Back in 2019 one of the many major roadblocks we faced to moving back to Indiana was where we wanted to build was smack in the middle of an internet desert. You could almost draw the property lines based on the lack of AT&T coverage. Verizon was “ok” (about 1 bar and slow) but not enough for a high speed household load. (This was also before Verizon started offering real unlimited home internet hotspots.) There was point-to-point internet offered in the area that if you had a visual line of sight, you could get 8 MB/s but without a full line-of-sight, it was reduced to less than 1 MB/s and highly prone to going out because of wind or haze in the air. In short, if you worked from home, there simply was no way to do that in this part of Indiana.

As my Father-in-law briefly demonstrated in the above screenshot of a Facebook Messenger conversation, the internet was so bad my in-laws would share numbers when they got anything on a speed test close to 1 MB/s. I left Elizabeth’s message in the screenshot because her name in our shared group is adorable.

As long as we’ve discussed returning to Indiana to build, I’ve been investigating alternative internet possibilities. The primary contender was HughesNet. They offered decent download speeds, but they capped your data usage. And, if you managed to stay under the cap, their ping rate was very high. Ping rate is the time it takes one server to get your signal and respond with a packet. It’s a way of measuring the lag time from clicking a link to getting a server’s response. Or you can think of it as what used to happen when we talked to people on the other side of the world, and there was a delay between receiving and responding. Slow ping rates will inevitably make work-from-home meetings very confusing.

So, when SpaceX’s Starlink program started getting regulation approval, this was a big step towards “we might be able to work in Indiana,” and work is needed if we are to live there.

The CNBC article above discusses how many Starlink competitors are failing or stalled completely. In fact, the internet from a global installation seemed impossible. Each launch was hundreds of millions of dollars; each satellite was bus-sized and placed in geo-stationery orbit so high up the ping rate would always suffer. The Starlink program by SpaceX faced each of these problems head-on:

• Slow ping - Make the satellites go into extremely low Earth orbit (LEO). The closer the satellites, the faster the ping.

• Capacity - The need for affordable high-speed internet was global, very high, and would have to scale to hundreds of homes every couple of square miles in some rural areas or even more in the case of isolated islands. That’s why HughesNet was capped. They only had so much space available on their bus-sized satellites. SpaceX designed Starlink to have tens of thousands of satellites in their system.

• Data Caps - Starlink launched with no data cap. Now there is a data cap, but it’s so high they don’t publish the max; just the percentage of customers that hit it is less than 1%.

• High power needs - I’m not sure I fully understand the details, but I believe the older satellite internet services had high-powered antennas so they could broadcast to their ground stations. Instead, Starlink acts like a mirror and bounces the signal from our backyard to a ground station in Chicago. We’re connecting to the same ground station. Each Starlink is a fancy mirror that redirects signals to a known geo-located spot. Instead of one massive satellite launch every couple of years, SpaceX sends a rocket up of 60 or so satellites every week.

What does all of this mean? Well, that means we can reliably work from home, enjoy Netflix, and go about our days. For the whole world, this means internet deserts are far less common. This was just the first chapter in Starlink's ongoing saga, and its beloved DishyMcFlatFace.

After we got our Starlink Dishy in the mail, we just plugged it in, pointed it to the sky, and had internet. But we didn’t have reliable internet. As anyone who has worked with Starlink, especially in the early beta days, will attest, you must have a nearly uninterrupted sky to have a continuous signal. Thus, whenever the internet goes out, much like Tinkerbell needs the whole world to believe: we need everyone within earshot to holler “Go Dishy Go!” and maybe, our internet will return.