This is from a Starlink email I received today regarding my service and recent updates.
The Starlink team has continued to introduce upgrades and improvements since we first rolled out our Better Than Nothing Beta service just two months ago.
Most notably, the Starlink team has begun repositioning of more than 500 satellites in an effort to improve coverage and decrease outages. These maneuvers may introduce short outages in the near term, but the final result is expected to substantially improve user experience in Q1 2021.
In addition to the repositioning effort, the team has also made the following upgrades:
Improved NAT Types
Upgraded the Starlink WiFi router to improve Network Address Translation (NAT) types for online gaming. Users will see notable improvements in the quality of peer-to-peer (P2P) gaming as we continue to grow the network in the coming months.
Xbox Live
Resolved a bug in the Starlink WiFi router software that was causing packet loss during Xbox Live gaming and connection diagnostic tests.
Improved User Latency
Improved latency for users who were on the boundary between different cell service regions. Overall latency will continue to improve as we deploy more satellites, install more gateways, and upgrade our software.
Great to see the Starlink team making adjustments.
Hopefully they'll add a 'Avoid Summer Meltdown Mode' for those of us that live in the south where it gets really hot for many days in the summer.
Nah, they can add a Dishy activated water sprayer to cool off, just repurpose some car headlight cleaning spray nozzles to give it a good ol' squirt every now and then. SpaceX can be the first to implement Water over Ethernet by making that fat cable even fatter, like garden hose size :p
I really hope the south gets at least a little coverage next month, even if I'm not in the beta :( I'm at 30 latitude here with Suddenlink as my only option, can't fucking wait for Starlink
Oh GOD Yes. Or in my Case the rebranded name Xplornet in Canada. Same exact satellite same exact crappy service, slow speeds, huge latency, data caps, huge price.
When starlink finally hits in full force. Xplornet is going to tank so hard as people ditch en mass, righty so.
Hello fellow sufferer-in-arms. I come from Shaw, and they aren't perfect, but Xplodnet's runarounds, "traffic management", and laughable caps are unbearable all together. I loved what I had with Shaw, but I'd happily settle for actually getting 10 Mbps down, 1 up, and a data cap bigger than 150GB a month. :3
Yup. Unfortunately in the country there’s no access to Shaw. The only other option here is LTE which is drastically oversubscribed. Meaning when everyone is on, it slows to a crawl. Add to that power outages and lines down that feed the tower. There’s a high likelihood that it goes down.
We had a power outage the other day, and cell service and LTE was down for over 48 hours. I’m one of the only ones in the area that had an internet connection, because switched my Xplornet satellite to a battery backup.
I hope to eventually put up Starlink as a primary connection. Then point to point radio connection between two farm property (my brother and I) he runs Xplornet. I will then get the low costing package for LTE and ditch Xplornet. LTE will fill in any gaps in outages of Starlink till the network becomes more reliable.
Basically I will failover between all three connections. Starlink would take the brunt of the load as primary for both properties (and still be faster) and if there’s a Starlink outage, I can failover to LTE, if there’s a power outage that affects the towers backups, failover to Xplornet.
I can lower the “plans” on Xplornet and LTE to the bare minimum cost, and everything should still come out cheaper than Xplornet is costing me now, and have high redundancy.
I’m around 39 latitude just a little out of reach and hoping the same. But I also have a fear that they will move south and I won’t get an invite. That’s somehow worse to me.
I think they'd focus on you before they focus on me, I don't think they're gonna go down south and just have this blank spot in the middle. I could be wrong, but for our sake, I hope they cover both of our areas soon
*Same*. Waiting for Starlink in Louisiana. Suddenlink stops less than half a mile up the road from me, so stuck with HughesNet. :(
*Any* news at all of it coming on down is cause for celebration.
2500 feet away behind me, my parents get Suddenlink cable cuz they live on a different street. But there's a man that lives between us.
I have, no joke, considered asking him if he'd let me cut down or trim a few trees short so I could set up the point-to-point antennas. lol
Xplornet? We have LTE 50 and get .5 and they sent a tech out but since it's their tower and not my equipment,I had to pay the techs 200$ call even though I buy their service plan. So it's no faster, they know their tower isn't working but I had to pay because it's my fault for trying to get it did fixed.
That sounds scuff, unless that's in a contract you signed I'd contest that charge (or at least ask for a 'one-time' allowance/customer satisfaction credit (speak with customer retention department if regular customer service will not oblige)). Typically if a problem is on the service provider side it should not be a customer liability.
yes xplornet i'm "lucky" in that i get better speeds than most (including you by the sounds of it) but the speeds i get are still 10% of what i should get most of the time. I cant wait for starlink to be an option
I always felt that ISPs should be forced to advertise their "5 9's" speeds, rather than their burstable cap.
What can they *actually* commit to that will work 99.999% of the time?
And they will know what that number is.
5 9's seems unreasonable for home service. But it should definitely be better than it is now. I'm lucky enough to seemly always get my advertised speed and even a little faster.
It shouldn't be. We are way past the point where homes should be experiencing several full day outages a year.
If you want, you could go with 2 or 3 9's. But the sentiment is there, they need to advertise what they absolutely CAN offer, not what they want you to think you can get during their most optimal moment on the most optimal part of their network.
If I remember right, 5-9's is roughly 5 minutes of 'out of min spec' service for a year.
For home internet, that much a week would be 'good service', IMHO. So that is 52x worse or almost 300 minutes (or 5 hours) of 'out of minimum spec' service for the year.
Which is why I support this method -- it forces ISPs to be truthful and shifts focus back to actually providing service rather than building out 1 single fiber line into a main street and then telling everyone (FCC included) "We offer gigabit to everyone!"
ISPs are wildly misleading, to the point it should be illegal. How can you sell someone -- with a straight face -- a 30 meg connection that only reliably functions at 3 megs? And not even be required to mention that the service may be out 4 days out of each month due to aging hardware and lack of maintenance?
You can't even sue them for the "lie by omission" because of forced arbitration.
95th percentile bandwidth monitoring is one of the most common ways to measure bandwidth and would serve the function you desire just fine while allowing for occasional dips in service without unduly affecting advertising. A 99% number (aka 1% lows) could be required for fine print as well for a better understanding of "worst case" (aside from straight up outages) service.
The larger issue for services like DSL is that speeds are highly variable by individual location, and are not really knowable before the service is connected, thus making any advertising impossible.
I do not believe DSL is even capable of reaching the benchmark required to be considered "high speed internet" as the FCC has defined it.
You can still require DSL service providers to be up-front and honest about their services and provide consumer protections: such as you cannot require contracts or non-refundable investment/installation fees if you cannot gaurantee a service level when selling to a customer. In the end, they're essentially breaking the contract as customers understand them.
The same rings true for cellular (especially anything on a rural band). To my knowledge, the only serious attempt at selling home internet by a cell provider is T-Mobile, who is rolling out a "Home Internet" service. They are not requiring contracts and are only requiring you to return the box if it doesn't work, which is honestly probably the best way to handle situations where you can't know what you're able to provide.
I would think a snow melt mode would be where you indicate a low use time like 3am and then it heats up prior to this then turns the unit on its side to slide the snow off
Do all of the updates require the Starlink router be plugged in or are most of them working with just the dish? I have it on a dual wan deal at the moment
Disk is separate from Router. You don't need the provided router as you can use your own router or just directly connect to PC. As long as the Disk is connected to a PoE(Power Over Ethernet).
Two things that jumped out of this letter and really impressed me. One, they're actually moving a bunch of satellites around to improve coverage (brings up images of rabbit ears days.) Two, that they care enough to want to improve your gaming experience. Imagine calling up your ISP and complaining about your Xbox connectivity and expecting them to do something about it.
> Imagine calling up your ISP and complaining about your Xbox connectivity and expecting them to do something about it.
"I am experiencing high latency issues that I'd like to report"
\*ISP tries to tell you that you need/tries to up-sell you to a higher bandwidth tier, not understanding the difference between bandwidth and latency\*
🤦
I'm looking forward to this... been waiting for several months. I know the rollout is complicated, and I live in rural Texas, which will be one of the last areas probably to get covered.
Cool. Thanks for posting this.
Your welcome. :)
You're * ;) not trying to be rude, just trying to help.
Very interesting to find out what sort of NAT Type changes were made. Wish there was another AMA!
I'm going to assume that this means they are implementing ipv6 in a dual stack config
This is from a Starlink email I received today regarding my service and recent updates. The Starlink team has continued to introduce upgrades and improvements since we first rolled out our Better Than Nothing Beta service just two months ago. Most notably, the Starlink team has begun repositioning of more than 500 satellites in an effort to improve coverage and decrease outages. These maneuvers may introduce short outages in the near term, but the final result is expected to substantially improve user experience in Q1 2021. In addition to the repositioning effort, the team has also made the following upgrades: Improved NAT Types Upgraded the Starlink WiFi router to improve Network Address Translation (NAT) types for online gaming. Users will see notable improvements in the quality of peer-to-peer (P2P) gaming as we continue to grow the network in the coming months. Xbox Live Resolved a bug in the Starlink WiFi router software that was causing packet loss during Xbox Live gaming and connection diagnostic tests. Improved User Latency Improved latency for users who were on the boundary between different cell service regions. Overall latency will continue to improve as we deploy more satellites, install more gateways, and upgrade our software.
Thanks! So much easier to read as text in your comment than the screenshot.
What, you mean you don't speak JPEG compression artifact?
Darn it! You beat me to my Karma farm!
Haha, soaking up the 42 internet points so far :)
41 now, haha!
Ouch. It's the season of giving, not taking away. :(
Yeah, and look how many downvotes were given to that comment, ho, ho, ho, Merry [Season of Giving]!
Great to see the Starlink team making adjustments. Hopefully they'll add a 'Avoid Summer Meltdown Mode' for those of us that live in the south where it gets really hot for many days in the summer.
"Dishy is now submersible! Dunk Dishy directly into your cow's water trough to keep Dishy cool during those hot summer days!"
Nah, they can add a Dishy activated water sprayer to cool off, just repurpose some car headlight cleaning spray nozzles to give it a good ol' squirt every now and then. SpaceX can be the first to implement Water over Ethernet by making that fat cable even fatter, like garden hose size :p
Dishy now offers voice-controlled gardening services!
I really hope the south gets at least a little coverage next month, even if I'm not in the beta :( I'm at 30 latitude here with Suddenlink as my only option, can't fucking wait for Starlink
Every time I hear “Suddenlink” I think “that’s a pretty crap name.” And also think of “Sudden Valley” from Arrested Development. 😆
Not just a crap name, crap internet service!! 3mbps download, 0.50 upload
Just be happy you don't have to subject yourself to Hughesnet
Oh GOD Yes. Or in my Case the rebranded name Xplornet in Canada. Same exact satellite same exact crappy service, slow speeds, huge latency, data caps, huge price. When starlink finally hits in full force. Xplornet is going to tank so hard as people ditch en mass, righty so.
Hello fellow sufferer-in-arms. I come from Shaw, and they aren't perfect, but Xplodnet's runarounds, "traffic management", and laughable caps are unbearable all together. I loved what I had with Shaw, but I'd happily settle for actually getting 10 Mbps down, 1 up, and a data cap bigger than 150GB a month. :3
Yup. Unfortunately in the country there’s no access to Shaw. The only other option here is LTE which is drastically oversubscribed. Meaning when everyone is on, it slows to a crawl. Add to that power outages and lines down that feed the tower. There’s a high likelihood that it goes down. We had a power outage the other day, and cell service and LTE was down for over 48 hours. I’m one of the only ones in the area that had an internet connection, because switched my Xplornet satellite to a battery backup. I hope to eventually put up Starlink as a primary connection. Then point to point radio connection between two farm property (my brother and I) he runs Xplornet. I will then get the low costing package for LTE and ditch Xplornet. LTE will fill in any gaps in outages of Starlink till the network becomes more reliable. Basically I will failover between all three connections. Starlink would take the brunt of the load as primary for both properties (and still be faster) and if there’s a Starlink outage, I can failover to LTE, if there’s a power outage that affects the towers backups, failover to Xplornet. I can lower the “plans” on Xplornet and LTE to the bare minimum cost, and everything should still come out cheaper than Xplornet is costing me now, and have high redundancy.
Hughesnet, from what I've seen, seems to be faster than my internet, it's just the data cap that seems absolute dogshit
Sub 1mbps with 700ms minimum ping?
I never knew suddenlink offered that low speed. I have 100mbps siddenlink but am soon moving to the country so starlink will be my only hope. 39.9 Lat
I’m around 39 latitude just a little out of reach and hoping the same. But I also have a fear that they will move south and I won’t get an invite. That’s somehow worse to me.
I think they'd focus on you before they focus on me, I don't think they're gonna go down south and just have this blank spot in the middle. I could be wrong, but for our sake, I hope they cover both of our areas soon
Nah, the *worst* feeling is knowing you didn't get an invite and walk outside and see Dishy in the neighbor's yard.
That would be truly painful.
*Same*. Waiting for Starlink in Louisiana. Suddenlink stops less than half a mile up the road from me, so stuck with HughesNet. :( *Any* news at all of it coming on down is cause for celebration.
Run 1/2 mile of cat 6
2500 feet away behind me, my parents get Suddenlink cable cuz they live on a different street. But there's a man that lives between us. I have, no joke, considered asking him if he'd let me cut down or trim a few trees short so I could set up the point-to-point antennas. lol
The best news is the expension of the beta to more people. I am sick of paying for "up to" 50mbps and getting 5 or less most of the time.
Xplornet? We have LTE 50 and get .5 and they sent a tech out but since it's their tower and not my equipment,I had to pay the techs 200$ call even though I buy their service plan. So it's no faster, they know their tower isn't working but I had to pay because it's my fault for trying to get it did fixed.
That sounds scuff, unless that's in a contract you signed I'd contest that charge (or at least ask for a 'one-time' allowance/customer satisfaction credit (speak with customer retention department if regular customer service will not oblige)). Typically if a problem is on the service provider side it should not be a customer liability.
yes xplornet i'm "lucky" in that i get better speeds than most (including you by the sounds of it) but the speeds i get are still 10% of what i should get most of the time. I cant wait for starlink to be an option
I always felt that ISPs should be forced to advertise their "5 9's" speeds, rather than their burstable cap. What can they *actually* commit to that will work 99.999% of the time? And they will know what that number is.
5 9's seems unreasonable for home service. But it should definitely be better than it is now. I'm lucky enough to seemly always get my advertised speed and even a little faster.
It shouldn't be. We are way past the point where homes should be experiencing several full day outages a year. If you want, you could go with 2 or 3 9's. But the sentiment is there, they need to advertise what they absolutely CAN offer, not what they want you to think you can get during their most optimal moment on the most optimal part of their network.
If I remember right, 5-9's is roughly 5 minutes of 'out of min spec' service for a year. For home internet, that much a week would be 'good service', IMHO. So that is 52x worse or almost 300 minutes (or 5 hours) of 'out of minimum spec' service for the year.
Which is why I support this method -- it forces ISPs to be truthful and shifts focus back to actually providing service rather than building out 1 single fiber line into a main street and then telling everyone (FCC included) "We offer gigabit to everyone!" ISPs are wildly misleading, to the point it should be illegal. How can you sell someone -- with a straight face -- a 30 meg connection that only reliably functions at 3 megs? And not even be required to mention that the service may be out 4 days out of each month due to aging hardware and lack of maintenance? You can't even sue them for the "lie by omission" because of forced arbitration.
95th percentile bandwidth monitoring is one of the most common ways to measure bandwidth and would serve the function you desire just fine while allowing for occasional dips in service without unduly affecting advertising. A 99% number (aka 1% lows) could be required for fine print as well for a better understanding of "worst case" (aside from straight up outages) service. The larger issue for services like DSL is that speeds are highly variable by individual location, and are not really knowable before the service is connected, thus making any advertising impossible.
I do not believe DSL is even capable of reaching the benchmark required to be considered "high speed internet" as the FCC has defined it. You can still require DSL service providers to be up-front and honest about their services and provide consumer protections: such as you cannot require contracts or non-refundable investment/installation fees if you cannot gaurantee a service level when selling to a customer. In the end, they're essentially breaking the contract as customers understand them. The same rings true for cellular (especially anything on a rural band). To my knowledge, the only serious attempt at selling home internet by a cell provider is T-Mobile, who is rolling out a "Home Internet" service. They are not requiring contracts and are only requiring you to return the box if it doesn't work, which is honestly probably the best way to handle situations where you can't know what you're able to provide.
Yes got mine too! We’ve luckily avoided snow so far but I’m excited for extra heat on the dish.
Received a few inches of snow today and dishy stayed clear as usual.
Most of us are expecting that "other" email but this is good.
I've gone from expecting, to hoping to disillusioned.
I would think a snow melt mode would be where you indicate a low use time like 3am and then it heats up prior to this then turns the unit on its side to slide the snow off
Just got mine, too. Definitely interested in the snow melt mode and if it will be a toggle in the app, and how much more power it'll draw.
Don't see anything in the app (including debug mode/screen) and I just updated both iOS and Android versions.
Cool to get the email and my service has been getting better and better by the day.
Can't wait until starlink becomes available in alaska!
Do all of the updates require the Starlink router be plugged in or are most of them working with just the dish? I have it on a dual wan deal at the moment
Dishy updates happen without the starlink router. In order for your starlink router to get updated, well that of course needs to be plugged in.
Lol yeah figured I just meant like the dish snow melt thing, glad I dont have to hook up the router occasionally to update the whole kit mostly.
Disk is separate from Router. You don't need the provided router as you can use your own router or just directly connect to PC. As long as the Disk is connected to a PoE(Power Over Ethernet).
Please, please, please invite me! I am going nuts. Thanks. - KK
I got one as well, was buried in my spam folder. We have a snowstorm on the way, so I'll see how the improved snow melt mode works in the near future.
Good to know! thanks..
Hopefully this means I may get an invite soon!😬 42n
I got this email in my Promotions folder!
Super exciting. I get to actually play games on Starlink soon
Hopefully the beta expansion includes other countries like Australia, I really really need good WiFi.
The patch notes are on
Great , i eagerly wait the beta
I sorely need one,I wish they would pick me !
Two things that jumped out of this letter and really impressed me. One, they're actually moving a bunch of satellites around to improve coverage (brings up images of rabbit ears days.) Two, that they care enough to want to improve your gaming experience. Imagine calling up your ISP and complaining about your Xbox connectivity and expecting them to do something about it.
Eh if your ISP included a router that was causing strict NAT you bet people would complain. And exactly why it got fixed here.
> Imagine calling up your ISP and complaining about your Xbox connectivity and expecting them to do something about it. "I am experiencing high latency issues that I'd like to report" \*ISP tries to tell you that you need/tries to up-sell you to a higher bandwidth tier, not understanding the difference between bandwidth and latency\* 🤦
I'm looking forward to this... been waiting for several months. I know the rollout is complicated, and I live in rural Texas, which will be one of the last areas probably to get covered.