Two years after initially getting Starlink internet for my home in rural Idaho, I jumped at the chance to upgrade to the newest equipment, the Dish V4 and Gen 3 Wi-Fi router ($499.99). And why wouldn't I? In addition to being PCMag's Starlink tester/guinea pig, I've also been a very happy customer of the service. I was eager to see how the improved dish design and Wi-Fi 6 router enhanced an already-great experience.
My first impressions were very good. And now, after several weeks of use and testing, I can confidently say that Starlink is, once again, better than ever. The new residential equipment pairs with updated satellite hardware and a growing number of terrestrial gateways to make Starlink bigger, better, and faster. We don't typically test Wi-Fi routers that only work with one ISP, but the Dish V4/Router Gen 3 combo is innovative enough to warrant a close look and easily deserving of an Editors' Choice award.
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What Is Starlink?
Starlink is the satellite internet service from Elon Musk's company SpaceX. It offers broadband internet service almost anywhere that has a clear view of the sky, making fast, reliable access available in remote areas that may never get access to traditional services like cable or fiber. By using a satellite link and a specially designed, fairly portable dish to give users a wireless connection to the larger web, it allows speedy internet for things like streaming, gaming, and video calling.
How does Starlink extend speedy internet access to remote locations? Instead of running physical cables that connect your home or RV to the greater internet, Starlink uses a series of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites that communicate between your home dish and a base station somewhere else on Earth that connects to the greater internet.
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By removing the need for cable or fiber-optic connectivity in that last mile, Starlink is able to serve up decent internet speeds to anyone with a dish and a Starlink subscription, whether they're on a farm, on a mountain, or simply on the road too often to warrant a traditional stationary internet connection. As of this writing, SpaceX has 6,146 active Starlink satellites in orbit. The sheer number of satellites allows Starlink to serve more than three million customers worldwide.
The Latest Starlink Gear: Dish V4 and Router Gen 3
Obviously, that process requires a lot of equipment behind the scenes besides the satellites themselves, but for residential users, it's surprisingly simple. All you need is a Starlink dish, a router, and the electricity to power them. (That last part may sound obvious, but enough potential Starlink users want to go off the grid or use it for their van or camper that it's worth pointing out.)
(Credit: Brian Westover)
Getting that equipment used to be a hassle, requiring ordering directly from Starlink and potentially getting put on a waitlist if you were in the wrong part of the country. But these days, it's super easy, with Starlink gear for sale at Best Buy, Home Depot, Target, and other retailers. (Check out our guide on the best places to buy Starlink.)
(Credit: Brian Westover)
Starlink has used a couple of different dishes and routers in the past. In January, the company introduced the newest standard versions: Dish V4 and Router Gen 3, which boast better specs and better durability. In conjunction with upgraded satellites overhead, they also promise better performance. This new equipment can be purchased together in the Starlink Standard Installation Kit, with cable and power supply included, for $500. That's a big up-front cost, but it's not much more than what you'd spend on a midrange Wi-Fi router and a cable modem, which each cost around $200. It's also a full $100 less than the previous installation kit sold for. In some areas of the US where Starlink has extra capacity, the company also offers significant discounts.
The older Starlink Dish V2 (left) alongside the larger Dish V4 (Credit: Brian Westover)
The new dish has a larger antenna surface but a slimmer, more compact design that's more durable and more wind-resistant. Here's how the old and new dishes stack up in terms of physical specs and technology:
The router is also improved, with a new look, additional ports, and the addition of Wi-Fi 6 connectivity. The result is faster speeds, better coverage in your home, and even easier integration with existing network hardware, whether it's a mesh network or a wired connection for a printer or network-attached storage (NAS) device.
(Credit: Brian Westover)
The biggest improvement to the new router is the move to Wi-Fi 6, which is faster and farther-reaching than the previous Wi-Fi 5 router that came with the older dish. But it's hardly the only improvement. The router also upgrades from dual-band to tri-band support, with an improved 4x4 MU-MIMO setup that can handle up to 235 simultaneous devices on the network. The maximum Wi-Fi range has grown from 2,000 square feet to 3,200 square feet, and if that extended range and better connectivity aren't enough, it also supports adding up to three mesh nodes for whole-house coverage.
The full glory of Wi-Fi 6's 11Gbps theoretical maximum speed may not be readily apparent, given that Starlink promises only 200Mbps download speeds. Still, you will get better speeds between devices on the network, whether you're casting video to your smart TV or grabbing files from a home NAS device.
The re-introduction of two Ethernet ports on the router further enhances connectivity. If you look closely, you'll see some interesting hidden messages in your router port sockets, with etched text and images saying "To Mars and beyond," "Made on Earth by humans," and a stylized image of a SpaceX rocket launch. Say what you will about Elon Musk and his goal to colonize Mars using SpaceX tech, but you can't deny that the Starlink division of the company has made for a surprisingly great internet service for us Earth-bound customers.
(Credit: Brian Westover)
The new router is also more compact, thanks to a redesigned external power supply, which used to be integrated into the router itself. Here's the full breakdown of the spec improvements:
You can also check out our first tests of the Dish V4 and Router Gen 3 for a different look at the improved designs and enhanced specs.
(Credit: Brian Westover)
Starlink also has several new accessories to accompany the redesigned dish, like the pole mount I used to attach my dish to an old mast that was left over from the previous homeowner's satellite TV dish.
Installation is easier, too, especially for those in RVs and vans, who will appreciate the dish's integrated kickstand. Starlink's instructions are direct and to the point: Plug in the dish and point it at the sky, so most users will assume they can handle the installation themselves. In most cases, there will be a couple more steps, though, like climbing on a roof or running cable through an exterior wall. If that sounds prohibitive, Starlink contracts with installers nationwide, who will install your dish and router for a nominal fee ($199). Self-installation is still free.
Rooftop view of Starlink dish, mid-installation (Credit: Brian Westover)
One thing that hasn't changed much since our first review of the service is the Starlink app, which serves as your main interface to check your connection status, adjust settings, and access your Starlink account. It's essential when setting up your dish, as well as for monitoring network performance in day-to-day use. (Check out our guide to how to use the Starlink app).
Starlink's 2024 Service Plans
Aside from the one-time purchase of the dish and installation equipment, Starlink does require a service plan, which costs $120 per month for the standard residential service. For that monthly fee, you'll get speedy internet that easily outperforms local DSL and other satellite ISP competitors, providing internet speeds that are fast enough for streaming media, playing online games, and joining in on video calls—all the niceties of modern life that high-speed internet provides. And it comes with no data cap.
(Credit: SpaceX)
If you're in need of something more robust, such as providing internet for a whole business, using the dish on the go, or even using it for internet connectivity on a boat in the ocean, the company offers specific plans tailored to those use cases, which have a higher per-month cost and sometimes require pricier hardware. For the vast majority of residential users, however, the standard residential plan is perfect.
Testing the Dish V4 and Router Gen 3: Boosted Performance
For previous Starlink testing, I've gathered data across a 14-day period. Two weeks of speed and latency data have proved more than enough to evaluate the overall performance of Starlink, which we tested in 2022, 2023, and earlier this year. But this time around, I collected more, stretching the test period to 20 days.
The reason for this is pretty simple. Starlink changed my default gateway from Denver to Salt Lake City. Was this a result of my complaints about wonky geolocation? Possibly. Or is it just the consequence of SpaceX's ongoing efforts to service more customers and reduce latency across the Starlink system? That sounds a lot more likely.
In any event, this gateway shuffle did have a noticeable and positive impact on download and upload speeds, as well as latency, giving the test location an additional boost in performance.
Mean download speeds sit right around a healthy 150Mbps. That's significantly faster than we saw with the older Starlink V2 hardware earlier this year, which averaged 113Mbps and resulted in better performance for a wide range of uses. For daily work, including Zoom calls, it was smoother than ever, and it even offered better streaming and gaming performance during my off hours.
The top download speed climbed to 325Mbps, though the average top speed was closer to 255Mbps. Given that the top speed we'd seen in prior testing was 265Mbps, that's a massive improvement, especially in day-to-day performance.
Low speeds also improved, averaging 47Mbps. But what was most notable was a change on day 10 of testing, when Starlink changed my default gateway from Denver to Salt Lake City. The average coming out of Denver was 29.43Mbps, but out of Salt Lake, the lows averaged 66Mbps.
Measuring download and upload speeds is just part of the evaluation process. Why? Because those peak and average speeds only matter if they're the speeds you're actually experiencing, and if that performance is stable. Nobody cares how fast your internet registers in tests if your video feed keeps freezing up during work meetings.
To gauge consistency, we map out how many of our hundreds of test results fell within a 10Mbps range, letting us see how regularly the performance delivers those speeds. In download and upload speed testing, we measure by Mbps, and we map out the result in 10Mbps increments. For latency (aka ping response times), we measure in milliseconds (ms), again in intervals of 10. Higher numbers are better for uploads and downloads, while lower numbers are better for latency.
Where download speeds had previously clustered around the 70Mbps-to-110Mbps range earlier this year, we now see a grouping in the much higher 150Mbps-to-180Mbps range, indicating performance that's not just occasionally faster but consistently faster.
Upload speeds similarly clustered in the 10Mbps-to-20Mbps and 20Mbps-to-30Mbps ranges, notably faster than previous tests using the older Dish V2.
In latency and ping testing, where we run thousands of tests rather than merely hundreds, we saw more results in the 20ms-to-30ms range than any other by an order of magnitude. That's actually slightly slower than what we saw last spring, but we also have a larger data set, and the average latency still dropped from 38ms to 29ms using the new hardware.
Breaking out the ping results by server—we test using both Cloudflare and Google— we saw an interesting result:
On Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1, the latency stayed under 30ms most of the time, with a fairly predictable sloping curve for results at higher latency. But the results from Google's 8.8.8.8 server were different. We had a cluster of results in the 0-to-30ms range and another cluster in the slower 60-to-90ms range. This may have been caused by the gateway switch or some other factor we aren't aware of. In any case, the average latency was still very low most of the time.
Finally, when comparing raw averages across our annual Starlink tests, we saw that the latest Starlink V4 tests were consistently better than years past and even better than our 2024 tests, which were conducted in January on the older V2 dish and Gen 2 Router.
Download speeds jumped to their highest yet, averaging 148.39Mbps across all the testing with the V4 hardware.
Upload speeds were also the highest we've seen from the service, at 23.21Mbps. Upload speeds are always a fraction of download speeds (with the exception of some fiber-based ISPs), but we've seen upload speeds more than double since we started testing in 2022.
Finally, latency was the lowest we've ever seen, down to 28.99ms on average. Given that Starlink requires blasting your internet activity to space and back, the latency has always been impressively low, but this is dramatically better than what we've seen before. It appears that SpaceX's investment in improving every link in the Starlink chain, from ground stations to the satellites in space, has paid off.
(Credit: Brian Westover)
The above tests factor in the performance of the Dish V4 and Router Gen 3 together. We aren't able to isolate the router's performance in order to compare it with other routers using our standard test criteria since we don't have Starlink service at the New York location we use for router testing. If you're happy with the performance of your existing router or mesh system or are interested in buying a third-party one, it's easy enough to use your own router with Starlink.
Verdict: The Best Satellite Internet Hardware
Even as Starlink has gained a huge number of customers, the satellite internet company has done more than ever to increase its availability, improve performance across the board, and drive down latency across the network of terrestrial base stations and LEO satellites. From improved system infrastructure like next-gen satellites and a growing number of terrestrial gateways, to the sleeker, faster, and more durable dishes and routers, it's a big win, both for Starlink, and for Starlink customers.
I've made no secret that I'm a fan of Starlink internet as both a reviewer and a customer, and the test numbers show why: It keeps improving. For a system that's bringing high-speed connectivity to underserved people around the globe, it would be easy for a company to say that good enough is good enough, but SpaceX has continued to invest in Starlink's development, making it better now than it's ever been.
Starlink Dish V4 and Router Gen 3
4.5
Editors' Choice
See It$299.99 at Best Buy
MSRP $499.99
Pros
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Better download and upload speeds
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Reduced latency
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Better durability
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User-friendly setup and app
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Wide availability
ViewMore
Cons
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Significant up-front cost compared with cable or fiber modems
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Performance varies with location and gateway assignment
The Bottom Line
Thanks in part to the latest Dish V4 and Router Gen 3, Starlink is faster and more reliable, making it the best option for high-speed internet connectivity in remote and rural areas.
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