Starlink Review | PCMag

Starlink solves a problem that has plagued modern broadband for years: How to reach the rural and remote users who aren’t accessible to traditional cable and fiber internet? If you’re one of the millions of Americans living in an area without high-speed broadband through major internet service providers (ISPs) like Comcast Xfinity, Cox, Verizon Fios, or AT&T Fiber, you may find yourself stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place, wanting (or even needing) speedy internet for school, work, or entertainment, but having very few options, and none of them great.

With Starlink internet, you can finally get usable speeds pretty much anywhere, and at a fairly affordable price. Sure, it’s a little expensive to get started, and the service is far from perfect, but it’s downright revolutionary for farming communities and homes that aren’t in the city or suburbs. For millions of Americans, that’s a life-changing opportunity, enough that the service has already garnered a PCMag Readers’ Choice award. After months of use and weeks of testing, we can confirm that it lives up to the hype.

Editor’s Note 4/8/24: This review was first published in September 2022, but service quality and details can change over time. See how connection speeds, coverage, and pricing have changed in our follow-up evaluation, in which we re-test Starlink service for 2024.

Starlink Internet: From Satellites to Your Home

Starlink is a satellite internet system from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which uses low-Earth-orbiting (LEO) satellites and self-adjusting receiver dishes to provide internet speeds from 50Mbps to 200Mbps almost anywhere on Earth. With more than 2,500 satellites in operation and users needing only a clear view of the sky for reception, Starlink has proven immensely popular in rural areas where traditional broadband services are rarely offered, and where local services are lackluster, at best.

It’s also growing rapidly, with an estimated 500,000 users, from across the US to Australia, Ukraine, and beyond. The satellite-based Starlink system can theoretically be used worldwide, but the majority of service is still limited to North America and Europe. Other parts of the world are labeled “coming soon” on Starlink’s availability map, and even parts of the US are waitlisting potential customers.

(Credit: Starlink)

We don’t often review ISPs at PCMag, with complications arising from location, installation, and the time it takes to properly review a service. Instead, we rely on our readers’ feedback in our annual Fastest ISPs story, as well as other statistics, for a broad picture of the ISP market. But Starlink offers a unique opportunity, with its service largely address-agnostic, and its sign-up and installation process simple. Plus, the level of interest in the futuristic company makes it well worth our while to test.

It also has been a solution to my own very real problem. Shortly after joining PCMag, my family found a home to buy in southeast Idaho. It was a significant change, moving from a well-connected city in Utah to a very rural part of Idaho, and it very nearly didn’t happen. Without adequate internet service, my job is pretty much impossible to do, so finding a workable option was a make-or-break decision in our home-buying process.

Working remotely as the lead PC and hardware reviewer for PCMag, I live online, with heavy demands for testing and moving data (sometimes as much as 70GB in a day), along with the necessities of online meetings and chat services that comprise the modern, distributed workplace. And that’s in addition to a family that’s just as connected—my kids want to watch Curious George and Bluey just as much as my wife wants to make video calls to friends and family, and I want to enjoy streaming shows and the occasional online game.

But with local ISPs offering anemic 40Mbps DSL plans—the best option in our area—the move to rural Idaho almost didn’t happen. Thank heavens for Starlink. I’ve been using it for several months now, both in my daily work and my family time, and it’s become an indispensable part of my newly rural life.

Starlink Service and Plans, Explained

Signing up for Starlink is fairly simple. You start by looking up your address on a map at Starlink.com, and if your location is suitable for service, you can sign up.

(Credit: Starlink)

Starlink requires both a one-time equipment purchase as well as a monthly service fee. The $599 equipment package includes the Starlink dish, router, and mounting equipment. The gear is tied to your account, and service costs $110 per month for the standard plan. It’s month-to-month, with no long-term contract or fees for early cancellation.

It’s also refreshingly free of any extra fees, like equipment costs, data overages, or other annoying charges—just a single monthly fee, with no data cap. And if you need to turn off service for a period, you can do so without closing your account, reactivating it when you’re ready to resume monthly payments. (The one caveat here is that, due to congestion issues, Starlink may not let you back on the service when you’re ready to resume if your area has too many active users.)

(Credit: Starlink.com)

Other plans are also offered, such as a lower tier called the Best Effort plan. This plan promises download speeds ranging from 5Mbps to 100Mbps, which is lower than the standard plan’s 50Mbps to 200Mbps speeds, but gives you the option of skipping the waitlists that have left many hopeful Starlink users waiting for weeks or even months. Skipping the line is only perk here, since the Best Effort plan will cost the same $110 per month as the standard Starlink plan.

Other plans open up flexibility or higher performance, like Starlink RV, which lets you use Starlink in varied locations, ideal for road tripping in rural areas, for $135 per month. On the other extreme is Starlink Maritime, which lets you use Starlink globally on a boat or yacht, for a stratospheric $5,000 per month, plus a $10,000 hardware purchase.

A business tier was also added earlier this year, offering faster, premium connectivity. It’s $500 per month, with a $2,500 equipment purchase. Although residential users can buy it, it’s designed for businesses, with download speeds of up to 350Mbps.

A free app is also available, which is used for everything from managing your Starlink account to setting up equipment and monitoring network performance. We’ll discuss these features below.

Starlink Hardware: Set It and Forget It

With thousands of Starlink satellites orbiting the planet, the technology behind an internet connection is obviously more involved than the equipment at your house, but setting up Starlink’s equipment package is your first step.

(Credit: Brian Westover)

The Starlink kit includes one ground dish, a dish mount, and a Wi-Fi router, along with a power cable and a 75-foot cable that connects the router to the dish. Simple instructions are included to guide you through the setup (check out our own Starlink set-up guide for a detailed walkthrough), and it’s a fairly straightforward process. A range of accessories, like mounts and an Ethernet adapter, are also available for purchase through Starlink’s online store or app.

The Starlink dish is a self-contained unit that’s designed for “set it and forget it” installation. Once the dish is mounted—I put mine on the roof using a pre-existing Dish satellite TV mast—it will automatically adjust its position throughout the day, changing the angle and orientation to switch among the different satellites that pass overhead.

(Credit: Starlink)

It’s made for all seasons, too. The dish has a built-in function that melts snow and ice off of it—no climbing a ladder to brush off snow after a flurry or storm. In the Starlink app, you can turn the snow melt feature on or off, or simply set it to kick on automatically when it detects the first hint of snow buildup.

The included Starlink router offers dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi service (also known as Wi-Fi 5), using a 3×3 MIMO radio that can handle a handful of connected devices at a time. It’s not as speedy as you’d get from newer Wi-Fi 6 and 6E routers, but those standards are better-suited to higher bandwidths, like you’d get with gigabit internet or fiber. The extra speed would go unused with Starlink’s lower-bandwidth offerings.

(Credit: Brian Westover)

The design of the router is a bit unusual in that it has no prominent status lights or onboard controls for resetting the unit or managing the different bands. Instead, there’s a single power indicator on the underside of the router that glows when the unit is plugged in and receiving power. All controls and settings are handled by the accompanying Starlink app.

If you want to pair your Starlink connection with an aftermarket router or mesh system, you’ll need to buy the Starlink Ethernet adapter accessory, since there’s no Ethernet connection available out of the box. That said, in my 2,800-square-foot home, I not only have great coverage throughout both the main floor and basement, but the Wi-Fi covers much of our 1-acre yard, as well.

Starlink Technology: High Tech, Low Orbit

What’s happening overhead is a bit more complicated. Each Starlink ground dish down on Earth communicates with a number of satellites in low earth orbit, some 340 miles aloft. That’s significantly closer than a traditional TV satellite, which orbits at an altitude of approximately 22,000 miles. The closer proximity makes it possible to send and receive signals back and forth, but only in a tight beam directly between satellite and dish. And, because the satellites are in motion, the dish constantly readjusts throughout the day to switch between satellites as they pass overhead, letting users maintain a fairly constant connection throughout the day.

The satellites can service several users within a specific area, and these satellites, in turn, connect to larger ground stations that then connect users to the rest of the internet. The small satellites and fixed ground stations can only handle a certain amount of bandwidth, split between however many users are in the present coverage area below the moving satellite. As a result, congestion can be a problem when too many users are in one area, sharing the same satellite for service. Starlink is hoping to keep this congestion to a minimum by putting more satellites up in the sky, but is also limiting sign-ups in some areas to keep the number of users at a manageable level.

It also makes Starlink especially well-suited to rural areas, where the lower population density keeps a geographic area from being oversaturated with users. It’s also why solutions like T-Mobile Home Internet and Verizon 5G Home Internet are better suited to suburbs and cities, where 5G coverage is best developed.

Starlink Installation: Roll Up Your Sleeves

The dish needs to be set up outdoors, with a clear view of the sky overhead. The Starlink app includes a camera mode that lets you use a smartphone to scan the sky above your intended installation spot, letting you check beforehand that it’s sufficiently free of obstructions.

(Credit: Brian Westover)

The included mount is usable on either flat ground or rooftops, but I also purchased an adapter mount that let me sit the Starlink dish on the mast of an old satellite dish that the previous owner had left on the house.

The most difficult part of installation was simply running the cable into the house through an exterior wall. Unlike the coaxial cable that you would use for cable or satellite, the Starlink cable doesn’t come in raw form with crimpable ends. The cable, which provides power to the dish as well as sending signal back to the router, uses a proprietary connector on each end. Each end has a distinct shape that fits into either the dish mast or the bottom of the router, and the bulky ends are a bit too large to easily fit through whatever smaller hole might already exist for cable or another service. The process isn’t that difficult, but without professional installation, like you might get with cable service, it’s definitely a DIY project you’ll need to figure out.

Starlink Performance, Tested: High Speeds Spotted in the (Actual) Field

Though I’ve been using Starlink consistently since May, we didn’t have an opportunity to do detailed data collection until late August and early September. Data collection uses a small PC in my office running a bandwidth measurement from Ookla’s Speedtest.net every 20 minutes. (Ookla is owned by PCMag’s parent company, Ziff Davis.) The PC also pings Cloudflare and Google domain name servers (1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8) every minute. The resulting record provides thousands of data points for every day of testing, giving us a very clear picture of performance over time.

However, our first few days of testing were skewed by a highly unusual event: a global service outage that disrupted users worldwide for more than 3 hours. As a result, we omitted this obvious outlier from our testing.

(Credit: Brian Westover)

Over several days of performance testing, we saw a range of speeds offered by the Starlink system. On the high end, top speed routinely exceeded 200Mbps, but with lows dipping below 5Mbps. These lows were rare, with speeds otherwise staying above 20Mbps.

The mean download speed remained quite satisfactory, with speeds above 80Mbps almost every day of testing. That more than doubles the 40Mbps top speeds that local DSL service providers offer, and was quite sufficient for my family and home office.

The charts below show the distribution of download, upload, and ping speeds across our testing period.

To provide a clearer view of the day-to-day performance, we looked at the distribution of test results across our several days of testing. The bulk of test results fell between 20Mbps and 160Mbps, with only a few outliers above and below this range. This all tracks with the expected download speeds of 50Mbps to 200Mbps that Starlink promises for its standard service package.

Upload speeds were less impressive, rarely rising above 20Mbps, and the majority falling below 10Mbps. That’s a little low, given that Starlink claims upload speeds of 10Mbps to 20Mbps, but I never did actually notice the slow speeds when I needed to upload data.

Again, this still exceeded the other local options in my location, where some DSL providers could offer download speeds that topped out at 20Mbps to 25Mbps. And, to put this in broader perspective, even the fastest options, like gigabit cable, still deliver upload speeds that are a fraction of the available download speeds.

The other question mark is the ping rate. Even with the bottlenecks of radio transmissions into space, Starlink promises latency of 20 to 40 milliseconds (ms)—low enough for gaming and pretty much everything else. I used it in work meetings over Zoom and Google Chat with no discernable lag time. I also used it to play some casual online games, like Among Us and Fortnite. In every case, I usually had enough speed to handle whatever I wanted to do, but I would run into significant (but temporary) slowdowns as the dish adjusted to switch from one satellite to another periodically during the day. These were rare, but obvious, followed by a quick return to the expected speeds.

The 20ms latency that Starlink advertises is a best-case scenario, and comes with a disclaimer that actual speeds will be lower in daily use, especially in times of congestion. By and large, the speed was more than quick enough for work and play.

If low latency is a must, Starlink may fit the bill, but with one big caveat—consistency is not guaranteed. While it was rare to encounter unexpected lag in my day-to-day use, our testing saw latency creeping up as high as 100ms or more.

Breaking out those ping results, we were also able to look at how latency differed between Cloudflare and Google domain name servers, with pings to 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8, respectively.

In our tests, we saw a small sample of pings to Google’s 8.8.8.8 delivering more of the faster speeds of 30ms or less, but both seemed to offer a similar distribution of latency in our test results. The majority still came in under 60ms, offering speed that in many parts of the country is simply unmatched.

We also performed additional testing in January 2024, and found that overall performance has significantly improved.

Verdict: A Godsend for Country Living

After several months of use and a bit of detailed testing, we can safely make two claims about Starlink. First, it delivers on its claims. The speeds are everything that are promised, the setup is straightforward, and it has one of the simplest sign-up and billing processes we’ve ever encountered.

Second, this isn’t for everybody, but it is a major win for people in rural areas. There are so many parts of the country that don’t have the same high-speed options that are abundant in major cities. Starlink may not have open availability in every part of the world or even across the United States, but if you’re stuck with only one or two ISPs in your area, you should look up whether your address is eligible for the service. If you need it and have service available, it’s a huge win, and that earns it our Editors’ Choice award.