I replaced my DirecTV dish with Starlink.

The other rectangular dish is for our AT&T Fixed Wireless internet connection which is pointed toward a cell tower about a mile away.

Ordering Starlink

How to get Starlink if you're in a waitlist area

I placed a deposit for Starlink years ago, but my address is still in a Waitlist area. However, on May 5, 2022 Starlink added a "portability" feature. This gave me an idea.

What if I place a Starlink order for an Available address, ship to my Waitlist address, then enable Portability for an extra $25/month and pretend I'm just traveling, away from home?

Taking that one step further, once you already have Starlink, you can eventually update your service address, even to a waitlisted area. So that's exactly what I did.

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• Ordered using an Available address in New Jersey with permission from a friend

• Enabled Portability for an extra $25/month

• Shipped to my house in Michigan

• Used Starlink for a few weeks

• Updated my address to my Michigan location

• Canceled my old deposit for Waitlist on same address

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Portability limitations

• Best effort service

"Portability service is provided on a best effort basis. Stated speeds and uninterrupted use of services are not guaranteed. Starlink prioritizes network resources for users at their registered service address. When you bring your Starlink to a new location, this prioritization may result in degraded service, particularly at times of peak usage or network congestion."

• Must stay on the continent you ordered in

• No in-motion use

Placing the order

Using the New Jersey service address I was able to order the Starlink Kit but have it shipped to my address in Michigan. I also ordered an Ethernet Adapter and Pipe Adapter from the Starlink shop.

• Ethernet Adapter

• Pipe Adapter

• Starlink Kit

I received everything by May 17th, so it was only 12 days from order placed to arrival.

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Mounting Starlink with Pipe Adapter

Before heading up the ladder, I threaded the four screws part way into the pipe adapter mount. I placed the Starlink Kit into the backpack which came with it and headed up the ladder with the kit and pipe adapter.

I very carefully removed the DirecTV dish so as not to damage the shingles on the roof, and then heaved it off the side where it landed on my air conditioner unit below leaving a large dent. I had forgotten it was there... oops!

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I spoke a few words to myself about that and continued on with the installation. The next step was to secure the pipe adapter mount to the pole. Using the Allen wrench it came with, I simply tightened each of the screws by hand until they were tight.

Finally, I connected the Starlink Kit to the pipe adapter. It clicked in, locking in place.

Cabling Starlink

The next phase of the installation was running the Starlink cable into the network room in the house, which happened to be the room directly below the dish.

Rather than drilling through the roof, I passed the cabled off the side of the roof and drilled a half-inch inch hole under the soffit.

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I didn't want to drill a hole big enough to pass the bulky USBC head through the walls, so after reading up on guides where people had modified the cables I decided to cut the head off, pass the cable through, then terminate the ends with an RJ45 modular plug and a Keystone jack to get them reconnected.

I headed up into the attic to retrieve the headless Starlink cable and pass it into the network room.

A friend stayed in the network room while I was in the attic taping the Starlink cable to a pull string I had left on a previous cable run. Once attached, he pulled the string down until the Starlink cable came through.

Now that we had the Starlink cable in the network room, it was time to:

• Reconnect the proprietary USB head using an RJ45 modular plug on one end and Keystone jack on the other

• Plug the head of the Starlink cable into the Ethernet Adapter

• Plug the Ethernet Adapter into the Starlink modem for power (using the USB end) and my router's WAN (from the ethernet output)

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Starlink Speed Tests

Starlink hasn't been the connection I hoped for when I ordered it, but it's still useful and quite impressive. Our current provider, AT&T Fixed Wireless, has speeds of about 75mbps down, 10 up with 80-120ms ping. It's usable for just about anything we need to do, but for gaming it will occasionally lag out. We were hoping Starlink's 20-40ms ping would fix that issue.

It's true that we've seen pings as low as 25ms. But it varies a lot. While playing a game we might be getting 0% packet loss and 30ms ping one minute, and 10% packet loss, 2,000ms spikes the next.

We also have some obstructions due to trees and I don't think we'll be able to fix that.

So Starlink is an excellent connection for most things we need, but it hasn't been the gaming connection we hoped for. Because of that, AT&T Fixed Wireless will remain our primary with Starlink as a secondary. I'm hoping Starlink reliability will surpass our AT&T Fixed Wireless connection over time as more satellites launch and our area joins the "Available" address list.

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