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Villa Alexandrou

Remote Work Setup: How We Installed Starlink at Villa Alexandrou

By Manolis
starlink
remote work
internet
technical

The Problem

Kalamitsi Alexandrou is beautiful. It's also 4 km from the nearest telephone exchange. For years, the best we could get was a 12 Mbps VDSL line that dropped to 6 Mbps when the village was busy. Video calls were a gamble. Uploading anything over 50 MB was an overnight job.

For a villa that wanted to attract remote workers, this was a dealbreaker.

Why Starlink

We evaluated three options:

  1. Upgraded VDSL with bonding — theoretical max of 30 Mbps, but the copper infrastructure couldn't deliver it reliably.
  2. 4G/5G fixed wireless — decent speeds near Chania, but our village sits in a valley. Signal was inconsistent.
  3. Starlink — satellite internet with no dependency on local infrastructure.

Starlink won because it doesn't care about copper lines, cell towers, or distance from an exchange. It cares about a clear view of the sky. Our courtyard has that.

The Installation

The Starlink dish (Gen 3, rectangular model) is mounted on the south-facing wall of the villa, angled toward the open sky above the courtyard. The installation took about 45 minutes:

  1. Mounting: Wall mount bracket on the stone wall. We drilled into the mortar, not the stone — preserving the original masonry.
  2. Cable routing: The flat cable runs along the exterior wall and enters through an existing cable conduit. No new holes in 130-year-old walls.
  3. Router placement: The Starlink router sits in the central hallway, equidistant from all rooms.
  4. Mesh extension: We added a mesh node in the courtyard to ensure full outdoor coverage for people working by the pool.

The Numbers

We've been testing consistently since installation. Here are the real numbers, not marketing claims:

  • Download speed: 150-220 Mbps (average 180 Mbps)
  • Upload speed: 20-30 Mbps (average 25 Mbps)
  • Latency: 25-50 ms (average 32 ms)
  • Jitter: 3-8 ms
  • Uptime: 99.7% over the past 6 months

For context, these numbers comfortably support:

  • 2-3 simultaneous Zoom/Teams calls with screen sharing
  • Large file uploads to GitHub, Figma, or cloud storage
  • Streaming 4K video while someone else is on a call
  • VPN connections to corporate networks without timeouts

The UPS Backup

Power cuts happen in rural Crete — usually brief (5-30 minutes) during storms. We installed a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) on the Starlink router and mesh node. This gives approximately 3 hours of internet during a power outage.

Your laptop battery plus our UPS means a power cut won't end your workday.

What We Learned

  • Weather impact is minimal. Heavy rain can cause brief slowdowns (100-120 Mbps instead of 180), but we've never had a complete dropout from weather.
  • Peak hours don't matter here. Unlike urban Starlink users who see congestion in the evening, our rural cell has very few users. Performance is consistent from 8 AM to midnight.
  • The dish heats itself. In winter, the Starlink dish has a built-in heater that melts frost and light snow. We've never had to manually clear it.

The Bottom Line

If you're a remote worker considering Crete, the internet question is no longer a barrier. Starlink in a rural area actually performs better than in cities because there's less congestion per satellite cell.

We publish our latest Speedtest results on the workspace page. The numbers are real, verified, and updated regularly.

All villa guests get the Wi-Fi credentials on arrival. The network name is "VillaAlexandrou" — you'll be connected before your bags hit the floor.