The cable isn't permanent on the rectangular dish. It's got weird proprietary micro-HDMI esque connectors on both ends (and each end is different!) This at least isn't completely out there, since the cable can be replaced, but certainly isn't as good as an off the shelf cable that can be replaced in almost any town.
I think this must have been done due to either weatherproofing (RJ45 is awful for this, you can make it waterproof with weird enclosures but it's painful) or some kind of issue with the excessive power requirements from the dish. The cable is just CAT5e. I cut it and put RJ45 in the middle (through a gas discharge surge arrestor) to avoid needing to drill another hole in my house, and my system works fine even in snow melt mode, so... shrug.
The weirdest part about the rectangular Dishy system is that the router doesn't have an Ethernet port, and, to add one you have to buy a proprietary dongle because there's no Ethernet PHY for an additional port in the router itself. Plus, there's no official way to eliminate the router hardware - you can put it in passthrough mode and eliminate the actual routing part, but the proprietary PoE injector is fully integrated into the router hardware.
Things are improving slowly, though - at least there's now a "remote management" function in the Starlink app, so passthrough mode users have (proprietary) access to their connection's vitals. Previously, enabling passthrough mode eliminated all telemetry from the connection, so you couldn't see if the link was obstructed, for example.
I think this must have been done due to either weatherproofing (RJ45 is awful for this, you can make it waterproof with weird enclosures but it's painful) or some kind of issue with the excessive power requirements from the dish. The cable is just CAT5e. I cut it and put RJ45 in the middle (through a gas discharge surge arrestor) to avoid needing to drill another hole in my house, and my system works fine even in snow melt mode, so... shrug.
The weirdest part about the rectangular Dishy system is that the router doesn't have an Ethernet port, and, to add one you have to buy a proprietary dongle because there's no Ethernet PHY for an additional port in the router itself. Plus, there's no official way to eliminate the router hardware - you can put it in passthrough mode and eliminate the actual routing part, but the proprietary PoE injector is fully integrated into the router hardware.
Things are improving slowly, though - at least there's now a "remote management" function in the Starlink app, so passthrough mode users have (proprietary) access to their connection's vitals. Previously, enabling passthrough mode eliminated all telemetry from the connection, so you couldn't see if the link was obstructed, for example.