Just curious. Does anyone know anyone who has received their terminal who is not a SpaceX employee or opted for Mobile/RV? I keep hearing about how they're being deployed, but the only people I know who have received their terminals are SpaceX employees or people who agreed to the more expensive Mobile/RV service.
Me (for a client). I got it in January 2021 and deployed a few weeks later. At 10 below zero F in a fairly stiff wind natch, quite memorable :). Deployed up near 45°. This was of course a generation 1 circular unit, which actually turned out to be superior IMO since it has zero need for their router though it does have a fixed cable. I used an SFP<>ethernet adapter to bring the signal the rest of the way to our OPNsense router and bypass any grounding issues in that respect, it's functioned continuously ever since. First few months as warned there were occasional dropouts, but I could watch those steadily become rarer and rarer as the weeks went by, and the bandwidth go up as well as more sats came online. There was nothing significant long before it went officially public.
Less anecdotally, Starlink passed 400,000 customers as of a month and a half or so ago [0]. I wouldn't be surprised if it was pushing towards the half million mark now or fairly soon. They're limited now in terms of terrestrial cell density primarily, and that cannot be solved without more and more powerful sats which can actually shrink the physical cell size and improve beam count and bandwidth. Mobile/RV is therefore useful for them because it's lower priority with no guarantees, but that's ok for that usage model. The times where it will tend to be very important are in remote areas where cells are not full, and the times where cells are full there is also more likelihood of LTE, and RV can by definition move around if necessary. Maritime (or aircraft for that matter) obviously also fits those current limits, the oceans are near empty of Starlink right now and it's high revenue per user given the competition.
I was visiting some rural family in Alberta Canada and there's a bunch of them running with starlink setups now. I feel they're prioritizing rural first because there isn't really service to compete with / target demographic?
Yeah, their product compares very favourably to competition in rural but I suspect the other reason is density. They don't have enough satellites with enough bandwidth to provide high speeds for a lot of people in a small area (like a city) but the more spread out their customers are the more efficiently they make use of their fast moving satellites.
I received mine in the first batch, have been using it for ~a year now. Have used it for everything from 4K Netflix to gaming to work, ama I guess. My experience has been overall good relative to the rest of the options in this space (most other companies are still offering limited 500kbps/high-latency plans for twice as much), but you can definitely still push it hard enough to reveal that it's still satellite internet underneath. It's worth it if your other options are HughesNet or a data-capped WISP.
