Starlink Mini Review: Space-Age Internet Solution (2024)

Starlink Mini Review

 Introduction:

Starlink Mini is here, and this may just be the Starlink satellite dish that you've been waiting for.

 In this video, I'm going to go over all of the specs of this new dish, we're going to set it up in my backyard, and we're going to test it out for both internet speeds and power consumption. There's a lot to get to, so let's get started.

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Starlink Mini Overview :

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 Starlink Mini Overview Starlink Mini addresses two of the biggest complaints with previous versions of the Starlink satellite dish, which are size and power consumption. While the Starlink Gen 2 and Gen 3 rectangular dishes were much smaller and lighter than the original round Gen 1 dish, they're still pretty good size and they're not super portable. They also pull a ton of wattage with the latest Gen 3 dish averaging between 40 to 60 watts when idle and bursting up over 100 watts while booting up. Now we have a dish that's smaller, lighter and less power hungry. So let's see what comes in the box. All right, this is the first time that I'm seeing the Starlink Mini in person. So let's get it out of the box. Right away when we open it up, we can see all of the instructions for how to set it up. Starlink historically has always been super, super simple to get up and running. And in this case, you plug in power, you connect to it with the app, and you just make sure that it's pointed in the right direction and you're online, you're good to go. Inside the box, we have our power adapter right here. You can see that it has a circular plug that plugs in separately. This is because there are some new power options with Starlink Mini that we're going to talk about in this video. Also here, we have a pole mount for the Starlink Mini. And then if we open up this section right here, here is the Starlink Mini dish itself.

 Absolutely gorgeous. You also get a 15 meter or 50 foot power cable. We'll put that to the side for now. And that's about it inside the box. All right, so there is the Starlink Mini. On the back

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Starlink Mini Pricing:

Here, we have our standard kickstand mount, the same thing that comes with the newer Gen 3 dish.

 And then we have a plug for power. And then we have a plug for ethernet, which we will also talk about here in this video. But let's start with pricing or in other words, how hard is the Starlink Mini dish and service going to hit you in the wallet? Now, the dish itself is $599 and I also paid $20 in shipping. So that being said, with the release of Starlink Mini, SpaceX has lowered the price of the standard residential dish to $499. And they're even running promotions as low as $199 for the full size dish in some locations. As far as service, there are two separate Starlink Mini service plans available. You've got Mobile Regional and Mini Rome. Mobile Regional is $150 a month and it gets you unlimited data. Mini Rome is $50 a month, but it has a 50 gigabyte data cap.

 So for a real world example of 50 gigabytes of data, that's equivalent to approximately 25 hours of standard HD 1080p Netflix streaming. Now, if you hit that 50 gigabyte cap, additional usage is billed out at $1 per gigabyte, which is optional. I think you actually have to opt into overages. Now with either of these service plans, you do have the option of pausing the service when you're not using it, meaning that you can turn it on and off at will. And Starlink does prorate their monthly invoices if you happen to restart your service in the middle of a billing cycle.

Pricing and Subscription Plans

Item	Cost
Starlink Mini Hardware Kit	$599
Monthly Subscription	$99/month
Total First Year Cost	$1,187

 Now this is great for part-time or seasonal users who don't want to get stuck with a bill for internet service when they're not actually using the dish. The other difference between these plans is that the Mobile Regional or Unlimited plan allows for in-motion usage of the dish up to 10 miles an hour, whereas the Mini Rome plan has no limit on in-motion usage. Now that being said, I did test the standard Gen 3 dish in motion on a 12-hour road trip using the Mobile Regional plan, and I had no problem at all using the service, even at, you know, 80 miles an hour.

 So

How Fast is Starlink Mini?

Metric	Starlink Mini Performance
Download Speed	100-200 Mbps
Upload Speed	20-40 Mbps
Latency	20-40 ms

 Starlink Mini Power Options:-

I'm not sure how strictly those rules are enforced. Starlink Mini measures just a bit bigger than a piece of paper, coming in at 12 inches by about 10 and a quarter inches and weighing just over three pounds with the kickstand and cable attached. And here you can see a size comparison to the Gen 3 Starlink dish. Of course, Starlink Mini is much, much smaller. The included DC power cable is 50 feet or 15 meters, and it seems that there actually may be some interesting alternative power options coming in the future. The datasheet says that the input rating is between 12 to 48 volts with a 12-volt short Starlink cable coming soon. There also seems to be a USB-C to barrel jack cable accessory also coming soon, which to me means they're including a lot more power options for RVs and off-the-grid deployments who may not have a standard AC wall jack available. Another thing that you might notice right away is that Starlink Mini has no separate router. All of the networking is integrated right into the dish itself, which I absolutely love. The integrated wireless is a three-by-three multi-user MIMO Wi-Fi 5 access point. And you might be asking, hey, why isn't it Wi-Fi 6 like the Starlink Gen 3 router?

 

So to me, Wi-Fi 5 is perfectly fine for this dish, right? You're never going to get Wi-Fi 6 speeds out to the internet through this dish. So the type of wireless that's being used is really only for communication between devices locally. So like if you had to back up files wirelessly from your laptop over to a NAS device or something like that. So other than those pretty specific use cases, you don't need Wi-Fi 6 speeds on this device. And since it has an ethernet port, you can always just use Starlink Mini as a WAN-only device plugged into your own separate network infrastructure. And then you can build that out to be as robust as you want.

 Most of the people using Starlink Mini, however, likely aren't going to be using it for that, right? It's going to be used as a temporary internet solution for your RV or while you're out camping or out on some remote deployment somewhere and for just straight up remote internet connectivity. And so for just straight up remote internet connectivity, this is perfect.

 Starlink Mini Ethernet Port And as I mentioned, Starlink Mini has a built-in wireless access point, but it also has an RJ45 ethernet port for wired connectivity. Now this is great for when you want to hardwire your laptop or when you want to use Starlink Mini as the WAN source for your own equipment. But there is one interesting note when using the ethernet port. Starlink Mini is IP67 weather rated, meaning that It's dustproof and it can withstand being immersed in one meter of water for up to 30 minutes.

 Basically, you can install this directly outside in any type of weather without bricking the dish.

 But when you pull the plug on the ethernet port, it is now no longer IP67 weather rated. So keep that in mind if you're going to be using your own equipment. Now Starlink has a note on their website that the IP67 rating is maintained if you use their ethernet cable, but that cable hasn't been released yet. So we don't really have any details on what kind of cable lengths are going to be available, but it may already be in the store by the time you're watching this video.

Starlink Mini Reviews and Complaints:-

Starlink Mini Reviews	Starlink Mini Complaints
Reliable high-speed interne  Excellent for remote/rural areas  Easy setup process	Occasional service disruptions during bad weather  Concerns about pricing and affordability

Starlink Mini Initial Setup:-

Okay, now onto the fun part. Let's go outside and go through the initial setup of Starlink Mini. Okay, so the initial setup of Starlink Mini is going to be super, super simple. I have an EcoFlow Delta here that I'm going to be using to power up the device, kind of simulating something that you might have to power this up if you are on the road or away from shore power.

 One end of the power cable goes into the AC adapter. All right, I turned on the AC in the back of the device and plugged it in. Now we take the Starlink Mini and you want to position it basically kind of north facing. So we're going to put it north, but first we want to plug in the power. All right, so power is in and it should be booting up. Now that's it for setup, right?

 I'm not connecting this to any sort of external firewall or anything like that, which would require a little bit of extra setup with the ethernet plug, but I'm just using this as is, like if I was camping or something, right? So at this point we just need to fire up the Starlink app and then follow the instructions there and we should be online pretty quickly. All right, so opening up my Wi-Fi settings, I see a Starlink SSID. That's the first thing we want to do is connect to that SSID. All right, and now that I'm connected, you want to open up the Starlink app.

 And here it says calculating orientation. This means that the dish is trying to communicate with some satellites. Once it figures out exactly its position in the world, it will pop up a little thing for me to actually adjust it into the proper orientation. Okay, that was pretty quick. And now it says online and it is downloading an update. And once it's done updating, I will come back and finish the setup. Okay, so total time here. We're talking about two minutes to get this thing out of the box and plugged in and then another five minutes or so to update the dish. And now we are online and that's it. So I'm not going to run a speed test just yet. I have two things here. It says Wi-Fi is not configured as well as a software update. So I think it downloaded the update, but maybe it doesn't apply until you run that. So let's do the Wi-Fi first.

 Starlink Mini Speed Test We're going to call this Starlink Mini as the SSID. And we'll give it a nice secure strong password of 123456789. Obviously, if you're using this in production, make sure you use a nice strong password for your wireless SSID. We're going to say submit. And now it's going to reload the Wi-Fi and I assume I will have to reconnect to the new SSID in just a moment. Okay, and now it says to connect to Starlink Wi-Fi. We're going to go ahead and connect to that new SSID. Yes, Okay, we're connected. Let's close this up here. And now we're going to run the software update.

 Yes, so we're going to let this run the update. Once it's done, I will come back once again, and we'll start doing our speed test. Alright, so the second update took a little bit longer, about 10 minutes total. But we are now fully online with Starlink Mini. So let's take a look at the statistics here. And keep in mind, as I'm running speed tests, that the note at the top says your Starlink just powered on network performance should stabilize after about 15 minutes. So just bear that in mind. I'm not going to wait the full 15 minutes to do this.

 Before we get to the speed test, though, let's look at the alignment. So under alignment, we can see that I am just a little bit off. And one of the cool things about this app is it actually does update in real time as you move the dish around. So let's go ahead and do that. Now we can see that it's pretty good, but it's just a little bit off. So we're going to shift it just ever so slightly like that. And now we can see that it is aligned. Actually, Let me go back just a little bit. Alright, perfect. And we'll say we're done. Okay, so now that we're perfectly aligned with the Starlink Mini, let's go ahead and run a speed test through the app here. And we ended up with 138 megabits down and 16.4 megabits up with a 54 millisecond latency. That is just awesome. Alright, so imagine what we're doing here, we have this tiny dish, it's a little bit bigger than the size of a piece of paper, we're plugged into a portable battery bank out in my backyard, it's connecting up to satellites in the sky, and I'm getting 138 megabits worth of download. That is phenomenal. Now the speeds of the Starlink Mini aren't supposed to be as good as the speeds of the standard size residential dish. The standard size residential dish, I typically get speeds between 150 up to a maximum of about 300 megabits per second. So I'm not expecting to get the same speeds that I get with the full size dish. But again, this isn't made for residential, this is made for camping, right? The pictures online show a guy with this thing on his backpack, right? So it's made to be portable. And if you're in a situation where you just need some internet out in a very remote spot, 138 megabits is phenomenal. But let's not trust the Starlink app completely. Let's also bring up the Ookla speed test. We're going to say go. And so the Ookla speed test shows us 82 megabits down by about 14 and a half megabits up.

 Not as good as the other speed tests from Starlink, but still really, really phenomenal.

 And keep in mind that Starlink is connecting to satellites up in the sky that are flying over at very fast rates of speed. So there is a lot of fluctuation in speeds when you're using Starlink.

 That's just sort of the nature of the game. If I run this speed test again in five minutes, I might get a totally different result. It might be even better than the Starlink speed test.

 That's just how it works. All right, we've set up the Starlink Mini. We've done some speed testing.

Availability and Coverage:-

Feature	Starlink Mini	Cable Internet	DSL
Download Speed	Up to 200 Mbps	50-1000 Mbps	0.5-100 Mbps
Latency	20-40 ms	10-50 ms	20-100 ms
Availability	Global coverage	Limited to cable infrastructure	Limited to telephone lines
Reliability	High	Moderate to High	Moderate

Power Consumption:-

Now what about power? Let's check that next. So when idle, Starlink Mini appears to pull between 20 to 30 watts, which is a lot better than the 40 to 60 watts when idle that we see with the standard Gen 3 Starlink dish. Interesting though, take a look at this. Right now we can see that we're at about 30 watts, 27 to 30 watts as it's just sitting idle. I'm going to run a speed test and watch the wattage jump up. We're going to say speed test go.

 And look at that. It popped up to 40 watts as I'm getting a download test happening from speedtest.net. Now we're on the upload test again around 40 watts and now back to idle. So that speed test got me 138 down by 14 and a half up and it bounced the actual wattage of the Starlink Mini up about 10 watts throughout the duration of that speed test. That's pretty interesting.

 Final Thoughts:-

So what do I think about the Starlink Mini? I absolutely love it. All right, the size speaks for itself. The speeds speak for themselves. The power consumption speaks for itself.

 By almost every measure, this dish is superior to all previous Starlink versions. If you're using Starlink in any sort of mobile capacity for RVs or camping or hiking up to a remote mountain top or for off the grid deployments, this is the dish that you're going to want to use. If you're using Starlink in a fixed location, such as at your home or at a business, then you're still going to want to go for the full-size residential dish in order to squeeze out that extra bandwidth. But the Starlink Mini is made to be portable and used in motion and it's even marketed that way on Starlink's website. Other companies are also already coming out with Starlink Mini accessories like this striker mount that gives the Mini a handle and a nice place to hide an Apple AirTag. So yeah, Starlink has come a long way since the initial Generation 1 dish that I reviewed back in February of 2021. And I love that bringing broadband internet anywhere in the world is now available in such an easy to use package with such a compact form factor. This video, by the way, is not sponsored by SpaceX. I purchased this Starlink Mini dish as well as the service with my own hard-earned money, some of which comes from YouTube views. So be sure to like this video if you learned something new and subscribe to Crosstalk Solutions so that you don't miss out on any future videos. And if you'd like to keep this party going, I have hand-selected a couple of videos on the right here for you to watch next. The top video is my full overview and setup of the full-size Gen 3 Starlink dish that now has over 1 million views. And the bottom video is my full wireless design video for the silver mining ghost town of Cerro Gordo, California.

FAQ

What is Starlink Mini?

Starlink Mini is a compact model of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet with simplified design and form factor. It is for those who want to have internet with fast speed in areas where normal broadband is not available.

What sets the Starlink Mini apart from the regular Starlink system?

Starlink Mini is smaller in size and weight than the conventional Starlink kit. It is portable and can be established in any loose area. The standard system is larger and intended to be lived in one location.

How should Starlink Mini be prepared for its use?

Installation of Starlink Mini is quite simple. All you have to do is take it out of the box, plug in the cords, and then listen for the directions to guide you from the screen. It links to the Starlink satellite network readily.

How fast is Starlink Mini?

Starlink Mini is able to provide internet at a fast speed. It is possible to obtain a download rate of 50 Mbps to 250 Mbps. Operating speeds are from 10 Mbps to 40 Mbps, this means that the uploading speed is within this range. However, they vary depending on a location, weather conditions, and traffic intensity of the network in use.

What is the use of Starlink Mini?

Starlink Mini is good for many things. That makes it convenient for business, while on the move, during disasters, or in areas of poor connectivity. It is ideal for fast internet connection that is portable in nature that will transform ones on the go connection.

Does Starlink Mini require a router?

No, with Starlink Mini you do not require any router since it can function independently on its own. It has Wi-Fi built-in. With it you can hook up to it or use it as a wi-fi access point.

In this case, the question that is of interest will be: What can actual customers say about using Starlink Mini?

Micro influencers such as Starlink Mini are well loved by people. People say it is convenient to implement, it is mobile, and can support a fast connection. However, those are often experiencing disconnection or slow response in bad weather or some locations.

How much would it cost to buy Starlink Mini?

Starlink Mini would cost about $500-600 in plan charge. Then, it's about $99 a month. It is dependent upon the package, which you choose and if there are additional costs in that regard.

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