In this week's Grand Adventure
we're going to update you on Starlink satellite Internet for your RV for 2023. Starlink is rapidly evolving and a lot has changed even since our own videos on
Starlink produced only a year ago. We'll share everything you
need to know about Starlink, including what's good, what's bad, and
whether Starlink in your RV is for you. So stay tuned! So what is Starlink? It's a satellite-based Internet service
run by Elon Musk's company SpaceX, whereby users connect to a
constellation of over 2,700 satellites in low earth orbit above the world, with
tens of thousands of satellites planned. The moving green dots on this
map represent the satellites. Satellites then relay the signal to ground
stations connected to the Internet backbone, the stationary orange dots on this map. It works virtually everywhere in North America, even in places where there
is no cell phone service.
Those satellites orbit about
342 miles above the Earth, far less than the 22,000 miles that
geostationary satellites orbit at. That means lower latency. Latency is the time it takes
for a packet of data to go from the user to the satellite, back to the user and it's a fraction of that time
using low earth orbit satellites, which means faster Internet. Starlink has also introduced
service dedicated for RV use and coming up in the very near future Starlink
plans to use its Starship launch vehicle rather than the Falcon launch vehicle, which will enable the company to launch
many many more satellites per launch. So who is Starlink for? Anyone who needs high-speed Internet
service virtually anywhere in North America, and that can include remote workers
like ourselves who work from our RV, folks who want to stay connected
while they're in their RV, or folks who have kids who want to.
It's available for those in rural areas for
their residential service where high-speed Internet is very difficult,
if not impossible to come by. And even for folks who may not be
so worried about Internet service but want to have cell phone
service anywhere that they camp. So where exactly does Starlink work? The answer is virtually anywhere in North America where you have a clear view of
the northern half of the sky and that includes the polar
regions and many regions in Alaska that were only recently added
to Starlink's coverage map. Any of the areas that aren't
shown in grey on this map. So what makes Starlink special? Higher speeds, lower costs, and more
data than other satellite providers like ViaSat or HughesNet ,or
even your cell phone carriers. So how do you sign up for Starlink? You simply head on over to
their website at starlink.com. Now there are two primary versions of Starlink
that we're going to talk about in this video. One is for residential use, and
the other is dedicated for RV use. Now there are other versions available as well
for businesses and commercial enterprises, for boats out at sea, for motorhomes
while you're traveling down the road, but quite frankly those come
at a substantially higher cost and we're not going to dedicate any
time in this video to those versions.
We're going to focus on
residential and Starlink RV. So what does Starlink cost? Well, residential service goes for $110 per month and if you want to use that in your RV there's
a $25 per month upcharge for portability. Now you can turn that upcharge
on and off, but the total is $135 which not coincidentally, is the price for Starlink RV service.
$135 per month, including portability. We said that data transfer
on Starlink is unlimited and that's true, but with one minor
caveat that's coming up fairly soon. And that is Starlink has announced that they are going to institute a soft cap of
one terabyte of data per month. What that means is that if you're a
residential customer you receive prioritization on that first one terabyte in your
area over other users like Starlink RV that receive service on a best effort basis. If you happen to exceed that one terabyte
cap you can buy more priority data or you can simply be served as best effort
along with everybody else in your area.
Now a couple of thoughts on that. One, it's really only affecting
Starlink residential customers because Starlink RV is always provided
on a best effort basis anyway. Number two, you really have
to be an extreme power user to even come close to one terabytes' worth of data That's a lot of data! Now, Starlink initially announced that they were
going to institute this soft cap in December then they bumped it back to February. Now they're saying it will be instituted
at the earliest sometime in April. So what are the advantages of Starlink? Well, for one thing it works
absolutely anywhere in North America including areas that have
no cell service whatsoever. It's also far more cost effective than
other satellite internet providers or even cell phone companies providing
internet data with their cell phone plans.
