Everything You Need to Know About Starlink (in the Philippines)

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1. On Thursday, I received my Starlink kit here in Taguig, after having preordered it all the way back i twn May 2022. My total cash-out was a one-time payment of 29,320 pesos for the standard bundle, with an ongoing monthly subscription fee of 2,700 pesos. Even amortized over 3 years, this is easily one of the most expensive Internet connections you can currently get in the Philippines, so I wanted to write this primer on the Starlink service as well as my initial impressions after 48 hours of using it in the city.

2. Let’s start with who Starlink is meant for, because I’ve seen a lot of comments in my posts about how it’s too expensive or too slow, or both. SpaceX’s internet service isn’t meant to compete with fiber internet in the city — that’s simply an impossible proposition. Even if we’re just talking about their basic physical properties, fiber internet uses pulses of light to send a signal, while satellite internet uses radio waves. Because of light’s higher frequency, fiber can handle speeds of over 1gbps, whereas satellites can usually only hit 100mbps to 200mbps consistently. Of course, fiber internet needs an actual fiber optic cable being laid out to your home or condo, and that kind of rollout is sometimes impossible in remote locations. Meanwhile, Starlink’s only real requirement is that you place the dish in front of an open sky. (Of course, in a dense city like Metro Manila, that’s easier said than done.)

3. Starlink is a SpaceX company, and is the first tangible application of SpaceX’s vision of low-cost rocketry. Starlink’s internet service is made up of a floating grid of satellites in a low-Earth orbit (about 550 km up). Since the service began in 2019, SpaceX has launched over 3,800 Starlink satellites, with a goal of 12,000 by 2028. SpaceX ferries these satellites into the lower atmosphere in batches, about 60 at a time, using their signature Falcon 9 rockets. Once the Falcon 9 is about 400km up, each of the individual 260-kg satellites unfurl their solar panels and fly off to their designated low-earth orbit positions.

4. The Starlink satellites are in constant motion, orbiting the Earth at speeds of over 27,000 kph, and you can track all of them in real-time at Satellitemap.space. The satellites aren’t using any energy to propel themselves; Earth’s gravity is causing them to naturally orbit the planet, and each full revolution only takes 90 minutes. In order to actually connect to the Internet, each satellite has to talk to a ground station which is in turn connected to a fiber-based Internet backbone. Starlink operates 87 of these ground stations, with the majority of them being in North America and exactly zero in Southeast Asia. The closest ground station to the Philippines is in Toonpan, Australia, which is a Queensland suburb over 3000 km away from Manila. At any given time there appears to only be 5 or 6 satellites patrolling the skies over the Philippines, but maybe this is enough for the number of users they’re currently expecting at this stage.

5. Because the satellites are zipping around the sky at such high speeds, your satellite dish needs to have a completely unobstructed view of the sky. A given satellite is only within view of a dish for about 4 minutes before it disconnects, leaving the dish to find the next available satellite to connect to. Basically, this means that if there’s a tree or building partially blocking your dish’s view, you will experience a dropped connection once every few minutes. If you’re not sure if you have enough of a sky view in your area, there’s a helpful Obstruction scanner in the Starlink app that you can download and use even if you don’t have a dish yet. Here in the city, we positioned the dish on a third-floor balcony facing North. Over about 3 days of testing, we were seeing consistent download speeds of 80-90mbps and upload speeds of 20-30mbps. These are substantially slower than a similarly priced connection from PLDT, Converge, or Globe, which you would normally expect to be at least in the 300mbps range. The ping times were also a little over 100ms, so gamers will most likely be disappointed by this service, unless they’re playing slower games like Hearthstone or Axie Infinity.

6. When you first get your Starlink, you’ll be on the standard Residential plan, which assumes that you’ll be installing your dish in a single location. There’s a Portability plan upgrade available for users that allows you to move between multiple locations within your country. In the US, Starlink has stopped offering this upgrade, but as far as I can tell, it’s still available to Philippine users, for just 600 pesos more. Interestingly, Starlink in the Philippines costs only about half of what it does in the US —2700 pesos here vs $100 there, for the basic Residential plan — so even the upgrades are cheaper. There’s also an “RV” plan that allows you to use the Starlink even on the road, which is offered to Philippine users for only 3,300 pesos per month all-in (but $150 in the US!). Signing up for the RV service gives you the additional ability to pause the service and pay nothing whenever you’re not using it, which makes it really useful for summer homes.

See you all next week, cryptofam!