Mine, too. I installed Starlink v2 a couple of years ago, with a mesh system, and it has been flawless since. Around 250-300 Megs down, and 20-30 up. No atmospheric problems at all, and I’ve only been without it when we lose power (quite often, recently…)
Needs must when the devil drives as they say.
A cheap Chinese petrol generator is money very well spent to keep the comms hot and the freezer cold during power outages.
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Just out of interest, how long will food remain eatable from a freezer which has lost power but remained closed?
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Online the opinion is 48 hours if the freezer is full. Also I imagine you need to not open the door.
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Yes, I would never open the door but my freezer is rarely full, nevertheless the figure you quote is acceptable and in line with my practice.
The more frozen mass inside the freezer when the power goes out = the longer it takes to thaw.
Starlink is a pretty cool system very sustainable cost effective connections from the home or field locations. It would definitely be a serious option where we are on France (we have friends up the hill in the village already using it.
Interestingly I got round to watching this today:
I didn’t realise that Starlink satellites only have a lifespan of 5-7 years (how long have the ones over France been up there?).
If Starlink just crashes as a company by being wrapped up with “X” and Tesla facing a diminishing market due to increased competition, I can’t help but wonder if it will be around in the next few years.
Nothing alarmist just wondering if it will be another Betamax in the future. Would be cool to have other options and see the French fibre optique infrastructure improve.
Is Amazon’s equivalent to Starlink (Amazon Leo?) available in Europe yet?
Starlink are years ahead of Amazon Kuiper but competition can only be a good thing.
Soon Starlink will be a huge disrupter in the mobile provider market. You will basically have a satellite phone in your hand, that you can use anywhere in the world, no black spots, no international roaming charges and no data limits. Old school comms companies won’t be able to compete. So instead of crashing, I think they will dominate the mobile provider market, on an international level never seen before. I am sure Amazon will get there too.
Starlink as a company will be IPO’d, so at any point in the future if having Musk at the top doesn’t suit investors then changes would be made.
People think of Musk as the owner of Tesla, but he only has 15% (still the largest single share holder by a long way) but he only remains the CEO because he offers a great return for investors.
Unless you are an astronomer 
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It’s not so much how much Musk owns of Tesla that is of concern. Tesla is on it’s way out already hammered by BYD on cars (not that they have actually designed a new car in the past few years preferring to rely on hype on being a new company that makes androids - has anyone bought one yet?), for me it’s the fact that the Space X IPO will be for a company that that has taken on the liabilities of “X”, the Starship program, Tesla, building data centres in space, Grok AI etc etc….
There will be a mad populist rush driven by hype and the fear of missing out to bump the IPO to be bigger than ARAMCO but for those who buy these shares where will the returns come from - a factory on the moon? Too many liabilities, Starlink works as a company but being wrapped up with all of the other poison pills will it survive in the face increasing competition, will they have the liquidity to replace this huge network of satellites in 5 years time?
The expectation is that the Space X IPO will go for 94 times the revenue the company made in 2025 - sounds overly optimistic and destined to crash to me. Does anyone think that Musk won’t pull the rug before the shares dip and cash out?
Space X will not be linked to Tesla though, it will be a separate company. I could see Starlink also being spun out and completely separate to Space X.
As a consumer I not too concerned though. If today’s products don’t suit me tomorrow, or are not even available, I will just choose what suits me best then.
I welcome Tesla becoming an electricity supplier in the UK, as it’s more competition. This could also be a huge diversification for them, in many other countries too. Hopefully there will be extra incentives to buy home batteries, and perhaps even further discounts on home charging of a Tesla.
Storing energy is the one biggest hurdles to net zero, so any company that starts going down that road at grid level should be well placed.
BYD are heavily into that as well, but I am not sure how many western governments will want them tightly coupled to their domestic energy grids. Also their car sales are heavily dependent on china (80%)
None are actually over France, at least not for very long. They’re in quite a low orbit, which is why they have a lowish lifetime. The low orbit also means they move fairly quickly around the sky overhead in fixed patterns. The dish tracks one or more satellites and then seamlessly switches to other satellites when they go out of range.
Satellites are being continuously replenished so that enough are in the sky where they are needed. Several hundred satellites re-enter and burn up in the atmosphere every year 
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For the professionals, yes. For an amateur like me it’s not much of an issue. I tend to get Starlink satellite trails on maybe 5% of my exposures (normally 180 to 300s) but these can usually be removed by software. For the professional astronomer it’s now an issue and will only get worse, especially for certain types of ground based astronomy.
Closing this down, I now have Starlink up and running, and yes, it does what it says on the tin. Two weeks on nearly and Orange have not replaced the pole. They (telephone back office) say that poles do not belong to Orange and I need to contact others. I declined the urge to give them a lesson on contract law… Anyway, they are finished here now!
Fed-Ex were two days late in delivery, for which I was given a month’s free rental!
One bit of advice - the 29€ service is basic Residential cover and uses the Starlink Mini. The other residential service uses the Gen3 system. I say this because for one who does not know the capaqbilities of small routers, the Mini is a pig to set up. It comes with five routers with a claim they can mesh up to ten metres apart. They cannot! Four metres absolute max! Once I realised this, it was a doddle to set up. Everything with the Mini is wireless - dish to router and router to router. As I have a really good Google mesh network I only use one router and then pop into an ethernet switch. I took Grok’s (yes, he is the back office techy…) advice and wired the dish to the router with an ethernet line.
Much of the time I get up around 90Mbs + but on avearge, maybe 50 or 60. Enough for me. Latency between 19 and 30ms, generally 23-25 though.
I currently have referred wife, gf and three neighbours (with a few others thinking about it) that gives each of us a free month, so if anyone is contemplating Starlink and wants a free month, please let me know 
In all, pretty good! Go Elon, go!
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Oh, that Mini sounds like way too much drama for non-techy folks in old French stone house!
One of the most technologically disinclined people I know here was talking about Starlink and I’ll insure he goes for the Gen 3 hardware if he decides to go that way. Mainly because it will be me setting it up for him..
Thanks for the info.
Unfortunately, they are correct. The poles are infrastructure and are dealt with by whoever maintains the infrastructure, which is often not Orange, and when it is Orange, it’s a different part of Orange. In saying that, they should have been able to give you details of who to contact.
They may well be correct. It does matter. My contract is with Orange.
We have had Starlink for 3 plus years and it is excellent.
Mobile- Red all the way. I have the 9.99 tariff and use a lot of data and it’s absolutely fine for my needs.
Use this link and you get 15€ off and so do I. Win win!
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