DirecPC

I have the same issue when calling wifi over starlinik but what works for me is I have a Femto cell which is connected to my router. I turn off wifi calling In the phone which then makes it use the 4g signal from the Femto cell. No issues doing it this way. The Femto cell box was given to me free by my cell provider as we have no signal at our address.

To get access back to your account you might try this email starlinkresolutions@spacex.com No experience myself with it but it's the one recommended as a stcky on this forum. other than that you might try to reach Musk at Twitter where all his energy time and money is fixated. I maintain my old Dsl account because of lack of support.

Update to this, the Tplink router worked Ok for a couple of months, 99% of the time staying on Starllink with a few rare instances where it failed over due to weather, as it is supposed to, with our backup slow DSL. Two nights ago the DSL link went belly up, which happens once a month, and takes a 10 minute call to the provider to get it back up. (Annoying but at least there is someone to call when things go south). On coming back on line, the Tplink promptly switched to the DSL and would not use Starlink. Tried rebooting router, same behavior. As a temporary fix I just pulled the ethernet connection out of the DSL modem, and Starlink was accessible again. Plug DSL cable back in, Tplink switched back to DSL. Rechecked all connections, updated the firmware in the router, tried deleting and rewriting the failover rule, unit still wants to use the DSL. Unplug the DSL it switches to Starlink. In a perplexed fit I switched the ethernet cables from Starlink and the DSL around thinking aha now I fooled ya, and it worked briefly but then switched to the DSL. I then rebooted everything, including Starlink, and this time Starlink is once again the primary WAN and the DSL is the backup and not in use. We will see how long that lasts. As a side note, I was using speed test and whats my ip to see what service was running my internet. Running just Starlink, early in the AM had 60 mbs, noon time hit 130 mbs, now after all this messing around I have 12. However thats non unusual for later in the day, so i dont think its related to the tplink router issue.

How you doing with speeds, for awhile there it seemed your were reporting appallingly low sub 10 mbs speed. Mine have picked up a bit, get 150+ in the early AM, 100 later morning to sometimes early afternoon, and from there it degrades to the 40-60 range by the evening. Still way better than the DSL. I guess alot will depend on what the caps and policies are, if you go to the terms of service (https://www.starlink.com/legal/documents/DOC-1020-91087-64?regionCode=US) ) you can see section 4 where its been updated, but, the actual limits are at this link (https://www.starlink.com/legal/documents/DOC-1138-34130-60) which at this writing is a dead 404 link. I work from home too, engineering, but alot of my stuff does not eat up as much bandwidth, I just started tracking it and It looks like 3 +/- GB a day. The work I have to take in and kick out might be 30 to 100 megs, not much on Starlink but it takes forever to upload it on a 0.5 mbs DSL service. So 250 GB I suspect would not cause me harm, but we dont know thats what it will be or of there will be tiers of degraded service based on usage, or what they call "basic" service will get you. I half wonder though if it be any different from what we already have? Speed tests in the afternoon show clear evidence of throttling., so, will they just be making it official? I have had Starband, Wildblue, way back in the day, and the two things they all had in common were, they never delivered the advertised speeds (and they used weasel words to wash their hands of it) , the data caps were never enough for ordinary usage and when the data caps were hit, the service was as bad as dialup and often worse. I was in 7th heaven when 4 mbs down 0.5 up DSL came in, it was twice as fast as wildbue and unlimited and was ecstatic when they coaxed it up to 8 mbs down. I guess we will see.

This may be the kiss of death, it was for me with every other satellite provider https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacexs-starlink-quietly-mentions-high-speed-data-caps-are-coming-for-us

We are well away from the path Ian took across Florida, at its closest approach it was maybe 80 miles away. I dont think wind speed here exceeded 50. Pleased to see my installer secured the dish to the tower very well, its still up there. Through a day and half of rain, never lost service. Power sometimes flickered on and off but I have everything on battery backup. Was surprised this AM to check the system status in the app and it said I had no outages over the last 12 hours. Speeds are as they usually are for this time of day, sub 50 mbs Was wondering how the ground station fared in Punta Gorda. Located it on GE and it was 5 miles from the path of Ian 7pm when Ian had 125 mph winds. Anyone know how bad it got hit or if it survived intact?

I don't recall doing alot of research other than I wanted to have a router that would pass more than 100 mbs alot of the cheaper multi Wan routers don't do that also I wanted to not spend more than 150 bucks or so. The tplink unit I have does its job ok, we have switched WANs a few times for weather. Its pretty basic though it doesn't have near the customizable settings my 300 dollar linksys router now doing duty as a switch.

Our phone company dsl wireless router was never that good at getting a signal throughout the house. Starlink was slightly better but we use a some what higher end router as an access point to get a better signal everywhere. Also, You may be aware that that routers and access points in general broadcast two networks, one at 2.4 ghz and one over 5ghz. The lower frequency is better at penetrating walls. The starlink router out of the box just has one channel but there is a setting in the app for it to broadcast both frequencies separately as two networks. That's what we did to get better coverage. Because of occasional loss of signal in heavy rain, occasional network issues , concern that if we turned the dsl off the phone company might not be able to restore it qiickly during a major outage of SL, and starlinks internet message only slow customer support, we are keeping the dsl. Currently have starlink and dsl going into a dual Wan failover router that connects to our dual band access point.

As near as I can tell, a goodly number of people using starlink are self employed/work at home /run their business from home, so dont see any difference. The business account Starlink sells is with a bigger dish with higher performance , and is priced accordingly. its available to 'residential' customers who dont mind paying the higher bill for the bigger hardware and service. In your case a residential account should be just find. On sign up it might have to be in one persons name, dont know for sure, all I can say is go try to sign up. Send pics of your church and dish when you are set up

One other update, been testing what works and what stops during failover: - browsing continues seamlessely - streaming continues without interruption - Phone calls are dropped during failover. Tried it both making a call via our femto cell and also just doing basic wifi calling. The femto cell connection light stays on but the call gets dropped. Something about the change in IP I guess.

Short update, figured out the load balancing control in the tplink (its either on or off) and was wondering 1) why I would need to load balance between starlink and an 8 mbs DSL connection and 2) if it was load balancing would it be slowing down my overall connection speed?. Dont know, but I turned load balancing off and let failover stay on. Got an immediate improvement in speed. With load balancing on, was seeing holiday PM speeds dropping below 10 on some runs, with off, speeds are back up to they were before I had installed the failover router, which is to say all over the place at different times of day, as low as 20, as high as 100+. Latest test is 42 mbs.

I picked up and installed a TpLink ER 7206 multi WAN wired router to manage a backup internet connection to Starlink. Reasons below for those interested, otherwise will explain the setup first. Long post, but wanted to provide the details of the setup and how I did it as non network guy. The setup before the failover router was Starlink as router with ethernet adaptor connected via cable to a linksys wireless/wired router placed in switch or bridge mode. Security cameras are both wired and wireless to separate recording box which was connected by cable to the linksys 'switch'. Femto cell connected via wire to the linksys 'switch'. Centurylink operating as router and wireless modem completely separate. In the event of failed Starlink connection, had to manually connect wirelessly to the century link modem and manually pull the cable from the Starlink ethernet adaptor and plug into the Centurylink modem I picked the TpLink ER 7206 multiwan wired router based in part on price and its specs that it could support more than 100 mbs speeds (super cheap ones dont) and it had a variety of failover configurable options. I decided against a new wireless and wired router because we discovered between smart home and entertainment devices plus computers, tablets, phones we had a boatload of connections to the linksys 'switch' which might have to be individually reset to work with a new router if we got rid of the linksys 'switch'. So the set up now is Starlink modem (in bypass mode) to ethernet adator to tplink router WAN primary port. The centurylink modem was also put in bypass/bridge mode and goes to the Tplink WAN/LAN secondary port. (it has a couple). Linksys 'switch" and everything thats connected to it is connected via ethernet cable to the Tplink Lan port. In setting it up, I first connected the tplink unit with a cable to one computer to configure it. Configuration was not that difficult, I am not a network guy so it probably took me longer than some other people might take. To configure failover 'service' there is a setting that has to be enabled in the Tplink router to actually turn on the secondary Wan/Lan port so it can take a WAN connection. There is a second setting elsewhere in the router GUI to configure under what conditions it will switch from the primary WAN to the secondary WAN: it can be set by time of day, loss of primary service, and it can load balance, come on when bandwidth gets too restricted. I think i got it setup for just loss of primary WAN, at this writing I am not sure exactly what its doing with load balancing (like I said, not a network guy). Then I switched the centurylink modem into bridge mode, connected it to the secondary WAN/LAN port on the tplink router. Tested the connection at the computer and it worked ok. Next step was to place the starlink modem into bypass mode, had to do that through the phone app. It flashed some scary red letter warning message in the app but it seems to have gone into bypass mode OK. Then connected the starlink from the internet adaptor to the primary WAN port on the tplink router. In the tplink router on one of the status pages I was able to see both the Starlink IP and Centurylink IP. Computer ipconfig indicated it was connected to Starlink. To test failover I unplugged the starlink cable and the typlink router switched the connection to the centurylink modem; tested it at the computer, and checked the other devices hooked to the linksys 'switch' and they were all working. Put the Starlink cable back in the primary WAN port on the Tplink router, checked the computer ipconfig, and it was back on Starlink. Some post set up notes: I still have access through the android app to the Starlink dish so I can get the status reports. On a computer browser 192.168.100.1 or dishy.starlink.com no longer connects to starlink. On the century link modem I have not found a way to access the modem from a computer at all. (I have read the only way to get it back is to do a reset on it back to its original state, but if anyone has a suggestion, do appreciate it.) The linksys router as switch GUI is still accessible via https://linksys08308.local/. Performance: jury is still out, I am not sure yet how the Tplink failover performs when I get a starlink "network issue", all I can say is so far so good. Speed may be an issue. When I was done with all this late in the afternoon on a labor day weekend and started doing speed tests it seemed like Starlink had totally tanked to sub 10 mbs speeds. Sometimes got 20+, mostly got 5-15. [This is a big concern, consistent super low DSL like speeds would be cause for cancelling service, whats the point in having it?) However, SL speeds typically go in the toilet in the afternoon around here so I tested again earlier this AM and was back up to 60-100+. Later in the AM I am back down to 20-30 mbs. Weird thing is the lower the download speed, the higher the upload speed, seeing 10-20 mbs upload when I get <20 mbs download. So I am thinking the dual WAN setup is not slowing me down, its just Starlink congestion, and its labor day weekend and everybody is home using bandwidth. Security; was not sure about how secure the Tplink router was, but I have tested it via Shields Up! web site (as I did for the Starlink router) and it says I am good as far open ports or UpnP or other such typical concerns. ***** Reasons for doing this I was hoping to pull the plug on our sub 8 mbs centurylink service we have had for years and save $50/mo, but we have found we need to maintain a backup. "Typical" rainfall does not seem to bother Starlink but heavy rainfall we get sometimes does. We also get intermittent "network issues" throughout the day, 90%+ of which do not effect our service, but the SO has complained of a few dropped cell calls through our femto cell unit, and we are doing some live video distance learning which requires an uninterrupted hours+ long connection that does not drop. Finally, in the event of prolonged network outage over hours [which has not happened yet ] the lack of customer service access is scary; centurylink told me if I cancelled service and asked to restart it it may take up to two weeks to turn it back on. So we need a backup, and we need auto switch over rather than manually pulling ethernet cables from one modem to the other for interruptions lasting more than a few seconds. Also still looking at boosting a 4G signal to see what that may do for us, but thats another post)

Well for sure, if you have no other options, wait and see what happens is the tack to take. I waited 18 months on a waiting list to get this, like most of us did, and now its here. Patience was rewarded, good thing I waited and not asked for my $99 back. Now that its here, however, I am seeing a steady degradation in performance. When we first hoisted it aloft, early am was consistently hitting over 100 mbs, now its consistently hitting 40-60 mbs. Still way better than my DSL, but seeing performance drop by nearly a half in almost two months does not bode well for the future, one wonders what it will be like two months from now? Is 20 mbs off peak, 1.5 mbs peak in October the future? . However, one can appreciate this is a new industry, a new technology, it has growing pains. The big problem the other sat providers who promised x and never delivered more than 0.5*X I have used had was not enough bandwidth from not enough satellites. Starlink is clearly working on getting more satellites aloft. They are also working on getting more customers and more people online now that are still waiting for their unit. According to pcmag, they are going to bring more people into already full cells or zones or whatever they call them and they will get "Best Effort" service, meaning degraded, depriortized service over existing "residential" customers. Also did I mention they are going to help TMobile out with their dead zones. Those of us residential customers already seeing degraded, deprioritized service who signed up before "Best Effort" are wondering what this means. If there is any good news to look forward to, PCmag says " people may have to wait until “mid-2023” before SpaceX has enough capacity to offer them standard residential Starlink service, which can receive download speeds between 50Mbps and 200Mbps". So perhaps next year it will be improved. https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacexs-starlink-tackles-pre-order-backlog-with-best-effort-tier

Once in a while my numbers run that low but it's rare. Still have typical early AM speeds 80 to 120, which degrades to 20 to 40 by late afternoon and is also when I might see less than 10. Numbers vary wildly each test. Starlink last month said they were shipping me a new router but never did. Each time I check the account they roll the expected ship date forward. Some odd behavior. Storms don't bother it much, we can lose sat tv and star link usually stays up. But when it doesn't we notice it does not always recover when conditions abate. Have to reboot it. Lately in the evening we notice in the status log we get a ton of network issues. Doesn't seem to effect performance much though. Still keep my DSL, so I am paying 160 a month for internet. Overall, starlink has reliably delivered way better service than the DSL but the two major strikes against it are we are not getting the 100 to 200 mbs speeds it was sold to deliver except like 8 AM, and is well below that as the day goes on; and lack of readily accessible responsive customer service. It's causing me to have another look at other alternatives for backup. One thing I discovered was it's not the case that I don't have a cell signal at all its just very weak. Been taking decibel measurements around the yard and up on the roof . Been talking with signal boost vendors and found I have enough signal I could boost it and get 4g speeds, maybe. It would not be a replacement for starlink but it would be a possible backup to replace the DSL via Hotspot which I get with my cell plan. Or if starlink degrades to sub 4g just get a cell router and pull the plug on starlink. I hope it doesn't come to that, starlink is launching more satellites but it's got to Improve customer service

I have a similar set up with a netgear router, different model. The Starlink box in the house is a power supply but more importantly it is a router, not a modem. So you have one router plugged into another which creates a dual NAT. Dual NAT creates some problems (for an explanation of what that is, see https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/6277579?hl=en)/ )In my case, I could not get anything to work when I first set it up like that to see what would happen, no devices had internet access. You have two choices. One is to disable the router function in the Starlink box, which they call bypass mode. In bypass mode, your starlink becomes kind of like a modem. I considered going that route but I heard if you do that than you lose access to some of the features in the Starlink app, and I did not like that idea very much. The other option is you can put your netgear router into access point/ switch mode, so it acts like a switch instead of a router. Netgear calls that Bridge Mode. To put your netgear router into bridge mode, get the documentation for the router and look up how to do it. In my case it was dirt simple, go into the router admin, go someplace, check this, and voila. Even better, the operation of all the devices we have hooked up continued to work seamlessly going through the router in bridge mode, did not have to change a thing. The downside of course is in switch or bridge mode you lose alot of the functions a router provides, one of those being the security it provides, so you rely on the security of the starlink router instead of the netgear router. After researching that some, I decided the Starlink router was pretty secure and a non issue. Now when I want to visit the starlink router, I go to 192.168.100.1. 192.168.1.1 takes me direct to starlink.com. To get into the netgear router, a couple of ways. You can go into the starlink app, go into connected devices and look up the IP address of bridge moded router. Alternate is when you switch the router into bridge mode, copy the URL of the unit after the switch. In my case it was something like https://linksys123456.local/ (where 123456 was the model) Hope that helps

Hard to compare the graphic but it looks similar to what mine looked like before I decided to have the dish moved atop a tower to clear trees I was not willing to cut down. Pre and Post move I don't see much noticeable difference in speed, first day I thought it was slower but since then I find the performance is the same overall , blazing fast one test in the am and so so the next, and dropping below 50 mbs in the afternoon. I suspect unless your obstructions are knocking you off line quite often like every minute maybe, they probably don't have much effect on speed. What eliminating the obstructions does however is that in the statistics part of the starlink app, "outages" due to obstructions totally disappears. Pre and post move I didnt really notice the 2 seconds or greater outages every so many minutes the app tracks, either in web browsing or streaming. Once in a while I noticed my cell phone calls would get a bit warbly (we have no cell signal here, so to use our cell phone our calls go through a femto cell box connected to a router in switch mode connected to the ethernet adaptor connected to the starlink router). No problems with cell calls now. The other effect, not so much on performance, but on customer service. I was puzzled by the way the starlink would test fast speed one minute and slow down , sometimes to DSL speed, the next, so I had a ticket for that. Took a week to get a response. And then it was, remove your obstructions. Ok, done, still weird. Works but wierd, is this how its supposed to work? CS got back pretty quick, had me run tests through and out of the adaptor , and decided my router was acting whacky, so they are sending me a new router and adaptor. Whether that solves it or whether the real issue is just a whole lotta people coming on board, I dont know. But, I kinda suspect their tech support is pretty overloaded and if you have obstructions showing up in the app, whether or not you really notice any of the outages those cause problems or not, they will will want you to deal with it before they do more effort. Just my opinion. My tests and original obstruction pic here

While waiting for the new router and adaptor to get here, am noticing some different behavior on the speed tests with Ookla. It will start out fast then increase speed with the meter showing fluctuating digits then, it will stop at a certain speed, no change in digits for awhile, then the speed drops way back and then slowly ramps up again, but never faster than it started out. Run the speed test through the dish app, it shows less of a level halt, but you can kinda see how it can ramp up, drop back, and the come back Now this is the AM and Starlink for me has been consistently better in the AM than later in the day, and I sometimes get over 150 once in a while in the AM. This AM I think 74/10 is OK. I heard this was marketed at up to 200, but I also see the target service level for non commercial accounts is 50 down and 10 up. That is quite an improvement over my DSL. Still wondering if its $110 more. Two nights ago, lost service for about 45 minutes, still had DSL and not sure I can pull the plug on that yet.

Working from home I have had a chance to do alot of tests and track the results I found with Starlink the speeds vary so much from test to test one or two tests dont mean much its the aggregate average speed you get. What I found is the average goes down during the day. And it is weird uploads are sometimes faster than downloads. On the customer service front, shared my data with SL and they have been much better getting back to me within a couple of hours. Based on the data i sent them,they are sending out a new router and adapter. I get the impression from this forum and reddit that is not unusual. Here is yesterdays average DL speeds , sub 40 is when I am getting as the days goes on: 10-12 84.9 12-2 80.6 2-4 28

No I did not want to lose access to the data and app functionality. To the ethernet adaptor I have a router connected that has been put in switch or access point mode. 8 can run speed tests connected to the starkink router or through the switch and adaptor and if I find the sl router speed is way faster than the adaptor and switch.

That looks considerably more obstructed than mine was. Running alot of tests before and after relocating the dish i concluded the obstructions did not impact speed so much as they caused outages In my case every few minutes. Most were not noticeable. But I suspect with as much as you have with less than a minute frequency it could be a problem. In my case it was either cut down several trees or put the dish on a tower or live with the short outages and figure every time I might have to contact support they would blame everything on obstructions. I opted for the tower. The tower is a 3 leg 40 foot TV antenna type.

That is a starlink box I am seeing in these screen caps and video? From https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/24/world/europe/ukraine-war-mariupol-azovstal.html 101584_1_Vid-Azovstal-Open-Air-Corridor_wg_720p.mp4

That is a starlink box I am seeing in these screen caps and video? 101584_1_Vid-Azovstal-Open-Air-Corridor_wg_720p.mp4

Been through more or less the same things, slower than expected speeds, email starlink, wait a week, get a message obstructions may be a factor, spend a couple hundred more to relocate the dish, no obstructions, no change in performance, if anything, slightly poorer. Email again, wait a week, get a response send us a picture of the dish (WHY?), and latest is unplug the ethernet adaptor try again. I kinda suspect there is an issue with this new wireless only router that requires the ethernet adaptor to hook in any wired connections one may need, but I think clearly increasing network congestion is the major factor, as speeds are much better early in the day and goes downhill as the day goes on. One other check I have to run, and that is disconnect everything that is connected to the router and do multiple speed tests one device only connected. Not long ago I was getting speeds 60-180, every test way different, with an average in the high 80s, now the average running 40-60. Uploads all over the map too, 5-15 typical Compared to the DSL we had , correction , still have, this is still a major improvement over 6-8 down and 0.5 up. Its also its been up pretty continuously, my DSL goes out every couple of weeks. Web browsing at starlink is not that much different from DSL. Where we notice the improvement is a once in awhile intermittent streaming service buffering problem we had is gone, and pushing work out of here over 5 megs is alot easier, and accessing remotely our security cameras is alot better. For that we pay an extra $110 a month and the question is, is it good value?. I call it extra because with the email only long delays reaching customer service, I am not ready to cut the $50 a month bill to the DSL provider. When the DSL goes out, even on weekends, it takes a phone call and 15 minutes of voice prompt hell to get it back up. If Starlink goes down and the only way to connect to them is through the internet and the app, what do you do with no internet, and then they take a week to get back to you? Dont even get a cell signal here. Over the years I have had several satellite providers, all promised x, all delivered 50% of x. The old sat tech was delivered at best 1.5 mbs, and I see today you can get 30+ mbs., but still with the dreaded datacaps, which was the end of it for us, was so happy when DSL came. At least Starlink does not have data caps. Maybe as Starlink puts more satellites in orbit, maybe as the customer base increases they will improve customer service, more ground stations or whatever goes in, and it will improve. So bottom line, for now, we will keep it on, but I consider it month to month. If next month the speeds degrade further, I will probably pull the plug.

The first day with it up on the tower was kind of disappointing. However within 24 hours it auto updated its software and auto rebooted a couple of times. Speeds now are more or less what they were before, which is to say, all over the map. Generally 100-150 in the AM and slower in the afternoon. However, when I run the average and std deviation on the speeds, its back to where it was pre move, so OK I guess. Biggest change however is when I check the app for obstructions and outages, now it says there are none. Other than a couple a couple of "network issues" over a 12 hour period, no obstructed issues, so thats a major improvement. Over the last couple of weeks we have periods of rain. Rain does not seem to bother it much, except yesterday, when it went off line for an hour and a half following a heavy thunderstorm. I manually rebooted it and it came back up. Has me wondering how often I might have to do a manual reboot, biggest concern is when we go away and want to access our security cameras might not be able to. Have similar episodic loss of our service with our troublesome DSL but I can actually phone Centurylink from afar and they can "clear the ports" or whatever they do and get it going again. (By contrast contacted Starlink about the degraded performance after moving it to the tower day 1 and days later still have not heard anything back from them, not even an auto response; their CS is scary). I half wonder if when we go away I should put a timer on the power to the SL router to force an auto reboot once a day or something. Or maybe install a fail over router to switch to the DSL. Or both. I was kind of expecting the speeds to be consistently closer to 200. They vary alot, almost seems cyclical how it goes up and down, which I wonder if its related to the orbits of different satellites and where it makes a connection. In any case, at its worse performance, its still many many times faster than DSL, so aside from CS, am feeling better about this.

Ok, so I brought the installer back out at my cost and had the DIsh moved and reinstalled atop a 40 foot tower, trees no longer an issue. Sorry I did, latency has gone up, speeds now 30-50 max down, 3-5 up, generally web browsing is sluggish, would be better on my much slower DSL. Performance was much much better when the Dish was on the roof and partially obstructed every 7 minutes. Debating whether I should blow another couple hundred dollars and move it back to the roof. This was performance at various time yesterday partially obstructed on the roof, should i put it back?