I’ve had Starlink Mini as my home internet for around 7 months and for most of that time it was honestly better than I expected.
I’m on Residential Lite. Small one-story house, nothing crazy connected to it — two phones, a laptop and occasionally a tablet.
Over the last few weeks though the connection has gotten noticeably worse. YouTube will randomly drop quality or buffer, pages sometimes hang, and yesterday Spotify actually gave me a slow connection warning.
I haven’t added more devices. If anything, there are fewer things using it now.
The Mini is mounted near a window and I’m just using its built-in WiFi, no extra router or mesh.
Trying to figure out whether Starlink itself is getting worse here or if there’s something dumb about my setup that I never noticed because it worked fine before.
If I were you, I’d do some radio reconnaissance first before shelling out any cash. Install NetSpot — it’s great at showing dynamic signal strength and channel load. Take a measurement: walk from the room with the Mini to the spots where you actually use your devices. If the signal drops significantly as you move, the problem is local, and that’s useful information. Then forget about your local network, open the Starlink app, and check what’s going on with your provider.
If you can, do one temporary Ethernet test directly from the Mini. Doesn’t need to become your permanent setup. If Ethernet is good while WiFi in the house is bad, you’ve isolated the problem pretty cleanly. If Ethernet is also crawling, stop moving furniture around and start looking at Starlink/plan/congestion/obstructions.
@XN_doctorX_11 I just realized I’ve never actually tested it close to the Mini because most of the time I’m using it from the back half of the house. I was assuming fewer devices = WiFi can’t be the problem.
@daily.chaos Number of devices isn’t really the important part here. One laptop far away behind a couple walls can have a worse connection than ten devices sitting near the router. Less traffic doesn’t magically improve coverage.
Also check the Starlink app before changing anything: obstructions, outages, and whatever performance stats it gives you. If the dish side shows problems, that’s a completely different troubleshooting path from weak indoor WiFi.
Look, there’s a chain of two networks here: Cosmos ➔ Mini and Mini ➔ Devices . People here immediately blame the satellite at the drop of a hat, but home Wi-Fi can lag on its own — completely standard and dismal, with no at all.