Starlink is available just about everywhere

Jon Martindale / Foundry, Starlink

While I might look enviously upon the upload (and download) speeds of my fiber-powered friends and colleagues, it’s not like everyone truly has multi-gigabit home internet. Indeed, outside most major cities, getting even gigabit fiber can be something of a challenge.

If all you have access to is older-style cable or fiber broadband—or even ADSL over copper telephone lines—then Starlink’s performance is going to blow that away… and Starlink is just about everywhere. If your local internet options suck, then it can be mighty tempting.

Okay, okay, Starlink technically isn’t available everywhere. But just take a look at Starlink’s US availability map. It’s ubiquitous! Across the entirety of the Americas, there are only a handful of countries where it isn’t available. (The reasons why are complex and beyond the scope of this article.) Starlink, by its satellite nature, is widely available because it doesn’t require much local infrastructure. It’s just you, your dishy, and the thousands of low-orbiting satellites that you connect to.

For standard home internet, where you are dictates what kinds of internet service you can get. Not so with Starlink. As long as you aren’t living in Russia, China, Afghanistan, or North Korea, you’ve got Starlink now (or will get it at some point).

Starlink goes with you when you move

Evgeny Opanasenko / Unsplash

Moving to another house? No problem. Just take your Starlink dish and router with you. You’ll need to update your address on your Starlink account so it’s all above board, but other than that you can maintain the same service package at the same price with no interruptions.

Compare that to cable or fiber internet, which tend to lock you into contracts with termination fees (depending on how predatory your ISP is) and usually require you to return your equipment. You then need to sign up for another internet service at your next home.

I love the hassle-free convenience of Starlink. I can just plug everything in, wait for the dish to connect to the satellite network, and I’m immediately online and ready to go. That means I don’t have to wait for service to be re-established or new hardware setup kits to arrive.

Starlink is faster than some broadband

Jon Martindale / Foundry, Speedtest

Getting Starlink was a big speed boost for me. I went from an average speed of 65 Mbps with fiber to about 150 Mbps with Starlink. It’s even better during off-peak hours, as I’m able to hit 300 Mbps later in the evening and have even gotten close to 400 Mbps a few times.

Although that’s still a far cry from gigabit fiber—not to mention multi-gigabit options in some major cities—it’s faster than low-tier broadband plans that cost about the same, or costs less than similar-speed broadband plans. (Your mileage may vary based on where you live, and gigabit internet may not even be worth it for you.) Furthermore, Starlink’s latency is better than other satellite internet options, making it more suitable for online games and video calls.

Upload speeds do leave me wanting, though, capping out at around 45 Mbps (with an average of about 20 Mbps at the time of writing). That’s plenty for day-to-day use, but it does take a bit longer when I do stuff like uploading the odd video now and again. I can deal with that.

You can use Starlink while on the go

Roadpass / Unsplash

For me, Starlink is a home internet solution. But for others, Starlink is high-speed internet wherever they go… and they really do go places.

Check out any of the Reddit communities dedicated to remote living—think van life enthusiasts, house boaters, sailors, anyone who works in remote locations like oil rigs—and you’ll see they’re all using Starlink to get online and enjoy high-speed internet wherever they happen to be. I’ve even seen people strap Starlink to their cars just so the kids have great internet speeds on long drives and trips.

Of course, Starlink’s Roaming packages are more expensive than its Residential plans on a per-gigabyte basis, and you’re capped in ways that the standard residential and business options aren’t. But for people who want to live a remote, nomadic lifestyle or need to travel often for work, Starlink is a unique solution that works fantastically well at delivering high-speed internet (almost) anywhere and everywhere.

Starlink isn’t vulnerable to local outages

Jon Martindale / Foundry

Has your home internet ever gone down because a local substation blew or because someone cut through a buried fiber cable while renovating their yard? That simply can’t happen with Starlink.

Sure, you have a cable that runs from your Starlink router (inside) to your Starlink dish (outside), but unless someone cuts that—there’s no way someone’s doing that by accident—you’re pretty much safe.

That isn’t to say Starlink doesn’t have its own issues. When I first signed up, I was immediately hit by Starlink’s first major global outage in a long time. I’ve also experienced a few other spotty occasions since then, usually because a tree branch leaned in front of my dish or inclement weather got in the way of my satellite view.

But on the whole? Starlink is surprisingly reliable and isn’t susceptible to the kinds of outages that most home internet users face.

Starlink’s router is actually pretty good

Jon Martindale / Foundry

Some internet service providers send out legitimately good routers and modems with their internet service packages, but many don’t—especially when you’re on a cheaper plan. (Learn more about choosing a good router and getting started with it.)

Although Starlink is very much not a cheap internet solution and absolutely should ship with a decent router, I’m pleased to report the one you get is indeed solid. Not excellent—and certainly worth replacing if you’re a power user—but if you’re just looking for a capable Wi-Fi 6 router to go with your fancy new space internet, it’s good.

I have Starlink’s third-generation router and it’s plenty fast for most modern devices. Although it’s missing the newer Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 protocols, I’m okay with that because I don’t have any cutting-edge devices that could even take advantage of it. My Starlink router is tri-band, giving me plenty of network space for hundreds of devices.

The router also comes with a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports, and the Wi-Fi range is capped at 3,200 square feet. That’s enough for all but the largest of homes, although some walls and obstructions can get in the way, and the lack of external antennas can make it harder to orient for a better signal. But for most apartments and open homes, it should be plenty. Need more range? It supports mesh networking, and Starlink sells cost-effective nodes for expanding your network if needed.

Further reading: I spent $24 to future-proof my home Wi-Fi forever

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.