I wonder why it cost £35 in the UK for the basic package?
You can check the current costs at here, it’s probably around 400 euros which includes the shipping.
We used an old satellite dish bracket as the fixing point, and it just slotted straight into that. Just as long as it’s got a clear view of the sky straight up then it will be fine, large trees close by have no impact.
A few years ago they had to point at a certain angle due to a smaller orbital inclination range but now they have so many satellites across different latitudes you basically just point it straight up.
When we moved into our place in the Alpilles we had to get internet in. Assumed would go orange fiber as had just been installed in our lane. My security guy who was installing alarm said he recommended starlink as people were having issues with orange fiber. Morally was against it but ultimately we had little choice. He installed it and the WiFi through house and outside in the garden. So far after six months so good. Decent speeds. Supports everything we need to stream and it survived mistral. Plus compared to internet in the States it’s pretty cheap.
We’ve stayed in several gîtes with Starlink attached to top of fence post, or on an upper windowsill - needs to have clear sky access that’s all it seems.
And then what? a cable in through a hole in the wall of the house?
I looked at your Orange Flybox but unfortunately we are an Orange dead area.
That is the downside, you need to drill an 20mm diameter hole (because of the chunky connector Starlink) to run the cable from the dish into the house.
Ideally bigger so you can insert a piece of 32mm gaine to protect the cable from the masonry, as per regulations.
I’ll argue that it you want.
For all the claims that Musk is some sort of über engineer I am not sure that he has had that many, or any, original ideas, and far from knowing how to “build reliable stuff” his negative interventions on the Tesla production line in terms of the quality of the shipped product are well known.
Starlink was not his idea - it was floating around in the 1990’s at least (see Teledesic). His gift, such as it was, was in timing - I don’t think the world was ready for a Starlink-like system in the 1990’s whereas the last decade has seen a significant rise in “the last 5%” of hard to reach locations where direct connection (either copper or fibre) is not feasible.
As the Starlink cable that goes between modem and dish is screened Cat5/6 following the T-568B pinout, you could cut off one of the proprietary Starlink connectors, feed the cable through a narrower section of gaine and then rebuild the cable using 2 regular RJ45s and a coupler.
I am not too concerned about whose idea it was, that doesn’t impact the user experience.
It doesn’t matter to me either how good he is at engineering personally himself, it’s the fact he knows how to build a company that produces great products and fantastic customer service.
I have a new model Y, and it just works, really well!
It currently sits at no.2 in the most reliable electric cars which seems pretty good since it’s sold double that of its nearest competitor.
I choose products on their own merit (how well does it the job that I want it to do) and don’t see it as personal transaction.
Which many would say is fair enough. Even I might consider Starlink in the right circumstances though a Tesla would probably not be something I’d buy because whatever your experience is they have a poor reputation for build quality and there are plenty of alternatives.
The thing is, though, I’d like to reserve my business for ethical companies and partners - it’s just that it’s bloody hard to find any these days.
Opinion is always a personal thing, so I like to base things on facts and all current surveys just don’t support what you say about the build quality of Teslas.
I think we have had this discussion before, but if you walk around your house, probably 90% of the tech is Chinese made, perhaps many of your clothes were made in Indian sweat shops, so the morality argument typically goes out of the window.
Like somebody else showed earlier in the thread, their “moral” objections went completely out of the window as soon it had the potential to inconvenience them. I find that happens a lot in life.
I am very much guilty of that myself with eating meat.
But people’s issue with Musk seem to be all based around not agreeing with his political affiliations, but I not aware that he runs unethical companies.
No, not true in our house! As consumers the only power we have is not to buy things we disapprove of. Which we try to do as much as possible even when marginally inconvenienced. I recognise that I am in a very luxurious position of being able to spend €40 on my internet rather than Starlink €29, or 20 centimes more on organic local and seasonal products.
Small beer, but I like to care for my conscience.
So you have no Chinese’s made products in your house? Wow, you must be the only one!
Where was your TV made?
I bet your router for your Orange internet was made in China.
And half the components in your none Chinese products will have been made in China.
My internet is 40 euros a month, it isn’t about price it was the fact it worked for me.
I would hazard a guess that the device you are using to access this thread is Chinese, or no doubt the majority of it is.
I’m not saying we have no chinese products, just that we are very mindful about what we buy and if it can be avoided we will (actually I do have some Chinese clothes but they were bought in china about 30 years ago
). I have no idea about our TV - it was my mother’s who died over 12 years ago so it is not modern. All our tech is old, often recycled and pretty basic as it’s not really something that interests us hugely.
We were persuaded to buy a firestick type device a month or so back, but it is still in its packet.
We can each choose how to spend any money we have, and you would probably be horrified by what we have spent on recycled tomettes for our kitchen floor rather than popping into Leroy Merlin for a roll of PVC. It’s not virtue signalling, just our choice about our life style and that we have the ability to choose.
We’ve been using Starlink now for around three years. It’s been absolutely rock solid and even in heavy rain the services works perfectly. We get around 350-400 Mbps down and 40-60 Mbps up. About 18 months ago we had a power surge during a storm that took out the router. I contacted tech support and Starlink immediately sent us a completely new system by upgrading us to gen 3 equipment. There were no questions asked and we even got a free month’s subscription thrown in. As I have an extensive UniFi based WiFi network we’ve put the Starlink router into bridge mode and directly connected our UniFi router via Ethernet to the Starlink router. We are very happy with Starlink and even though we have the possibility to have fibre we won’t switch over to fibre. I’m not a fan of Musk but I’m totally in awe with the engineers who have built Starlink!
Exactly the same as my experience Tony!
Yes, anecdotally the build quality of Tesla has improved since they started keeping him off the shop floor ![]()
Not just his politics - the man himself seems entirely unpleasant.
I don’t often use AI summaries but this time Google’s has been useful to catalogue some of the things that Musk has done
You don’t need to dig very deep. As well as as a poor quality control record Tesla has been criticised for poor treatment of workers, and a poor attitude to workplace safety. Not to mention Musk overselling “full self driving” for years and accusations that they have been very coy about the environmental and social impact of their battery production, including claims of involvement of child labour. Customer service is generally considered poor even these days.
Then there was the “solar roof tiles” gig which was a complete scam.
Ahem, cough, the Tesla Semi truck was vapourware on a massive scale (I see they claim they are going into production “in March” after how many years?).
Then there are things like the massive layoffs at Twitter, the behaviour of Grok - often at Musk’s explicit instruction, the massively unethical behaviour in the entire “DOGE” thing.
One could go on for hours.
What car do you drive?
Let me know and no doubt I can give you many similar examples for that company.
Human nature can be very strange
That was the thread, but then people with no experience at all, feel the need to comment, and add no value whatsoever other than to give themselves a warped sense of moral superiority.
