Starlink Mini tested — The power of the Internet in a backpack – MyBroadband

The Starlink Mini offers fibre-like Internet speeds in a much more compact package than its regular-sized sibling dishes.

MyBroadband recently tested Starlink’s smaller dish in several locations in South Africa.

Although the service is not officially available locally, the satellite service’s roaming feature is active in the country and used by several thousand people in rural areas without other fast and reliable Internet products.

The Mini — announced in late June 2024 — is currently only available in select countries, often at a premium over the bigger Standard dishes.

The dish we tested was provided by IcasaSePush, which imports Starlink kits from countries where the service is officially available on behalf of South African users.

Having previously tested the Standard Actuated dish in several locations across the country, we were astounded by how much smaller and lighter the Mini was.

The packaging with the dish and all its accessories was similar to what you would expect for a box housing a 15-inch laptop with its charger.

The dish’s sky-facing surface measures 298.5mm long and 259mm wide, with a diagonal of 395.2mm.

In comparison, the Standard Actuated dish has a 513mm length and 303mm width, while the newer non-actuated dish is 594mm long and 383mm wide.

That means the footprint of the Mini’s main panel is about a third of the size of the latest non-actuated Standard dish.

The Mini is also thinner and stands far lower on the ground than the Standard units and tips the scale at a much lighter 1.16kg, compared with the 2.9kg of the larger models.

All these factors make for a far less cumbersome transporting experience than with Standard dishes.

You can easily fit the Mini and its accessories into a laptop bag or backpack.

What is perhaps even more impressive about the downsizing is that the Mini includes a built-in Wi-Fi router, whereas the other two dishes have separate standalone routers.

The built-in router is dual-band — like the router that comes with the Standard Actuated dish — and supports up to 128 devices connected simultaneously.

It also has an Ethernet port for directly connecting to a device or another router, ensuring you can get fast Internet speeds even if the dish must be located far away from where people need to access the Internet.

Setting up in seconds

MyBroadband performed a few dozen Internet speed tests with the Starlink app’s built-in testing tool in three locations.

The setup process was straightforward, with image-based instructions for powering up the kit provided on one of the box’s inside panels.

Unlike the Actuated dish, the Mini and the new Standard dish require manual alignment in a specific direction to achieve optimal speeds.

In the Southern Hemisphere, the dish should ideally face south, while users in the Northern Hemisphere should preferably point it north.

The ideal alignment was easy to achieve using the Starlink mobile app’s built-in Alignment tool, which quickly reads the dish’s positioning and shows the user how to correct it.

After aligning towards the south, we also used the Obstructions tool to check whether there were any major obstacles between the dish and the sky.

The first tests were done in a residential area in Pretoria East with plenty of alternative broadband options available — including fibre-to-the-home, fixed-5G, and fixed-LTE products.

The Mini comes with a 15-metre cable, so plugging it into a wall socket or extension cord should not be a hassle.

However, as our installation would not be permanent and we wanted to illustrate the kit’s usefulness in mobile applications, we opted to power it with a 500W portable power station.

The power consumption during speed tests typically ranged between 20W and 40W, right in line with Starlink’s claimed usage.

At times, usage would jump to 50W briefly, but this was still less power than the 75W to 100W that the Standard dishes typically consume.

We positioned the Mini on a lawn with as unobstructed a view as possible in our area without having to ascend a roof, and it connected to the Internet almost immediately.

Across ten tests, our download and upload speeds averaged 126Mbps and 15Mbps, respectively, while latency averaged about 218ms.

Starlink’s latency in South Africa remains higher than in many officially supported countries, as these have nearby ground stations and don’t require signals to be bounced thousands of kilometres using inter-satellite links.

For the second round of tests, we put the Starlink Mini through its paces on a farm about 18km outside Brits in the North West.

There was no fixed Internet or cellular connectivity available at this location, a scenario in which much of Starlink’s primary target market finds itself.

The average download and upload speeds were similar to Pretoria East, but the latency was generally lower at 188ms.

This could have been due to the dish’s clearer view of the sky and fewer obstructions.

While not intended to be used in mobile scenarios, we were also able to use the dish while on the go at highway speeds.

IcasaSePush gave us a small 12V DC inverter and adapter to power the dish while the car’s ignition was running.

We placed the dish on the car’s dashboard because it had the best view of the sky.

Travelling at about 120km/h on the N4 in a western direction, we achieved an average download speed of 61Mbps and uploads of 13Mbps.

We saw some tests where the speed dropped to the lower double digits. Still, the performance was impressive, considering Starlink recommends the much larger Flat High-Performance dish for mobile use.

Even though the dish was not oriented in the right direction and we were constantly on the move, the Starlink Mini maintained a connection to the Internet.

Overall, we were thoroughly impressed with the dish’s capabilities, which makes it all the more disappointing that it is not officially on sale in South Africa or any other African country.

The unit IcasaSePush imported came from the US — where it costs $599 (R10,903, excl. VAT) — and required buying an expensive Global Roaming subscription of $400 per month (R7,281, excl. VAT) to work in South Africa.

It will be at least another three months before the kit can be transferred to an African country with a lower Regional Roaming subscription to work in South Africa.

IcasaSePush told MyBroadband that it expects to have the Starlink Mini available for South African customers at R24,999, including all shipping costs and taxes, from mid-September 2024.

These units will support the Regional Roaming subscription directly with Starlink from the get-go — currently costing around R1,800 per month, depending on the African country of registration.

The table below summarises the results of our Starlink Mini speed tests on a Global Roaming package in South Africa.

	Download	Upload	Latency
Residential suburb in Pretoria East
Average	126Mbps	15Mbps	218ms
Fastest	170Mbps	15Mbps	170ms
Slowest	65Mbps	9Mbps	188ms
Farm outside Brits in North West
Average	106Mbps	17Mbps	188ms
Fastest	173Mbps	24Mbps	131ms
Slowest	61Mbps	16Mbps	210ms
Driving west on N4
Average	61Mbps	13Mbps	173ms
Fastest	117Mbps	6.7Mbps	202ms
Slowest	13Mbps	4Mbps	138ms