Starlink for RVers
Imperfect but with a potentially bright future.
I want to politely temper your excitement at what Starlink can offer you. This is not, in our opinion, the LTE killer from the gods come to save you from managing multiple plans to work full time from nearly any boondocking location.
There is a layer of pure fan person hype that detracts from the factual experience of being a Starlink owner. I am not a Starlink “hater” but I can’t stress enough that our LTE setup is still far more reliable for Zoom, Slack, and work critical VOIP than Starlink. For now.
Starlink is however, an incredible tool in your arsenal to work from the road and at 135/month, the same cost as a gray market AT&T plan.
Details on our complete internet setup are below or read on for our ongoing Starlink Review.
Before we dive into our Starlink review, let’s get some common questions out of the way.
Yes you can travel with it, not in motion necessarily though some are doing that, but roaming is enabled in the debug flags when you leave your current address. Prior to roaming enabled we used the self service portal to change locations. Read more about roaming here.
There is now an RV specific tier for Starlink, with standard Dishy equipment, order here.
Power consumption is around 30-50 watts for Dishy Gen 2, we use a custom built 12v POE to avoid running an inverter for Dishy.
We have ours roof mounted with a backup ladder mount
We manage our Starlink through a Pepwave BR1 5g Pro so that when it does drop a connection critical traffic like Zoom is not impacted. This takes some setup but is worth it for us.
Our Ongoing Starlink Review
Our first month with Starlink was dreamy, downloading ISO files and games off of Steam at 180+mbps while 50 miles from the nearest city was incredible. Starlink continues to excel at the basic tasks of streaming, downloading and general web surfing today but working from Starlink has proved to be a bit less of a dream state.
We have had Dishy McFlatface since 2/2/22, now going on just about 2.5 months we’ve had it as our primary flagship connection managed via our Pepwave Balance 20x cellular modem.
While incredibly fast at times, Starlink suffers from an understandable (yet still annoying) amount of micro outages per day, and the app you use to manage your dish only reports on those longer than 2 seconds. Latency and jitter sensitive traffic, like my own 12-13 hours of Zoom calls per week, suffer greatly if Dishy has a brief outage. Lucky for me, I can overcome this using Speed Fusion Cloud from Pepwave, where my Verizon LTE plan covers for these incidents so that certain apps are not impacted. More info on that work here.
My Pepwave keeps logs of every time the Starlink connection fails a basic health check, in my case, three re-attempts to ping its own DNS server via Google’s 8.8.4.4. On average Starlink drops out 1-3x a day, sometimes for 5 minutes sometimes for just 20 seconds.
“We do not think for those that need reliable setups that Starlink is going to be their one and only…” - Cherie from the Mobile Internet Resource Center
The quote above is taken from this video, a welcome reminder that even the most experienced connectivity team out there thinks Starlink needs an LTE backup.
Starlink also provides a paltry amount of upload, which for those of us on Zoom video, especially if you have a partner working at the same time over a similar medium, is a tight rope to walk. If you’re uploading a lot, you’ll feel it too. 5-10mbps is the most I’ve ever seen over Starlink. With T-Mobile Home Internet we average 50mbps.
If you were solely streaming or just web browsing, none of these small outages would be very impactful. But for us, working means 50-60 hours per week, for each of us, with our company meetings, client meetings, chat, support emails, etc, all of which we need to be available to conduct just as if we were in the cubicle down the hall from you. Based on chats with other owners of Starlink, this is generally the typical experience, pretty great, not perfect.
Gaming, as a non work critical past time, worked at times on Starlink but has become more and more unreliable as packet loss has increased lately with Dishy. I now route all gaming traffic over our Verizon connection and go about my time hanging out with friends back home.
At this time would I recommend Starlink?
Yes, if you are willing to temper your expectations a bit. If you think of Starlink as another data plan, it goes from somewhat disappointing future tech to a pretty damn good second fiddle, in my opinion. Solely focusing on what Starlink could be takes away from what it is today, which is a much faster, decently reliable connection that will help you work from the road, especially if you have a lot of traffic on your network that is eating up a data cap on your primary cell plan. You could have a whole swath of family streaming Netflix on Starlink while you work away off your LTE connection perfectly. I strongly recommend pairing Starlink with a Pepwave device for this sort of traffic fail over and network management though.