If I do nothing will I still eventually get it? It looks like they want you to agree to the best effort (and pay and wait). Any insight would be appreciated.
Yes.
We were offered "best effort" last September, and chose not to complete our order at that time. Then in April we were notified that we were able to complete the order for regular residential service. We were only given 7 days notice, though, after which we'd lose our spot in line, so keep an eye on your email and promptly read anything with "@starlink.com" in it.
Here's our timeline:
June 2020 - Signed up for Starlink email list - they were only gauging interest and gathering zip codes at this point.
July 2020 - Added my full address to the service
February 2021 - Got notice of starlink availability, within 24 hours of that email I paid a deposit to get on the waiting list since my area had no more spots available. Order confirmed with estimated availability of mid to late 2021.
November 2021 - Blaming silicon shortages they indicate the time is longer, but didn't give it in email. Had to go to the site, and if I recall correctly my order slipped to mid 2022
March 2022 - Notice of price increase, and told that I'd have 7 days notice once my spot became available (ie, they can take as long as they want, but if I take any time I'll lose my spot - a one sided game if there ever was one)
May 2022 - Starlink for RVs is offered.
September 2022 - Delivery slipped to mid 2023, offered "Best effort" option - for the same price as regular residential (again, a ridiculous one-sided game)
April 6, 2023 - I can complete the order in 7 days or I'll be dropped off the list with a full refund automatically.
April 10, 2023 - I see the email and we discuss it. They don't indicate if we are in the new pricing arrangement where people in congested areas pay more than those in uncongested areas, so we just have to assume that we will be paying the higher service rate and base our decision on that.
April 11, 2023 - We complete the order. In addition to the price hike, they also charge $50 for shipping and handling. Amazon could do it for $5, but here's another way for starlink to rake in the money from those in internet poor areas. I also order the ethernet adaptor (shipping free, go figure)
April 13 & 14, 2023 - shipment notices with tracking info
April 15, 2023 - Starlink dish received - Shipped from Groveport, Ohio so next day for me. (ethernet adaptor shipping from same location on the same day didn't arrive until 4/17)
I was able to setup and use the dish the same day I received it, and my service start date in the bill was listed as 4/28, so essentially 2 weeks "free" - probably to handle the return period and make things less of a hassle for refunds and customer partial refund complaints.
We did end up in the more expensive area - $120/mo. They bill about 7 days after a given service period ends. There is no information or estimate about when or if we would ever be moved to a less expensive "uncongested" plan.
Previous setup:
For reference, our internet has largely consisted of multiple cellular hotspots, with their ups and downs. I got an ATT unlimited plan which included unlimited hotspot data for up to 10 lines, we had 2 4G LTE hotspots with 2 yagi antennas per hotspot pointed to our strongest tower. I eventually worked on cobbling together MCTCP which would perform some link aggregation with the use of a VPS, but it was never very stable. Eventually TMobile brought out their 5G hotspot for $50/mo and we gave that a go, and found that it was better in many ways, and since I didn't have to shell out $$$ for the hotspot (5G hotspots are still very expensive) and could use the external antennas with it we switched to that, though kept our ATT free hotspots as well since they only added $20/mo to the ATT plan each, and we had some specific use cases.
In all of this we generally had about 8-32MBps with 60mS down, and 5-10Mbps up. Average about 12mbps down overall. When aggregated I saw speeds as high as 50mbps when the tower wasn't busy, but during the day it just wasn't much better than the t-mobile alone - it seemed to be carrying the load - and there were issues with the ATT and TMobile networks dropping MCTCP packets. I had to enable a VPN for one link because they wouldn't pass the data at all. When they passed the VPN data they appeared to slow it down. The biggest benefit was we had a real, fixed public IP and no longer had to deal with the CGNAT on top of which our router would place another NAT.
Starlink service:
I have a clear, unobstructed view of the sky, according to the starlink dish, and the only time we see speeds below 30mbps or latency greater than 45mS is if it's raining really, really hard with heavy cloud cover. Even then we still get 3mbps or better.
When everyone is on the network and streaming, during the evening when the network seems its slowest, a speed test will usually show 20-40mbps bandwidth still available. It's gotten better since a lightning storm forced a router upgrade and I purchased a set of TP-Link Deco X55 mesh units that handle my high number of wifi connections better.
When I perform the advanced speed test starlink provides that measures speed from the dish to the satellite, then from the dish to my device I generally find about 80-150mbps.
So it's definitely an upgrade from what we had been using, and we'll happily pay the premium until we get fiber, which is being built out with rural funding programs, though we're on the tail end of that too, so it may be another 2 years before it finally reaches us.
At any rate, we decided to hold the course, however I'm pretty sure the "best effort" internet connection would have still been better than our cellular, and we should have upgraded at that point, or even gone for the RV program when it was made available. I held off because I heard reports of others that their starlink was not as good as tmobile's 5G option, and I wasn't going to pay the additional cost for a worse connection. Further, it wasn't clear whether we could keep our place in line, and convert the RV dish to residential when our time came up (it looks like you can't, but I'm guessing if you contacted customer service once you were a paying customer they would figure something out). If we had gottent he best effort in September it would have automatically converted to residential (ostensibly in April when we go to the top of the list - but Starlink has done some shady money/time things in the past which makes me skeptical).
I haven't had reason or need to work with customer service. It just works, it works all the time, and while I'm no die-hard prepper, I do have a few things I've been holding onto, such as a Spot 3 satellite messenger, for emergency use which this resolves. If, like we've experienced twice in the last two decades, things go awry for several days, the cell towers become slow or useless, and our communication avenues become limited, this should still work fairly well. I'm unsure of the ground station backup situation, but with laser link satellites being deployed in the constellations I suspect even nearby ground station outages will not cause significant network outages. This with amateur radio takes care of communications, the well and solar takes care of water and most environmental concerns.
www.starlinkhardware.com
