Favorite team:	LSU
Location:	Baton Rouge
Biography:	Born in Texas, but adopted Louisiana as my home state!
Interests:	College Football, NFL, Baseball, Nascar
Occupation:	Recreation and Real Estate
Number of Posts:	123
Registered on:	10/3/2016
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Starlink deal to jump on now! Deep dive don't read if you have attention deficit disorder.

Posted by Rowdy Mcflowdy on 2/21/26 at 8:49 pm

So I'd been pondering dropping Cox for a good while now but no good alternatives were available. I'd tried tmobile home internet which was very cheap because I'm with tmobile for phone service. It was fantastic 80 percent of the time BUT right around 6pm to about 8pm speeds slowed down every day during peak usage. So that was out. I wanted Starlink but but kept checking estimated speeds and they were somewhat underwhelming. Its apparently fast in rural areas but in more densely populated areas it could slow down a lot during peak usage times.
Well I follow SpaceX very closely and have watched them launching more satellites weekly to improve the network. So I knew it was a matter of time before it got really good.
Then I recently did some research for a client that wanted Starlink added to his luxury vehicle. Then saw they had a new deal.
NO upfront equipment costs. NO installation costs.
That was my biggest problem with trying Starlink. I didn't want to spend 300 for equipment and 300 for installation then find out it wasn't serviceable.
So I ordered installation. To my surprise it also included a "router mini" to use as a mesh extender, wired or wireless. It looks like a tiny Starlink antenna about the size of your hand.
When you order the service shortly thereafter, 24 hours they will call you to coordinate installation. I asked details about where it would be installed because I had specific needs because of my central area where my current equipment is and is hard wired, then the rest of the house is wireless. They said if it was going to require fishing cables there would be an upcharge. I was fine with that as long as things are done right and to my liking.
Equipment was shipped ahead of time to my house. Installation day came and the installer called me a couple of hours before my 1pm scheduled time and asked if I would be ok if we bumped it up to noon because things were going smoothly for him and he was way ahead of schedule. Of course!
Installation day was rough, more so for the installer not so much for me because it was brutally cold and windy that day Baton Rouge. I even tried to reschedule the installation for later in the week out of concern for the installer having to be on the roof in that ugly weather. The lady assured me it would be fine because my installer recently moved here from Colorado and our cold was not a big deal for him.
Ok so installation went well. The antenna didn't get installed where I Ideally wanted which was on the very top of my 2 story house. He installed it on the roof of my back patio. He assured me it would be fine as it could see the northern sky perfectly.
He didn't install the mini mesh router because he said if he did it would be an automatic upcharge but he showed me how to do it and it was super easy if your are doing wireless which I planned to anyway.
After the installer left I added the mini router at my equipment room so I could plug in my hard wired equipment like surveillance camera hub, and other hub type devices that run my smart home equipment. This happened to be on the opposite end of the house from where the main router was installed.
Still great connection. No buffering. I did a lot of speed tests during the week and identified several areas where signal wasn't as excellent as near the main router or the mini mesh router. So I went on the Starlink site and ordered another mini mesh router. They are ONLY 40 dollars each. When I checked out the charge was Zero dollars so I got the second mini for free. So I ordered a 3rd, that one they did charge me for. So I got 3 mesh minis in my house and so far going on 2 weeks its been fantastic. Absolutely zero regrets. No buffering!
Speeds are not officially as good as Cox cable most of the time. With Cox I was on a 500gb plan which only gave speeds of 300 to 400. I have a couple of their pod mesh extenders. And those things are not very good. They are hard to pair to the system and whenever there is a system reboot like after a power outage or a Cox outage you have to go and restart each pod individually. What's really a problem is that you don't realize is that they are offline until your investigating why your area covered by a pod keeps buffering.
Id kept Cox active incase it turned out I had to keep Cox. But Friday I finally did it. I disconnected the Cox modem and drove it to Cox on Millerville. Easy peasy. I expected a retention attempt but no, they were happy to take the equipment back and terminate my account. They didn't even look at the equipment. There could have been a brick in the bag because they never checked anything. (If you have Cox stock sell!!)
So after all this I'll say my only concerns are that we had a storm co.e through last week or early this week, i forget when it rained really hard for maybe 20 minutes. Starlink lost signal for maybe 5 minutes.
It was a short storm so not a lot of long term data there but my internet searching says that the antenna adjusts in such situations and service is restored quickly. Im a little concerned about performance during a hurricane which happens in Baton Rouge every now and then but if things go south I can always switch to my Hotspot on my phone which has never dropped even during the 2016 flood thanks to tmobile which I've been with for 15 years.
So I say all that to say if your considering changing providers go with Starlink.

Rowdy Mcflowdy

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