “check for obstructions” to see what might be in the way.

Starlink still in the box

Upon startup the dish moves from the “stowed” position (tilted down) to perfectly vertical (to scan the sky). After a couple of minutes it then moves to its final orientation (for me this is facing somewhat North).

Scanning the sky

The cable is fixed attached to the dish which avoids waterproofing issues at the dish end but it is definitely NOT setup for professional installers. The cable is maybe 75’ or 100’ (I have not measured it yet) and it has a huge “choke” on the end which means you need a large hole into your building. A professional installer would just drill a hole large enough for the cable and “field terminate” ends for the wire. Sadly this is not an option for Starlink currently.

Starlink permanently attached ethernet cable

The choke on the cable you have to pass through the wall is huge!

I put the dish on a kill-a-watt to measure its power consumption. I saw it up to 154 watts (combined for the dish and the router which is also powered by the same power injector brick). This leads me to believe that output power is more than even the highest 802.11bt PoE spec allows. I suspect this is one of the reasons for the permanently attached cable on the dish. They likely don’t support any longer cords due to voltage drop issues. Note that 154 watts is quite a bit of power! That may be a challenge for off-grid operations.

Power consumption of the PoE brick with both the Dish and Router powered (sometimes it draws less)

The PoE towards the “router” does not seem to be standard 802.11af/at as my Polycom PoE phone would not boot directly off of it.

The PoE brick that sends power to the dish and the router

The router looks cool though it is pretty braindead simple. No web interface I have found yet (navigating to the router IP redirects you to the starlink.com web site). It is managed through the app. It appears to run OpenWrt based on what I see as reverse DNS for the first hop in RFC1918 space. It is annoying that it uses 40mhz in 2.4ghz and 80mhz in 5.8ghz. I guess this may make sense for folks in super rural areas where there is not much interference around. Obviously the wider channels are good for more peak bandwidth throughput from the client to the router, but not being able to set this is a major issue in dense urban areas. It has a single “aux” port on the back to plug in wired devices. They also appear to use 10.0.0.0/8 as the client subnet that is assigned which is is eyebrow raising. This may be more likely to conflict with corporate VPN’s (typically routers are in the 192.168.x.x space). The IP my laptop has right now is 10.0.0.111 and the default gateway is 10.10.1.1.

Using WiFi Explorer on my mac to see how it is configured

The router seems a bit \"cybertruck\" themed

I had an issue with the app during setup - once it set the WiFi SSID and password then it would no longer connect to get stats from the router/dish. It fixed itself the next day. There is still one graph missing from the “statistics” page in the app.

A snapshot of statistics from the Starlink app

Speeds are good, my first speediest was 122 / 12.3 with a purported ping time of 19ms according to speedtest.net. I don’t know if I believe that RTT as since then it seems a little higher generally. I must have gotten lucky. The speeds are highly variable depending on where satellites are at any given second above me.

My first speedtest on Starlink! (not sure I believe that latency #)

The IPv4 address the dish hands out is in 100.64.0.0/10 which is the “carrier grade NAT” IP space. This is annoying as it is not a “real” Internet IP, so no inbound connections possible. 😞 The Starlink router does not hand out IPv6 addresses either which is extra annoying. The good news is that you absolutely do not have to use their router. I used an old Ubiquiti Edge Router Lite 3 without issue. Note that I was even able to get an IPv6 address on that device using SLAAC but it would not “hold” it. My router keeps dropping the IP after it times out and I have unplug/replug to get it to come back (I have not dove into troubleshooting this at all). I was hoping I could use IPv6 to enable inbound SSH for remote managing my router and for playing with things remotely. I tried setting my router up to request DHCPv6-PD but it did not seem to work (or it could have been my config).

This was when I discovered I get an IPv6 address when directly plugged into the dish

The dish does seem willing to hand out more than one IP address - so right now I am going from my dish (well the PoE injector) to a little unmanaged Netgear PoE switch and then from there to my EdgeRouter and also I am PoE powering the Starlink router as well (it does appear to take standard 802.3af power from my switch just fine). This is allowing me to run tests from a Raspberry Pi behind the EdgeRouter and still connect my laptop and phone to the Starlink router / WiFi (which allows the Starlink app to work still to manage the dish).

I hooked my Polycom IP phone up to Starlink and it has worked well for the one phone call I made on it (~15 minutes?). The other end was a cell phone so it was hard to judge audio quality.

My first Starlink satphone call!

It absolutely has coverage holes. On an hour long MS Teams meeting (not my choice) it dropped out a few times (presumably due to coverage issues). I have a commanding view of the sky from my roof - no obstructions locally.

Starlink is doing some kind of blocking of IPv4 packets such that MTR (a traceroute tool) does not function properly which is extremely annoying. Other kinds of traceroutes do work and IPv6 traceroute also seems to work. I have not dove in to see which probe types are being blocked (you can pass flags to MTR to do different probe types).

Blocking of IPv4 MTR

The public IP’s given out right now seem to sit behind a Google WiFi ASN (but the v4 prefix I am in is registered to Starlink). I am guessing this was done when they first set it up in order to “hide” where they were testing from. I will be curious to see how this evolves.

IP and ASN I am \"seen\" from on the Internet

It appears they are using Google recursive DNS resolvers right now.

Source IP of the recursive resolver I am using (Google)

The app graphs of coverage holes are pretty neat, but sometimes it shows downtime that is not due to lack of satellite coverage. Not sure what that is about exactly.

Starlink needs to offer more mount options and ways to use industry standard mounts (as there is a rich ecosystem). The bricks they want folks to use for the non-penetrating mount don’t make sense, the ones of the size specified are not heavy enough to meet the Starlink specifications (20lbs is the spec - they actually weigh under 15 lbs). I had to use ones twice as thick (which are way heavier than the specifications call for - these are 34 lbs I think). I worry about these larger ones coming out in an earthquake. Even with the smaller bricks they should have provisions for how to strap down the bricks so they don’t bounce out in an earthquake. Also, using small bricks is a horrible idea earthquake wise. I would not advise this.

This is the optional non-penetrating mount - note the dish is in the \"stowed\" position

I see no provisions on the Starlink for grounding the dish or the cable. I am not sure how this meets code in some jurisdictions. Perhaps it is classed as a “mobile” device.

The non-pen mount comes with a backpack thing for carrying stuff up a ladder

It is quite the fashion statement - I feel like a Ninja Turtle

And yes, it does seem to work at least some distance from your "official" home location. I had to take it to a few friends houses where they have connectivity challenges to do a show-and-tell.

Testing Starlink at a friends Christmas Tree Farm (off generator)

I wish I had this thing 10 weeks ago during the horrible fires we had here in Oregon. It would have revolutionized the emergency telecom restoration work I have been doing (though we also would have needed coverage slightly farther south).

Working on emergency telecom restoration in Detroit Oregon

Improvements I want to see:

I would like to see a visualization in the app of where their satellites are currently located in the sky.

I want to be able to stow the dish without using the app - it is not always convenient to get the system fully up and operating in order to just put it in the storage position.

Overall, this thing is bloody revolutionary. They really have knocked it out of the park here. We just need more satellite coverage in order to avoid the coverage holes! You can’t participate in group meetings very well when you get randomly kicked off for 60-90 seconds frequently (obviously this is coming but it is going to take time). I personally can’t wait for the mobile units that can go on vehicles and I am hoping they can come up with super low power handheld devices like for doing SMS texting when backpacking. If they can make the hardware small enough and price it reasonably enough, it would increase safety massively.

Let me know if you have any questions!

 

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[afacc123]

Starling.com

[afacc123]

Elon musk gaadi  debba 

xfinity verizon comcast andariki ABBA

 

 

[dasara_bullodu1]

So how does it work when the throuput increases because of consumption ?

[afacc123]

Just now, dasara_bullodu1 said:

So how does it work when the throuput increases because of consumption ?

It just works

how ? Satellites give you the connectivity and it will 

 

why worry though

this is beta testing in North America and canada

[hyperbole]

2 minutes ago, dasara_bullodu1 said:

So how does it work when the throuput increases because of consumption ?

They are going to scale by launching thousands of satellites

[Spartan]

Just now, hyperbole said:

They are going to scale by launching thousands of satellites

#spacejunk

[dasara_bullodu1]

1 minute ago, afacc123 said:

It just works

how ? Satellites give you the connectivity and it will 

 

why worry though

this is beta testing in North America and canada

Data goes through these ‘connections’ .. guess this is just another elite product like tesla cars

[afacc123]

Falcon 9 vundiga

pichha comedy ga satellites teesukeltundi

plus resume the same launchers

edo scifi movie chustunattu vundi

lucky to be alive and witnessing such things the first time

[AndhraneedSCS]

7 minutes ago, afacc123 said:

Elon musk gaadi  debba 

xfinity verizon comcast andariki ABBA

 

 

I think he has to undercut all of them in price to see real difference. Right now, I think its attractive only for people who don't have a cable 

[afacc123]

1 minute ago, Spartan said:

#spacejunk

Utilization of unused space

there are two sides to everything 

#whatonethinksmatters

[afacc123]

3 minutes ago, AndhraneedSCS said:

I think he has to undercut all of them in price to see real difference. Right now, I think its attractive only for people who don't have a cable 

People are running towards such futuristic tech as everyone wants latest iphone12 max for example

and if it is cheap as well

#don’tMindSwitching

[Spartan]

3 minutes ago, afacc123 said:

Utilization of unused space

there are two sides to everything 

#whatonethinksmatters

plan to clean up the existing junk first....

a tarvata #whatonethinksmatters

it has been becoming really difficult and strenous for countries to design paths for the satellites which are more helpful than Internet junk.

 

[afacc123]

Just now, Spartan said:

plan to clean up the existing junk first....

a tarvata #whatonethinksmatters

it has been becoming really difficult and strenous for countries to design paths for the satellites which are more helpful than Internet junk.

 

I agree to disagree

1) it all depends on the planning but not like going there tomorrow correcting and coming back

2) yes Indian satellite getting close to Russian satellite is one recent example

 

am not sure if I have a solution but competition is enormous as I agree fully to your points of consideration brother

[afacc123]

Overall, this thing is bloody revolutionary. They really have knocked it out of the park here. We just need more satellite coverage in order to avoid the coverage holes! You can’t participate in group meetings very well when you get randomly kicked off for 60-90 seconds frequently (obviously this is coming but it is going to take time). I personally can’t wait for the mobile units that can go on vehicles and I am hoping they can come up with super low power handheld devices like for doing SMS texting when backpacking. If they can make the hardware small enough and price it reasonably enough, it would increase safety massively.

 

network engineer thoughts are above and if he thinks it’s bloody revolutionary in a beta test test am not worried about its stupendous coverage to outlast the whole world with absolute connectivity in the very near future

#NoCables

#NoInterruptionsEver