Choice in the boons: Bell "High Speed" internet vs. Starlink

As background, during the winter I will likely need to work from home as the roads will be pretty dangerous (but still maintained). This is in rural New Brunswick (Canada).

The place where I bought property, only has Bell as a cable internet provider.

Their pricing is $150/month for "50 MbpsMega bits per second Maximum download speed", "10 MbpsMega bits per second Max upload speed", and  Unlimited usage. I've lived in a rural area before and their "Maximum" speed is never what you get. It's too bad I can't test it out to see what I would actually get, before signing a contract, eh?

Starlink is the other option I'm looking at. $800 initial cost, and then $150/month. There are no tiers or packages that Starlink sells, but this article shows speeds in Canada, generally speaking: https://www.ookla.com/articles/starlink-hughesnet-viasat-performance-q1-2022#:~:text=In%20the%20U.S.%2C%20Starlink%20median,during%20the%20same%20time%20period.

Any thoughts or suggestions welcome. Let me know what you do/did, etc.

We added a 'booster' to our system and it improved a lot.
We are in rural Victoria, Australia.
Mybe similar equipment is around for you to look at. The company did some remote testing to confirm it would work before we purchased it.

This is what I have found out over the last 15 years:

Any Internet Service Provider you can get in the country will be using a shared system, Starlink included. That means it's super fast when first introduced, but slows down as more and more users sign on. If the ISP doesn't add more capacity, it gets ugly.

Does Xplornet offer fixed wireless service where you are? It's a line of sight system. It's not perfect and takes a little handholding on occasion, and I have to keep upgrading to stay ahead of cat video bandwidth hogs, but it has served me well enough. Hint: stay in touch with the local installer -- they know when new rings (frequencies) have been added to your local tower, meaning you can get the new service level again.

BTW, Ookla is sometimes useful as a diagnostic tool, but don't take the scores they publish at face value. My experience is that places with high scores can be quite laggy, and places with modest scores can be quick and snappy. There's a lot more to a good service than a momentary snapshot of upload/download speeds.

Hope this is helpful.

Very helpful, Douglas!

I also asked a local community group on Facebook about this (in more vague terms to try to get a wider range of answers) and received over 27 responses from different individuals. Later, I'll tally the responses up and post them.

It may not be beneficial to anyone else but me, but you never know. Hopefully it helps someone else too.

So to mention how my tally worked

There ended up being 3 services people used in my neck of the woods. Bell, Xplornet, and Starlink.

I tallied these based on the comments like so:
Positive review of current service = 1 point
Negative review of current service = -1 point
If in a comment it was expressed that a previous service was so bad they needed to switch away, that service would receive -2 points.

Bell received a total of -2 points
Xplornet received a total of 1 points
Starlink received a total of 4 points

Bell had the most current and previous users, followed closely by Xplornet. Starlink had the fewest but, however all reviews of Starlink were positive.

Please note for transparency: I did not count Douglas' review in the tally. I was also contacted in my DMs by the pwner of the property I am buying, and did not use her response either, as it seemed to me a private message seemed biased somehow.

If had counted these, Bell would be at 0, and Xplornet would be at 2.

There was also 1 response of using Xplornet where no mention of positive or negative experience was gleaned. They were awarded no points for that submission.

I have Starlink and I love it.  It has great speeds, incredibly low latency for satellite service (or any service for that matter), and I have had a total downtime of just under 2 seconds this month.

T Hunte wrote:There ended up being 3 services people used in my neck of the woods. Bell, Xplornet, and Starlink.

Note that Xplornet offers both fixed wireless and satellite services. I know that not everyone around here is happy with their fixed wireless service -- but I'm on a hill with a clear line of site to the tower. Location matters. I have no experience with their satellite service.

My monthly cost for the fixed wireless 4G service is $95/month.

Our solution is incredibly local, so won't be useful to you, but when we were moving to the country, internet access was one of the very most important priorities because my wife and I work full time from home where we need to be able to video-conference and screen-share (so latency is unacceptable) and our kids are media pigs too. So we moved adjacent to tribal land where a native American band runs a fiber-internet enterprise and now we have gigabit fiber into the house. The boneheads who lived here before us (two different owners, actually) turned down the offer of a free (grant-funded) connection to the house, so we had to pay ~$1200 to hook up and now we pay something like $120 per month for 1GB up and down. They're a very small operation and are maybe not as professional in handling outages as other ISPs, but also not bad. We have something like two four-hour outages per year.

I have no options besides Starlink or Xplornet.
I went with Starlink. Southern Alberta.
Day 1 it was beautiful. Like 30+mbps all the time
Then the speeds declined. By about half per day. It was practically formulaic.
Emailed in. Restart check the wire check the dish bla bla bla. Couple days later it’s good again. They apologize for the inconvenience. Then it disappeared.
I could get a response from service to save my life. More than a month later, they reply and apologize but they are so swamped and all that bla bla bla. Send me a new router.
New router doesn’t work. Couple more weeks of radio silence. Get message oh can you please check the dish. Sure. I’m on the roof right now. Phone rings. Guy says they’ll send a new kit and return package right away. 2 days later I was up and running. It’s been 4 months and I haven’t even checked my speeds. I haven’t even had to restart.

Starlink is beautiful. Especially since it’s not a Canadian company. Just know customer service isn’t the type you can just pick up the phone and call. If it works it works, if it doesn’t then good luck.
There’s a lot of ill in the Canadian telecoms and I’m happy to be out of it. Canadians KNOW.

Glad that Starlink worked for you. A neighbour went with it too -- they're in a hollow, so Xplornet was dodgy; I'm on a hill and I can see the tower, and Xplornet works fine. We'll see how it looks a year from now. Should be an interesting conversation over a cold one.

BTW, Xplornet isn't a Canadian company any more, except in name. It was bought out a while ago. The new owners seem willing to invest in better infrastructure, for now, having deeper pockets I suppose. We'll see what happens.

We have a camp in a very remote location already, typically where we fly in by float plane, sometimes by boat, and 1.5 hours by car if we must. In that, the GPS shows us driving in the woods because its so, so, so remote.

We have Starlink and its amazing speeds. My sister in law and her husband will stay there most of the summer, and does work remotely for her business because Starlink works so well.

I recognise this thread is all but dead, but just to put some info out for anyone who is looking into it later our experience with Starlink is different than everyone else's.

When we bought our place the only option available to us was a wifi over 4g system.  They didn't have a tower in the valley, so our connection was #dodgyAF.  One of our nearest neighbours got Starlink and suggested we piggyback off of them, so I bought the equipment to do so and we trialled it while still paying for our original internet.  For most everything Starlink was great...until my husband needed to facilitate a program over the course of several weeks through video conferencing.  There was frequently just a wide enough gap in satellite signal that his conference calls would drop out and things got real awkward.

Thankfully, since the moment we moved out here my husband has been working with our provider to gather enough community support and find a location to put a tower and they came through for us.  No more problems, no more Starlink.  And, thankfully, we didn't end up having to give an extra dime to Elon.

For what it's worth, I still have starlink, and it's still awesome.  I have used it teleworking, as has my lady and it's been flawless.  Teams messaging works perfectly.  I couldn't be happier.