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Starlink’s LEO Satellite Broadband Gets Energy Saving Sleep Mode

Sunday, Jan 29th, 2023 (10:04 am) - Score 2,488
Starlink Satellite Broadband PREMIUM Terminal Dish

Customers of SpaceX’s popular Starlink ultrafast broadband service, which harnesses a mega constellation of satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and is already home to 1 million subscribers, may like to know that it’s slowly adding a new ‘Sleep Schedule‘ feature to help save electricity.

As the name suggests, this feature simply allows customers to define a time period for when the system will go into a sleep (i.e. pausing its internet service and disabling other features, such as heating to melt snow). In effect, this is a kind of standby feature, although anybody expecting snowfall will need to make sure they clean off the accumulation first when re-enabling (i.e. using the heater to do this could take several hours).

The new feature doesn’t appear to be available for everybody yet, and initially it may only be intended for those on their Starlink for RVs (motorhomes) service, where energy saving is most important. But it’s a useful feature for everybody to have – especially given UK electricity prices – since the Starlink service does tend to consume a fair bit of power (up to around 100 Watts).

Customers in the UK typically pay from £75 per month, plus £460 for the regular home kit (standard dish, router etc.) and £40 for shipping on the ‘Standard‘ Starlink package, which gets you unlimited usage, fast latency times of 25-50ms, advertised downloads of c. 50-200Mbps and uploads of c.5-15Mbps (speeds may change as the network grows).

The latest launch means that Starlink now has around 3,480 LEO satellites in orbit around the Earth (altitude of c. 500km+) and their initial plan is to deploy a total of roughly 4,400 by 2024, with approval already granted to add around 7,500 more to this by the end of 2027.

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Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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Comments
4 Responses
  1. Avatar photo Optimist says:

    Useful for customers with off-peak electricity tariffs

  2. Avatar photo Berry Well says:

    I have Starlink home service (£75/month) and received the Sleep Schedule update (iOS) a couple of days ago.

    I still haven’t managed to get around to enabling this feature yet though, as there are already some reports that there is a huge spike in power when it comes out of sleep mode.
    Knowing how poor their customer service can be, I think I’ll hold off for the time being

    1. Avatar photo NE555 says:

      > some reports that there is a huge spike in power when it comes out of sleep mode

      Even a huge spike of a few minutes wouldn’t make much difference.

      Say it’s switched off for 5 hours and would have used 100W, you’ve saved 0.5 units (kWh)

      If it switches on and heats as much as a kettle (2kW) for 3 minutes, that’s only 0.1 units.

      You’ve still saved 0.4 units overall, or 14p at current prices – translates to about £51 per year.

  3. Avatar photo Elon M says:

    Big up starlink. Truly game changing.

Comments are closed

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