I am about to buy a Starlink dish. It’s going to be used exclusively for overlanding trips and mounted to my truck’s rack, and powered by 12V LiFePO4 batteries.
Starlink recently released the Starlink Mini, which seems to be a better option for my use case - it has a smaller footprint, can be powered via 12V instead of 120, and from what I understand, draws less power.
The catch is that they are currently only offering it to Starlink residential customers at first. I have no interested or use for Starlink Residential service since I have fiber internet. That said, Starlink Mini is only a $30/month add-on with the $120 residential service, so it costs about the same as a standalone Roam plan, anyway.
I know that Starlink residential can’t be “paused” the same way Roam can. I only every really do trips during the summer, so I only want it for 3 months out of the year, basically. I would venture a guess that they will eventually make the Mini compatible with the standard Roam plan at some point.
So, I could:
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Just get the full-size dish and Roam plan
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Get the Starlink residential service with the Mini dish, use it for the summer, then cancel when I am done. Then hope by next summer I can re-use this now-cancelled Mini dish with the Roam plan. This means I’d be paying for a resi dish (I don’t think they will sell you service without buying one, will they?) that I won’t even be using. I’d also have to hope that they will let me buy the Roam plan with that mini dish next year.
Anybody have any input on this?