For the base subscription types, your account needs to be "activated" with the dish associated, and the address on your account has to match the rough location of the Starlink. This gives you a giant chicken-and-egg problem where you need the Internet to set the account location and perform account activation, but you don't have the Internet because you have a Starlink that's not set up yet.
It's odd that Starlink don't offer a "walled garden" experience allowing you to perform activation using just the Starlink itself, like almost all DOCSIS providers send down to unprovisioned modems. I can't tell if it's an intentional protection/KYC kind of thing or just an unimplemented feature.
You can access the starlink.com site from none registered and unsubscribed units. But you need to use the Starlink provided DHCP/DNS servers to do it. Most people use other DNS settings on devices so the walled garden part might not work depending on user device config.
Strange, everything I've heard about the setup says that they do provide a captive portal for doing the initial setup stuff that needs a network connection.
This must be new as of ~9 months ago; it definitely didn’t used to work on retail dishes (directly purchased dishes came pre activated anyway). Thanks for the correction!
It's odd that Starlink don't offer a "walled garden" experience allowing you to perform activation using just the Starlink itself, like almost all DOCSIS providers send down to unprovisioned modems. I can't tell if it's an intentional protection/KYC kind of thing or just an unimplemented feature.