I've been a user of Starlink for over three years now. Recently they started offering their portable Starlink Mini for "free" to those who have been customers for more than two years. I thought it was a good deal and picked it up. Here's my experiences and how I'm planning on using it as a ham radio tool.
I've felt the struggle of poor internet access since moving into our old farm house. The local phone company's infrastructure is in rough shape and they refuse to fix it. So DSL is slow (<1 Mbps) if it's working at all. The only other option was cellular based internet which was also limited by weak signal strength. So I was excited to try Starlink when they finally opened orders for our area.
Residential service has been fantastic. The low earth orbit satellites provide a low latency connection and the speeds have increased steadily over the years as they launch more satellites into orbit. Many times I wished I could take the service with me, however it's been too cost preventive.
Recently they started to provide portable units for "free" to loyal residential customers. By free, they actually mean no up front hardware cost. You have to use it with either the standby plan or one of the other mobile plans, and you can't cancel or modify your existing residential service or you have to send the mini back. I figured since I'm probably going to be keeping my residential service for the foreseeable future, I would take the offer.
The cheapest option is to keep the unit in standby which is a fee of $5/month, which gets you an unlimited 500 kbps connection. At first glance this sounds like an atrocious speed limit until you think about the other options available. For example, before Starlink you had a couple of providers that primarily offered sat phones which had data rates of around 300-400 Kbps and the cost was astronomical. But if you had to have a data connection anywhere that was your only choice.
So what does 500 Kbps look like in a real world scenario? Not as bad as you might think. 500k is enough to use WiFi calling, basic web browsing, email, and even video chat. The modern web is bloated and bandwidth consuming, but if you are smart about things you can get a lot out of such limited speeds.
For example, there are some apps that are designed for lower bandwidth conditions. If you are a Facebook user, you should look into the Facebook Lite app. If web pages seem too slow, install an ad blocking browser extension to limit unnecessary junk from loading. If you are using a Windows device, you can change your connection to metered and save on bandwidth usage. You can even visit YouTube as long as you set the video resolution to something smaller (<420p).
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A quick and dirty mount on the back of my truck under the bed cover.
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I've had the mini for a couple weeks now and have only used the 500K service. In my personal experience it works well as long as a single person is using it. 500K is enough for an individual's basic internet needs, but sharing the connection isn't advised. I have deployed it in an open area with no obstructions as well as mounted under the vinyl bed cover on the back of my truck. The latter is most impressive as using it mobile in areas where I would normally have no internet at all is a huge plus. The limited speed is enough for Google maps to load as well as stream music while traveling. My son like to play multiplayer games and it worked just fine for him due to the low latency. (Note: Playing games isn't normally bandwidth consuming. But, downloading maps or other content doesn't work so well over a slow connection.)
The mini has the ability to operate on a large swath of dc power from 12 to 48 volts. I tested it with the plug in power supply it came with, a fully charged 12v LFP battery, as well as some old 36 volt ebike batteries I had laying around and all seemed to perform equally. The Starlink app as well as my inline power meter showed the equipment drew about 20 watts while I was testing it, however the specs state it requires a 65-100 watt supply. I imagine the higher power requirements listed are for the snow melt feature or are for instances where the transmit power is increased due to obstructions.
Adding the mini to my tool box means I'll have some form of internet connectivity if deploying for a public service event or to a real emergency. One advantage of the deal I acquired is the roaming plans are half off. So when I need a faster connection it's easy enough to enable faster speeds on demand. As of this writing there are two higher speed plans available, a 50GB plan which allows for 50GB of consumption and a per gigabyte fee thereafter or the unlimited roam plan. The first normally costing $50/month and the unlimited costing $165/month.
Whether it's a good deal or not is up to your use case. I think the $5/month fee and free hardware is a great opportunity. If you are into emergency communication or like to be connected while traveling/camping, I think it's excellent. My only concern is that Starlink likes to change service plans pretty often and I can see them scrapping this deal quick if people take advantage of the cheap low bandwidth option without at least occasionally upgrading their service to one of the other options. But, while it lasts, I'm adding it to my list of items to pack out with me when being deployed.
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