SpaceX Starlink Internet Experience & Performance

[FireBurn]

"the wife" ? Really?

[lamka02sk]

$140 for an internet connection? Wow, you can easily get 1Gb symmetrical for around $40 and 1Gb/100Mb for $30 where I live in Europe...

[artivision]

With xDSL, VDSL2 included, latencies can vary widely depending on your distance from the CO. As the distance increases, error correction and interleaving plays a big role to prevent unreasonable packet loss, so you're fortunate such latency is even possible for you. When you factor those in which many customers have to deal with, the latency to the gateway can easily go from your sub 5ms to 20ms. I would guess, given the fact most users on average are not always living on top of the CO, that this is the case for most people using xDSL, not a minority of them.

So for many xDSL customers, especially when you factor in throughput, Starlink is still a very worthy option. Also given the fact much POTS infrastructure is going largely unmaintained by ISPs in markets where it's not profitable to upgrade to FTTP, the need of starlink for these users increases even further. Going from 40 ms to 60 ms in CS:GO, using SSH or something is not that noticeable anyway at those latencies.

Are you for real? Adsl have 3ms latency to the provider server and Vdsl have 5ms. I have 200mbps Vdsl2 35b with actual 5ms tested with common online speed tests and that is with the "almost" fast path and byte swap activated for those ultra small packages. On that note i get ~75ms on Csgo both when i had Adsl fast_1 and Vdsl. You understand that if we add like 45ms more we go to the unplayable 120ms. Yes you heard correct those engines don't work at all at 100+ms, it's not a "what is noticeable" thing.

[CMDRZOD]

Hi Michael. I have Starlink in north east Alberta. I use a website to monitor my ping and DL and UL.

Might be something to check put for a nice organized history of your stats.

https://starlinkstatus.space/

My station is #806. I seem to be the only person in western Canada reporting using this tool. Just requires a small script.

For those trying to open ports, I have a small PC and use FRP (Fast relay proxy) at my girlfriends apartment that is not behind Cgnat. I use wireguard and connect back to my starlink network using this tool. Strongly recommend although it requires one end to be accessible.

[CMDRZOD]

Just know that FRP does introduce significant lag, I typically get 200ms ping through it. No good for gaming or chat but perfect for VPN and SSH uses as well as accessing local network web pages.

I only use it to route out Plex and wireguard VPN.

I know Starlink was testing IPv6. I have tried enabling it on my older round dishy with no success.

Hopefully it is enabled soon to be able to access the network from outside with minimal lag.

[torsionbar28]

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

You're confused. Starlink is not a DSL replacement. It's a dial-up modem replacement. The intended use is for folks not currently serviced by high-speed internet. Underserved rural populations, primarily. For years there have been companies promising rural broadband, the government has spent $billions on incentives and programs to encourage it's rollout, but very little real connectivity has been deployed. Musk's Starlink is the very first genuinely high speed internet service available to all of these grossly under-served rural populations. Huge kudos to him on this achievement!

[torsionbar28]

$140 for an internet connection? Wow, you can easily get 1Gb symmetrical for around $40 and 1Gb/100Mb for $30 where I live in Europe...

I know that new technology is scary and confusing, but it's genuinely surprising to me that people in these forums can be so uninformed regarding internet accessibility.

[bridgman]

Yep - it varies hugely depending on where you live, and the specifics are very fine-grained.

Around here the only options are satellite or cellular internet - and satellite was not an option for me because of the tall trees all around. The only option on my street is cellular with a fairly high per-GB charge, costing around $260/mo for ~120GB.

One street over the same company is offering a higher speed cellular service for less than half the price, 450GB/mo full speed then throttled after that. Hopefully it will become available here as well.

[Michael]

Yep - it varies hugely depending on where you live, and the specifics are very fine-grained.

Around here the only options are satellite or cellular internet - and satellite was not an option for me because of the tall trees all around. The only option on my street is cellular with a fairly high per-GB charge, costing around $260/mo for ~120GB.

One street over the same company is offering a higher speed cellular service for less than half the price, 450GB/mo full speed then throttled after that. Hopefully it will become available here as well.

Starlink does have an option for a 75 foot cable run before hitting the base station / router... Presumably you could mount Starlink on a 50~75 foot pole to work around the tree issue? :P

[phoenix_rizzen]

It's better than nothing if you live out in the woods I guess. Even the cheapest fiber here is faster than this and I'm in a rural area. When you add in the cost of the hardware, it's not worth it if you have services in your area.

That's kind of the point. Starlink is for those who don't have fast Internet options already. If you have 100 Mbps cable or fibre or even fixed wireless ISP options, then you don't need Starlink.

For those who's only options are dial-up, crappy DSL, LTE hotspots, or traditional satellite, then Starlink is beyond awesome and wonderful and needed.

In many places, Starlink is the competition required to get crappy DSL/LTE-based ISPs to start investing in network upgrades. There's lots of chatter on the Starlink forums about ISPs that never bothered with infrastructure upgrades suddenly stringing fibre down long stretches of dirt roads, as they're losing customers to Starlink in droves.

Even in our little village, the cable side of the local telco has been upgrading their infrastructure this calendar year, bringing in 10 Gbps fibre links to their head office, upgrading some cable runs around town, and offering 100-250 Mbps plans (although they still have weekly outages in different parts of town, and still have horribly low data caps). Prior to Starlink being offered here, they were content to let it rot in the ground as there were no other options.