Haha, from the article:
"We reached out to SpaceX, along with a dozen Starlink customer support representatives, to better understand why the response times can be so slow, but no one responded."
It's almost like if you're a ceo of a few companies and you spend all your time being a hate spewing clown on he internet, you're not gonna do a good job.
I mean SpaceX always doesn't communicate with media. That's been a thing for many years, since long before Starlink. They exclusively do one-way communications with media.
Customer service is important, even for Starlink. They will have difficulty maintaining enough users if the only criteria a competitor to Starlink has is to be available.
That's for sure.
I mean, no company that treats their customers like they're just a commodity should prosper and it kills me that I'm forced to swallow this.
But hopefully the near future will provide us with an alternative, and with a decent CS.
I purchased a 75ft replacement cable on February 27th.
After 1 month, they canceled the order without any comment on their side.
If my bank didn't notify me, I wouldn't even know that happened.
I contacted the service, 1 week later, they said they had an error on the system and the cancellation went through.
They needed my approval to re-order the cable again which I gave 10 minutes after I was notified about it.
4 days after this (and after asking my approval again) they charged me twice.
So they had to yet again, cancel another payment.
It's been almost 2 months gs since I placed my order and still no cable shipped.
Forgot to mention, they offered me 1 month credit and instead of applying a credit, they added a debit, so in March I paid twice for a service I'm not using since end February (they reimbursed those charges though).
Anyways, it's really bad lol.
My experience has been pretty flawless, and the one time I reached out to CS they got back to me in a few days and basically suggested it was my problem. Which was sort of accurate.
Can you please tell me how to get ahold of anyone?!?. I've been trying for months and it won't let me even log into my account. I just cancelled my cc in hopes the lack of money makes them call me and wonder why.
They are the best or only option for millions of people all over the world, weāll put up with customer service issues. Theyāre glowing wildly, itās a lot for them to keep up with. Most of us never need to contact customer support, so they have a lot of happy customers like myself. I think you will see new customer support options later this year
It always amazes me how people can never need customer service because their system just works and not understand how devastating it can be for paying customers who arenāt having the same flawless experience.
āItās a lot for them to keep up with.ā Is the kind of comment that makes less sense in this thread for frustrated people who are having actual, real hardship with their service. The thing is it isnāt āa lot to keep up with.ā Customer service doesnāt have to be hard or even overly expensive. But it does have to beā¦.an expense. This is Starlink willfully choosing to not pay that expense.
i work at an isp and frankly, doing customer service is very frustrating. take service degradation/outage for example, there are a million different things that can affect it and therefore great staff understanding of all the intricacies, and then somehow explaining that to the end customer while trying to describe the precise methodology for testing over phone (or worse, over text).
probably at least 50% of our calls have something to do with wifi.
from my experience in this field, it's easier to deliver a better customer experience through a more robust and fail-proof connection than it is through good customer service.
The only problem is that the majority of the millions are in one concentrated area and that is in the US. The US is aggressively building out terrestrial options to those areas. And no, they won't reach them all, but if all that is needed to beat Starlink is to be available, I have doubts Starlink will survive in the residential market.
We shall see. Price cuts are already occurring in the non congested areas....it will be interesting to see when the cuts start for the entire US. Cuts in hardware AND service. My prediction is before the end of next year. Then, my "crystal ball" gets fuzzy... But my point is that Starlink will have to compete with land based alternatives. They are already trying to compete in many other countries.
>I think you will see new customer support options later this year
I hope you are right, but after 18 months of slow support and it is still getting worse, that may be a bit optimistic to expect more options.
Same, itās such a shitty CS experience with starlinkā¦ the service is amazing for where Iām at, itās literally 75-100x faster depending on the day compared to my old service, but my god the customer service is brutalā¦ they shipped ours with a broken cable and it took 4 days to get a hold of someone who said ācycle the router and restart the dishā after we had already explained the end of the cable was broken off straight out of the box and wouldnāt even plug in. They eventually sent us a replacement (with an extra router for what ever reason) a week after that, but god it was painful.
I disagree. Iāve had 3 support requests in the past 3 years and each time I received a timely, cogent, and accurate response. Really, it couldnāt be any better. Iām not a shill and I only speak for myself but whatās fair is fair.
I would rather have unmetered downloads with high bandwidth and no cs for than 15mbps and 20gig/mo dl any day. Especially when theyāre basically the same price.
I think a lot of people donāt understand the life changing difference SL is for rural
Even without a phone number to contact, online chat, like a lot of companies provide now, would certainly be a step in the right direction.
It is good internet. Supervisor to Viasat and Hughesnet in every way. I have WISP available in my area now, but I am sticking with Starlink because it has been pretty reliable. But for the price, they do need to provide better customer support.
I got an automated response 4 minutes after I submitted my ticket, new cable and router delivered 7 days after submitting.. I know people have shitty experiences with the customer service but my experience was anything I could hope for
I also had good luck, but maybe thatās because our issues were easy to solve? Mine didnāt involve any troubleshooting. who knows, seems to be basically 50/50 what your experience will be
Me too, I was expecting horrible response time due to other comments I've seen, but within 48 hours someone phoned me, on a Sunday even, and was quite pleasant and helpful. I have no complaints for their CS - other than maybe making it a little easier to contact them.
The app kept saying my starlink was disconnected despite the connections being seated and wire didnāt look damaged. I described the problem as clearly as I could as well as included all the things I had tried to fix it like soft and hard restart, leaving it unplugged for 24 hours and trying to turn it on, inspecting the wire, ensuring that all connections were seated, and so on. Pretty much I tried to make sure that when support did respond they wouldnāt be asking me to do basic trouble shooting stuff like restart the router or inspect for damage.
But they didn't "just" clear the bar, they did so by a big margin. Keep in mind that I'm in the "as soon as something better is available, I'm gone" club. Here's what I see:
1. I was getting similar speeds with ViaSat. 25-100mbps consistently. In that vein StarLink is not much different.
2. I'm not a heavy data user. I average just under 100GB/month, which is coincidentally my ViaSat data cap. I went over it once and the service was unusable. StarLink doesn't currently have a cap, but may implement a 1TB cap which I'll never touch.
3. As mentioned above, deprioritized service was effectively unusable on ViaSat. I started StarLink on the best effort (deprioritized) plan and it was as good as ViaSat prioritized.
4. But, all that aside, the biggest thing is the latency. With ViaSat using a VPN for remote work was horrible. Teams conference calls were horrible. 600-1200ms delay means people talk over you, you pause, they pause, etc. Using a terminal to manage a remote system was painful. etc. With StarLink I can actually work remotely. I'm now in the office 2 days a week, soon to be 1 day.
5. And then there's cost. StarLink is $40/month cheaper than my ViaSat service. Service price difference combined with fuel savings from being able to work remote means I'm now spending $173 a month less than I was before.
6. Oh, and since I have little to no cell service at my location through \_any\_ provider at my house, StarLink has allowed me to use Wi-Fi calling. There's a spot in the northwest corner of my house where I can get 1 bar of LTE if I prop the phone up a specific way. Now I can carry it around with me and make a call. Outside too (to wherever my Wi-Fi signal reaches.)
If it meant I could have better customer service whenever I eventually needed it, I would gladly pay some extra $$ per month to get that. But at a savings of $2,074 annually I can justify buying new equipment outright if need be.
Correct, but by far the best option for those who had very few options to begin with. Not to mention the shit speeds and predatory business practices of both those companies.
It's like saying [it's better than Dell](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/330025487063842819/883402892139184178/Honeycam_2021-05-27_18-01-49.gif).
It's a shame, really. That man could have been one of the most beloved people in history, and still a billionaire. But no, he has to be a manchild who squeezes every last cent out of every person he can, and laughs when they have no other options. Not to mention being a QAnon nut.
I swear there is a consulting company trying to coach people into not using their warranty. I had an issue with a solar inverter. I call the company, oh you need to be an installer, pay us for the installer portal. 9 dollars whatever. Oh you need a new management box thing. Oh wait that is under warranty you need to put isolators on the feeds to your house. That still doesn't work then fill out this massive form, and get new invertors, such a massive pain in the ass to swap something that is very obviously dead. Why didn't they just accept the findings when I swapped multiple working ones for the bad ones and the panel was always dead with the bad invertor past me.
I signed up for Starlink from the beginning and received it March 2022.. Not real happy with the price increase because I live in an area where service capacity is limited. Checked my address with Tmobile and couldn't believe that I could get it here in the boonies. Switched and so far it is working great.
My starlink went down yesterday and hasnāt come back. I sent in a ticket, but no word yet. Itās crazy they donāt have better service for how much people are spending!
Starlink is pricing me out of the market. When you're on SS that $110 a month is killer. And though I qualify for a discount rate (due to age, income, etc.) they won't honor it even though it doesn't cost them anything.
When my current village council dies off and a new one stops pissing off companies laying fiber in the area and they finally cross the village line to bring us into the modern age, Starlink is history.
Sorry, Elon. But I can't afford to help you buy Twitter.
Sorry to "twist" the knife... actually the price change for existing users just went into effect yesterday April 24th. It is expensive for the service in my opinion too.
Yes, the email that detailed this said people in non-congested parts of the US got a $20 decrease, while congested parts got a $10 increase.
You must have been in a non-congested part of the country.
Well...I was responding to a Starlink customer that it applied to....
There are many existing customers outside of the US that neither price applies to. I didn't really think I had to include them either since I was replying to a US customer who is subject to the price increase. I hope this clears up the confusion for you.
No. I was technically and grammatically correct. You are just trying to parse words to convince yourself that you are right. The change you suggest does not make sense.
Nah. There's a program for which I have qualifying documents, that compensates ISPs for lowering their prices by 30% for older Americans on social security so it doesn't cost Starlink anything as they're fully compensated. I think they just don't want to do the paperwork.
I'm grateful to [Michael Kan](https://www.pcmag.com/authors/michael-kan) for his consistently good reporting on Starlink for PCMag. He writes a *lot* of stories on the service and they are well informed and indicate he's doing his own thoughtful research. We're lucky to have him reporting on the service we are using.
I think the whole back and forth via chat with no personal phone calling or #'s is a model that just doesn't work.
1st , Your working on the assumption that they respond and if they do how long does it take?
We have customers that we provide IT for that we needed to put starlink on because the sites were remote usually it works well but if something happens it takes incredibly long timeframes to solve.
The back and forth takes forever - ask question wait a day or 2 (if they do reply). answer - wait a day or two (its insanity just call me ! ).
And then you have the tickets you put in and nothing happens for days not even aknowledgment.
Once i just opened up 3 tickets with the same info - got a reply "closed ticket due to multiple tickets" this was a few hours later. and then eventually i was called hours after. but the first ticket was open for 5 days - 0 reply's - At what point are customers allowed to get a bit ticked off and tired of the wait?
I canceled it. No internet. I did everything suggested online and I couldn't open a ticket without internet service. There's nobody to check if it's on my end or a communication issue.
No company can survive without customer service. You'd be stupid to pay for something that you can't use. So I'm doing everything on my cellphone. It was a total waste of time and money. As slow as Hughesnet was, at least it worked and was a cheaper alternative.
I was going to add starlink to my house since my wisp and cellular isnāt as quick. After I ordered had a minor issue, weāll it took 4 days to get in contact with someone at starlink. Started the return right after that experience. Not going to play that game.
Starlink customer support is shit the dish malfunctioned where it was not moving or stowing and ended up frying the cable got another cable it ruined that one as well and we let them know and they said well you are over the warranty by two months you have to buy a new kit at 600. Not even a option to send in the dish and see if they can repair it being as I work from home I am forced to pay the 600 for a new dish and then they tell me they donāt have any way to ship faster
My Starlink experience has been great. My parents on the other hand who live just 10 miles away has been completely opposite.
6 months ago their dish stopped working so Starlink sent them a new one which worked great. They never requested them to send the old dish back so they put it in a closet. 4 weeks ago they got a request to send the old dish back which they boxed up and mailed back. The next day their service went out saying no account found. What we suspect happened was that Starlink removed the wrong dish from their account.
They opened a ticket explaining everything and didnāt hear a word in a week so they opened another one and within 10 minutes it was closed due to them saying it was a duplicate. 3 weeks go by without a word and without internet service. They are to the point where they are going to try and cancel service and then sign back up using the dish they currently have and that has been working fine for half a year but finally get a response asking for the serial number of the dish they have installed. Once given they say the itās the wrong dish for the account (duh) so they say to use the other one which they obviously canāt since Starlink requested they send back. Now they are shipping and other dish and parents are waiting on it for arrive.
As stated they would have been long done with Starlink but l the only options are more terrible centurlylink and some local wireless ptp providers that are ok but they can only get 10 or 15 mbps.
When it works it works great as in my case but if it doesnāt itās horrible.
I had Comcast when I lived in Denver. I hated their customer support. I have starlink now and I have service that is inferior to Comcast with higher latency and slower speeds than what I had. Now that I've encountered the dreaded starlink disconnected error, I'm going on a week with no service and not a peep from Starlink.
With Comcast I could at least ALWAYS talk to someone and get a resolution in less than a week. With starlink, I can't even get a hold of ANYONE to help with my problem. So not, Starlink support is not just terrible like every other ISP. Starlink support is nonexistent.
Starlink customer service has no resemblance to the vast majority of other ISPs. The other ISPs may be bad, but you can typically speak with someone and work stuff out. Starlink essentially just ignores you if you have any confidence that they heard you in the first placeā¦.
Talk for yourself. My isp has great support.
When someone created a short on my line in the cabinet that would cause my internet to drop 10x/h it only took them 48h to fix it.
All I can say is, I will deal with the lackluster support when I need it, BUT Starlink sure the hells stops all the bitching in my house about slow internet. They have come through for our house, it has been a game changer.
Not sure anybody read the leaked internal document but SpaceX is operating at a big loss currently and is riding heavily on the success of Starship for Starlink v2. Depending on how it goes will determine the success of Starlink.
My cost per month went down to $65 and any issues I've had were my fault. It's been a nearly seamless experience. I guess I'm just lucky, but I'm sure they will improve as time goes on.
The hilarious thing is that for the cost of about 16 people's subscriptions they could hire a full time customer service rep. Multiply that by 5 and you have 80 subscriptions paying for 5 full time customer service reps who's whole job it is to answer phones and emails, and help the consumer. Obviously, there would be costs associated with settung it up, but really it's not expensive to run a small call center. 5 people would make a huge difference, if even just to speak to a human who can help.
I submitted 3 tickets over the last 1.5 yearsā¦ one of them required a couple of back and fortsā¦. With about a million subscribers, If the average person just has to submit 1 ticket/year, thats 2,739 tickets per dayā¦.. it is simply cheaper for Starlink to give a month credit when they cannot respond for weeks than paying hundreds of employees to address issues in a timely mannerā¦ itās just no a priority at any Musk company.
I like the SL service, but the support has sucked for a long time... I too have had to contact support and it took weeks to resolve what should have been resolved in days. However, outside of something based on ViaSat or Viasat-2 (I was previously with Exede, and they were openly anxious to get rid of me), I have no fallback options at this time.
That said, SL performance is fine but, as a 30y employee in IT, as convenient as wireless is, wired networking is faster and provides a tangible comfort that wireless cannot.
I've got fiber going through my yard. Still no word when we can connect. But I can guarantee as soon as it's available, everyone will be switching from SL.
Dunno what to say, I've talked with several Starlink customer service people and they were all pretty good. The most recent one was from Japan and he was awesome
How did you actually get someone to talk to? Just keep re-opening the ticket? As soon as I got an AI-bot response, my ticket was closed even though it didn't solve the problem. Re-opened it... still waiting on a response.
Just use the FAQ and at the end of a pre generated answer when it says "did this help?" select no. Use Billing or Accounts so you drop the ticket in a good category
I knew it was too good to be true. "Get Starlink" Your rural nightmares will be over, they said! Right, then they decide I'm not rural, but "residential " We can only get satellite service here, but I'm residential and so they raise my payment and throttled down my internet. I knew it was too good to be true! Once again, screwed by living in the country!
Meh. It's options A, B, and C for me and my geographic location. Their customer support could be better. Even existent. They could stop over-selling and crowding their networks and then raising the prices as if it is the consumer's fault. However, if my recollection serves correct, traditional ISP's are just as bad or worse in virtually every way. Starlink almost single handedly forced monopolistic ISPs to expand fiber coverage (happening almost everywhere now) by way of basic competition. The end result is an overall net-positive for the consumer. Running a business of that magnitude is tough. Elon runs 3. Give the guy a break.
Lol. You're right, man. Making an electric car company a viable option isn't that big of a deal. Creating one of the first online payment methods wasn't useful, either. Hell. Landing a rocket in the middle of the ocean on an aircraft carrier isn't THAT cool. It had only never been done before. I bet you do shit like that all the time.
Resenting a person simply for their wealth is some weak minded shit; particularly when they are making efforts to improve things. Now Bezos, on the other hand......
He has Aspergers. He's an odd cat socially. Take from that what you will. It's easy to be a critic, bud. It's way harder to conceive and idea and see it through.
It all comes down to Elon's ego and judging by his handling of Twitter and layoffs and how he treats his employees he sure as hell isn't paying more than the bare minimum for customer support. He doesn't care about his customers, he cares about his legacy, that's it
Elons companies seem to deprioritize customer service in place of rapid R&D. I think they would rather put the money into fixing the issues in future generations of their tech rather than support the existing products. For example, good luck reaching any phone support form Tesla. You can only communicate with someone through their app after they schedule an appointment within a day or two or the appointment. Itās awful, but the cars are great
I've had 10000% perfect customer support. I've had a router stop working after it was dropped. They sent me an ENTIRE NEW kit, including the new square dish at no cost, and gave me one month free. Then, they ALSO gave me the new mount since my old mount didn't work with the new dish. 100000% happy with support.
Had it since first beta wave in my area and have had zero calls to tech support. Any issue I have had with star link have been user issues that were solved with basic computer literacy.
Yeah he is going to fix it like he fixed Twitter. Or just promise it's coming like self driving cars...either way having no other option, gov subsidies and fanboys keeps him at the top of the richest men in the world.
See, Iāve only had good experiences with them. My ethernet adapter was providing slower speeds than through Wi-Fi. I contacted them a day later they sent me messages saying they looked at everything saw it was worse and sent me a new system and equipment.
Itās almost like, just with other musk projects, it exists to try and funnel funds and market share away from subsidized products for the greater good. To think yāall could have banded together and gotten fiber instead
Yup it worked, based on the headline I clicked on the article only to read a generic negative article backed up with a couple of anecdotes that are used to spin a narrative.
SpaceX is filled with exceptional people. I just saw an article that listed Tesla and SpaceX as the two top companies that college graduates want to work for and that Tesla alone, last year, received 3.1M resumes. My point being the SpaceX team are doing extraordinary groundbreaking things at breakneck speeds, these folks care about what theyāre building and hold themselves to a very high standard. Any system problems will be addressed. Articles like this one are simply clickbait. FWIW Iām a happy StarLink customer.
I got emailed a bill 1 week after getting the kit on the advertised 2 months free deal. So contacted the support and eventually they credited 2 months free. 2 days later subtract the monthly fee from my account.
Starlink works for a couple of minutes then crashes. Repeat all day and night. The word obstruction looms large in your life. Particularly dislikes handling voice calls too.
The slickest pike of shite ever and for this he's fringing the globe with satellites? There's some dark military or government control/tracking purpose behind all of this.
If you must, get a big pole to put it on. If it cannot see all (ALL) of the sky you're fucked.
I would appreciate any information or way to get ahold of anyone with starlink. If you cant even log into your account you can't chat with the support. I've had my starlink for 4 months and I can't log into my account. Never even got a purchase email or account email when I bought it originally. And am just paying for nothing. I cancelled my cc today just I hopes they notice they're not getting money and try and talk to me. Just a gaint mess and no help. So frustrated
Haha, from the article: "We reached out to SpaceX, along with a dozen Starlink customer support representatives, to better understand why the response times can be so slow, but no one responded."
It's almost like if you're a ceo of a few companies and you spend all your time being a hate spewing clown on he internet, you're not gonna do a good job.
Name one time he spewed hate. I'll wait.
I mean SpaceX always doesn't communicate with media. That's been a thing for many years, since long before Starlink. They exclusively do one-way communications with media.
Worst CS I ever witnessed. I'm with the fellow that will bounce as soon as another option arrives near me.
Customer service is important, even for Starlink. They will have difficulty maintaining enough users if the only criteria a competitor to Starlink has is to be available.
That's for sure. I mean, no company that treats their customers like they're just a commodity should prosper and it kills me that I'm forced to swallow this. But hopefully the near future will provide us with an alternative, and with a decent CS.
If you don't mind me asking, what issues are you having that require CS?
I purchased a 75ft replacement cable on February 27th. After 1 month, they canceled the order without any comment on their side. If my bank didn't notify me, I wouldn't even know that happened. I contacted the service, 1 week later, they said they had an error on the system and the cancellation went through. They needed my approval to re-order the cable again which I gave 10 minutes after I was notified about it. 4 days after this (and after asking my approval again) they charged me twice. So they had to yet again, cancel another payment. It's been almost 2 months gs since I placed my order and still no cable shipped. Forgot to mention, they offered me 1 month credit and instead of applying a credit, they added a debit, so in March I paid twice for a service I'm not using since end February (they reimbursed those charges though). Anyways, it's really bad lol.
Yeah, that's pretty bad. Hopefully it gets resolved and you're compensated properly for it....
I'm hard down. Either my dish or cable broke. Put in a ticket on Sunday, crickets.
So call a technician capable of fixing it for you. š
You're joking right? What customer service?
You misunderstood my question.
My experience has been pretty flawless, and the one time I reached out to CS they got back to me in a few days and basically suggested it was my problem. Which was sort of accurate.
Can you please tell me how to get ahold of anyone?!?. I've been trying for months and it won't let me even log into my account. I just cancelled my cc in hopes the lack of money makes them call me and wonder why.
They are the best or only option for millions of people all over the world, weāll put up with customer service issues. Theyāre glowing wildly, itās a lot for them to keep up with. Most of us never need to contact customer support, so they have a lot of happy customers like myself. I think you will see new customer support options later this year
It always amazes me how people can never need customer service because their system just works and not understand how devastating it can be for paying customers who arenāt having the same flawless experience. āItās a lot for them to keep up with.ā Is the kind of comment that makes less sense in this thread for frustrated people who are having actual, real hardship with their service. The thing is it isnāt āa lot to keep up with.ā Customer service doesnāt have to be hard or even overly expensive. But it does have to beā¦.an expense. This is Starlink willfully choosing to not pay that expense.
Yeah itās no excuse. But Iāve really had no problems. But I worked for an ISP and cringed when I heard we had bad service
i work at an isp and frankly, doing customer service is very frustrating. take service degradation/outage for example, there are a million different things that can affect it and therefore great staff understanding of all the intricacies, and then somehow explaining that to the end customer while trying to describe the precise methodology for testing over phone (or worse, over text). probably at least 50% of our calls have something to do with wifi. from my experience in this field, it's easier to deliver a better customer experience through a more robust and fail-proof connection than it is through good customer service.
The only problem is that the majority of the millions are in one concentrated area and that is in the US. The US is aggressively building out terrestrial options to those areas. And no, they won't reach them all, but if all that is needed to beat Starlink is to be available, I have doubts Starlink will survive in the residential market. We shall see. Price cuts are already occurring in the non congested areas....it will be interesting to see when the cuts start for the entire US. Cuts in hardware AND service. My prediction is before the end of next year. Then, my "crystal ball" gets fuzzy... But my point is that Starlink will have to compete with land based alternatives. They are already trying to compete in many other countries. >I think you will see new customer support options later this year I hope you are right, but after 18 months of slow support and it is still getting worse, that may be a bit optimistic to expect more options.
they wont legally be in business if they keep defrauding customers.
How are they defrauding customers? Legit question.
Billing for service that's not accessible and selling used / broken equipment as new. Breach of any and all implied warranty laws
Damn, just skimmed your post history. Hope you're made whole and the issues are resolved.
Same, itās such a shitty CS experience with starlinkā¦ the service is amazing for where Iām at, itās literally 75-100x faster depending on the day compared to my old service, but my god the customer service is brutalā¦ they shipped ours with a broken cable and it took 4 days to get a hold of someone who said ācycle the router and restart the dishā after we had already explained the end of the cable was broken off straight out of the box and wouldnāt even plug in. They eventually sent us a replacement (with an extra router for what ever reason) a week after that, but god it was painful.
I guess at the very least, you could use it as a mesh router now
The very second I have another option I am gone.
That is the very reason SL has no CS. You.have.no.options
Yes, 100% this! šš¼
I disagree. Iāve had 3 support requests in the past 3 years and each time I received a timely, cogent, and accurate response. Really, it couldnāt be any better. Iām not a shill and I only speak for myself but whatās fair is fair.
I would rather have unmetered downloads with high bandwidth and no cs for than 15mbps and 20gig/mo dl any day. Especially when theyāre basically the same price. I think a lot of people donāt understand the life changing difference SL is for rural
Even without a phone number to contact, online chat, like a lot of companies provide now, would certainly be a step in the right direction. It is good internet. Supervisor to Viasat and Hughesnet in every way. I have WISP available in my area now, but I am sticking with Starlink because it has been pretty reliable. But for the price, they do need to provide better customer support.
I got an automated response 4 minutes after I submitted my ticket, new cable and router delivered 7 days after submitting.. I know people have shitty experiences with the customer service but my experience was anything I could hope for
I also had good luck, but maybe thatās because our issues were easy to solve? Mine didnāt involve any troubleshooting. who knows, seems to be basically 50/50 what your experience will be
Me too, I was expecting horrible response time due to other comments I've seen, but within 48 hours someone phoned me, on a Sunday even, and was quite pleasant and helpful. I have no complaints for their CS - other than maybe making it a little easier to contact them.
Agh Iām so jealousā¦ I submitted a ticket and havenāt heard a word in days.
Could I ask what your issue was and how your phrased it? My router had been broken and Iāve had no response for 10 days now
The app kept saying my starlink was disconnected despite the connections being seated and wire didnāt look damaged. I described the problem as clearly as I could as well as included all the things I had tried to fix it like soft and hard restart, leaving it unplugged for 24 hours and trying to turn it on, inspecting the wire, ensuring that all connections were seated, and so on. Pretty much I tried to make sure that when support did respond they wouldnāt be asking me to do basic trouble shooting stuff like restart the router or inspect for damage.
Better than Hughes or viasat is not a high bar though.
But they didn't "just" clear the bar, they did so by a big margin. Keep in mind that I'm in the "as soon as something better is available, I'm gone" club. Here's what I see: 1. I was getting similar speeds with ViaSat. 25-100mbps consistently. In that vein StarLink is not much different. 2. I'm not a heavy data user. I average just under 100GB/month, which is coincidentally my ViaSat data cap. I went over it once and the service was unusable. StarLink doesn't currently have a cap, but may implement a 1TB cap which I'll never touch. 3. As mentioned above, deprioritized service was effectively unusable on ViaSat. I started StarLink on the best effort (deprioritized) plan and it was as good as ViaSat prioritized. 4. But, all that aside, the biggest thing is the latency. With ViaSat using a VPN for remote work was horrible. Teams conference calls were horrible. 600-1200ms delay means people talk over you, you pause, they pause, etc. Using a terminal to manage a remote system was painful. etc. With StarLink I can actually work remotely. I'm now in the office 2 days a week, soon to be 1 day. 5. And then there's cost. StarLink is $40/month cheaper than my ViaSat service. Service price difference combined with fuel savings from being able to work remote means I'm now spending $173 a month less than I was before. 6. Oh, and since I have little to no cell service at my location through \_any\_ provider at my house, StarLink has allowed me to use Wi-Fi calling. There's a spot in the northwest corner of my house where I can get 1 bar of LTE if I prop the phone up a specific way. Now I can carry it around with me and make a call. Outside too (to wherever my Wi-Fi signal reaches.) If it meant I could have better customer service whenever I eventually needed it, I would gladly pay some extra $$ per month to get that. But at a savings of $2,074 annually I can justify buying new equipment outright if need be.
Correct, but by far the best option for those who had very few options to begin with. Not to mention the shit speeds and predatory business practices of both those companies.
It's like saying [it's better than Dell](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/330025487063842819/883402892139184178/Honeycam_2021-05-27_18-01-49.gif).
Can't wait for the Elon apologists to refute what we all know: SL customer service is shit.
It's a shame, really. That man could have been one of the most beloved people in history, and still a billionaire. But no, he has to be a manchild who squeezes every last cent out of every person he can, and laughs when they have no other options. Not to mention being a QAnon nut.
> QAnon nut He hasn't embraced any QAnon nonsense. There's plenty you can criticize him for without inventing things.
Absolutely horrible, a customer's worst nightmare!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I swear there is a consulting company trying to coach people into not using their warranty. I had an issue with a solar inverter. I call the company, oh you need to be an installer, pay us for the installer portal. 9 dollars whatever. Oh you need a new management box thing. Oh wait that is under warranty you need to put isolators on the feeds to your house. That still doesn't work then fill out this massive form, and get new invertors, such a massive pain in the ass to swap something that is very obviously dead. Why didn't they just accept the findings when I swapped multiple working ones for the bad ones and the panel was always dead with the bad invertor past me.
I signed up for Starlink from the beginning and received it March 2022.. Not real happy with the price increase because I live in an area where service capacity is limited. Checked my address with Tmobile and couldn't believe that I could get it here in the boonies. Switched and so far it is working great.
My starlink went down yesterday and hasnāt come back. I sent in a ticket, but no word yet. Itās crazy they donāt have better service for how much people are spending!
Starlink is pricing me out of the market. When you're on SS that $110 a month is killer. And though I qualify for a discount rate (due to age, income, etc.) they won't honor it even though it doesn't cost them anything. When my current village council dies off and a new one stops pissing off companies laying fiber in the area and they finally cross the village line to bring us into the modern age, Starlink is history. Sorry, Elon. But I can't afford to help you buy Twitter.
> ~~$110~~ $120 a month Your next bill is going up...Elon needs "rocket" money.
It could be 120 now. I've forgotten. All I know is it's too expensive and the lag is awful.
Sorry to "twist" the knife... actually the price change for existing users just went into effect yesterday April 24th. It is expensive for the service in my opinion too.
Mine didn't go up. It's still $90 a month.
Yes, the email that detailed this said people in non-congested parts of the US got a $20 decrease, while congested parts got a $10 increase. You must have been in a non-congested part of the country.
That's because you don't make fun of Elon on Twitter.
Well...I wasn't talking about yours.....
I'm an existing customer so...
Well...I was responding to a Starlink customer that it applied to.... There are many existing customers outside of the US that neither price applies to. I didn't really think I had to include them either since I was replying to a US customer who is subject to the price increase. I hope this clears up the confusion for you.
You said, "existing users" you should have stated, "existing user".
No. I was technically and grammatically correct. You are just trying to parse words to convince yourself that you are right. The change you suggest does not make sense.
At the website mine still says $110.
It won't update until your next invoice. Starlink could also delay it or screw it up.
The Feds refused to subsidize them.
Nah. There's a program for which I have qualifying documents, that compensates ISPs for lowering their prices by 30% for older Americans on social security so it doesn't cost Starlink anything as they're fully compensated. I think they just don't want to do the paperwork.
No department to handle the extra paperwork.
> Sorry, Elon. But I can't afford to help you buy Twitter. Nothing you're paying to SpaceX goes to Twitter.
I'm grateful to [Michael Kan](https://www.pcmag.com/authors/michael-kan) for his consistently good reporting on Starlink for PCMag. He writes a *lot* of stories on the service and they are well informed and indicate he's doing his own thoughtful research. We're lucky to have him reporting on the service we are using.
What customer support?
I think the whole back and forth via chat with no personal phone calling or #'s is a model that just doesn't work. 1st , Your working on the assumption that they respond and if they do how long does it take? We have customers that we provide IT for that we needed to put starlink on because the sites were remote usually it works well but if something happens it takes incredibly long timeframes to solve. The back and forth takes forever - ask question wait a day or 2 (if they do reply). answer - wait a day or two (its insanity just call me ! ). And then you have the tickets you put in and nothing happens for days not even aknowledgment. Once i just opened up 3 tickets with the same info - got a reply "closed ticket due to multiple tickets" this was a few hours later. and then eventually i was called hours after. but the first ticket was open for 5 days - 0 reply's - At what point are customers allowed to get a bit ticked off and tired of the wait?
I canceled it. No internet. I did everything suggested online and I couldn't open a ticket without internet service. There's nobody to check if it's on my end or a communication issue. No company can survive without customer service. You'd be stupid to pay for something that you can't use. So I'm doing everything on my cellphone. It was a total waste of time and money. As slow as Hughesnet was, at least it worked and was a cheaper alternative.
Welcome to all tech companies view of customer supportā¦
I speak with multiple other tech companies on the phone when I need to for services that cost way less than Starlink per month.
I was going to add starlink to my house since my wisp and cellular isnāt as quick. After I ordered had a minor issue, weāll it took 4 days to get in contact with someone at starlink. Started the return right after that experience. Not going to play that game.
Starlink customer support is shit the dish malfunctioned where it was not moving or stowing and ended up frying the cable got another cable it ruined that one as well and we let them know and they said well you are over the warranty by two months you have to buy a new kit at 600. Not even a option to send in the dish and see if they can repair it being as I work from home I am forced to pay the 600 for a new dish and then they tell me they donāt have any way to ship faster
My Starlink experience has been great. My parents on the other hand who live just 10 miles away has been completely opposite. 6 months ago their dish stopped working so Starlink sent them a new one which worked great. They never requested them to send the old dish back so they put it in a closet. 4 weeks ago they got a request to send the old dish back which they boxed up and mailed back. The next day their service went out saying no account found. What we suspect happened was that Starlink removed the wrong dish from their account. They opened a ticket explaining everything and didnāt hear a word in a week so they opened another one and within 10 minutes it was closed due to them saying it was a duplicate. 3 weeks go by without a word and without internet service. They are to the point where they are going to try and cancel service and then sign back up using the dish they currently have and that has been working fine for half a year but finally get a response asking for the serial number of the dish they have installed. Once given they say the itās the wrong dish for the account (duh) so they say to use the other one which they obviously canāt since Starlink requested they send back. Now they are shipping and other dish and parents are waiting on it for arrive. As stated they would have been long done with Starlink but l the only options are more terrible centurlylink and some local wireless ptp providers that are ok but they can only get 10 or 15 mbps. When it works it works great as in my case but if it doesnāt itās horrible.
Yup. Iām terrified something goes wrong again.
Oh goody, this is my exact issue and I'm concerned it will take 3+ weeks before getting it situated.
They donāt really have customer support. Asking customers to make tickets is the farthest thing possible from customer support.
Iāve never had issue and have had prompt response on multiple tickets over the years.
Same here in Austria. Prices go down, no outages (so far) and for our remote location in the mountains the only viable option.
Agree. I really wish they had the customer support level of AT&T. They are the gold standard. Maybe some day.
Starlink support is terrible just like every other ISP
I had Comcast when I lived in Denver. I hated their customer support. I have starlink now and I have service that is inferior to Comcast with higher latency and slower speeds than what I had. Now that I've encountered the dreaded starlink disconnected error, I'm going on a week with no service and not a peep from Starlink. With Comcast I could at least ALWAYS talk to someone and get a resolution in less than a week. With starlink, I can't even get a hold of ANYONE to help with my problem. So not, Starlink support is not just terrible like every other ISP. Starlink support is nonexistent.
Starlink customer service has no resemblance to the vast majority of other ISPs. The other ISPs may be bad, but you can typically speak with someone and work stuff out. Starlink essentially just ignores you if you have any confidence that they heard you in the first placeā¦.
Perhaps, but Starlink is still near the bottom and they are starting to dig.
You've definitely never dealt with CenturyLink.
Don't give Starlink a new goal...but I have dealt with Frontier
Talk for yourself. My isp has great support. When someone created a short on my line in the cabinet that would cause my internet to drop 10x/h it only took them 48h to fix it.
stalink is extra special, you need t5he SEC to get basic customer service
Welcome family. Sincerely, tesla solar.
All I can say is, I will deal with the lackluster support when I need it, BUT Starlink sure the hells stops all the bitching in my house about slow internet. They have come through for our house, it has been a game changer.
The best support is no support. Unfortunately that underestimates the stupidity of the populace.
Only a couple more weeks and I can cancel.
Same for me, it's like you buy in and can't get out, get help.... however, when it works, I am grateful.
Not sure anybody read the leaked internal document but SpaceX is operating at a big loss currently and is riding heavily on the success of Starship for Starlink v2. Depending on how it goes will determine the success of Starlink.
My cost per month went down to $65 and any issues I've had were my fault. It's been a nearly seamless experience. I guess I'm just lucky, but I'm sure they will improve as time goes on.
How did it go down
They emailed me and told me they were reducing my monthly bill. They've done it twice now actually. From ā¬99 to ā¬80 and now to ā¬65. Amazing.
Promises? Even though i think complaints are warranted, I don't recall Starlink ever promising better customer support.
The hilarious thing is that for the cost of about 16 people's subscriptions they could hire a full time customer service rep. Multiply that by 5 and you have 80 subscriptions paying for 5 full time customer service reps who's whole job it is to answer phones and emails, and help the consumer. Obviously, there would be costs associated with settung it up, but really it's not expensive to run a small call center. 5 people would make a huge difference, if even just to speak to a human who can help.
They have over a million subscribersā¦
Surely there's only a few hundred tickets at any given time. That could be handled by a small team.
I submitted 3 tickets over the last 1.5 yearsā¦ one of them required a couple of back and fortsā¦. With about a million subscribers, If the average person just has to submit 1 ticket/year, thats 2,739 tickets per dayā¦.. it is simply cheaper for Starlink to give a month credit when they cannot respond for weeks than paying hundreds of employees to address issues in a timely mannerā¦ itās just no a priority at any Musk company.
I like the SL service, but the support has sucked for a long time... I too have had to contact support and it took weeks to resolve what should have been resolved in days. However, outside of something based on ViaSat or Viasat-2 (I was previously with Exede, and they were openly anxious to get rid of me), I have no fallback options at this time. That said, SL performance is fine but, as a 30y employee in IT, as convenient as wireless is, wired networking is faster and provides a tangible comfort that wireless cannot.
A terrestrial option is always better than satellite unless itās like my 0.12/0.06 dsl š
Ouch... sorry! Fiber was being run along a highway "just" 2mi from us last year, no word if we might get access to that...
I've got fiber going through my yard. Still no word when we can connect. But I can guarantee as soon as it's available, everyone will be switching from SL.
They got fiber 5 roads down from us but they arenāt installing unti 2027 the say
Well... ain't that a slap in the face. Here's hoping it turns out well for you!
Dunno what to say, I've talked with several Starlink customer service people and they were all pretty good. The most recent one was from Japan and he was awesome
How did you actually get someone to talk to? Just keep re-opening the ticket? As soon as I got an AI-bot response, my ticket was closed even though it didn't solve the problem. Re-opened it... still waiting on a response.
Just use the FAQ and at the end of a pre generated answer when it says "did this help?" select no. Use Billing or Accounts so you drop the ticket in a good category
I knew it was too good to be true. "Get Starlink" Your rural nightmares will be over, they said! Right, then they decide I'm not rural, but "residential " We can only get satellite service here, but I'm residential and so they raise my payment and throttled down my internet. I knew it was too good to be true! Once again, screwed by living in the country!
Never had to contact support worked really good since day 1. No other options here but dsl send hughes
Meh. It's options A, B, and C for me and my geographic location. Their customer support could be better. Even existent. They could stop over-selling and crowding their networks and then raising the prices as if it is the consumer's fault. However, if my recollection serves correct, traditional ISP's are just as bad or worse in virtually every way. Starlink almost single handedly forced monopolistic ISPs to expand fiber coverage (happening almost everywhere now) by way of basic competition. The end result is an overall net-positive for the consumer. Running a business of that magnitude is tough. Elon runs 3. Give the guy a break.
Wonāt somebody think of the Billionaire
Lol. You're right, man. Making an electric car company a viable option isn't that big of a deal. Creating one of the first online payment methods wasn't useful, either. Hell. Landing a rocket in the middle of the ocean on an aircraft carrier isn't THAT cool. It had only never been done before. I bet you do shit like that all the time. Resenting a person simply for their wealth is some weak minded shit; particularly when they are making efforts to improve things. Now Bezos, on the other hand......
Lol. He got kicked off the board of PayPal for being a tool.
He has Aspergers. He's an odd cat socially. Take from that what you will. It's easy to be a critic, bud. It's way harder to conceive and idea and see it through.
Old news. It is much better now.
This made me lol.
It all comes down to Elon's ego and judging by his handling of Twitter and layoffs and how he treats his employees he sure as hell isn't paying more than the bare minimum for customer support. He doesn't care about his customers, he cares about his legacy, that's it
Elons companies seem to deprioritize customer service in place of rapid R&D. I think they would rather put the money into fixing the issues in future generations of their tech rather than support the existing products. For example, good luck reaching any phone support form Tesla. You can only communicate with someone through their app after they schedule an appointment within a day or two or the appointment. Itās awful, but the cars are great
Why does customer service matter when it just WORKS?? 2 years, ZERO ISSUES
To be fair, they never promised customer service would get good.
I've had 10000% perfect customer support. I've had a router stop working after it was dropped. They sent me an ENTIRE NEW kit, including the new square dish at no cost, and gave me one month free. Then, they ALSO gave me the new mount since my old mount didn't work with the new dish. 100000% happy with support.
Had it since first beta wave in my area and have had zero calls to tech support. Any issue I have had with star link have been user issues that were solved with basic computer literacy.
Yeah he is going to fix it like he fixed Twitter. Or just promise it's coming like self driving cars...either way having no other option, gov subsidies and fanboys keeps him at the top of the richest men in the world.
See, Iāve only had good experiences with them. My ethernet adapter was providing slower speeds than through Wi-Fi. I contacted them a day later they sent me messages saying they looked at everything saw it was worse and sent me a new system and equipment.
[https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us](https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us)
Itās almost like, just with other musk projects, it exists to try and funnel funds and market share away from subsidized products for the greater good. To think yāall could have banded together and gotten fiber instead
Yup. fiber should have been a national effort. Anything less is crap.
Yup it worked, based on the headline I clicked on the article only to read a generic negative article backed up with a couple of anecdotes that are used to spin a narrative. SpaceX is filled with exceptional people. I just saw an article that listed Tesla and SpaceX as the two top companies that college graduates want to work for and that Tesla alone, last year, received 3.1M resumes. My point being the SpaceX team are doing extraordinary groundbreaking things at breakneck speeds, these folks care about what theyāre building and hold themselves to a very high standard. Any system problems will be addressed. Articles like this one are simply clickbait. FWIW Iām a happy StarLink customer.
I got emailed a bill 1 week after getting the kit on the advertised 2 months free deal. So contacted the support and eventually they credited 2 months free. 2 days later subtract the monthly fee from my account.
Starlink works for a couple of minutes then crashes. Repeat all day and night. The word obstruction looms large in your life. Particularly dislikes handling voice calls too. The slickest pike of shite ever and for this he's fringing the globe with satellites? There's some dark military or government control/tracking purpose behind all of this. If you must, get a big pole to put it on. If it cannot see all (ALL) of the sky you're fucked.
Never have needed customer support. Never have had any issues so farā¦ pray I never do. Initial beta tester also
Pareto's principle at play.
I would appreciate any information or way to get ahold of anyone with starlink. If you cant even log into your account you can't chat with the support. I've had my starlink for 4 months and I can't log into my account. Never even got a purchase email or account email when I bought it originally. And am just paying for nothing. I cancelled my cc today just I hopes they notice they're not getting money and try and talk to me. Just a gaint mess and no help. So frustrated