We bought a Starlink Mini for the use case of frequent travel to far-off (international) places with limited mobile service, where we occasionally need to get online for high-priority work tasks or meetings. For $55 / month for 100GB and flexible usage in many countries, it was extremely useful.
Then, recently, SpaceX changed the terms such that the 100GB and 300GB subscriptions are no longer usable internationally (technically outside of North America). You have to pay for the unlimited service tier and even then can only use it for 30 days before returning to the home region.
A huge decrease in utility and a tripling in cost. A new device with a built-in battery is definitely not going to make up for that.
(Still a great service when it works, am posting this from remote western Mongolia.)
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rmm
This has completely changed my industry (hard rock mining). A lot of the time drillers would be in the middle of nowhere looking for resources and would be sometimes days away from providing results (which also lead to lots of dodgy situations where drillers would know some results before market…) now it’s instant live feed. It’s made revising drilling plans trivial. Very cool
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zxcvbn4038
I live in a remote part of the US and if you go more than three miles from the interstate there is no cell service at all. Likewise you can easily travel sixty miles without cell service, gas stations, or even rest stops. I put a Starlink Mini in my car because it ensures access to both navigation data via the internet and emergency services via WiFi calling. Since it might be many hours until someone can get to me I paired my Starlink Mini with a Jackery power station so even if my engine won’t start I’ve got about thirty hours of power. Because of the 100gb limit I won’t be spending those hours watching YouTube, but I’ll be able to call out and people will be able to call me back.
Or as I’ve explained to other people it’s great that AAA will tow me a hundred miles if I need it, but if I can’t call them then what good is it?
artdigital
I wanted to get one so bad because I’m a very frequent travelled and the idea of Starlink sounded so interesting
I just checked a few weeks ago and “Roam” does no longer include international coverage at all. Only “Roam unlimited” does, and only for 30 days at a time which entirely defeats the purpose for me. Also no way to replenish this quota or buy additional, you have to go back to your country for it to reset.
My SIM card already gives me 14 days of roaming included, so Starlink is just marginally better for my use case.
I’m sure it’s regulations related but still a bummer :(
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cwt137
Recently, I've been watching ultramarathon races (Western States, UTMB, Javalina Jundred, etc.) live online. All of them have been doing live video shots of the race leaders with a camera man on a mountain bike using a Starlink Mini on the back (with networking gear and batteries in a backpack). This new Starlink Mini 2 will be a more compact solution for the cameraman and possibly give the producers of the live broadcast more options and maybe more interesting shots.
noodlesUK
I want so badly for starlink to offer a sensible well priced self-service B2B offering with fleet management. Any kind of fixed, high bandwidth IoT device that currently has a SIM card could easily use a starlink. As it stands SMBs who want this have to screw around with residential starlink and live in fear that they’ll get banned.
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asats
And it seems to have a normal USB-C port now! Excellent, having to order that old weird cable of theirs was a pain, especially when one broke out in the wild.
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Tepix
Starlink Mini improved the power consumption a lot. Does Starlink Mini 2 improve things further? The page lacks specs.
I read elsewhere the battery has 71Wh and lasts 4.5h. That's 15.77W/h if it indeed uses 100% of the battery's capacity.
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porphyra
They should totally sell a foldable solar panel for the ultimate offgrid set-it-and-forget-it internet solution.
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modeless
Removable battery is cool. Does "quick-swap" mean you can switch the battery while it's operating? I always thought it would be a good idea for devices like this to have a tiny secondary battery or large capacitor in the main unit that would let it keep going for a few seconds while you swap the main battery.
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sdorf
Starlink Mini 1st has been on 'clearance' for $149 for a while. Wonder if this is a worthwhile upgrade for truck camping or if the Mini 1 is still a good deal. No indication on price yet?
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drecoe
Got a lot of usage with my Mini when traveling across the southwestern US and Mexico, but they no longer allow travel usage outside US/Canada which is a huge bummer and forced me to switch back to cell coverage which isn’t nearly as good.
tarpitt
Starlink is an interesting option for RVs, but I can't use it because they don't offer static IPs or even ip addresses that aren't behind NAT.
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PStamatiou
It seems like the launch requires purchasing it with a bundled 1 year subscription for $999. I hope they sell it standalone like the old Mini. I'm planning to pick one up to have as primarily backup internet and just pay the standby fee to have it paused as needed.
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soundworlds
Because this is so useful to several industries, governments absolutely cannot let Elon maintain a monopoly on what may become fundamental infrastructure. We've already seen what happened in Ukraine.
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victorbuilds
I bought the Starlink Gen 2 out of curiosity and used it for a couple of months, it was too expensive to justify the limited 100Mb/s speed so I packed it and switched to fiber optic. But I do see myself buying a Mini when I do retire and travel the world...
tsxng
This is great for national park. I've been looking for a portable network device that can be attached in my car for a long time.
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arjie
Smart. Everywhere we take the Mini we also haul a portable battery. A fun thing we did a few times was that we took the whole thing on a weekday to Golden Gate Park and my wife and I worked while my daughter and grandparents played around and saw things and then they came back and we ate lunch and they went back around to see stuff. Lots of fun.
Park was practically empty and it was a bright and sunny day.
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apparent
This is nice if you want to be able to work remotely, but for purely emergency purposes is it materially better than sending iMessage over satellite?
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varispeed
Don't support Russian assets.
Gshaheen
Maybe it's just me, but the heart of going camping, adventuring, out into the wild, going to the beach, etc (essentially, getting away from it all), seems in nearly direct opposition to having internet at every single one of these places.
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34679
Man, I literally just set up my Starlink Mini about 2 hours ago.
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fox833
I use Starlink on my small boat near shore in PNW - where there is no mobile network, works perfect, DC cable is inconvinience, battery is much more useful imo. Great upgrade
roughly
The upside of Starlink is it’s not easily blockable by a terrestrial nation state; the downside of Starlink is it’s easily blockable by a single fickle trillionaire. That first problem’s been a bear to work around for the entire Internet era, that second one’s gonna be the challenge going forward.
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pythonRon
I'm waiting for someone other than the Skunk to bring out satellite service.
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fedpost
Excited to see how the huge cottage industry of people trying to package minis into weapons systems react to this. It looks like it'll be slightly more of a pain in the ass than the previous version but maybe Elon threw the MIC a bone and made them disassemble-able
Yes, this is really a thing, yes, I'm being sarcastic.
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t1234s
I want one of these magic internet rectangles especially now that they have a battery.
Do you know if they offer a sort of pay as you need it plan like when you go out of town you can just buy bandwidth in blocks and use as needed?
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swed420
Cool, they hijacked the browser back button. That's a requirement for anybody I do business with.
mrheosuper
In this AI Age, it surprises me that no nerd has hook SDR to the chatbot and Reverse engineer the Starlink, and further, enjoy the free internet.
Epimethus
Comrade, what is SKU number for the Ratnik version?
We bought a Starlink Mini for the use case of frequent travel to far-off (international) places with limited mobile service, where we occasionally need to get online for high-priority work tasks or meetings. For $55 / month for 100GB and flexible usage in many countries, it was extremely useful.
Then, recently, SpaceX changed the terms such that the 100GB and 300GB subscriptions are no longer usable internationally (technically outside of North America). You have to pay for the unlimited service tier and even then can only use it for 30 days before returning to the home region.
A huge decrease in utility and a tripling in cost. A new device with a built-in battery is definitely not going to make up for that.
(Still a great service when it works, am posting this from remote western Mongolia.)
This has completely changed my industry (hard rock mining). A lot of the time drillers would be in the middle of nowhere looking for resources and would be sometimes days away from providing results (which also lead to lots of dodgy situations where drillers would know some results before market…) now it’s instant live feed. It’s made revising drilling plans trivial. Very cool
I live in a remote part of the US and if you go more than three miles from the interstate there is no cell service at all. Likewise you can easily travel sixty miles without cell service, gas stations, or even rest stops. I put a Starlink Mini in my car because it ensures access to both navigation data via the internet and emergency services via WiFi calling. Since it might be many hours until someone can get to me I paired my Starlink Mini with a Jackery power station so even if my engine won’t start I’ve got about thirty hours of power. Because of the 100gb limit I won’t be spending those hours watching YouTube, but I’ll be able to call out and people will be able to call me back.
Or as I’ve explained to other people it’s great that AAA will tow me a hundred miles if I need it, but if I can’t call them then what good is it?
I wanted to get one so bad because I’m a very frequent travelled and the idea of Starlink sounded so interesting
I just checked a few weeks ago and “Roam” does no longer include international coverage at all. Only “Roam unlimited” does, and only for 30 days at a time which entirely defeats the purpose for me. Also no way to replenish this quota or buy additional, you have to go back to your country for it to reset.
My SIM card already gives me 14 days of roaming included, so Starlink is just marginally better for my use case.
I’m sure it’s regulations related but still a bummer :(
Recently, I've been watching ultramarathon races (Western States, UTMB, Javalina Jundred, etc.) live online. All of them have been doing live video shots of the race leaders with a camera man on a mountain bike using a Starlink Mini on the back (with networking gear and batteries in a backpack). This new Starlink Mini 2 will be a more compact solution for the cameraman and possibly give the producers of the live broadcast more options and maybe more interesting shots.
I want so badly for starlink to offer a sensible well priced self-service B2B offering with fleet management. Any kind of fixed, high bandwidth IoT device that currently has a SIM card could easily use a starlink. As it stands SMBs who want this have to screw around with residential starlink and live in fear that they’ll get banned.
And it seems to have a normal USB-C port now! Excellent, having to order that old weird cable of theirs was a pain, especially when one broke out in the wild.
Starlink Mini improved the power consumption a lot. Does Starlink Mini 2 improve things further? The page lacks specs.
I read elsewhere the battery has 71Wh and lasts 4.5h. That's 15.77W/h if it indeed uses 100% of the battery's capacity.
They should totally sell a foldable solar panel for the ultimate offgrid set-it-and-forget-it internet solution.
Removable battery is cool. Does "quick-swap" mean you can switch the battery while it's operating? I always thought it would be a good idea for devices like this to have a tiny secondary battery or large capacitor in the main unit that would let it keep going for a few seconds while you swap the main battery.
Starlink Mini 1st has been on 'clearance' for $149 for a while. Wonder if this is a worthwhile upgrade for truck camping or if the Mini 1 is still a good deal. No indication on price yet?
Got a lot of usage with my Mini when traveling across the southwestern US and Mexico, but they no longer allow travel usage outside US/Canada which is a huge bummer and forced me to switch back to cell coverage which isn’t nearly as good.
Starlink is an interesting option for RVs, but I can't use it because they don't offer static IPs or even ip addresses that aren't behind NAT.
It seems like the launch requires purchasing it with a bundled 1 year subscription for $999. I hope they sell it standalone like the old Mini. I'm planning to pick one up to have as primarily backup internet and just pay the standby fee to have it paused as needed.
Because this is so useful to several industries, governments absolutely cannot let Elon maintain a monopoly on what may become fundamental infrastructure. We've already seen what happened in Ukraine.
I bought the Starlink Gen 2 out of curiosity and used it for a couple of months, it was too expensive to justify the limited 100Mb/s speed so I packed it and switched to fiber optic. But I do see myself buying a Mini when I do retire and travel the world...
This is great for national park. I've been looking for a portable network device that can be attached in my car for a long time.
Smart. Everywhere we take the Mini we also haul a portable battery. A fun thing we did a few times was that we took the whole thing on a weekday to Golden Gate Park and my wife and I worked while my daughter and grandparents played around and saw things and then they came back and we ate lunch and they went back around to see stuff. Lots of fun.
Park was practically empty and it was a bright and sunny day.
This is nice if you want to be able to work remotely, but for purely emergency purposes is it materially better than sending iMessage over satellite?
Don't support Russian assets.
Maybe it's just me, but the heart of going camping, adventuring, out into the wild, going to the beach, etc (essentially, getting away from it all), seems in nearly direct opposition to having internet at every single one of these places.
Man, I literally just set up my Starlink Mini about 2 hours ago.
I use Starlink on my small boat near shore in PNW - where there is no mobile network, works perfect, DC cable is inconvinience, battery is much more useful imo. Great upgrade
The upside of Starlink is it’s not easily blockable by a terrestrial nation state; the downside of Starlink is it’s easily blockable by a single fickle trillionaire. That first problem’s been a bear to work around for the entire Internet era, that second one’s gonna be the challenge going forward.
I'm waiting for someone other than the Skunk to bring out satellite service.
Excited to see how the huge cottage industry of people trying to package minis into weapons systems react to this. It looks like it'll be slightly more of a pain in the ass than the previous version but maybe Elon threw the MIC a bone and made them disassemble-able
Yes, this is really a thing, yes, I'm being sarcastic.
I want one of these magic internet rectangles especially now that they have a battery.
Do you know if they offer a sort of pay as you need it plan like when you go out of town you can just buy bandwidth in blocks and use as needed?
Cool, they hijacked the browser back button. That's a requirement for anybody I do business with.
In this AI Age, it surprises me that no nerd has hook SDR to the chatbot and Reverse engineer the Starlink, and further, enjoy the free internet.
Comrade, what is SKU number for the Ratnik version?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratnik_(program)
Starlink attached to solar drone. That sounds super interesting.
Why does it need that little stand?
Very soon is going to be top1 present for birthday
For some reason this page tanks my CPU and slows down my PC to a crawl. On Omarchy/Brave browser.
4.5 hours on battery surprised me - cool that it's built in, but yeah these things are power hungry. 25-35W kinda surprised me.
I guess it makes sense, space is a long way away after all...
would be useful if it could also reverse charge your phone
I'm deeply disappointed in this company's leadership and refusal to continue launching commercial payloads
Stop ruining the heart of camping, Musk. Camping is fun because it's internetless