Starlink is great, but there one major drawback to it

I've been a huge fan of SpaceX and Starlink for many years, so I was first in line when they launched in Norway two years ago. Up until November 26th when my router died, it's been brilliant.

Many of Elon Musk's companies have growing pains. Just ask anyone that ever needed to get their Tesla repaired and they'll likely tell that the experience is less than stellar. I know people that have waited for more than 2 months to fix simple issues on their car. I've been on Twitter/X for ages, so when they launched the Blue checkmark, I signed up thinking it was a good idea. When the one year subscription elapsed, I got an email that looked so dodgy I didn't take it seriously. Replies to the twitter.com email account in the email bounced, so the recipient was likely one of the many Mr. Musk fired? And now I got to experience the Starlink customer service and 5+ weeks with no internet.

More than just the router died

November 26th, we woke up to the house feeling colder than normal. We soon found that one of our automatic fuses/breakers had triggered and shut down the circuit. What was odd is that the circuit breaker (GEWISS GW95226) not just shut off. Flipping it back on, it did not return power to the circuits? It was completely busted. In Norway (and Europe in general?), you cannot fix this yourself so I had to call an electrician. This cost me just above $300. I wanted to know what caused the breaker to fail, so I plugged things back in, one by one. To my surprise, the new breaker tripped when the Starlink was plugged back in.

The only way to contact Starlink support is through the App. It's slow, but it does work. On a former occasion, the cable from the Router to the antenna broke. Starlink customer support sent me a new cable within 4 days. Based on that experience, my hopes were high. I politely messaged them about once a week when they postoned my delivery for the n'th time. At some point just before xmas, I finally happened to come across a customer rep that realized that they would not get the Router back in stock, but they could send me a full kit with the Router within it? Why didn't they think about that right at once? In the end - it took 37 days to get a new Router?

SpaceX opened a new factory in Bastrop, Texas back in September to build more hardware. Apparently, 90k new terminals per week isn't enough? Or they're not quite up to speed yet? That brings me to a piece of advice:

Only get Starlink if you have a backup solution!

Any ISP in Norway will have an emergency team that can fix connection issues in their network within a day (or at most 2 days). If your router breaks, you can just pick up a new one at a brick'n'mortar shop. With Starlink, you're completely dependant on their specific router since it also controls the antenna so it always points at the Starlink satelites. This means that unless you can live without internet for a month, you probably shouldn't get Starlink. Most phone subscriptions in Norway have close to unlimited data included, so when the Starlink died, I just plugged in a 4G router in it's place. It's not quite as fast as the Starlink, but we could use all the connected devices in our house just as before.

Not everyone has a 4G router and a spare SIM card available and if you're not tech savvy, you likely won't even know that a 4G router is possible. I'm not using the Starlink's builtin wifi, since it can only provide coverage for small apartments. I've purchased a special cable from SpaceX/Starlink that will instead provide the connection to my Mesh WiFi. So when the Starlink Router died, I could just replace it with the 4G router and no devices on my network noticed any difference. It all just worked, 10 minutes after finding the problem. I don't think such a setup is common, so for most customers this would literally be an outage of more than a month.

One specific case where you should NOT get Starlink

If you're a gamer and play lots of Network games, you should know that during heavy rain, Starlink may drop connection. While playing a network game using my Quest 2, I was thrown out of the game 5-6 times since I lost connection. The second the rain stopped, I had no connection issues. At the same time, my wife was streaming without any problems, so it was the intermittent dropouts that was the issue.

Overall, I've been quite happy with Starlink. Apart from rain and the time it froze to my roof, it's a good internet connection at a good price. Loosing internet for 30+ days wasn't fun, so I hope they'll find a better solution if this happens again.