Starlink internet service begins public beta in the Methow Valley

It appears that, last week, Starlink notified users who had $100 deposits on orders for equipment and service that their orders were being delayed for up to a year or more. Only days previously, Starlink customers reported from the Starlink account portal homepage that their expected order delivery time was late 2021. Now, it is late 2022 that is being targeted. Some users reported expected order fulfillment dates into 2023.


This is the email that was sent to waitlist customers:

Thank you for being a supporter of Starlink! Over 14 million people have inquired about Starlink service in their area and today Starlink is available in over 20 countries (and counting).

The Starlink team has been working hard to expand service and increase capacity while continuously improving quality of service. We will be able to accommodate more users per area as we increase the number of satellites in orbit.

Check delivery timelines in your account

Silicon shortages over the last 6 months have slowed our expected production rate and impacted our ability to fulfill many Starlink orders this year. We apologize for the delay and are working hard across our engineering, supply chain, and production teams to improve and streamline our product and factory to increase our production rate.

You can check estimated delivery times by logging into your account page on Starlink.com. You will still receive an email from the Starlink team when your order is ready to ship, and you may cancel your order at any time for a full refund of your deposit.

Latest Starlink now in production

We recently released the latest version of Starlink which was designed for high volume manufacturing. The latest version of Starlink has comparable performance to the previous version and will begin to ship globally next year.

Expanding to more countries across the world

Since our October 2020 launch in the United States we have expanded our service to 20 additional countries: Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, Austria, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Switzerland, Portugal, Chile, Poland, Italy, Czech Republic, Mexico, Sweden, and Croatia. Pending regulatory approval, we are planning to launch in an additional 45+ new countries by the end of 2022.

More satellites in orbit with newer technology

We recently completed our 31st Starlink launch with our latest generation of satellites that are equipped with inter-satellite laser links, which enable our satellites to transfer data between each other. Once fully deployed, inter-satellite laser links will make Starlink one of the fastest options available to transfer data around the world.

Yes, the longer outages are mostly between midnight and 5am or so, it seems. Which makes sense to do if they can choose when they happen. But sometimes they might still have one for 15 or 20 minutes during the day, or into the evening. Those don't seem to happen too often though.

Haha, and I know, I'm not complaining (much). I just did a speedtest to Seattle and barely got 45mbps down and about 3.5 up. It's significantly faster still than any of my previous valley services, but just a ways away from what it was in Nov/Dec last year.

I did see that some 60 new satellites were launched yesterday, and a new launch was supposed to happen today with another 60 satellites, but has been delayed to next week. It takes weeks for the satellites to make their way to orbit positions though.

Starlink is targeting 16 to 19 ms latency by the summer, about half of what it usually is currently, so I'm sure they're refining their network and routes all the time through then.

Just this afternoon, I've seen an enormous improvement in uptime percentage. No more tiny connection dropouts every few minutes. Just a few here and there over each hour, minimal. Connection uptime is at 99.6% for the last eight hours. 99.8% for the last hour.

I've been tracking general Starlink performance since acquisition. And for roughly the past 10 days, service was a bit rough in the performance department.

The main issue was that starting on Tuesday, January 26th, Starlink appeared to be testing failover of traffic to ground stations in other geographical regions. Our internet traffic here was apparently no longer routed through a local ground station in Seattle, or even elsewhere in Washington, but instead came out of Starlink's internal network to the internet somewhere in Illinois or Michigan.

This had the effect of greatly increasing ping times - an indication of network latency - to services in Seattle. Instead of a 20 or 30ms latency time, the latency increased to around 140-150ms, as expected for the increased terrestrial distance. Data transfer speeds were also lower.

The region failover test appears to have concluded on Friday, Jan 29th. Though routing had been switched back to Seattle for some hours, once within that time period.

Unfortunately, since about last weekend to earlier today, it seems that speeds have mostly been way down, and connection instability way up. My usual down speeds have dropped from something nearly always over 100 mbps - except in extreme weather, to something over 10 mbps, and usually barely over such as 15 mbps. Upload has been from a stable 15-20 mbps previously, to 1-2 mbps usually, perhaps up to 4 mbps here and there.

We have had some weather events through then, and such things as snow and fog can greatly interfere with the signal to the satellites. No doubt that's part of the performance loss. Also I'm sure that Starlink is still testing and experimenting with aspects of the service.

Still, I do wonder if Starlink's many newly onboarded customers are contributing more load to the network than anticipated and are contributing to the noticeable performance issues lately.

The Starlink service is still in beta, and from what I've seen in these months of service, is that Starlink engineers are obviously experimenting and testing at times, and then things settle down again. So I'm confident that the service comes back to "normal" fairly soon, likely better than it was previously.

Welcome Mbarrington!

Yes, there's no issues with posting recommendations or commercial posts on this forum.

The required install for Starlink is quite easy, but if you're not comfortable being up on a roof, or a ladder, then maybe Charlie can help you with it. He's at methowvalleyhandyman.com/