The new availability map on Starlink.com website gives us a breakdown of Starlinks service area. This is really significant for a few reasons. That Starlink felt the need ,to make one is saying something already.
They did not make it the most evident, almost obscure. You have to sniff around on their site to find it, it wasn't even linked to the search motor at the time of writing this article. Lets go to www.starlink.com and take a look at the map. In the top left corner on Starlinks homepage screen. It will pull up a digital globe in shades of green, grey and black. Try to zoom into your location.
Once you have zoomed in enough you will be able to locate your area. Using the legend and the shades of green you can see if you're in an open area. We have tested our system and marked our area in which we were able to move the Dishy around and still keep it working. We have a 1 mile/1.5 kilometer radius around are dishy.
Because we're in dark green Starlink is not activating any new customers in the area. There is enough users that they don't want to diminish existing signal quality for the clients, or maybe its a trouble spot...but I don't think so as my system has been working fine with speeds typically between 150-200Mbps. If they are capping the area while maintaining these speeds all I can say is "bravo" Starlink.
The Satellites are constantly moving as well, go to www.satellitemap.com and click on Starlink and check out your satellites above your service area. While the satellites are passing by, you can see the fluctuations in signals while testing. It doesn't go offline but it can definitely slow your speeds down, not usually noticeable unless you are speed testing at the time.
Running Multiple speed-test back to back rarely ever stays steady with a Starlink system, unlike fiber lines that can be extremely consistent in its delivery the Starlink system is tracking and changing satellites frequently. This causes ups and downs but not easily noticed, even at its weakest points it still delivers great bandwidth. The main cause of shut downs is updates that happen very early in the morning hours.
If you zoom out on the map you will see more visible dark spots. Could you possibly use this map for mobile services? I would think so. If you can use it as a new customer looking for the Starlink system I don't see why it couldn't be used the same for existing customers. Looks like we just found a mass RV migration tracking map, I'm sure they'll be looking at this before leaving to their next destination.
Some areas in the map are filled in with a lot of dark green showing a high amount of Starlink users in the area. I would suggest getting on the list if you're in one of these areas as "spots are limited" no pun intended. Will RV'ers use this map for travelling to find the open Starlink areas? will this map be accurate enough to help them connect? It will be put to the test this summer as the RV's start rolling out for the summer vacations!.
The release of the Starlink availability map has definitely caught my curiosity, Let me know what you think of it by commenting below. Thank you for reading, if you're enjoying the content then become a member to stay up to date with everything Starlink.