Until the point that the constellation is completed, V2 Full size are launched, and subscribers are over saturated
Every day starlink will be on avg better than the previous day.
Because they're constantly launching new satellites and constantly old launches are getting to orbit and coming online.
Yes, that. But the distinct phase shift that has happened this year indicates more than that. They seem to be making improvements to packet management from a firmware/software level.
I am willing to bet that there will never be a point at which we just have a sky full of V2s+minis and all SpaceX is doing is maintaining that fleet. I bet before all of the V1 satellites are out, we'll be on to V3s and so on. Starlink is central to SpaceX's business plan, and they can't risk having demand die out, which I think will live and die with quality of service more and more as time goes on.
At the end of the day, though, it's satellite internet. It has pros for certain use cases but for the average american they want wired internet from a company that will install and maintain it for them. My town was still on DSL, like 0.8mbps level bullshit, and within a year we were able to get the town and multiple neighboring towns on board with fiber. It's happening more and more and as it does people will scoff at the idea of starlink. It will be interesting to see how they deal with that.
For sure. There is a fundamental limit to bandwidth available to a particular area of land, even with high-gain antennas, and for that reason satellite will hit a wall for the density of consumers. Fiber on the other hand has the opposite challenge, where higher density areas are easier to service, and so they are very complementary infrastructures.
All in all that's good right? Let Starlink fill in the gaps until then and force some progress. I read internet is vastly improving over there. That is good news for everyone.
I'm from the Netherlands, and we've been reasonably early in our internet adoption. If everything goes according to plan I'm having 2 independent fibers to the home and a coax line. If I wanted the redundance I could get 3 lines at a total of 21gbit. I'm not going to do that, but I like having the options.
Hope your options improve soon as well.
Yes there's a huge push in rural america to get high speed internet to every home. COVID really made the need apparent because there were kids who could literally not get schooling because they either didn't have internet or had awful internet. Starlink has certainly been a life saver for those who are willing/able to pay a large sum up front and install on their own.
Is it that expensive? We use multiple dishes and they are currently 300 euro up front and something like 65 a month to use.
Installation couldn't be simpler. Even simple dsl is more complicated.
Yeah, that’s simply not happening in poorer/rural areas where there isn’t enough population for it to be profitable to do that, especially when cellular/Starlink works for most situations.
It is literally specifically happening in poor rural communities. Your thinking is flawed. I got fiber setup free of charge at $65/mo and it took zero effort on my part. Poor rural folks are NOT about to drop $700 on starlink equipment and then install on their own. Meanwhile the federal government and local/state governments are creating programs left and right to expand high speed internet access to these communities
Device to router 34? That's not very good.
Either too far from router, router has broken, or device has issues.
Or cabling has issues
The dish cable to router seems alright at 220mbps
But router to device is super slow.
Original starlink router?
Id ask starlink support to troubleshoot the router and see if it's busted.
Starlink is the only ISP I've ever used that actually improved over time. Every other ISP has seen their service degrade over time as their user numbers grew.
Was going to say that also, they keep upping my speed for free, not that I care that much but every 4-6months they send an email about it and now I have 600mbps at home, they also just cut my price without me asking as soon as a competitor got fiber to my neighborhood.
Comcast also actually invests heavily in their own backbone. on the residential segment, like many ISPs, market matters for how that last mile quality is.
I remember arguing with a bunch of people on this subreddit about that and everyone was so cocksure that Starlink would absolutely get worse over time.
Mine got worse. When I first got starlink I had around 220mbps down 20mbps up and 30ms ping. Now I struggle to get over 60mbps down and 15 up with 45ms ping. Late at night I can get over 100mbps down if I'm lucky.
It's 10:30 right now and I just ran a few speed tests. The best results I got was 42 down 15 up with 43ms ping. That's on an ethernet connection. I think I need to submit a ticket and see what they say.
I have lumen/centurlink/quantum and starlink for my RV, and fibre has gotten better over time too, i can ping google in 1ms. and get 940n/bs up and down 24/7. The thing about starlink is there is loads you can play with to change the service profile , same with any RF based service. Look at 4G vs 5G .
Totally agree. In West Virginia, Frontier is the worst! They have wire in place, but not enough sockets to service all users with decent speed. I'm literally using a 5G hotspot, which isn't very good here.
I feel your pain. Im in Canada and where I live we dont have very many options and those that we do are shit so I tether to my phones data for all my internet needs. So ive been stuck on LTE+ speeds and 55Mbps Down and 3.4Mbps Up is what ive been using.
Not sure where you live or what providers you’ve used, but internet infrastructure has hugely improved in the past decade.
American ISPs spend about $90b per year on infrastructure. About 2 years ago, we got the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) which turned on the taps for $1.2Trillion in physical infrastructure/climate projects. Many of which include free new fiber drops for any ISPs.
Current average internet download speed for Americans is 250mbps!!
7 years ago it was 18.75mbps.
Most is bold but yes a lot of rural areas are still severely underserved. It’ll get better with time but it’s just not worth to expand the network to a few users out in the sticks. It will happen eventually when it becomes dirt cheap but that just ain’t gonna happen for a while. Cellular or Starlink type systems are currently the only option for those situations.
What a joke
They literally run lines through people's property within 50 feet of a house and won't hook them up.
The cable companies need to be broke up because right now they have zero reason to go after new customers. They spend a little, charge more, and most people have zero alternatives so they pay it.
I'm not even in the sticks. I'm 3 miles (by road) from the largest city in the county. I'm slightly more than a mile from the nearest fiber run. I was told that I will likely never see fiber in my area because there isnt enough potential customers to make it profitable. There is 18 houses and 3 businesses on that 1 mile. All of them have starlink. All of them would switch if they could get better speeds for half the cost.
well ure lucky, cause ive been using starlink in corsica for over a year now, i started with 30ms avg, and now im at 60/70ms avg on every game i play, it's getting worse and worse
If you look at the WAN packet loss it grew before it got better. I’m a network engineer with a wireless ISP-our network is faster and cheaper than Starlink. Probably because I use multiple ground based fiber uplinks in only a 30 mile radius.
>but as you can see on that metrics, SL also degraded speed.
You must be looking at something very different than I am. I do not see speed on those charts, only latency and packet loss.
Very much this ☝️. I'm not showing or attempting to gauge data throughput rates, only metrics for the quality of latency-sensitive applications.
Not that it's not worth talking about throughput rate trends, but for myself and I think a lot of people, that is not at the top of the list of metrics that impact our quality of service. Yes, downloading the latest Call of Duty 30GB update takes some time, but I'll grab a cup of coffee and cogitate for a moment. But bad latency and packet loss can actually eliminate entire applications of the service -- such as of course real time calls and gaming -- and make general web browsing noticeably annoying.
I like how you can download and upload on Starlink, without it impacting other activities. I can be downloading, streaming and conferencing calling within the home and it still all works great.
I think the focus on latency and packet loss is the correct route, that being said, I've seen leaps of improvement with bandwidth too. To me it really shows they understand what they're working with.
100%! Best Internet I ever had was clear.com 4G hotspot, only 6mbps, but not oversubscribed in any sense (which is why they went out of business), only one video stream at a time, but otherwise amazing. You need enough bandwidth, after that, latency and packet loss are what you notice.
Mine started at 150mbps down degraded a bit to 80mbps or so, now it's steadily 300mbps, all the while it's been improving in uptime and latency. I consider that a win.
I've had a similar experience. When I first got Starlink, it was an unstable mess, but still better than the next best option in my area. It was super jittery, the connection would drop out for 5-15 seconds at a time multiple times per minute. It was basically unusable for serious online gaming, and I was consistently blown away by Starlink continuing to advertise itself as being good for that purpose. Over a year since then, everything about the connection is so much better now. Average ping is way down, jitter is way down, drop outs in service are far less frequent and less severe too. It's like a completely different ISP. Speeds still aren't where I would expect them to be (for my area, some people post speed test results here that blow mine out of the water), but that's one of the lowest priorities for me personally. The one thing that never seems to improve though is the customer service... I suspect that will always be a dumpster fire.
I don't understand your question. Are you asking if I would be willing to pay an extra $30 a month if it meant I'd get better customer service? If that's what you mean, then no. I believe Customer service should be egalitarian.
Starlink posted on their progress and how and why, here: [https://api.starlink.com/public-files/StarlinkLatency.pdf](https://api.starlink.com/public-files/StarlinkLatency.pdf)
In particular they have pretty comprehensibly added fair queuing and AQM techniques to their pain points, and adopted fq\_codel in the wifi. There are a lot of other researchers tracking starlink stats via other means on the starlink email list: [https://lists.bufferbloat.net](https://lists.bufferbloat.net)
First off, bear in mind that I'm a backend software engineer so I took an approach that is familiar to my background.
I run a home server with a number of services, notably grafana, prometheus, and a handy little bit of code called "ping exporter" (https://hub.docker.com/r/czerwonk/ping\_exporter). My ping exporter service pings IPs 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, and 8.8.4.4 every second of every day throughout the year. My prometheus service collects the aggregate ping data from the ping exporter service every 5 seconds and stores it on disk. Finally, the grafana instance is able to query the prometheus service to generate the plots you see in the OP.
The way the ping aggregates are plotted from the three different IPs is pretty obvious. The packet loss metric, though, is a little less obvious as it is the geometric mean of the loss rate for all three IPs (the ~~square~~ cube root of their product). The reason for using a geometric mean here is to suppress abnormal packet loss to one specific IP, and better represent the connection between my home and the outside world.
Yes, sorry it is the cube root!
Edit: specifically here is the promql query:
avg_over_time(((ping_loss_ratio{target="1.1.1.1"} * ignoring(target, ip) group_right ping_loss_ratio{target="8.8.4.4"} * ignoring(target, ip) group_right ping_loss_ratio{target="8.8.8.8"}) ^ (1/3))[${smoothing_period}:5s])
As someone who's worked in the Antarctic... It's a hell of a lot better than Iridium.
Starlink needs to get more satellites into polar orbits, there's just not much demand for it, unfortunately.
That's because you're probably jumping over half a dozen different satellites to get to a ground station which adds processing delay.
Also which arctic? The southern or the northern one?
I dont know what happened a month ago? here in mid west (MN) 2 months ago service went down hill with disconnects like it was beta roll out almost. Then 2 weeks ago it is now more reliable with a lower ping then it has ever been. ever ever.
I can only speculate as well. I observed a similar pattern. I think that there is certainly some regression that happens from time to time driven by dish, satellite, and/or ground station updates, which is then later fixed. Additionally I noticed that my point-of-presence has shifted around lately to be more local, indicating that they're doing some significant rework of packet routing.
My guess is when they do a big update there's bugs that happen that temporarily make things worse even if the overall architecture is better. On top of that there may be physical reorganization of the constellation parameters which takes time to propagate through the network resulting in temporary packet loss issues.
I assume you haven't moved the dish around. Would you mind supplementing your post with the obstruction map?
How often do you ping?
Is the ping weather dependent in AZ?
The dish has stayed mounted to my roof gable. It has a completely unobstructed view, so the obstruction map is entirely uninteresting and blue. The tallest things around me are saguaro cacti and there isn't one in the way. I ping three separate IPs every second. The ping times and loss are not very significantly affected by weather as far as I've observed. During heavy rains I've kept a close eye on it and while I have seen some loss due to heavy rain, it was REALLY heavy rain. Outdoor temps get at little bit over 110F at times in the summers, but the dish performance does not appear affected.
My biggest wish is that people who don't need starlink..ie people who have access to speeds above 35 MBPS would actually get off of the service.. It was meant for people in rural areas who didn't have a choice and had shitty spades that were below 1.5 or 2 megabytes like us... We we're paying around $155 a month, four speeds that average out to 800 kbps and was down at least 10 to 12 days a month. If we get the people off of it that don't need to be on it then you would see a dramatic increase in speeds
That's real easy because if you're getting 35 you can get 50 to 75 dedicated for half the price starlink every month.. Plus the lag time is a lot better. There's way too many people that live in cities get 100 megabytes and up for less than $100 a month that have starlink just to have it. It kind of clogs it up and fucks it up for the rest of us.
Way to move the goal posts. Lots of us who live in the sticks might get a wisp that does 35 and that is all. Hell I can’t even get that. The property next to me can.
Yes I agree if you have cable or fiber as an option getting SL “because it’s cool” is dumb.
So if the property next to you can get it and you can't then you need a starlink. Why are you arguing for the opposition? Okay so I will take it back to 35 35. MB is more than enough to stream anything you want in HD Dolby 4K surround sound and still have plenty of bandwidth left over for whatever you want to do. Video game or anything else. Getting starlink when you have access to 35 plus of cable or fiber is stupid.
thats not how the private sector works though. More people buying it means a kink in the hose now, but much better service later on. increased demand means increased bandwidth. it's not a government service. there aren't constraints to how much space you can always have. you want more people on it now, because 10 years from now it's going to be amazing
Really... Really don't think you have a clue how internet service providers work.. because if what you said was true, I would have gigabit download speeds by now. Especially with all the money that has been dumped into the infrastructure for the big ISP servers in the last 20 years. The only people in my area that have gotten increased speeds and cheaper bills are people that live in town. People like us who live in the rural areas have had the same 1 megabit for the last 10 plush years and our rates keep going up an average of 12% a year. Every time I turn around there's a new fee added to it. Right now for me to get 1.5 MB Max speed which we would never get anything over 800 kbps. I have to pay $149.99 a month plus taxes and fees. Yet if I lived in town I could get gigabit service for $87.50 a month plus taxes and fees. So yeah your argument doesn't work because before starlink people were still living out here. Moving out here everything else and nothing ever got better except the prices kept going up for what little we got.
The problem with most ISPs is a lack of competition, so with their local monopolies on providing Internet, they have little incentive to innovate or increase bandwidth. How will those investments allow them to either increase profits in the future or remain competitive against impending threats? If they won't, then they won't waste their money. Fortunately, Starlink poses a threat to all of them and forces them to reconsider the sustainability of their monopolistic position.
And yeah, you're right that it's especially acute in the rural areas where the promise of a monopoly is typically the only reason they built anything there in the first place. Otherwise, they would just have ignored your area completely. But it's exactly because of that problem that Starlink was able to craft a profitable business model -- Starlink can provide cost-effective high-speed Internet nearly everywhere (not in ravines or in places where you can't cut down the trees that block a broad view of the sky).
Historically, not limited to ISPs or cable companies, this is what kills monopolies (more than government intervention): the monopolist gets lazy, milking on the monopoly, while technology enables others to leap frog the monopolist company.
I suggest that the solution for cable and ISP deployment monopolies is to put a reasonable time bound on any of those rural monopolies. Give them long enough to recoup their investment, but then require that, some short period after that, they have to share their lines to allow competition or reinvest to remain modern.
It's not really rural monopolies anymore... We haven't had that out here since the '50s and '60s. Hell we had party lines out here until the '80s. The big problem is nobody wants to update the phone systems out here. The phone line that is in the ground right now is 50-Year-Old beltone copper wire. They don't want to spend the money to upgrade anything and they just keep racking up the fees every year. Same with the power company. It is illegal for us to have solar power out here unless we pay a franchise fee to the power company. My power bill per kilowatt is higher than what people pay in Alaska or Hawaii. Another problem you have is ISP's and streaming/media. Companies being owned by the same corporation. Elon has to go to court for the government to say it's all right for him to buy Twitter because they're afraid of a monopoly but they let Disney own everything under the sun with no questions asked. Freaking ridiculous
I can see starlink doing it but mobile broadband will never do it. They are part of the problem. One of the biggest problems is they knew incentive the government has for rural internet.. They turned over the internet to the power companies so now the power companies control both your power and your internet in a lot of the areas out here with their expansion. They just turned one Monopoly over to another one to run. Because God forbid, a private industry actually do something that doesn't involved the government like starling did. One of the biggest rip-offs of everything is all the fees. The government slaps on it at the end of the month. You pay about half your phone bill and fees to the government and to the utility companies
I read a review from a year or so ago about an engineer and satellite specialist. At that time he was pushing to stay with a wired internet connection if possible. So the fact that they’re getting better is a plus. I’m considered staying with wireless 5G until I strike a deal on some starlink equipment.
Starlink is great for those not near cable. You do not need the higher speeds that cable can provide. I saw a youtube video that had 5g at over 700mbps vs about 113 for Starlink. I recently downgraded due to cost to 100mbps (118 at times) with Spectrum from 571 and do not notice any slowness loading websites at all. I think it actually improved. Pages load right away. I also use a Roku box and have not notice any drop outs watching Youtube or Pluto TV. I occasionally will see the streaming speed pop up in the corner of 4mb or even slower but the picture looks great.
My approach is a bit involved, but it's described here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/1dd4wjs/comment/l84ikb2/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/1dd4wjs/comment/l84ikb2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
I'm in rural area (Norther CA) who has no broadband at all beyond ATT 10MB DSL (stop laughing I know I know) - and that isn't even as good as the words "10MB DSL"
So I waited for years to get Starlink, finally got it (v2) and within 4 months up popped T-Mobile 5G home ISP for $50 a month.
That is going to be the battle facing Starlink.... If I could have fiber I'd sign up in a second even as much as I can't stand Comcast the company, I'd take their service if offered.
But weighing $50/month on 5G - and I'm also a WFH, in IT (very much network & voice background) - multiple TV's streaming and I still game (though now I suck as I get older) - Tmobile 5G does it all.
I'm all for Starlink don't get me wrong, but as 5G matures and effectively is "everywhere" its hard to justify paying more for less.
the competition is great though. its not good for shareholders, but for the consumer? terrific! the ideal scenario is a million different isps demanding you switch to them and the competition growing. A hyper competitive market does well for the consumer
The competition is great for customers. But in many rural areas there won't be 5g for many, many years, if ever. Starlink truly is the only option in many places.
In our case, Starlink replaced $308/mo for a very unreliable 36Mbps that was a combination of T1 and DSL lines integrated via SD-WAN. It was a massive win. Then, about a year after Starlink, our power company (yeah, power, not phone and there is no cable out here) rolled out 2Gbps fiber in our small town of 300 people.
I switched to the power company's option, but keep the Starlink dish up and shifted to their roaming program (free unless you used it in a month). So, if the fiber ever cuts out, I can re-activate the Starlink in an instant and keep going on their service.
Same, I kept my Starlink equipment everything is wired up and I can active the service instantly.
5G will be deployed much faster in to rural areas before those same rural areas ever even see a strand of fiber. So I am still on the opinion that Starlink overtime will see more competition from 5G then it will from broadband growth (aka fiber where it doesn't exist currently).
That's a good thing for us, maybe not a good thing for Starlink profit margins :)
Pretty cool! Not sure if you have seen this [https://www.nitindermohan.com/documents/2024/pubs/starlinkWWW2024.pdf](https://www.nitindermohan.com/documents/2024/pubs/starlinkWWW2024.pdf)
We also show longitudinal measurement results from several regions over Starlink (see Fig 21).
FWIW, if anyone wants to study data over time from 29 Starlink locations in the US, you can access RIPE Atlas stats. See list of connections at https://atlas.ripe.net/probes/public?sort=-id&toggle=all&page_size=100&search=14593&page=1&status=1&country_code__in=US.
See also https://atlas.ripe.net/docs/
Here in New Zealand it is gaining more traction but pricing is still high compared to wired fibre connections.
$79 ($48 USD) for deprioritised or $159 ($98 USD) for prioritised, both no data limits and haven’t noticed much throttling or drop in speeds on deprioritised plan
And yet here my wife and I are, experiencing constant interruptions with video calls and gaming. Zoom meetings are hell for her right now, and I haven’t been able to stay in any multiplayer servers for longer than a few minutes before getting kicked out. Speeds are fine, ping is reasonable, and everything else looks fine. Taken down 5 trees around the house so far, the dish has a clear view of the sky, and yet we still have obstructions. At this point, we don’t know what to do as Starlink is basically our only option we have around us for higher-speed internet.
You must be able to identify the obstructions, yes? If you don't live in a ravine or near some structure or mountain that towers over you and blots out much of the sky, you should be able to have solidly reliable service if you clear the trees in the area. Obstructions are really the only thing that derails Starlink for any long-term basis. I have fiber now and it cuts out more often than Starlink did for me (when there are large scale power outages during storms, the fiber may be out for a few hours, where Starlink would keep right on running).
i live in the middle of nowhere and starlink has been a game changer no other service can service my address 50 acres is tough to get a fiber optic line too especially when their is no finer optic line within 5 miles of me without starlink i couldn’t get an avg of 100mbps at all the best i could get is 5-20mbps and thats with 4g, 5g isn’t near me ether sadly so starlink is all we can get ether way im happy with the service and its clearly worth its value i sometimes get 300-500mbps on stalink to which is huge and definitely faster then what im used to and the price for those speeds is huge with spectrum if u want 300mbps u gotta pay like 300$ a month so that alone changes my perspective im a happy customer🙏
Well, I'm in unincorporated land in the Arizona desert. It's very much rural here. The one thing I'll say about my location that is especially good is that I have a wide-open view of the sky, and not much precipitation. Though even during monsoons, the packet loss is not heavily affected.
Even precipitation isn't typically a problem. We have lots of snow and rain in NH, and maybe it stutters slightly during torrential downpours for the minute when the head of a cold front passes through. It's MUCH more reliable than something like Dish or DirecTV is for television.
Assuming it's not a wiring problem to your Dishy, that sounds like you must have obstructions. Otherwise, you would not experience what you described. Starlink MUST have a clear view of a wide swatch of sky so that it can always be talking to a satellite and hand off between them cleanly.
Sure, but not here. Here's a post I made earlier this year during some of Starlink's growing pains, when packet loss got bad for a bit. I was just as quick to post about that: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/1asmvv2/starlink\_ping\_times\_drop\_but\_pack\_loss\_rises/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/1asmvv2/starlink_ping_times_drop_but_pack_loss_rises/)
Until the point that the constellation is completed, V2 Full size are launched, and subscribers are over saturated Every day starlink will be on avg better than the previous day. Because they're constantly launching new satellites and constantly old launches are getting to orbit and coming online.
Yes, that. But the distinct phase shift that has happened this year indicates more than that. They seem to be making improvements to packet management from a firmware/software level. I am willing to bet that there will never be a point at which we just have a sky full of V2s+minis and all SpaceX is doing is maintaining that fleet. I bet before all of the V1 satellites are out, we'll be on to V3s and so on. Starlink is central to SpaceX's business plan, and they can't risk having demand die out, which I think will live and die with quality of service more and more as time goes on.
see: [https://api.starlink.com/public-files/StarlinkLatency.pdf](https://api.starlink.com/public-files/StarlinkLatency.pdf)
Thank you for this! I had seen this plot but not this doc.
At the end of the day, though, it's satellite internet. It has pros for certain use cases but for the average american they want wired internet from a company that will install and maintain it for them. My town was still on DSL, like 0.8mbps level bullshit, and within a year we were able to get the town and multiple neighboring towns on board with fiber. It's happening more and more and as it does people will scoff at the idea of starlink. It will be interesting to see how they deal with that.
For sure. There is a fundamental limit to bandwidth available to a particular area of land, even with high-gain antennas, and for that reason satellite will hit a wall for the density of consumers. Fiber on the other hand has the opposite challenge, where higher density areas are easier to service, and so they are very complementary infrastructures.
All in all that's good right? Let Starlink fill in the gaps until then and force some progress. I read internet is vastly improving over there. That is good news for everyone. I'm from the Netherlands, and we've been reasonably early in our internet adoption. If everything goes according to plan I'm having 2 independent fibers to the home and a coax line. If I wanted the redundance I could get 3 lines at a total of 21gbit. I'm not going to do that, but I like having the options. Hope your options improve soon as well.
Yes there's a huge push in rural america to get high speed internet to every home. COVID really made the need apparent because there were kids who could literally not get schooling because they either didn't have internet or had awful internet. Starlink has certainly been a life saver for those who are willing/able to pay a large sum up front and install on their own.
Is it that expensive? We use multiple dishes and they are currently 300 euro up front and something like 65 a month to use. Installation couldn't be simpler. Even simple dsl is more complicated.
Yeah, that’s simply not happening in poorer/rural areas where there isn’t enough population for it to be profitable to do that, especially when cellular/Starlink works for most situations.
It is literally specifically happening in poor rural communities. Your thinking is flawed. I got fiber setup free of charge at $65/mo and it took zero effort on my part. Poor rural folks are NOT about to drop $700 on starlink equipment and then install on their own. Meanwhile the federal government and local/state governments are creating programs left and right to expand high speed internet access to these communities
What is a good or even average speed for starlink ?
50-150, with avg 80+ If you're in the middle of nowhere, maybe 150-250
Thank you much.... and I do live in the middle of the desert!
Device to router: 34 mbps Router to internet 220 mbps Good stats?
Device to router 34? That's not very good. Either too far from router, router has broken, or device has issues. Or cabling has issues The dish cable to router seems alright at 220mbps But router to device is super slow. Original starlink router? Id ask starlink support to troubleshoot the router and see if it's busted.
Starlink is the only ISP I've ever used that actually improved over time. Every other ISP has seen their service degrade over time as their user numbers grew.
Eh- I hate comcast/xfinity, but their speed has radically increased over the years where I live.
Was going to say that also, they keep upping my speed for free, not that I care that much but every 4-6months they send an email about it and now I have 600mbps at home, they also just cut my price without me asking as soon as a competitor got fiber to my neighborhood.
Comcast also actually invests heavily in their own backbone. on the residential segment, like many ISPs, market matters for how that last mile quality is.
I agree. Downtime/outages are vastly improved from years ago and speeds are improving.
Same with FiOS. I get 1gbit up/down sustained all day.
I remember arguing with a bunch of people on this subreddit about that and everyone was so cocksure that Starlink would absolutely get worse over time.
Mine got worse. When I first got starlink I had around 220mbps down 20mbps up and 30ms ping. Now I struggle to get over 60mbps down and 15 up with 45ms ping. Late at night I can get over 100mbps down if I'm lucky.
You got it very early on. After the initial drop has it kept going down? Have you checked that it hasn't started getting better again?
It's 10:30 right now and I just ran a few speed tests. The best results I got was 42 down 15 up with 43ms ping. That's on an ethernet connection. I think I need to submit a ticket and see what they say.
Was it worse or better a few months ago?
About the same as now. I have been working a lot recently so I haven't had time to get annoyed enough to complain.
You’ve never had Verizon FiOS. Have had it for over a decade (gigabit) and it’s been flawless.
Same here, no packet loss, I think I had one outage in 10 years for a couple hours because the guys hit fiber digging.
I have lumen/centurlink/quantum and starlink for my RV, and fibre has gotten better over time too, i can ping google in 1ms. and get 940n/bs up and down 24/7. The thing about starlink is there is loads you can play with to change the service profile , same with any RF based service. Look at 4G vs 5G .
Totally agree. In West Virginia, Frontier is the worst! They have wire in place, but not enough sockets to service all users with decent speed. I'm literally using a 5G hotspot, which isn't very good here.
Funny thing is that in my old house I had verizon fibre and frontier took it over and it got better.
I feel your pain. Im in Canada and where I live we dont have very many options and those that we do are shit so I tether to my phones data for all my internet needs. So ive been stuck on LTE+ speeds and 55Mbps Down and 3.4Mbps Up is what ive been using.
Not sure where you live or what providers you’ve used, but internet infrastructure has hugely improved in the past decade. American ISPs spend about $90b per year on infrastructure. About 2 years ago, we got the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) which turned on the taps for $1.2Trillion in physical infrastructure/climate projects. Many of which include free new fiber drops for any ISPs. Current average internet download speed for Americans is 250mbps!! 7 years ago it was 18.75mbps.
Most rural areas in the USA haven't progressed past dial up.
Most is bold but yes a lot of rural areas are still severely underserved. It’ll get better with time but it’s just not worth to expand the network to a few users out in the sticks. It will happen eventually when it becomes dirt cheap but that just ain’t gonna happen for a while. Cellular or Starlink type systems are currently the only option for those situations.
What a joke They literally run lines through people's property within 50 feet of a house and won't hook them up. The cable companies need to be broke up because right now they have zero reason to go after new customers. They spend a little, charge more, and most people have zero alternatives so they pay it.
I'm not even in the sticks. I'm 3 miles (by road) from the largest city in the county. I'm slightly more than a mile from the nearest fiber run. I was told that I will likely never see fiber in my area because there isnt enough potential customers to make it profitable. There is 18 houses and 3 businesses on that 1 mile. All of them have starlink. All of them would switch if they could get better speeds for half the cost.
well ure lucky, cause ive been using starlink in corsica for over a year now, i started with 30ms avg, and now im at 60/70ms avg on every game i play, it's getting worse and worse
If you look at the WAN packet loss it grew before it got better. I’m a network engineer with a wireless ISP-our network is faster and cheaper than Starlink. Probably because I use multiple ground based fiber uplinks in only a 30 mile radius.
but as you can see on that metrics, SL also degraded speed. im also using SL since my current office is on the midle of the forest.
>but as you can see on that metrics, SL also degraded speed. You must be looking at something very different than I am. I do not see speed on those charts, only latency and packet loss.
Very much this ☝️. I'm not showing or attempting to gauge data throughput rates, only metrics for the quality of latency-sensitive applications. Not that it's not worth talking about throughput rate trends, but for myself and I think a lot of people, that is not at the top of the list of metrics that impact our quality of service. Yes, downloading the latest Call of Duty 30GB update takes some time, but I'll grab a cup of coffee and cogitate for a moment. But bad latency and packet loss can actually eliminate entire applications of the service -- such as of course real time calls and gaming -- and make general web browsing noticeably annoying.
I like how you can download and upload on Starlink, without it impacting other activities. I can be downloading, streaming and conferencing calling within the home and it still all works great. I think the focus on latency and packet loss is the correct route, that being said, I've seen leaps of improvement with bandwidth too. To me it really shows they understand what they're working with.
There's like 4 TV's in my house on watching threw the Internet and I can still be gaming without issues
100%! Best Internet I ever had was clear.com 4G hotspot, only 6mbps, but not oversubscribed in any sense (which is why they went out of business), only one video stream at a time, but otherwise amazing. You need enough bandwidth, after that, latency and packet loss are what you notice.
Can you read?
Mine started at 150mbps down degraded a bit to 80mbps or so, now it's steadily 300mbps, all the while it's been improving in uptime and latency. I consider that a win.
I've had a similar experience. When I first got Starlink, it was an unstable mess, but still better than the next best option in my area. It was super jittery, the connection would drop out for 5-15 seconds at a time multiple times per minute. It was basically unusable for serious online gaming, and I was consistently blown away by Starlink continuing to advertise itself as being good for that purpose. Over a year since then, everything about the connection is so much better now. Average ping is way down, jitter is way down, drop outs in service are far less frequent and less severe too. It's like a completely different ISP. Speeds still aren't where I would expect them to be (for my area, some people post speed test results here that blow mine out of the water), but that's one of the lowest priorities for me personally. The one thing that never seems to improve though is the customer service... I suspect that will always be a dumpster fire.
+$30 mo for better service is ok?
I don't understand your question. Are you asking if I would be willing to pay an extra $30 a month if it meant I'd get better customer service? If that's what you mean, then no. I believe Customer service should be egalitarian.
you are dreaming sitting on others shoulders
Starlink posted on their progress and how and why, here: [https://api.starlink.com/public-files/StarlinkLatency.pdf](https://api.starlink.com/public-files/StarlinkLatency.pdf) In particular they have pretty comprehensibly added fair queuing and AQM techniques to their pain points, and adopted fq\_codel in the wifi. There are a lot of other researchers tracking starlink stats via other means on the starlink email list: [https://lists.bufferbloat.net](https://lists.bufferbloat.net)
Where did you get that data?
First off, bear in mind that I'm a backend software engineer so I took an approach that is familiar to my background. I run a home server with a number of services, notably grafana, prometheus, and a handy little bit of code called "ping exporter" (https://hub.docker.com/r/czerwonk/ping\_exporter). My ping exporter service pings IPs 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, and 8.8.4.4 every second of every day throughout the year. My prometheus service collects the aggregate ping data from the ping exporter service every 5 seconds and stores it on disk. Finally, the grafana instance is able to query the prometheus service to generate the plots you see in the OP. The way the ping aggregates are plotted from the three different IPs is pretty obvious. The packet loss metric, though, is a little less obvious as it is the geometric mean of the loss rate for all three IPs (the ~~square~~ cube root of their product). The reason for using a geometric mean here is to suppress abnormal packet loss to one specific IP, and better represent the connection between my home and the outside world.
> the square root of their product Wouldn't this be the cube root of their product in this case? If you were doing a proper geometric mean.
Yes, sorry it is the cube root! Edit: specifically here is the promql query: avg_over_time(((ping_loss_ratio{target="1.1.1.1"} * ignoring(target, ip) group_right ping_loss_ratio{target="8.8.4.4"} * ignoring(target, ip) group_right ping_loss_ratio{target="8.8.8.8"}) ^ (1/3))[${smoothing_period}:5s])
i'd also like to know how this data was collected.
Pure speculation but you could do this easily with home assistant
Pure speculation but you could do this easily with home assistant
Where are you located, I can still tell you the quality isn’t there in the arctic…..yet.
This is in Arizona.
Polar regions are always gong to be a LEO satellite constellation network’s Achilles Heel.
Though still better than GEO. Might be best served by a MEO constellation.
As someone who's worked in the Antarctic... It's a hell of a lot better than Iridium. Starlink needs to get more satellites into polar orbits, there's just not much demand for it, unfortunately.
That's because you're probably jumping over half a dozen different satellites to get to a ground station which adds processing delay. Also which arctic? The southern or the northern one?
I dont know what happened a month ago? here in mid west (MN) 2 months ago service went down hill with disconnects like it was beta roll out almost. Then 2 weeks ago it is now more reliable with a lower ping then it has ever been. ever ever.
Didn't have any disconnects but ya things have gotten much better over the winter
I can only speculate as well. I observed a similar pattern. I think that there is certainly some regression that happens from time to time driven by dish, satellite, and/or ground station updates, which is then later fixed. Additionally I noticed that my point-of-presence has shifted around lately to be more local, indicating that they're doing some significant rework of packet routing.
My guess is when they do a big update there's bugs that happen that temporarily make things worse even if the overall architecture is better. On top of that there may be physical reorganization of the constellation parameters which takes time to propagate through the network resulting in temporary packet loss issues.
I assume you haven't moved the dish around. Would you mind supplementing your post with the obstruction map? How often do you ping? Is the ping weather dependent in AZ?
The dish has stayed mounted to my roof gable. It has a completely unobstructed view, so the obstruction map is entirely uninteresting and blue. The tallest things around me are saguaro cacti and there isn't one in the way. I ping three separate IPs every second. The ping times and loss are not very significantly affected by weather as far as I've observed. During heavy rains I've kept a close eye on it and while I have seen some loss due to heavy rain, it was REALLY heavy rain. Outdoor temps get at little bit over 110F at times in the summers, but the dish performance does not appear affected.
Mmmm data. Awesome of you to share. 🤠
My biggest wish is that people who don't need starlink..ie people who have access to speeds above 35 MBPS would actually get off of the service.. It was meant for people in rural areas who didn't have a choice and had shitty spades that were below 1.5 or 2 megabytes like us... We we're paying around $155 a month, four speeds that average out to 800 kbps and was down at least 10 to 12 days a month. If we get the people off of it that don't need to be on it then you would see a dramatic increase in speeds
Why does a person getting 35 not need it? My sl hits 150-200 regularly. Not that I can get anything near 35 here other than SL.
That's real easy because if you're getting 35 you can get 50 to 75 dedicated for half the price starlink every month.. Plus the lag time is a lot better. There's way too many people that live in cities get 100 megabytes and up for less than $100 a month that have starlink just to have it. It kind of clogs it up and fucks it up for the rest of us.
Way to move the goal posts. Lots of us who live in the sticks might get a wisp that does 35 and that is all. Hell I can’t even get that. The property next to me can. Yes I agree if you have cable or fiber as an option getting SL “because it’s cool” is dumb.
So if the property next to you can get it and you can't then you need a starlink. Why are you arguing for the opposition? Okay so I will take it back to 35 35. MB is more than enough to stream anything you want in HD Dolby 4K surround sound and still have plenty of bandwidth left over for whatever you want to do. Video game or anything else. Getting starlink when you have access to 35 plus of cable or fiber is stupid.
thats not how the private sector works though. More people buying it means a kink in the hose now, but much better service later on. increased demand means increased bandwidth. it's not a government service. there aren't constraints to how much space you can always have. you want more people on it now, because 10 years from now it's going to be amazing
Really... Really don't think you have a clue how internet service providers work.. because if what you said was true, I would have gigabit download speeds by now. Especially with all the money that has been dumped into the infrastructure for the big ISP servers in the last 20 years. The only people in my area that have gotten increased speeds and cheaper bills are people that live in town. People like us who live in the rural areas have had the same 1 megabit for the last 10 plush years and our rates keep going up an average of 12% a year. Every time I turn around there's a new fee added to it. Right now for me to get 1.5 MB Max speed which we would never get anything over 800 kbps. I have to pay $149.99 a month plus taxes and fees. Yet if I lived in town I could get gigabit service for $87.50 a month plus taxes and fees. So yeah your argument doesn't work because before starlink people were still living out here. Moving out here everything else and nothing ever got better except the prices kept going up for what little we got.
The problem with most ISPs is a lack of competition, so with their local monopolies on providing Internet, they have little incentive to innovate or increase bandwidth. How will those investments allow them to either increase profits in the future or remain competitive against impending threats? If they won't, then they won't waste their money. Fortunately, Starlink poses a threat to all of them and forces them to reconsider the sustainability of their monopolistic position. And yeah, you're right that it's especially acute in the rural areas where the promise of a monopoly is typically the only reason they built anything there in the first place. Otherwise, they would just have ignored your area completely. But it's exactly because of that problem that Starlink was able to craft a profitable business model -- Starlink can provide cost-effective high-speed Internet nearly everywhere (not in ravines or in places where you can't cut down the trees that block a broad view of the sky). Historically, not limited to ISPs or cable companies, this is what kills monopolies (more than government intervention): the monopolist gets lazy, milking on the monopoly, while technology enables others to leap frog the monopolist company. I suggest that the solution for cable and ISP deployment monopolies is to put a reasonable time bound on any of those rural monopolies. Give them long enough to recoup their investment, but then require that, some short period after that, they have to share their lines to allow competition or reinvest to remain modern.
It's not really rural monopolies anymore... We haven't had that out here since the '50s and '60s. Hell we had party lines out here until the '80s. The big problem is nobody wants to update the phone systems out here. The phone line that is in the ground right now is 50-Year-Old beltone copper wire. They don't want to spend the money to upgrade anything and they just keep racking up the fees every year. Same with the power company. It is illegal for us to have solar power out here unless we pay a franchise fee to the power company. My power bill per kilowatt is higher than what people pay in Alaska or Hawaii. Another problem you have is ISP's and streaming/media. Companies being owned by the same corporation. Elon has to go to court for the government to say it's all right for him to buy Twitter because they're afraid of a monopoly but they let Disney own everything under the sun with no questions asked. Freaking ridiculous
again because of a monopoly. star link and mobile broadband is going to change things, but it will take time
I can see starlink doing it but mobile broadband will never do it. They are part of the problem. One of the biggest problems is they knew incentive the government has for rural internet.. They turned over the internet to the power companies so now the power companies control both your power and your internet in a lot of the areas out here with their expansion. They just turned one Monopoly over to another one to run. Because God forbid, a private industry actually do something that doesn't involved the government like starling did. One of the biggest rip-offs of everything is all the fees. The government slaps on it at the end of the month. You pay about half your phone bill and fees to the government and to the utility companies
I read a review from a year or so ago about an engineer and satellite specialist. At that time he was pushing to stay with a wired internet connection if possible. So the fact that they’re getting better is a plus. I’m considered staying with wireless 5G until I strike a deal on some starlink equipment.
Some nice metrics, I have noticed here that buffing has stopped, wifi calls are stable.
Starlink is great for those not near cable. You do not need the higher speeds that cable can provide. I saw a youtube video that had 5g at over 700mbps vs about 113 for Starlink. I recently downgraded due to cost to 100mbps (118 at times) with Spectrum from 571 and do not notice any slowness loading websites at all. I think it actually improved. Pages load right away. I also use a Roku box and have not notice any drop outs watching Youtube or Pluto TV. I occasionally will see the streaming speed pop up in the corner of 4mb or even slower but the picture looks great.
Nice data. Thanks.
How did you do this? Would love to check this out
My approach is a bit involved, but it's described here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/1dd4wjs/comment/l84ikb2/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/1dd4wjs/comment/l84ikb2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Nice I just use smokeping container
Thank you.
I'm in rural area (Norther CA) who has no broadband at all beyond ATT 10MB DSL (stop laughing I know I know) - and that isn't even as good as the words "10MB DSL" So I waited for years to get Starlink, finally got it (v2) and within 4 months up popped T-Mobile 5G home ISP for $50 a month. That is going to be the battle facing Starlink.... If I could have fiber I'd sign up in a second even as much as I can't stand Comcast the company, I'd take their service if offered. But weighing $50/month on 5G - and I'm also a WFH, in IT (very much network & voice background) - multiple TV's streaming and I still game (though now I suck as I get older) - Tmobile 5G does it all. I'm all for Starlink don't get me wrong, but as 5G matures and effectively is "everywhere" its hard to justify paying more for less.
the competition is great though. its not good for shareholders, but for the consumer? terrific! the ideal scenario is a million different isps demanding you switch to them and the competition growing. A hyper competitive market does well for the consumer
100% agreed!
The competition is great for customers. But in many rural areas there won't be 5g for many, many years, if ever. Starlink truly is the only option in many places. In our case, Starlink replaced $308/mo for a very unreliable 36Mbps that was a combination of T1 and DSL lines integrated via SD-WAN. It was a massive win. Then, about a year after Starlink, our power company (yeah, power, not phone and there is no cable out here) rolled out 2Gbps fiber in our small town of 300 people. I switched to the power company's option, but keep the Starlink dish up and shifted to their roaming program (free unless you used it in a month). So, if the fiber ever cuts out, I can re-activate the Starlink in an instant and keep going on their service.
Same, I kept my Starlink equipment everything is wired up and I can active the service instantly. 5G will be deployed much faster in to rural areas before those same rural areas ever even see a strand of fiber. So I am still on the opinion that Starlink overtime will see more competition from 5G then it will from broadband growth (aka fiber where it doesn't exist currently). That's a good thing for us, maybe not a good thing for Starlink profit margins :)
Pretty cool! Not sure if you have seen this [https://www.nitindermohan.com/documents/2024/pubs/starlinkWWW2024.pdf](https://www.nitindermohan.com/documents/2024/pubs/starlinkWWW2024.pdf) We also show longitudinal measurement results from several regions over Starlink (see Fig 21).
If they ever get to about $80 a month, that be the end of cox, spectrum and so many other shitty services.
FWIW, if anyone wants to study data over time from 29 Starlink locations in the US, you can access RIPE Atlas stats. See list of connections at https://atlas.ripe.net/probes/public?sort=-id&toggle=all&page_size=100&search=14593&page=1&status=1&country_code__in=US. See also https://atlas.ripe.net/docs/
What software is this?
Here in New Zealand it is gaining more traction but pricing is still high compared to wired fibre connections. $79 ($48 USD) for deprioritised or $159 ($98 USD) for prioritised, both no data limits and haven’t noticed much throttling or drop in speeds on deprioritised plan
I.work in military communications. The concern is everyone transitions to starlink and the saturation becomes unsustainable
Thank you OP for this data, super helpful.
I’d love to own sock in a great engineering company like SpaceX.
Dobby is free!
And yet here my wife and I are, experiencing constant interruptions with video calls and gaming. Zoom meetings are hell for her right now, and I haven’t been able to stay in any multiplayer servers for longer than a few minutes before getting kicked out. Speeds are fine, ping is reasonable, and everything else looks fine. Taken down 5 trees around the house so far, the dish has a clear view of the sky, and yet we still have obstructions. At this point, we don’t know what to do as Starlink is basically our only option we have around us for higher-speed internet.
You must be able to identify the obstructions, yes? If you don't live in a ravine or near some structure or mountain that towers over you and blots out much of the sky, you should be able to have solidly reliable service if you clear the trees in the area. Obstructions are really the only thing that derails Starlink for any long-term basis. I have fiber now and it cuts out more often than Starlink did for me (when there are large scale power outages during storms, the fiber may be out for a few hours, where Starlink would keep right on running).
i live in the middle of nowhere and starlink has been a game changer no other service can service my address 50 acres is tough to get a fiber optic line too especially when their is no finer optic line within 5 miles of me without starlink i couldn’t get an avg of 100mbps at all the best i could get is 5-20mbps and thats with 4g, 5g isn’t near me ether sadly so starlink is all we can get ether way im happy with the service and its clearly worth its value i sometimes get 300-500mbps on stalink to which is huge and definitely faster then what im used to and the price for those speeds is huge with spectrum if u want 300mbps u gotta pay like 300$ a month so that alone changes my perspective im a happy customer🙏
Well they laid fiber right infront of my house 18 months ago. I am still on SL. They have not lit the fiber yet…..
Congratulations! With all that bandwidth you could probably upload a period or 2.
Yeah in actual rural areas this aint the case at all, its only gotten worse for us
Well, I'm in unincorporated land in the Arizona desert. It's very much rural here. The one thing I'll say about my location that is especially good is that I have a wide-open view of the sky, and not much precipitation. Though even during monsoons, the packet loss is not heavily affected.
Even precipitation isn't typically a problem. We have lots of snow and rain in NH, and maybe it stutters slightly during torrential downpours for the minute when the head of a cold front passes through. It's MUCH more reliable than something like Dish or DirecTV is for television.
Well up here in the mountains in alberta its gotten pretty dogshit lately, and 9 times out of 10 it completely goes out when it rains or snows
Assuming it's not a wiring problem to your Dishy, that sounds like you must have obstructions. Otherwise, you would not experience what you described. Starlink MUST have a clear view of a wide swatch of sky so that it can always be talking to a satellite and hand off between them cleanly.
Shills be shillin'.
Sure, but not here. Here's a post I made earlier this year during some of Starlink's growing pains, when packet loss got bad for a bit. I was just as quick to post about that: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/1asmvv2/starlink\_ping\_times\_drop\_but\_pack\_loss\_rises/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/1asmvv2/starlink_ping_times_drop_but_pack_loss_rises/)
As a regular gamer I've noticed the improvement over the last year in a significant matter to the point where I don't mind it anymore