David from Jim’s Antennas Horsham was recently asked to install a mobile phone repeater for a property in Wartook.

Wartook is a picturesque area with a wide variety of flora and fauna, and many mountains, hills and trees. Its beautiful scenery is something that everyone, from tourists to locals, all enjoy. However, due to its lush landscape, communications and aerial reception has always been an issue for local properties.

Although a small Telstra tower was installed in the valley sometime back, David’s customer was still barely able to get one bar of 3G.

While on the phone, discussing their options, David’s customer asked if he knew anything about Elon Musk’s new venture, Starlink, as he had already had a Starlink satellite delivered, but did not know how to install it. Luckily, David had been keeping up with this new technology and was able to complete the installation.

For those who don’t know, what exactly is Starlink?

Starlink provides internet through a low earth orbiting satellite, and offers speeds of up to 150Mbps and very low latency.

Compared to other internet providers, Starlink can offer a much lower latency, as the company has been able to launch a number of satellites orbiting the earth at approximately 550km. Whereas, traditional satellite internet has fewer satellites, orbiting at a much further distance of over 38,000km.

As wireless signal is limited to the speed of light, this has left traditional satellite services with a latency of over 600ms. On the other hand, Starlink can offer below 40ms to remote areas. This could be game changer for rural areas with historically poor internet, as this latency is close to the fixed line or fibre options available to more densely populated areas – which for decades has been difficult to achieve in these locations.

During this installation, David also installed a Cel-Fi booster system to provide a better mobile phone experience for his customer and as a backup form of internet in the case of a dropout. Currently, in Australia there is only one legal mobile phone repeater. This is the Cel-FiGo.