A WiFi mesh system uses multiple nodes to spread a WiFi network over a larger area. Because our house is a good size and has twisting hallways, a WiFi signal has difficulty pushing its signal from one side of the house to the other. With the mesh, we have six nodes placed strategically around the house that "talk" to each other and extend the WiFi so one can get a good signal from anywhere in the house. Most of our devices are already connected to that network (called Firefly--after the show), so I figured it would be nice to keep them on the same network albeit with a different connection to the Internet.
I moved the "parent" node from the office (where our ASC Internet comes in) to the garage (where our StarLink router was located); it needs to be directly connected to the router with an ethernet cord. I then had to reset each of the "child" nodes around the house. Already, I could tell that it wasn't working quite how I wanted it to. I felt that part of the problem was that it was sharing WiFi signal with the StarLink's built-in WiFi network, so I used the app to set the StarLink router to "bridge" mode.
We clearly had a connection, but it was not as strong as it should have been with my phone only getting download speeds of about 3 to 4 MPS when I checked Internet speed test sites. I rebooted the network and had it scan its channels for faster access, but with no real improvement. The only other thing I could think of was that the parent node was too far removed from the rest of the network as it was sitting in the garage--even if that hadn't been much of a factor for the StarLink's internal WiFi. As it was dark (and cold), I decided to wait to make that change until Monday.
On Monday, I--with some help from the boys--moved the StarLink router and Linksys parent node from the garage to the living room with the cord from the satellite dish attached to the eaves of the garage and arctic entryway before entering the house through an upstairs window. I still need to do a bit of adjustment to make it so the cord--which is hanging between the two buildings--is not in an area where the snow from the roof can fall and hit it. Unfortunately, even this physical change had little effect on the signal. I set the PS5 up to download a game (the free update of The Witcher 3 to the PS5 version) to test its signal, but it was only downloading at about 6 to 7 MPS. In comparison, Ghost of Tsushima's update had downloaded at 10 times that speed, albeit spottily. Meanwhile, my phone was now only getting about 1 MPS or less. It tried another reboot and channel scan, but I was pretty frustrated. I decided to sleep on the problem and either have a solution in the morning or to switch to StarLink's internal WiFi.
Sleeping on a problem often leads to a solution. In this case, this morning I noticed that the Linksys parent node was registering download speeds well over 100 MPS (at times about 200 MPS), but the PS5 was still downloading at that consistent 6 to 7 MPS and my phone was still low. This suggested that there was something in the Linksys Velop system that was causing the problem. Sure enough, I had prioritized the PS5 and a couple of other devices to make certain that our streaming videos would not get as interrupted when we were on the slower ACS service. Linksys had kept it locked at those low levels, dishing out bandwidth based on an average download speed of 7 MPS. The moment I turned the prioritizing section off, the floodgates opened. The PS5--which had said it had 10 hours of downloading still to go--finished the download in 20 minutes. My phone was speed testing above 20 MPS.
Now, I would like to say that everything is golden; however, even though the WiFi mesh system is running smoothly, we are still having some issues with StarLink itself. It has been MUCH more consistent in the past 48 hours, but just today I had a two-hour blackout which only ended half an hour after I rebooted the system. While it's been purring along nicely for the past two hours, just before then we had a section of about an hour where it was "searching" for about 75% of the time.
StarLink says that those disconnections will happen less and less as they launch more and more satellites. They predict to have it running completely smoothly by this summer. For now, it is good enough--and we have our phones as backups--that I'm going to give ACS a call tomorrow to end their service with us.