We live in a pretty rural area. Our broadband was rubbish and every time the wind blew the connection would go down. So we got rid of that and used a 4G unlimited data SIM. This was a bit better but the DHCP lease time meant the connection would drop for a little while every 3 days and the IP address would change which meant some stuff on my network would need restarting. This was a pain. Things got a bit better when I introduced another 4G SIM but it still wasn’t ideal. The data rates weren’t that great either and Oli would always be moaning about it all being a bit laggy and slow.
One evening, after a little bit of wine, I noticed that Starlink had dropped the price of their kit in the UK. I asked Oli if he’d be willing to pay for half the kit to speed up his connection – he absolutely was – so I finally pulled the trigger on buying Starlink after years of talking about it.
It finally arrived a week after it was supposed to. The road at the end of my lane was shut and so you had to come in from the other end of the bumpy lane. The DHL driver [ the lazy bastard ] just couldn’t be bothered. Three times they “tried to deliver” it. Three times they utterly couldn’t be arsed. In the end I had to redirect it to a shop pickup point thing and go and get it myself. Fucking DHL.
Whilst waiting for the mounting post to arrive so that I could attach it to my garage I just set it up on the roof outside Oli’s window and ran the cable into his PC. We were getting absolutely blistering speeds and latency was much lower. It’s a whole new internet experience
Finally the mounting post came and I could properly integrate Dishy McFlatFace into my home network and have a 4G SIM as a failover in case those sneaky Chinese bastards ever make good on their threats of blowing the Starlink satellites out of space.
Once everything was integrated into the network I ran around various locations in the house to see what speeds I was getting. My office….super fast. My garage…super fast. Oli’s room…super fast. My kitchen…rubbish. This puzzled me for a while but I plugged the AP straight into the switch in my utility room and then it was super fast. This was a relief as I was worried the cable from my garage to the house was bad…this would have been a massive PITA. Instead it was the cable from my utility room to the kitchen. This is still a potential pain in the ass as it goes through a stud wall and into the ceiling. Before I started pulling cables out of walls and putting new ones in I did a network test. The Ethernet tester in the utility room went 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 so was all good. The tester on the kitchen end went something bonkers like 1, 2, 6, 3, 5, 4, 7, 8. So all this time the Ethernet cable had been done wrong but it was limping along on 4 wires hence the poor data speeds. I’d never noticed the poor data speeds until Starlink came along with my super fast connection.
I chopped the end off and had another go at wiring it up. My least favourite job in the world is wiring up Cat 6 terminators. Anyway, it worked first time and now my kitchen is super fast too.
