New Tools and Spending Money are Always the Answers

I feel like posting information for other Starlink Junior users.

First of all, what I have isn’t called “Starlink Junior.” It’s “Best Effort” Starlink. Mr. Musk apparently wanted to reach customers and build a base as soon as possible even though he might not be able to give them the full Starlink treatment, so “Best Effort” is what he offered.

It’s kind of sad, because it makes it sound like they’re really trying, and here I am, calling it “Starlink Junior.”

On the other hand, Mr. Musk has rolled out a new surprise that makes me feel less bad. He is going to throttle everyone. EVERYONE.

By that I mean everyone will be given a data limit. Actual throttling will not occur until you pass it.

I got an email saying anyone who uses more than one terabyte per month will be throttled. This is called the “Fair Use” policy, which is unfortunate, because “Fair Use” is a legal term applied to copyrighted material.

I think it would be more accurate to call it the “Backpedaling to Save Starlink Money” policy, but I am not on the board, so there you go.

I have no idea whether I will use a terabyte per month. Let’s see. That’s around 33 gigs per day, right? Seems a little heavy. I know from using Verizon’s severely-limited “Unlimited” plan that it takes considerable surfing to break through Verizon’s 15 GB cap. That’s how much I get in a month, and during the months when I’ve had to use Verizon because of problems with my ISP, it has taken at least a couple of days to get in trouble.

Mr. Musk says fewer than 10% of users will be affected. My guess: that means about 9.9%. If it had been 8%, to choose a lower number at random, he would have said 8% to make it sound better.

The obvious problem is that web designers are constantly trying to pump up the data they send us. Websites are full of ridiculous garbage we don’t want or need, and it jacks up our consumption. This will probably continue, because when has it not continued? So Starlink’s cap may look a lot less generous in a year or two.

Nerds like to redefine words. I really hate what they’ve done to “unlimited.” Words are not their specialty. They should stay out of the definition business.

Second thing…I got my Starlink cable spliced.

I have to splice my cable because Mr. Musk, or “M,” as I like to call him suddenly, because he is the world’s M, no…wait, he’s the world’s Q. Dang. Well, I’ll call him M anyway. He’s kind of like M. He calls a lot of shots. M has decided to put proprietary plugs on his ordinary Cat5 shielded cables. Starlink cables look all mysterious, but they’re just like the ones you have in your house, only harder to work on.

The plugs are enormous, so in order to put a cable through a wall, you have to cut a 1″ hole. And you can’t decide how long your cable will be. M only sells them in certain lengths. Splicing is the obvious answer. If you can cut your cable and splice it, you can run your cable through a 5/16″ hole instead of an unsightly 1″ hole which is likely to leak and let bugs in even if you try to seal it.

Yesterday, I put an ordinary RJ45 plug on the side of the cable that goes to the router, and I put an RJ45 jack on the other side, intending to mount it to a wall plate later. The idea is dish -> hole in exterior wall -> attic -> rear of interior wall -> RJ45 jack -> wall plate -> RJ45 plug -> cable -> router.

I got okay download speeds after installing the jack and plug, but my uploads were, for practical purposes, motionless, and I got a lot of download errors.

I started researching and asking around.

The Cat5 cable M uses is shielded. It contains 8 conducting wires that do the data stuff, and it also has a bare wire and some foil shielding that goes around all the wires. The bare wire is supposed to be in direct contact with the foil. The foil and bare wire are ground conductors.

Most RJ45 plugs and jacks are not shielded. I can get shielded plugs locally (Lowe’s), but jacks have to come from Cyberia.

I tried to find out whether the shielding and ground had to be intact in order for the system to work. Some guy claimed they did, but he’s a guy who put Starlink in a truck, so who knows whether he knows anything?

I was afraid one or more of the following things were causing a problem: a) failure to reconnect the ground wires on my new ends after splicing, b) failure to reconnect the shielding on my new ends after splicing, and c) a really bad job of putting my new unshielded RJ45 plug on the cable.

I did a bad job with the plug because I did not have the right tool.

Putting Catx plugs and jacks on cables is much more complicated than it has to be. The tools you use for plugs don’t do the same things jack tools use, and different brands of plugs and jacks don’t work with every tool made by every company.

You can put a jack on a cable using a simple tool called a punch down tool. These range in price from $10 to at least $60. You can also use a screwdriver and knife, but don’t. Just do not.

You can also use a special crimping tool which is sort of like pliers. These things appear to start at about $50, unless you want to take a chance with low-end Chinese.

Plugs require crimping tools, period. You can try faking it with whatever you have on your bench, but it’s a bad idea.

When it comes to things you can find today near your house, you are probably limited to Ideal and Klein. Klein makes a crazy-complicated tool that will do jacks and plugs, but it only works with Klein stuff. Ideal’s plug tools only do Ideal plugs, and they don’t do jacks.

You can see what a mess it is.

Want some help? Here you go. Buy a package of Ideal shielded plugs. Buy an Ideal FT-45 crimping tool. These things will run you over $80, but it beats hiring some slacker who will charge a lot more and not care how much he damages your house.

Now you can do plugs.

For a wall jack, buy a trueCABLE Cat6 toolless keystone jack from Amazon. These things are shielded. I have not been able to find shielded jacks locally. I don’t know what “keystone” means, but I know that local stores sell wall plates that fit keystone jacks.

You can get a pack of two jacks for $13. I don’t know how to buy a single jack, or I would have.

Now you can do jacks.

When you attach your jack and plug, use the T-568B wiring standard. The wires in your cable are colored, and the standard tells you which wire goes where. There is also a T-568A standard, which only the government uses, because the government has to be an idiot.

The good news: you only need shielded stuff on the cable that goes from the router to the dish. In your walls, if you choose to have hardwiring, you can use plain old plastic jacks and plugs. I only need one shielded jack and one shielded plug. I’m going to use shielded plugs all over the place anyway because I had to buy a bag of 10.

What is shielding? It’s a conductive barrier that reduces the amount of electrmagnetic interference your cables pick up. When your cable tries to pick up the local rap station instead of your data, it feels like you when you use a cell phone in an elevator. It gets nowhere, so your precious data, which could, ironically, be rap MP3’s, passes through unmolested.

Why isn’t all Catx cable shielded? I don’t know. I guess it doesn’t need it.

The cable that Starlink uses doesn’t just carry 1’s and 0’s. It carries power to move the dish. This, I have learned, is called PoE, or “power over ethernet.” Why the mixed-case letters? Because nerds have no verbal aptitude; they don’t know it’s wrong. Is the juice the reason your cable is shielded? Is M running the juice through the foil and grounding wire? No idea, but why take a chance?

Will using unshielded stuff really let bad interference in? Again, no idea. My guess: not. My connection is still unshielded for about an inch, and it seems to be working fine. The ground is continuous, but the shielding is interrupted.

Today I used an Ideal FT-45 tool to install a shielded Ideal RJ45 plug on my cable. I left my unshielded jack alone. I ran a jumper from the ground on the jack to the ground on the plug, just in case. Now everything works. And I’m stuck with a $50 tool.

Will M void your warranty if you splice your cable? No idea, but it sounds like something he would do. I do not care. I was willing to bet the $600 cost of the router and dish that I could splice my cable without ruining anything.

Today my wife was laughing like crazy because M was trying to charge people to use Twitter. I don’t look at the news, but I will make an exception to comment on this story.

As you probably know, but I barely do, Twitter has a caste system. There are verified users who have blue check marks next to their handles, and there are the lowly, unwashed users who have no check marks. My understanding is that people are so stupid and immature, they actually look down on folks who have no check marks. Junior high never really ends.

M said he wanted to charge Twitter brahmins $20 per month for check marks, which is reasonable, since a lot of them get paid, and they also feel like they’re cooler than everyone else. Kim Kardashian is said to receive seven figures for every slutty, vacuous tweet.

My wife says there has been a hilarious tweet battle between a bemused M and his sincerely enraged brahmins. They are saying M should be paying them to tweet. Hello? Who said this about Huffto about a billion years ago? Me. Ariana Huffington, in an action harking back to Tom Sawyer’s ploy to get his friends to paint the fence, got people to write content for nothing, and they thought it was a privilege.

Anyway, it sounds like billionaires and the nearly so, like Stephen King, are losing their minds over eight smackers a month.

I think M is making a mistake. Social giants can push conservatives, Christians, and other decent people around, because we don’t run the Internet or Silicon Valley. When Facebook or Twitter pushes us around, we can bluster and leave and form pathetic, doomed alternatives like MeWe. Truth, and Parler, but they never go anywhere. Liberals, on the other hand, created Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Instagram, Youtube, and the good Lord only knows what else, and they can create new giants. And Twitter isn’t going to be around forever. Social giants fail.

The conservative giants, or, more accurately, anemic midgets with peanut allergies, will all fail completely or remain unimportant. This is my bold prediction, which isn’t all that bold, because it’s already happening.

A new leftist giant might make it.

Some think Trump is the troll king, but M is on a far higher level.

Anyway, I can totally see M voiding my warranty over a splice. Go see what he has done to Tesla owners.

If you take my advice, you can splice your cable and avoid buying new proprietary cables and cutting large holes. And maybe your router will explode. I’m not an engineer. Anyway, I hope my advice helps.