Hasty Treat - Starlink Rural Internet

Welcome to Syntax.

In this Monday, hasty treat, we're gonna be talking about how Wes Got Internet via satellites all the way out in the middle of nowhere, and that is a really neat peek into the future of the Internet for many people. So in this episode, we're gonna be talking all about the Starlink satellite Internet And Wes's experience with it, my name is Scott Talensky. I'm a developer from Denver, Colorado. And with me, as always, is Wes Bos.

Hey, everybody. This is our 1st podcast we're recording once we're back from our summer hiatus. And, hilariously enough, we scheduled it for Labor Day, which neither of us realized.

But here we are. I'm excited to to be back to recording. It's been it was a nice break, but I'm, stoked to be back. Yeah. Me too. It doesn't feel like a break to me because that whole time that we were on a break, I was On vacation, then I was moving, then I'm setting up an office, then we got family coming over. It is, like, just been go go go for me. So I look, You know, I looked at the calendar. I was like, holy cow. What month is this already? How did this happen? So here we are. I'm, ready to talk about your satellite Internet. Not that I need Such a thing with, you know, being in the the city with my, CenturyLink gigabit ups and downs. But yeah.

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Sick. So for a long time, you've been doing this really awesome satellites and or not satellites. They're antennas Yep. Bro, LTE antennas being expertly hung from your poles from your roof and all sorts of wild stuff. If you haven't been up on Wes's, like, Internet goes. We're trying to get good Internet. It's really, really been pretty interesting to watch. So now you have satellite inter I didn't even know that this was available now. Also, do you wanna talk a little bit about

all the ins and outs here? This is exciting. Yeah. So for listeners who are brand new to syntax, my family and I have a cottage up in Northern ish Ontario, and we spend our entire summer there. Because of COVID, we've spent quite a bit of our School year up there as well, and it's just an awesome spot that we love to go. The because sort of one of the downsides is that it's very hard to get Good Internet up there.

And if you want to be able to work from that type of thing and and also, this is just, like, Obviously, I have a huge privilege of having this amazing place that we can go to, but I think, like, rural Internet and access to good Internet and fast Internet It's huge for everybody because of access to information, for remote work. There's a lot of people like, I know a lot of people in the town that I have my cottage in, and There's just not opportunities to do the type of thing that Scott and I do. Right? If you need to live in a rural community because you're with your family, you're taking care of them, whatever, Often, it's just not an option to have the type of job that Scott and I have because you can't reliably npm install something. Right? Like, that just That's amazing for people having that job. It's amazing for home values just because now you can go further out. There's a bit of an issue there with Big city folk moving into rural areas and driving the prices up. That's a bit of a different issue, but I'm really excited for the wider world To get Internet, and that is with Starlink. It's called low orbit Internet. These are satellites that are flying very low compared to existing satellite Internet providers, and they can provide very fast speeds and ping times and and all that stuff. So previously, our cottage, we've had a couple LTE routers, So we do get some cell service. It's spotty, so I have these huge antennas on the top of the cottage. It worked well for what it was, but it was pretty Slow some of the stuff I was using the, like, sort of a 100% legitimate one I was using. It was a 100 gigs. And when you go over a 100 gigs, It was $4 a gig. So my family, we use 500 gigs a month. Yeah. You can do the math there. That would not work out. So I have a couple sorta Gray market ones, I won't talk too much more about that. They started to go up and down in the last couple of months because it's just a game of whack a mole. Yeah. Do you know what's funny? When we were moving to our house, the new house, we didn't have Internet for the 1st week,

so I paid it was like an Extra a bit of I forget what it was. It was, like, $10 or something to get 4 gigs of hotspot on my phone. And that's fine because I, you know, I I normally have, Like, decent amount of hot spot just that that comes with our plan.

But Yeah. I put on YouTube TV, and I forgot that I was tethering for my phone. I just, like, left it. So I used up Every bit of that in the 1st day that we were here, so that had, like, a whole week of really extremely slow. It was just like, oh, no. Why?

Yeah. It's crazy how quick it goes. Like It goes fast. Yeah. For the longest time, I was on a cell phone plan with 10 gigs, and that was the most you could get No matter how much money you could pay the company in Canada, things are not as good as as they are in the States. I recently they offered me a 50 gig plan for, like, $100 a month, which is Anytime I talk about this, I get these Europeans being like, we get unlimited gigabits I don't know about this accent. For CSF. For, what?

What? It was croissant per month. Oh, no. I didn't even know what,

I didn't even know facts that you were doing. Started like, Austrian and went French. Oh. Anyways, it's not that good in Canada, but I would just tether my phone whenever Scott and I were talking because Even with the Internet we had, the latency was 400 milliseconds and combine that with headphone latency and Zoom latency and whatever. And sometimes we were, like, a full second off, and our talking back and forth would be inhibited. And it kinda hurt the podcast because You can't just jump back and forth, and we have this, like, a really good banter. Yeah, totally. So I had to tell them my phone and use all my phone to just to record this podcast. We couldn't see each other.

No. No. I had to turn my video off because it would just couldn't do it. All of that is a thing of the past. I'm so happy. I have 1,000 of dollars worth of LTE Quick, man. I just put in a box. I'm gonna sell it all and Yeah. Throw it into the ocean. No. Don't do that. I won't throw it in the ocean. I will sell it to somebody else who does not I knew you're joking.

So Starlink is the SpaceX Elon Musk type of thing. I signed up for it. I put $129 down on February 8th. In late August, I finally received the email that my area was ready to to get it. They shipped me the dish, Which was, 650 plus the initial 129 Canadian.

So pretty expensive for the equipment. Apparently, they are selling it at a loss, And apparently, they are going to have a much cheaper dish.

But because this is all still in beta, I was literally like, I will pay you whatever. I just need faster Internet out there.

Yeah. It is my livelihood. It requires the Internet. Yeah. Totally. Exactly. It's a $120

a month that gives you unlimited bandwidth, and I'll talk about speed in just a second. So all of this is pretty expensive Compared to like, I had so many people being like, those speeds are brutal compared to what I can get, and that's 8 times the cost that I can get. And If you have access to regular Internet because you live anywhere that you can get any type of Internet, Starlink is not for you. And there's a lot of people that don't seem to understand that. They're like, Have you tried contacting your cable company? Like, of course. I tried. Like, I'm literally climbing on my roof with gray market LTE plans. I tried Yeah. Checking if there was a cable thing there.

My man's on his roof with some satellite dishes that he's soldering himself together.

Yeah. He called them. So let's talk about performance. This is what everybody wants to know. These numbers are not impressive to people with fiber, but they are life changing for people with rural folks. So As a sort of a a versus, if you use the existing satellite Internet providers, you can expect between 25 megabits Down and 0.5 up. With my LTE, I was getting between 5 and 10 down and less than 1 up, f. Which is pretty pretty slow. And with the satellite, I'm getting anywhere between 30 and 250 megabits down And anywhere from 25 to 80 megabits up. So the download is anywhere from pretty good to two 200 megabits down is pretty impressive even for people that live in city unless you have fiber.

Because you're thinking, like, most people on Wi Fi are still maxing out at, like, 350 because unless you have Mhmm. Wi Fi 6 on your phone.

And then the upload 25 to 80, that's faster than you can pay for With money where I live, unless you get a business account, which I do, so I was pretty impressed by that. Because the satellites are constantly moving and because they're Still launching satellites, the speeds go from super fast down to, like, 25, 30 sometimes, but Those are still more than enough for streaming shows, doing Zoom calls, live streams, all that type of stuff.

Ping right now around 40 milliseconds average. They're saying they're gonna get it down to 20 milliseconds, which I'm not a gamer, so that type of stuff really doesn't matter too much to me as long as it's not in the hundreds. Like like the satellite, if you have HughesNet or ExplorerNet, those are 800, 900 millisecond ping times. So 40 milliseconds is very, very good.

Is still in beta, so there is downtime still because the sky is not completely full of satellites. And what happens is that the dish on your roof tries to connect to the closest one. It's Not like a typical satellite dish for your TV where you just point it at 1. It has a motor in it, and it's constantly adjusting throughout the day. I initially when I got it, I unboxed it, and I just put it on the ground, pointed it at the sky. It has to point in the northernmost direction And it has to have no obstruction, so things like trees or whatever in the way. And I was getting 5 minutes of downtime per hour, which is too much. If you're trying to have a a Zoom call, imagine me and Scott recording this podcast, and 5 minutes of it me being cut out.

So I stuck it up on my existing LTE pole, which is on top of the roof of the cottage, goes up about 20 feet. And at that point, We are only seeing between like, the outages were measured in milliseconds, so between half a second to 2 second outages Once or twice an hour. So that's pretty good. So the the entire downtime for the the whole day is Under a minute or about usually about 40 seconds of downtime for the entire day that I was getting. So I was pretty impressed with that. YouTube Streams work super well. I was used to watching YouTube in, like, 3 60 p as it was throttled over over the solutions I had. Your eyes got used to pixelated view. You're just, like, seeing everything in in blurry pixels.

It's amazing. It went HD. I was like, oh, and our Kids even noticed it. They're like Mhmm. Because the kids are watching trying to stream shows and stuff like that, and they're like, it works so fast. It's It's not thinking anymore, they said.

It's yeah. My kids call it thinking too. It's thinking. It's thinking.

The only issue we did run into is Facebook and Instagram were slow and shoddy, which could be seen as a feature to a lot of people. Yep. And, apparently, there's just a known issue with Starlink and Facebook.

It's just lots of stuff timing out and whatnot. A bunch of people said they fixed it By changing it to a different DNS provider. Mhmm. Like Google's DNS? Or Yeah. Or or Cloudflare 1.1.1.1.

I didn't try that. I only had it For 3 days before we had to leave the cottage, the summer is over, but I didn't notice it too much. Every now and then, I was on, like, Instagram and, Like, a story wouldn't load or something like that, so that's a bit of an issue that will hopefully be fixed in the future. I talked about the sign up, the price, the speeds, the performance.

The equipment is the last thing I'll sort of review here. So when you buy it, it comes with the the satellite dish that you put on your roof Or or literally anywhere, it has to have a clear view of the north. It's really interesting is because they don't have, like, installers, When they don't have support or people that come to your house, they literally just FedEx you a box, and it's hilarious. The FedEx delivery driver came to my house And dropped it off, and she said, I've done 45 of these today, and everybody is so stoked.

Wow.

Which is funny because usually where we live, the delivery companies don't come to the cottage. They go to the health food store in town, And you have to go to the health food store and pick up your packages. That's funny. But because they had so many in the rural areas, they actually delivered it right to the house, but it comes all wired up. So the dish has a huge I think that's a 100 foot long Ethernet cable. It's all PoE, power over Ethernet, and it's all plugged in. Mhmm. You can't unplug the Ethernet cable from the satellite dish, which is, I think it's their attempt at because cutting down on support because people do silly stuff all the time. They unplug it, and they plug it into the wrong one or backwards or a or whatever. Yeah. And then they call, and they say it's not working. And they're like, did you unplug it? No. I didn't do anything, but they literally did. So the thing is, like, hard coded into the actual satellite dish, which I talked to a guy. I went to a yard sale, and the guy had it. And I was like, hey. Can I talk to you about your Internet, sir? And he said he said a squirrel chewed the wire, and they had to send him an entire new dish, which seems silly, but they don't want people using, like, Ethernet cable that isn't rated because the satellite dish is heated because the snow goes on it. It has to melt off. Right? Wow. There's so many variables here. Yeah. Apparently, one of the issues was in the summer. In Arizona, they were shutting down because they're just cooking themselves on the Arizona heat. Yeah. So that's I I don't think we have that issue in Canada, but that's something to think about. We do have the snow issue, but that is yet to be seen how that works in the snow. Apparently, people said it works fine, but I'll see for myself.

So that goes into this brick that powers it and then also does all the connecting to the Internet. And then it comes with a a router as well That is plugged in. And the router only has 1 port, so you can plug 1 thing into it. It doesn't have, like, WPS, a little button you press so you can connect, like, Cameras and stuff really quickly to your thing.

So I got rid of the Starlink router. The downside to that is there's the app. If you wanna log in and see your uptime and downtime and all that stuff, that is powered by the router.

So I currently have Just the Starlink router plugged into a PoE switch, which is getting pretty pretty nerdy. Luckily, I had a PoE switch.

But I tried doing it From the Starlink router into my own setup, but then it doesn't have bridge mode, which means that it has to do the network traversal twice, And that's where you start getting like, why is it so slow? It's because it's going through 2 routers before it gets to your phone. So I took it out of the equation, and things Sped up quite a bit, and then I just put the Starlink router on a PoE switch, which let it run, and I could still get the stats. I have a Unifi dream machine, which is, like, Seriously, the best equipment ever that I've had with 3 access points around the property as well as an outdoor one so you get because I have, like, a Wyze sprinkler controller that I need, like, Internet outdoor, and that's working super well. It's nice to just plug it in to my existing setup and have everything work. I was thinking that this stuff would be really good for

smart home stuff in these rural areas where, like I know, you know, anybody who has a cottage or whatever, you're away from it For a period of time Yeah. It's probably gonna be really nice to have your Wyze cams, all of that stuff online reliably, Your sprinklers online reliably so that you can control all of that from the home base, maybe even get a camera on those Those zones here and and spy on the zones and whatever. So I think that's really, really neat because you'll be able to really, I think maintain your property and be, aware of it much better now. Yeah. It's amazing. Like, I had been used to checking up on the cottage Over the Internet, which was slow, so it would always be, like, pixelated. I'd be able to make out what's going on, and sometimes, like, a deer would run by. There's a Gunk digging on my backyard.

Yeah.

Now the cameras are HD, and it's amazing.

And I have Haven't hooked it up yet, but I got sent this 4 k PoE outdoor cam from Unify.

And I was like, how sick is that gonna look When I can stream 4 k, like, view of the lake or something like that Mhmm. Straight from there. So that's I've gotta go back up there in in a month or so and Start to do that and hook all that stuff up. But I'd only had 3 days with it so far, but I've been super happy. And NPM installs work super CSS. Zoom works super fast. Hell, yeah. I already had one of our neighbors up there ask, can I go over and use it? Because I have a really important call. Mhmm. And I was like, absolutely.

Yeah. But, like, now I'm becoming the, like, the feeding zone for all the neighbors who need to take a call when they're up at their cottage. That's great.

So I'm excited about it. The only, like the downside I've heard from people is that you right now, because it's in beta and because I had to wait, like, 7 months to get it, You can't cancel it Mhmm. For, like, months that you're not there. We go up in the winter, but there's a lot of people who just close-up their cottage for the entire winter, turn off the water, all that stuff.

And they wanna, like, cancel all their utilities, including Internet. Like, you pay $120 a month when you're not there, that's that's a lot of money. Yeah. So luckily for me, it's a business expense. I just write it off. And I'm between all the LTE things I had before, it's actually cheaper Per month. So I'm excited about that. Yeah. Interesting. Man. That's it, though. I've been talking about this forever. I'm so stoked. This last year, between my house, I was able to get gigabit down.

And at the cottage, we now have fast Internet. It's a good life We're having good Internet. I am psyched for you, and I'm psyched that now that we'll be able to do the podcast better from the cottage. So Totally. Totally. Yeah. That's kind of the way I see it. I'm like, Well, like, we have sponsors on the podcast, and we kinda need fast Internet to do the podcast. So now the fact that we can do that a little bit better or way better is kinda pays for itself. Totally.

Yeah. Alright. That's it. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll catch you on Wednesday. Peace. Peace.

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