SpaceX Starlink Internet Experience & Performance

[NotMine999]

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

And I constantly read across multiple Internet forums and sites about the great Internet speeds in Europe and European cities.

Is all that "fake news"? EU propaganda to get people to move there and not leave the EU?

[bridgman]

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

Yep - I've been on the Starlink beta list since the day it opened. The Starlink site currently says "arriving in 2023" for my area...

... so I would need a lot more than 75 feet of cable in the short term

I'm a bit conflicted since one of the things I use internet connectivity for is astrophotography, and from that perspective I'm not enthusiastic about encouraging a clutter of LEO satellites zipping across the sky. I'm sure that filtering routines to take out Starlink trails will improve over time though.

[qarium]

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.

does this mean you no longer on these 56K analoge modem ? thats good news.

in germany its a sad story that mostly poor people on wellfare who are not allowed to have DSL/cable becouse they are in bankruptcy and because of this they can not make mothly contracts they are forced to use the cellular internet at very high price. the result is poor people become even more poor only because of this.

you get 100/40 mbps Vector-DSL for like 40€ per month but these wellfare people need 150-250€ on cellular internet for not even getting the same result because bandwith vollume throttled all the time.

normal people like me just watch a youtube video... these people have to pay like 5€ per youtube video on cellular internet...

[bridgman]

does this mean you no longer on these 56K analog modem ? thats good news.

Yep, I'm moving up in the world. If this keeps up then one day I will be able to watch movies without buying disks

[berend]

Meanwhile, I'm eyeing an upgrade to 8Gb/s fibre, unfortunately there's no modem, routers or WiFi I can really buy to handle those speeds. Even upgrade to 2GB/s upgrade is already a significant investment.

[brucehoult]

A report from New Zealand. I rented a house in mid January that had basically zero internet options. Not only no fibre but the house doesn't even have a copper phone line, so no dial-up or DSL either. There is pretty good mobile phone signal from both Vodafone and Spark, but neither will do fixed base wireless here. There is supposedly a rural wireless operator, but they are almost as expensive as Starlink but have a low data cap and also the speeds are apparently in the region of 20 Mbps. So I ordered StarLink before I even moved in. Order made Jan 3, equipment arrived Jan 14, I moved in Jan 19.

I get a lot better speeds than people in the USA!

I'll say virtually all the time it is between 180 and 300 Mbps. I've had 399 MBps. The worst speedtest ever was 32 Mbps. Otherwise it's never been under 80.

Upload is almost always between 10 and 25 Mbps. I've had 40 or 45, but it's rare. The last five months have only had 7 tests (out of 50) under 10 Mbps.

You can see all the detail you want here:

https://www.speedtest.net/results?sh=ecb49f20d6e3d2df6b1fdc68ca676525

In the city 25 minutes drive from me the standard internet is 300/300 fibre, and about 25% of people now have 1000/1000. *Average* internet speed in NZ is now 405 Mbps.

But I'm damn happy to live where I live and get over 180 Mbps the majority of the time.

[theriddick]

Yeah the rural internet in NZ is basically being profit gated with wireless/satellite share companies, its pretty disgusted but also hilarious that Starlink will 100% put them all out of business.. good riddance I say!

[dtaht]

It is the wildly variable latency under load that I consider to be the
biggest problem starlink has. If they could flatten out the latency
under various loads, you'd hardly notice how variable the bandwidth
is.

It would be really great, if you are to continue to test, for you to
also test for that. There are mods for both speedtest.net and fast to capture that.

Also you can get a lot more detailed statistics as to the evolution of
the connections by using a tool like flent rather than speedtest. I
have a whole flent cloud dedicated to starlink testing you'd be
welcome to use - I'm trying to capture the moment they start using
laser links in particular. There's also a starlink mailing lists.bufferbloat.net with
greats like vint cerf an len kleinrock participating.

Here are some detailed plots I took last year of just their uplink
problem.


I am mostly looking to get baseline tests from various vantage points, w/o sqm. Starlink throughput is varying wildly from multiple locations. The latency seems to vary as a function of a fixed length fifo. Increasingly seems to vary at peak hours. Running tests for 300 sec to be sure to see at least one sat change.

Script:

#!/bin/bash
T=dishy-nick # a unique name for your site, + options like sqm on or off.
# other servers are in ontario, de, atlanta, mumbai,london - if the lasers go up testing those become interesting
# pick 2 close ones
for S in fremont.starlink.taht.net dallas.starlink.taht.net
do
flent -t $T --step-size=.05 --socket-stats -l 300 -H $S rrul_be
flent -t $T --step-size=.05 --socket-stats -l 300 -H $S rrul
for i in 1 4 16
do
flent -t $T-$i --step-size=.05 --socket-stats -l 300 --te=upload_streams=$i -H $S tcp_nup
flent -t $T-$i --step-size=.05 --socket-stats -l 300 --te=download_streams=$i -H $S tcp_ndown
done
done

# Most simplly there's an interesting rtt_fair test here, keep these for a baseline worldwide measurement run once a week

flent -x -l 300 --socket-stats --step-size=.05 -H de.starlink.taht.net -H london.starlink.taht.net -H singapore.starlink.taht.net -H fremont.starlink.taht.net -t $T rtt_fair4be

[qarium]

Yep, I'm moving up in the world. If this keeps up then one day I will be able to watch movies without buying disks

you know what is the joke about buuying discs ? i am old-school even if it is a fact i can have 250/40mbps super vector DSL i still would buy Discs honestly i would buy discs but you know what did reallly stop me from buy discs... the incompatibility with linux. everything what is better than DVD like Blueray is in fact incompatible with linux. this means i can watch 4K movies on youtube the most without copy protection and even the rest on youtube with copy protection... but if i ever want something better than 720x480 pixel what a DVD gives me i can not play it on my linux pc. and to buy a blue ray player only to play copy protected stuff hell no.

and if you see the market they do the same in the past like 8 years ago there was a TV with integrated blueray player... today all the models only have DVD and if you see the statistic marketshare of dvd vs blueray the people buy more dvd in 2022 then blue ray this copy proetction bullshit is rejected in the market.

they destroyed the disc market completely i have a blue ray burner for MDISKs with 100GB per disc thats not bad for a read-only solution with 1000 years MDISK not bat at all.

just imagine this if there would not be copy protection and if they use AV1 video codex you could burn a lot of video time on 100GB 1000 year MDISK... but hell they destroyed the disk market.

[bridgman]

honestly i would buy discs but you know what did reallly stop me from buy discs... the incompatibility with linux. everything what is better than DVD like Blueray is in fact incompatible with linux. this means i can watch 4K movies on youtube the most without copy protection and even the rest on youtube with copy protection... but if i ever want something better than 720x480 pixel what a DVD gives me i can not play it on my linux pc. and to buy a blue ray player only to play copy protected stuff hell no.

If it helps, most BluRay players run on Linux internally. I know my first one did (from the software licenses)... haven't had time to dig in to my new one (last of the Oppo players) but I wouldn't be surprised to find it ran LInux as well.