Starlink Available? Says I can now order.

[Emilia]

Just received this email about starlink: 


Hardware costs 499 euro and the price of the plan monthly is 99 euro a month. Theres recent posts about starlink in kerry if you google it, not really sure what they mean by that, is it like a data center in kerry for the satellites or the first order available there?  

Link: https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/elon...85422.html

Managed to get my address to work by using google plus code, wondering should I order it    . I can't understand if they mean they will ship the dish in mid-late 2021 or they are just using that as their target for when it should be covered.

 

I'd definitely be interested in it , especially for the latency aspect.

[PJB]

Its fairly pricey, but apart from the costs its the line they use "There will also be brief periods of no connectivity at all" that would a problem. Would it be 5mins a week or 5hrs a day?

[Seán]

That's great that they are taking orders now. The following website has a handy interactive map to estimate Starlink uptime based on a choice of a 25 or 35 degree minimum elevation clearance angle.  The Starlink satellite will work down 25 degrees of elevation during the beta phase.  Once they have enough satellites up, it should work with 35 degrees minimum elevation and possibly also with less clearance of the sky with multiple satellites to choose from.

https://sebsebmc.github.io/starlink-coverage/index.html

Although I live in a valley, I have complete clearance across the southern horizon well below the 25 degree minimum elevation.  Going by the site, this would give me just 2 minutes of downtime per day:

   

The south of Co. Cork is currently the ideal spot with 100% uptime:

   

Even the tip of Co. Donegal has just 3 minutes of estimated downtime, assuming good clearance to the south:

   

Unfortunately, the price is too high for me, a lot more than I anticipated they would charge in Ireland, especially for a beta service.  If the NBI takes 5 years to reach me, the total cost would work out around €4000 based on cancelling my Three and 48 SIMs. If they could bring the price down to €60/month, I would definitely sign up. That would also give Imagine a big shake up.

I reckon the mid-late 2021 wait is for them to get a ground station installed to provide the uplink.  As they currently don't have satellite to satellite links on most of their satellites, this means that the ground station needs to be in view of the satellite that the user's dish is attempting to connect over, so the downtime may be a little higher.  On the other hand, with Starlink launching satellites every week or two, there will likely be over double the number of satellites in space in 6 months if that's around when they'll start dispatching their Irish orders.