Yup, the only reason I live in the rural house that I do is because it got fiber for some reason. Starlink speeds would have been enough(I would be fine with 25meg) too. We actually had as a condition of sale a requirement that sufficient internet was confirmed(I was expecting a challenge on that, turned out nicely). With Starlink I would not have hesitated.
I'm not far from a big city, and closer still to a small town. Property prices in that town have gone insane during the pandemic. People want their own space. With remote work and good internet, any town can see a boom. If this pandemic had happened once Starlink was fully operational, it would have really changed some of those numbers, I think.
Are you me? We moved from paying $4800/month for an apartment in Mountain View, CA to paying about $3100/month mortgage 10 minutes outside of Olympia Washington. Here we are gaining equity on a big, beautiful home on five lush acres.
Early last year, slightly before the pandemic, we decided to make the permanent move out of the SF bay area. In fact, when the pandemic hit in February, we were in Oregon looking at a property.
Prior to that, we were planning on waiting until Starlink became a thing, but decided to push forward without it, with the requirement that the new place have high speed Internet.
We made a big spreadsheet and put almost 500 properties in it. The very first thing was to check its Internet speed. My wife spent...many many hours...on the phone with xfinity and a couple of others, going through addresses.
When we found this place, the first thing we had our on-site agent do was get the wifi password and run a couple of speed tests. We required that prior to even being (remotely) shown around.
We are out in the country here, so there are power and Internet outages, but not too frequent. I did signup for and get a Starlink dish, and it acts as our secondary Internet connection in case comcast is out. It's connected to one of our generator backed up circuits.
From what we've heard over the seven months we've been here, property prices are going up all over Thurston county. The contractors we've had in tell us that there are TONS of people like us, largely from the SF bay area, arriving....people with money they're willing to spend.
I had recently noticed this was starting to drive me nuts as I block a lot of other in my day to day life and facebook has been getting through.
Went looking for a paid option on Facebook to remove ads, like youtube premium which I enjoy, but they are very much against doing this. I guess when your entire organization becomes about selling ads, the team that wants to just make money directly gets shouted down.
My rule for home automation at my house: a stranger walking in the front door should be able to intuitively use my house without instruction.
Extra features are fine, but if they cannot turn on the light without 6 steps, then it's wrong.
eg: my kitchen lights are all on Z-Wave dimmers. Each is still a normal wall switch to the average person and can be fully controlled from there. I probably use the switches 20% of the time and voice control about 75%(other automations account for maybe 5%). Anyone who enters my kitchen will be able to have light, I just get the conveniences.
Another example: my living room has no ceiling lights, just floor lamps. These are not setup with automation because I have not found a way to control them that makes sense to non-trained users. Therefore we keep the traditional lights.
Every smart device I have with the exception of 1 lamp in my office and 2 bedside tables in my bedroom are on z-wave switches. Eventually I might add zigbee buttons or a panel by the fan switch that controls the bedside table lights but honestly I see no real need. They have pull-strings you can use (and break automation but I'm the only one using those so I don't care as much).
The z-wave switches I use is the Leviton DZ15S-1BZ [0], they run about $45 a pop but work flawlessly. I think I've had one lose connection less than 10 times total across all switches in the past year if that. My only complaint is their size. They are chunky and if you have a tight electrical box you might have issues. That said I've installed 6 or so of these and they are easy to install (other than the shoving, pushing, cursing, crying, and begging them to fit part lol), I can install one in less than 30min easily. I just keep buying a new switch every few months, I'm a little over halfway there till I have full coverage (already have full coverage in rooms I care about, so what's left is the guest room, some bathrooms/closets, and 1 3-way that I can't bring myself to replace right now as it will "burn" 2 switches).
My top tips to people looking at getting into home automation would be:
* Go with SmartThings, Wink is dying if not dead and ST works with Alexa/Google voice assistants. It also has a nice API/SmartApp ecosystem.
* Z-wave > Zigbee and NEVER use a Wifi device, they are a security nightmare IMHO
* Make SmartThings your single point of truth, don't buy stuff that "Works with Alexa" unless it's zigbee or z-wave.
* Make everything fallback to switches (real preferably but virtual if needed) on the wall, anyone should be able to walk in and use your lights without a crash course.
I'm not far from a big city, and closer still to a small town. Property prices in that town have gone insane during the pandemic. People want their own space. With remote work and good internet, any town can see a boom. If this pandemic had happened once Starlink was fully operational, it would have really changed some of those numbers, I think.