Yes.

I bought the last two units left at any HD for a few hundred miles; drove them up there Monday.

Apparently my friend had to drive in and out of his (utterly destroyed) neighborhood in Swannanoa because it required the app and cell service to set up. And when they returned home it wouldn't work. Took multiple trips back and forth to get it usable in the area where it was actually needed.

Then of course the Helene intro deal requires an extensive form to fill out, so he just paid for it.

And, incrementally, we all give our money to another publicly funded, government protected, privately held monopoly. And yet... it's charity.

Anyway, the entire neighborhood is using it to coordinate resources to dig out their holler. So hey, she'll do for now.

> publicly funded, government protected,

How is it publicly funded and government protected?

> privately held monopoly

That's a weird complaint, would it be somehow better if it were a publicly held monopoly like Google, Amazon or Microsoft.

And what can SpaceX do to ensure Starlink is not a monopoly? Stop providing service and shut it down?

They have been even launching competitors satellites for them.

Some people suffer from Elon Derangement Syndrome and cannot think logically

Surprised by this, I think it has the easiest setup experience I’ve had in years for ISP tech. What conditions were you operating in?

For the base subscription types, your account needs to be "activated" with the dish associated, and the address on your account has to match the rough location of the Starlink. This gives you a giant chicken-and-egg problem where you need the Internet to set the account location and perform account activation, but you don't have the Internet because you have a Starlink that's not set up yet.

It's odd that Starlink don't offer a "walled garden" experience allowing you to perform activation using just the Starlink itself, like almost all DOCSIS providers send down to unprovisioned modems. I can't tell if it's an intentional protection/KYC kind of thing or just an unimplemented feature.

You can access the starlink.com site from none registered and unsubscribed units. But you need to use the Starlink provided DHCP/DNS servers to do it. Most people use other DNS settings on devices so the walled garden part might not work depending on user device config.

Strange, everything I've heard about the setup says that they do provide a captive portal for doing the initial setup stuff that needs a network connection.

This must be new as of ~9 months ago; it definitely didn’t used to work on retail dishes (directly purchased dishes came pre activated anyway). Thanks for the correction!

They do. You turn the dish on and the signup process is available.