Starlink. Great service, terrible router.

Rysters Tech · February 11, 2023

In December 2022 i recieved my starlink equipment which included the rectangular sattelite and the router. There are at least 15 amazon echo's connected, various mobile devices and laptops. I live in central louisiana where internet options are slim to none. There are zero, count them, zero ground options, only sattelite (but suddenlink runs up to literally less than a eighth(0.2km) of a mile away, i can see where it ends from the back porch. This means that starlink is the best option, although im still on a less priority plan. The service is good, never less than 20mbps down usually around 40. The included router is where the problems lie. My router is the latest included one. It has wifi a/c and all that. But it has no ethernet ports, and i dont just mean there are very few, there are zero ports. This is total BS. Unless you shell out for the ethernet adapter (which is 50 dollars for ONE PORT!!!), you cannot connect wired only devices to the Gen2 router (worth noting the Gen1 did have ethernet, as it was POE) unless you have the know-how to flash a router with dd-wrt or similar firmware, setup a client wifi router to act as an ethernet converter, and you might want another one to act as a repeater as the range on 5ghz is terrible, and the channels are combined with no way to seperate them with different SSID's (edit: they snuck an option in there" There is also no way to select a specific wifi channel for either network, there is no way to change the DHCP range, the routers local IP address, or even configure DHCP reservations for static IP's. There is no way to configure your own DNS, in fact, no way to configure much of anything. browsing to 192.168.1.1 simply displays "You are connected to starlink!". Surely grandma will know to check here if she is unsure about which isp she is using. If you try to ssh into it to see if there is any settings there, you get a piece of ASCII art and a story about a young network appliance that dreamed of one day being a proper wifi router, in those dreams he not only had removable and upgradable antennas, something all starlink routers do not have, but even ethernet jacks for wired networking(which the Gen1 had, but the, what a newfound concept!

This unsightly joke does NOT work to keep people from complaining that the included router you are forced to buy rather than a simple external modem like oh i dunno, every other ISP out there!

If the included router was actually any good this wouldnt be a big issue, but it is.

Donut417 · April 24, 2023

On 2/11/2023 at 3:53 PM, Rysters Tech said:

imple external modem like oh idunno, every other ISP out there!

Not sure what ISP's you're referring to. But most provide a modem router combo. Charter is the only cable provider I have heard will provide a plain Jane cable modem and Verizon is the only Fiber provider that I know provides just a standard media converter. All other providers provide a POS gateway device like Starlink. While you can buy your own modems, thats primarily only for cable providers and only due to FCC rules that have been put in place.

Rysters Tech · August 16, 2023

On 4/23/2023 at 9:03 PM, Donut417 said:

Not sure what ISP's you're referring to. But most provide a modem router combo. Charter is the only cable provider I have heard will provide a plain Jane cable modem and Verizon is the only Fiber provider that I know provides just a standard media converter. All other providers provide a POS gateway device like Starlink. While you can buy your own modems, thats primarily only for cable providers and only due to FCC rules that have been put in place.

There's a difference, I could at least with DSL on AT&T go out and purchase my own DSL modem and my own router and use it instead of whatever they provide. To my knowledge they don't explicitly recommend that, but they don't go out of their way to prevent you from doing it. Starlink has no such ability, I shouldn't have to pay my isp more money to use my own equipment instead of theirs for a service that I already pay for.

Donut417 · August 16, 2023

7 hours ago, Rysters Tech said:

There's a difference, I could at least with DSL on AT&T go out and purchase my own DSL modem and my own router and use it instead of whatever they provide. To my knowledge they don't explicitly recommend that, but they don't go out of their way to prevent you from doing it. Starlink has no such ability, I shouldn't have to pay my isp more money to use my own equipment instead of theirs for a service that I already pay for.

If you have an issue with that then maybe contact the FCC or write your congressman/senators. The reason why cable companies have to allow customer owned equipment is due to FCC rules, but the rules only apply to cable companies. Also for reference Fiber providers are the same way as Starlink. AT&T for example only provides a combo unit and you are stuck using it and paying for it forever. Remember this is America, any way to fuck over the working class they are doing it.