Starlink Setup

We went from paying 999php for Globe’s 100G of data at ~1-5M speeds that would sometimes get us a full 30 days to Starlink’s 2700php/month for 100M+ upload and download.

With Globe, our internet was hit and miss. 95% of the time we could do Google meetings. Updating Google Earth or downloading a Ubuntu image is slow.

I signed up for Starlink over a year ago and reserved a unit but was refunded after a year went by.

I had difficulty entering a Philippine address due to what appeared to be timeouts when validating an address.

I tried ordering ~15 times across 2 weeks before successfully having a payment go through. Of the 15, I was able to enter payment info 3x but only the last went through.

A case was submitted to Starlink but my impression was that it isn’t something they individually follow up on.

Our globe antenna is on a hill and is unobstructed. It then attache to fiber that goes to our staff house.

Initially, we installed Starlink on our roof

There wasn’t a clear view of the sky and we would regularly get disconnected on calls.

We expected problems at the non-ideal location but as part of due diligence wanted to try it out. It would be more convenient if we didn’t have to run power 200m to the unobstructed location. The network stats confirmed our experience of how we would sometimes lose a connection.

Starlink dish was moved higher on the hill with an unobstructed view of the sky.

This was our fastest test. We are consistently above 100M.

With this, using TeamViewer to connect to a farm machine, downloading a Ubuntu image and updating software was completed in a 3 hour session whereas previously downloading an image was something that would take multiple hours and had to be resumed I think 3 times to get the full file.

We paid 29000php for the hardware but after our purchase Starlink had a deal where it was only 19000 php.

Summary

For us, Starlink is worthwhile. Monthly costs are about double but performance is 100x. The transparency into performance allows us to fix problems encountered and provides a dignity and positive experience. Google meeting calls have higher quality video.

We can now move forward with computer vision and software projects without be slowed down by infrastructure.