SpaceX Starlink Internet Experience & Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: SpaceX Starlink Internet Experience & Performance

Last year I signed up for SpaceX's Starlink satellite Internet service with hopes of using it to replace the Internet connection used for running Phoronix. After months of using Starlink and carrying out thousands of benchmarks, Starlink in the US midwest / Chicagoland area has proven reliable but the performance can be rather volatile still and it was frustrating at first waiting for some Starlink accessories to ship, but the self-service nature and simplicity of the setup were great.

https://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=31230

[CochainComplex]

Very cool, also unexpected, article. Very interesting. Is it possible to pin down the issues for the variation? Solar wind, Weather ... other more earthly influences?

[artivision]

With Vdsl2 we have 5ms latency not 50ms. It supposed that low altitude will give as 20ms not 50ms. Trash.

[phoenix_rizzen]

We moved out of the city (where we had FTTH, 300/300 Mbps for $60 CAD) to a little village (~2500 people) where 25 Mbps DSL is considered "high-speed Internet", and a 50 Mbps cable connection is "blazing fast". Most people are lucky to get 12 Mbps of actual throughput via DSL, and the cable service drops out on an almost weekly basis. Both services are owned by the same telco now, and have very low data caps (400 GB for the cable service, $50 extra per month for unlimited). Both of these services are near $100 CAD per month before adding on unlimited data. There's also a couple home LTE plans available, but they're limited to 25 Mbps with low data caps as well.

We've been using Starlink (round Dishy) since the middle of January. While actual throughput can fluctuate (50-200 Mbps download, 5-25 Mbps upload, 25-65 ms latency) it has not actually affected our use cases or work flows. We have 4 security cameras, 4 cell phones, 2 tablets, personal and work laptops, and multiple Roku devices. The kids are almost always either watching something or gaming online, the wife does a lot of charity work online, and I worked from using VPN links without issues. Multiple simultaneous Zoom and Teams meetings weren't an issue, even when the kids were home.

The only downside has been the lack of public IPs and inability to port forward incoming connections, limiting my ability to access servers at home when away. We had public IPs for awhile, then got bumped into the CGNAT pool like most everyone else. Hasn't been as big of an issue as I originally thought it would be, though.

Was originally using a Ubiquiti USG3 firewall/router, but switched to a Firewalla Purple last month. The nice thing about the round Dishy is how easy it is to swap routers (and just toss the SL router into a cabinet). With the newer rectangle Dishy you need the extra Ethernet adapter and you have to fiddle with app settings to put the SL router into "bypass" mode, as the SL router is the power supply for rectangle Dishy.

For those with horrible ISP options, StarLink is a godsend. Especially in rural areas where you don't really have to worry about subscriber saturation.

[CochainComplex]

We moved out of the city (where we had FTTH, 300/300 Mbps for $60 CAD) to a little village (~2500 people) where 25 Mbps DSL is considered "high-speed Internet", and a 50 Mbps cable connection is "blazing fast". Most people are lucky to get 12 Mbps of actual throughput via DSL, and the cable service drops out on an almost weekly basis. Both services are owned by the same telco now, and have very low data caps (400 GB for the cable service, $50 extra per month for unlimited). Both of these services are near $100 CAD per month before adding on unlimited data. There's also a couple home LTE plans available, but they're limited to 25 Mbps with low data caps as well.

We've been using Starlink (round Dishy) since the middle of January. While actual throughput can fluctuate (50-200 Mbps download, 5-25 Mbps upload, 25-65 ms latency) it has not actually affected our use cases or work flows. We have 4 security cameras, 4 cell phones, 2 tablets, personal and work laptops, and multiple Roku devices. The kids are almost always either watching something or gaming online, the wife does a lot of charity work online, and I worked from using VPN links without issues. Multiple simultaneous Zoom and Teams meetings weren't an issue, even when the kids were home.

The only downside has been the lack of public IPs and inability to port forward incoming connections, limiting my ability to access servers at home when away. We had public IPs for awhile, then got bumped into the CGNAT pool like most everyone else. Hasn't been as big of an issue as I originally thought it would be, though.

Was originally using a Ubiquiti USG3 firewall/router, but switched to a Firewalla Purple last month. The nice thing about the round Dishy is how easy it is to swap routers (and just toss the SL router into a cabinet). With the newer rectangle Dishy you need the extra Ethernet adapter and you have to fiddle with app settings to put the SL router into "bypass" mode, as the SL router is the power supply for rectangle Dishy.

For those with horrible ISP options, StarLink is a godsend. Especially in rural areas where you don't really have to worry about subscriber saturation.

Reading this. German big cities could be considered as rural areas maybe Starlink could be a good alternative to DSL.

[gQuigs]

Been curious about real performance for a while on Starlink. Great article!

The only downside has been the lack of public IPs and inability to port forward incoming connections, limiting my ability to access servers at home when away. We had public IPs for awhile, then got bumped into the CGNAT pool like most everyone else. Hasn't been as big of an issue as I originally thought it would be, though.

Starlink can do IPv6, maybe? Is that an option?

[Jahimself]

Excepted for the price, I would gladly trade my xDSL lane for this solution. My ping is a bit better that this solution, but in the worst case scenario starlink is 10 times faster than my ISP for downloading and 30 time faster for uploading. I'm in the country side, 1 kilometer from where I live people have vDSL2 but too far away for me to get any improvement over my 15 years old xDSL.

[alberto-pv]

I live in a small italian town (5k people), I have a 300/50 Mbit connection for 27€/month, no data cap, so probably I won't ever need SL, but I really like this article, especially first page, I can relate a lot 😆

[CochainComplex]

I live in a small italian town (5k people), I have a 300/50 Mbit connection for 27€/month, no data cap, so probably I won't ever need SL, but I really like this article, especially first page, I can relate a lot 😆

I'm in a larger town near DE-CIX InterneNode until this year i was not able to get DSL over 50Mbit. FTTH? Cable? No way even if I'm living near the city center. Now I will be able to have 200/50 for around 40-50€/month

[phoenix_rizzen]

Starlink can do IPv6, maybe? Is that an option?

In theory, yes. In practise, I haven't looked at IPv6 in any way, shape, or form, so would have no idea how to go about configuring it. The Firewalla Purple does support IPv6 packet filtering, so I'll probably look into it at some point. But it's not a priority at the moment.