Muskoka Resident Praises SpaceX Starlink Internet and Up to 180 Mbps Downloads

In an interview with Muskoka Region, Gravenhurst resident Kevin North-Harris has expressed his satisfaction with the SpaceX Starlink satellite internet service, noting that heavy installation costs are definitely worth the reliability of the service.

SpaceX

North-Harris, who signed up for Starlink beta testing a few months ago and was selected as a beta tester three weeks back, calls the service “night and day compared to what we used to have.”

“We were with Xplornet, but with 30-35GBs a month, we were blowing through that, with my three kids and my wife working from home, in days,” he explained. “Now we have full, high-speed internet.”

He noted that the hardware cost him around $800 with shipping and taxes ($649 Starlink dish; $65 shipping), and the monthly service charge is $129 plus taxes, all of which has been totally worth it.

“We had almost no internet connection with Xplornet, and now we’re running anywhere from 75 megabytes per second up to 180, sometimes 200 megabytes per second. It’s phenomenal,” he said. “We can work from home now. The kids can do schooling from home.”

North-Harris also explained that before Starlink, their children sat in the library’s parking lot to access the free WiFi and do school work.

Starlink is a satellite internet service from Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The low-Earth-orbit satellite constellations hover only 550 km above Earth, allowing for lower latency and faster download speeds, compared to traditional satellite internet. Musk recently said Starlink download speeds are set to double by the end of the year.

Click here to sign up for Starlink internet’s limited beta program–it recently opened up pre-orders to everyone.

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