It's sort of mentioned, but not emphasized in this review that connection dropouts happen every few minutes for a few seconds. That makes starlink fine for any kind of asynchronous content like web browsing, torrenting or video streaming, but unusable for video calls, stream hosting, voip, or online gaming. It's implied that this is due to the trees obstructing a full view of the sky, but I have actually heard these connection dropouts are just about universal due to the constellation not having enough infill. Just a warning that for most of us we are still several hundred satellites short and some connection handoff updates away from this being a useful internet connection.
I have a property where Starlink would be perfect and I would pay triple the price to be able to do zoom calls over the connection.
Honestly when I first got the dish, and had it in an open field, that was the case—but now the momentary dropouts between satellites are less than 1-2 seconds.
They had 1000 or so satellites when I first started testing, and there are now something like 1600 or so. Most of the time, I don't even notice when it switches satellites.
If you were doing some more real-time work or extremely latency-sensitive operations, then yes, you need to stick to a different type of connection. But it's really seamless now, compared to even a few months ago.
Most of the software I used either showed no sign of the dropout, or at worst would freeze a frame or show a loading indicator for a brief moment before getting back to normal.
Online multiplayer gaming and/or streaming are the main areas where I'd have to not recommend Starlink for now.
>but not emphasized in this review that connection dropouts happen every few minutes for a few seconds
I don't see this at all. I have constant uptime monitoring, and connection drops are now a minute or two per week. We use it for VoIP, there is no cellular coverage at all where I have it deployed.
Edit: Also, I mentioned this in my fuller main comment but this is around the 45th parallel in New England, and around 1500' (500m) above sea level. This location is also within approximately 50-70 miles ground level of two separate Starlink ground station installations. The nature of Starlink is that there is much more of a geographic component than most people are used to in a WAN link, so it's probably important when talking experience to specify rough area of the world one is in. Once the network is completely built up that may not matter much anymore, but at this point there are definite coverage density differences, and with the current bent-pipe usage ground stations matter too more. Anyone interested in getting an idea of current planetary station and sat deployments might find this site interesting:
As a user of Starlink for more than 4 months - the quality has improved. While you say it is unusable for video calls, i think that is way overstated and it completely depends on where you are trying to connect.
Compared to the other options which were atrocious (10 MB down max, 3 MB Up max, weather changes everything) - the hiccup you get maybe every 10 minutes for 10 seconds - is annoying but not a deal breaker for VOIP calls. If you are doing client side calls maybe a deal breaker - team calls manageable but annoying. Also I do calls with our Australian team (and were North America based) and they are on cable internet and they get hiccuped in the same amount. So actually I would say that Starlink is on par if not better than their connection.
If you are comparing the internet to city quality cable then yeah not comparable - but thats not what they are targeting. They are bringing remote areas online.
That was the feeling a few months ago. But in the last 2 months, we have used zoom and other applications with very little drop outs. I have various TV stations running for hours at a time at high resolutions, and at the most there is a freeze frame for a split second once or twice every few hours.
Frankly, I have had more issues with all the other internet connections we still maintain, than with Starlink. (Zoom was always dropping out with the others.)
For example we have: (Slow) high speed DSL, (slow) high speed lte.
In all those the internet download speeds are very variable, start fast (5-12) dropping to 0.5-1 and going up and down over time.
Starlink maintains over 20 down, going up sometimes to over 30.
We are in the countryside in Canada, so true high speed doesn't exist. For now, Starlink is the most dependable high speed option. (What will happen when more subscribers will join all on the one satellite?)
Zoom handles intermittent dropouts better than anything else I have seen and I don't quite understand the whole mechanism.
When you lose a connection for a few seconds, maybe even 10 seconds, the video will pause, but when your connection reconnects, it continues where it paused. So you don't miss anything. I believe at some point when the speaker stops talking, like waiting for a response, it will jump cut their video to a more live feed again. So that you don't get too far behind.
I'm curious if anyone here knows about how this works and if it is common practice in live video chat?
As Geerling points out, he has substantial obstructions. I have no obstructions, and see a few seconds of downtime per day. My wife and I regularly have multi-hour zoom calls with no problems.
Obstructions are a problem, but users with no alternative are much more motivated to locate the dish appropriately.
Starlink is not for people who have gigabit wired connections. For those of us who were lucky to get a hotspot to work long enough to use our 15Gb cap, it is a godsend.
My mom has been using Starlink in Albany, OR for 2 months. It started spotty, but now works better than her other Comcast connection. The only issue is that every day at 7ish they lose connection for about 5 minutes. She’s said it’s not been a huge issue and plans to cancel her Comcast at the end of her contract. She works remote and Starlink has been great for video calls and video streaming. She’s getting 30-40 down and 20-30 ms latency; Comcast is 20 down and 25 ms latency.
I use it for zoom daily. Yesterday was the first day in awhile where I had difficulty completing a call. The handoffs now last only about a second or two. Previously they’d be 15 or so seconds but that hasn’t happened for over a month. It is my daily driver though I do have back up DSL just in case.
> It's implied that this is due to the trees obstructing a full view of the sky, but I have actually heard these connection dropouts are just about universal due to the constellation not having enough infill.
If you go to https://satellitemap.space/# and enter in your GPS location in the settings (45, -90 for a rural northern Wisconsin as an example), and you can see the satellites that that location has visibility of.
And there are times when there's nothing in that area of the sky.
> "It's sort of mentioned, but not emphasized in this review that connection dropouts happen every few minutes for a few seconds."
He mentions that this is due to the Starlink dish's view of the sky being partially obscured by trees.
This will presumably improve as the number of Starlink satellites grows, as it will be more likely that there will be an unobstructed satellite in view at any moment, and less frequent switching between satellites.
Dunno, I did a ~20min FaceTime call that was essentially flawless. That call ended with me being very impressed by the stability and bandwidth of the connection. Far better than the satellite service at the location previously. Maybe it was just pure luck? Not sure, but the consistent 90-100mbit downstream and 2-digit ping is pretty impressive.
> It's sort of mentioned, but not emphasized in this review that connection dropouts happen every few minutes for a few seconds. That makes starlink fine for any kind of asynchronous content like web browsing, torrenting or video streaming, but unusable for video calls, stream hosting, voip, or online gaming
Yep, been our experience as well. We've got a few of us who wanted to trade from our cottages and its just unusable if you need a continuous signal for more than 10 minutes at a time.
That doesn't mean its useless, just that its not usable if you want to do voip, trading, video calls etc.
Hopefully they'll figure out what causes drop ever few minutes at some point. But currently given how expensive it and the hardware are its a very disappointing product.
I guess we're just spoiled now a days with the 1Gbps wired internet that most city homes have access to.
I think it's important to remember that "connections" in networking aren't actually connections. Everything is sent one packet at a time over networks that aren't presumed to be stable.
That means the entire system is resilient. A 2-second pause in connectivity usually won't mean the app dies. It means the application presumes it dropped a few packets, which it did.
Now, if you're playing a very fast-paced multi-player game, a 2-second lag at the wrong moment can spell disaster. But most video call programs can easily handle a 2-second blip in connectivity, annoying though it is for participants- I see those all the time on my non-Satellite based internet.
That's because he has huge sections of his sky blocked.
> It's implied that this is due to the trees obstructing a full view of the sky
It's not implied, it's explicitly the reason...
> but I have actually heard these connection dropouts are just about universal due to the constellation not having enough infill.
That used to be the problem. Most users now report (you can see them talking about it on the starlink subreddit all the time) that they're now going days to weeks without a single drop.
Obviously latency is important in synchronous use cases like video calls, however I wonder if a delay for slower one on one discussions would be all that jarring for users
For the remote areas this is intended for, it is already a 10x or more improvement. Great internet service is better than perfectly reliable slow internet.
It may be that anyone who is willing and able to do so has already thought of it, but on Linux you could multiplex the connection with LTE/3G/dialup and probably get pretty good results.
The outages have been getting better recently. They are supposed to go away entirely once the first constellation is fully complete. If you don't have obstructions, that is.
> That makes starlink fine for any kind of asynchronous content like web browsing
This sounds terrible for web browsing. Last thing I want is to know is to submit a form and then have my connection drop out in the middle. Imagine being in the middle of filling out an application or opening an account or verifying your identity or something like that.
I've had Starlink for about 6 months and it is a massive improvement on upload speed at 10-25 Mb. Download speed is a mixed bag wildly oscillating from 5 to 100 Mb and back. It's okay for downloading things but it's terrible for any sort of video conferencing. There are brief dropouts on average every 6 minutes or so and my obstruction map is better than the author's. My neighbor up the street got slightly better service by mounting his dishy on a 20-ft antenna pole above his house.
Local ground service is 20 Mb download and 2 Mb upload. And that's just barely sufficient for watching streaming video and video conferencing. Gigabit service is but a mile and a half away but no one is going to pay to lay the fiber into our neighborhood. So the last mile and a half is copper from 20 years ago. I think that's going to require political will to fix and I don't think that political will exists right now nor will it in the near future. We could have paid $5,000 per house to lay it ourself but our own neighborhood couldn't come to consensus on that. Now imagine that at a national level.
So if they just deliver 100/100 within a year or two, this is an epic win IMO and I will cancel ground service. And if they don't someone else will so I'm not worried. But it took Teslas to spark the electric vehicle industry. Now there's a lot of choice. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens here.
I'm typing this message from Starlink. For me it's absolutely transformative; 10x the bandwidth I can get from any other source and very reliable.
Except for outages related to obstructions. That's a real problem and the author's situation is not good. There's ways to work around it on your property; a taller mount, a tree install, cutting some trees. But ultimately Dishy needs a clear view to the north and there's no getting around it.
I have some smaller obstructions for my install and it was a little annoying but fine. But in the past week or two it's gotten way better: my packet loss went from 2% to 0.6%. Details here: https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2021/07/20/starlink-improve...
My Starlink experience has gotten a lot better recently. In the past few months.
I'm in rural Arkansas, near the southern edge of the rollout still I believe. I have maintained 3 ISPs this whole time. I have an EM160R LTE modem that will do 5x carrier aggregation and pulls around 240-250 mbit from my local AT&T tower. I also have T-Mobile's 4g home internet (5g works here on my phone, but they won't give me the home internet for whatever reason) which pulls 100-115 mbit. Starlink itself is somewhere between 180 and 240 down, but only 15 up. On the ATT line I can get 40-60 mbit upload, and that's one of the main reasons I keep things set up this way.
I'm about to try disabling the wan port for T-Mobile to see what it's like without that ISP. I don't do any connection bonding - straight up round robin load balancing with no stickyness, and with the amount of servers and services that use multiple TCP streams I can see 300+mbit downloads often. Pings range from 30 (when using Starlink) to 90. (when using one of the LTE connections)
I no longer game enough to comment on it. My kids play Roblox and PS4 online games and don't whine about it, so I think it's sufficient.
I don't really do Zoom meetings. MS Teams is what we use. I don't use the camera very often, but the calls will pause and drop and the people I work with have coined this as, "being Starlinked". Usually a few seconds and rarely does it take an actual redial to reconnect anymore. Just a dead period.
I'm in Ontario, Canada, 46.5 degrees latitude and typing this on Starlink.
Even with the occasional dropouts Starlink is 10-100x better than any other option that we have here (the only options are LTE, or other satellites, like xplornet).
Even though we're only a few minutes drive from a municipality of 160,000 people and on a major highway, there, is no wired connection, and doesn't really seem likely that a wired connection will ever happen. Since moving here 7 years ago the pricing/data rates for the LTE data packages available have doubled in price. Literally doubled.
With Covid we had two adults working from home, and two kids home schooling, on a slow LTE connection with a total bandwidth of 100GB up/down. Even things like windows updates required planning and rationing of the internet.
The state of connectivity in Canada is so abysmal. At this point I hope Starlink matures enough to add a voice service.
This adds some color perhaps to the argument that this is for underserviced regions -- they don't mean third-world or impoverished even though it sounds like that, at least when I heard people defending Starlink.
Some of the comments here are kind of ridiculous. They are complaining (or just pointing out) issues that are EXPECTED at this stage of the beta.
Starlink has like 1700 of the planned 42,000 satellites in orbit now. Of course there are going to be temporarily blips in service plus the random longer dropouts during system upgrades.
Even with the current issues, the service is revolutionary in the remote areas that it's intended to service. Why Geerling thinks it's appropriate to compare beta starlink to his home cable/fiber service is beyond me. It's totally fair to review the current state of starlink, but to then conclude that "I don't love it" because it's not as good as his cable service is just plain dumb.
Why did you even begin the review with the expectation that it could be better than your land service in it's current beta form? You're not even supposed to be on the starlink service if you have great landline bandwidth and starlink should block you from their service as you're stealing bandwidth from people who don't have access to high speed internet.
One person even said "I hope they can figure out why it drops occasionally" as if some of the smartest people on the earth don't know exactly why it drops out. It drops because the satellite mesh network is only 4% complete!
I mean, Starlink is available as a closed beta commercial product. There's nothing wrong with comparing it in its current form to cable service in its current form, especially if you're going to pay $$$ for it.
The point is for the reader to figure out if they should try Starlink right now (if eligible) or if they should wait for some of these issues to be resolved.
To put it another way: would you complain that reviewers were judging Google Glass unfairly, because Google had grandiose plans for it in the future (that ultimately never happened)? Or would you recognize that Google made the decision to sell Google Glass in its current form, and thus accepted that it would be judged against its competitors?
> Starlink has like 1700 of the planned 42,000 satellites in orbit now.
I'm not sure if anyone believes that 42k number. They are launching ~60 satellites at a time - that would mean ~700 launches. There is no way that will be economical for the relative handful of people (500k? 1-2M?) who could realistically be interested in this.
Not to mention, the lifespan of these satellites in orbit is tiny, just a few years. They would have to be constantly launching new satellites to keep up.
The current state is probably more or less the best Starlink will ever offer - as more people will join the network, coming closer to Musk's 500k number, bandwidth will significantly diminish, even if the number of satellites is maybe doubled.
And if federal funds dry up, I expect the whole venture will quickly go bankrupt, or remain alive with a handful of satellites and a huge price spike.
I’m in a rural area in Montana and luckily I have access to a 5G tower. My impression is if you are close to one, it’s better and cheaper than going with Starlink even if you have to pay extra money to set up an external MIMO antenna to improve your signal.
I think Starlink is useful in many areas and industries, but 5G home internet is reliable for many cases at least in the US. Starlink will do great in the South hemisphere where providers struggle even in metropolitan areas. I see that as a huge win for many as long as the prices go down as the current prices could be a barrier for not so wealthy countries.
I'm one of the few client here in France for a few days. I moved from Paris to a quite isolated area (Vercors mountains) with only ADSL (no mobile coverage), and it's night and day, I now get between 100 Mbps and 200 mbps with 30/40 ms latency...
I don't have a lot of time with the service to give an exhaustive feedback, but for the moment I'm able to do video conferencing and call perfectly. And the setup experience is great!
No mention of this in the article, but I know someone with starlink and the router received a dhcp lease with a /10 subnet (100.64.0.0/10). I’ve got no problem with the CGNAT IP given, but found it odd the mask was a /10 and not a /31 normally seen in single device assignments like normally with PPP.
That is honestly a lot better than I expected. I think it is a game-changer for remote areas. You could build a house anywhere and still have energy (solar panels) and internet (Starlink).
This is an exceptionally good review, and (well small in the grand scheme of the worlds problems) a beautiful example of how a passionate happiest can sure goodness with the world. Thank you this is an exceptionally good review, and (while small in the grand scheme of the worlds problems) a beautiful example of how a passionate hobbiest can sure goodness with the world. Thank you!
Shameless plug - if you're using Starlink and want to fix the dropouts, plus get a static public IPv4 address that works over any ISP, get our SD-WAN service: https://www.bigleaf.net/. With a 2nd internet connection, our platform will auto-ID your sensitive traffic and route it over the best performing connection (e.g. aware of jitter, dropouts, etc), plus your bulk data traffic (e.g. Netflix) will route over your highest-throughput connection. 30-day money-back guarantee, so no risk to try.
As a former wireless ISP architect/engineer, it's wonderful to see the leadership that Starlink is providing in LEO satellite connectivity (due to the low latency compared to geostationary). I hope the "block the sky with satellites" visual/astronomy concerns won't play out as an actual issue, because this seems like a great platform to address connectivity needs in harder-to-reach areas.
Technology is pretty solid (no comparison to FSD), order of magnitude better than previous iterations of satellite internet. The solution is still getting our collective heads out of our asses and running fiber everywhere though
@geerlingguy: Consider checking out some global latency comparisons between StarLink and cable. I believe their long-term plan is to have the satellites route traffic between themselves using space lasers rather than hit a ground station and traverse undersea cables and the like.
Not sure if they have that fully implemented yet, but might be interesting looking at the path and latency traffic to .au or Asia or Africa takes on Starlink vs cable. A couple factors may come into play: "as the crow flies" and light speed in vacuum vs glass.
If Dishy can do beamforming to have a radio signal hit a fast moving satellite several hundred kilometers away, in space -- then couldn't two or more Dishies be repurposed/reprogrammed -- to create point-to-point line-of-sight terrestrial Internet links -- a wireless mesh network -- on the ground -- covering long distances?
You know, if there's ever a Zombie Apocalypse -- and Starlink for whatever reason, becomes unavailable...
Of course, we hope it never happens... but it seems like two or more repurposed Dishies -- would make a great Internet bridge (or wireless mesh segment) over long line-of-sight distances -- on the ground...
Also, multiple dishies in space, at different distances from the Earth, acting as repeaters -- might make a great future way to get Internet (and other space-related communications) to the Moon or Mars or beyond...
> Most well-known apps like Netflix, FaceTime, and Zoom, handled things well without any incident. It was really the apps and services that are obviously outsourced.
Not sure why he threw in outsourced there, but ok. I know this could be as simple as using the right library for your video chat app, but at a low level how is something like this achieved? If I establish a tcp connection with a handshake and everything and my internet connection drops or IP is changed the tcp connection gets terminated. Other than using udp is there a way to keep the tcp connection going when the IP address changes without having to establish a new connection, which takes non-trivial amount of time?
I have Starlink at my home located in a rural area where the only alternative is DSL at ~1.0MBPS average downlink. Using Starlink made it possible to actually do interactive work from the house without tethering to my spotty LTE service or traveling to a better location. My own experience is that the service has been quite reliable (often 12 hour stretches without an outage), but I do have unobstructed views of the sky. I do find that streaming audio/video can be glitchy and I usually have some kind of audio issues.
[+] [-] futureshock|4 years ago|reply
I have a property where Starlink would be perfect and I would pay triple the price to be able to do zoom calls over the connection.
[+] [-] geerlingguy|4 years ago|reply
They had 1000 or so satellites when I first started testing, and there are now something like 1600 or so. Most of the time, I don't even notice when it switches satellites.
If you were doing some more real-time work or extremely latency-sensitive operations, then yes, you need to stick to a different type of connection. But it's really seamless now, compared to even a few months ago.
Most of the software I used either showed no sign of the dropout, or at worst would freeze a frame or show a loading indicator for a brief moment before getting back to normal.
Online multiplayer gaming and/or streaming are the main areas where I'd have to not recommend Starlink for now.
[+] [-] xoa|4 years ago|reply
I don't see this at all. I have constant uptime monitoring, and connection drops are now a minute or two per week. We use it for VoIP, there is no cellular coverage at all where I have it deployed.
Edit: Also, I mentioned this in my fuller main comment but this is around the 45th parallel in New England, and around 1500' (500m) above sea level. This location is also within approximately 50-70 miles ground level of two separate Starlink ground station installations. The nature of Starlink is that there is much more of a geographic component than most people are used to in a WAN link, so it's probably important when talking experience to specify rough area of the world one is in. Once the network is completely built up that may not matter much anymore, but at this point there are definite coverage density differences, and with the current bent-pipe usage ground stations matter too more. Anyone interested in getting an idea of current planetary station and sat deployments might find this site interesting:
https://satellitemap.space/
[+] [-] boringg|4 years ago|reply
Compared to the other options which were atrocious (10 MB down max, 3 MB Up max, weather changes everything) - the hiccup you get maybe every 10 minutes for 10 seconds - is annoying but not a deal breaker for VOIP calls. If you are doing client side calls maybe a deal breaker - team calls manageable but annoying. Also I do calls with our Australian team (and were North America based) and they are on cable internet and they get hiccuped in the same amount. So actually I would say that Starlink is on par if not better than their connection.
If you are comparing the internet to city quality cable then yeah not comparable - but thats not what they are targeting. They are bringing remote areas online.
[+] [-] pomian|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjeaff|4 years ago|reply
When you lose a connection for a few seconds, maybe even 10 seconds, the video will pause, but when your connection reconnects, it continues where it paused. So you don't miss anything. I believe at some point when the speaker stops talking, like waiting for a response, it will jump cut their video to a more live feed again. So that you don't get too far behind.
I'm curious if anyone here knows about how this works and if it is common practice in live video chat?
[+] [-] fastaguy88|4 years ago|reply
Obstructions are a problem, but users with no alternative are much more motivated to locate the dish appropriately.
Starlink is not for people who have gigabit wired connections. For those of us who were lucky to get a hotspot to work long enough to use our 15Gb cap, it is a godsend.
[+] [-] gonehome|4 years ago|reply
Occasional blips occur, but the call isn’t dropped (and this is with some tree obstruction).
So it’s worth just getting it if that’s what you want it for. It’s probably 10x better than your existing connection.
[+] [-] jbluepolarbear|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tylerscott|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shagie|4 years ago|reply
If you go to https://satellitemap.space/# and enter in your GPS location in the settings (45, -90 for a rural northern Wisconsin as an example), and you can see the satellites that that location has visibility of.
And there are times when there's nothing in that area of the sky.
[+] [-] Reason077|4 years ago|reply
He mentions that this is due to the Starlink dish's view of the sky being partially obscured by trees.
This will presumably improve as the number of Starlink satellites grows, as it will be more likely that there will be an unobstructed satellite in view at any moment, and less frequent switching between satellites.
[+] [-] brummm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amatecha|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chollida1|4 years ago|reply
Yep, been our experience as well. We've got a few of us who wanted to trade from our cottages and its just unusable if you need a continuous signal for more than 10 minutes at a time.
That doesn't mean its useless, just that its not usable if you want to do voip, trading, video calls etc.
Hopefully they'll figure out what causes drop ever few minutes at some point. But currently given how expensive it and the hardware are its a very disappointing product.
I guess we're just spoiled now a days with the 1Gbps wired internet that most city homes have access to.
[+] [-] mabbo|4 years ago|reply
That means the entire system is resilient. A 2-second pause in connectivity usually won't mean the app dies. It means the application presumes it dropped a few packets, which it did.
Now, if you're playing a very fast-paced multi-player game, a 2-second lag at the wrong moment can spell disaster. But most video call programs can easily handle a 2-second blip in connectivity, annoying though it is for participants- I see those all the time on my non-Satellite based internet.
[+] [-] mlindner|4 years ago|reply
> It's implied that this is due to the trees obstructing a full view of the sky
It's not implied, it's explicitly the reason...
> but I have actually heard these connection dropouts are just about universal due to the constellation not having enough infill.
That used to be the problem. Most users now report (you can see them talking about it on the starlink subreddit all the time) that they're now going days to weeks without a single drop.
[+] [-] epmaybe|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] NelsonMinar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kortilla|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JulianMorrison|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] chrisseaton|4 years ago|reply
Why is the antenna on the ground and not up on a tall mast?
[+] [-] dataflow|4 years ago|reply
This sounds terrible for web browsing. Last thing I want is to know is to submit a form and then have my connection drop out in the middle. Imagine being in the middle of filling out an application or opening an account or verifying your identity or something like that.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] varelse|4 years ago|reply
Local ground service is 20 Mb download and 2 Mb upload. And that's just barely sufficient for watching streaming video and video conferencing. Gigabit service is but a mile and a half away but no one is going to pay to lay the fiber into our neighborhood. So the last mile and a half is copper from 20 years ago. I think that's going to require political will to fix and I don't think that political will exists right now nor will it in the near future. We could have paid $5,000 per house to lay it ourself but our own neighborhood couldn't come to consensus on that. Now imagine that at a national level.
So if they just deliver 100/100 within a year or two, this is an epic win IMO and I will cancel ground service. And if they don't someone else will so I'm not worried. But it took Teslas to spark the electric vehicle industry. Now there's a lot of choice. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens here.
[+] [-] NelsonMinar|4 years ago|reply
Except for outages related to obstructions. That's a real problem and the author's situation is not good. There's ways to work around it on your property; a taller mount, a tree install, cutting some trees. But ultimately Dishy needs a clear view to the north and there's no getting around it.
I have some smaller obstructions for my install and it was a little annoying but fine. But in the past week or two it's gotten way better: my packet loss went from 2% to 0.6%. Details here: https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2021/07/20/starlink-improve...
[+] [-] NDizzle|4 years ago|reply
I'm in rural Arkansas, near the southern edge of the rollout still I believe. I have maintained 3 ISPs this whole time. I have an EM160R LTE modem that will do 5x carrier aggregation and pulls around 240-250 mbit from my local AT&T tower. I also have T-Mobile's 4g home internet (5g works here on my phone, but they won't give me the home internet for whatever reason) which pulls 100-115 mbit. Starlink itself is somewhere between 180 and 240 down, but only 15 up. On the ATT line I can get 40-60 mbit upload, and that's one of the main reasons I keep things set up this way.
I'm about to try disabling the wan port for T-Mobile to see what it's like without that ISP. I don't do any connection bonding - straight up round robin load balancing with no stickyness, and with the amount of servers and services that use multiple TCP streams I can see 300+mbit downloads often. Pings range from 30 (when using Starlink) to 90. (when using one of the LTE connections)
I no longer game enough to comment on it. My kids play Roblox and PS4 online games and don't whine about it, so I think it's sufficient.
I don't really do Zoom meetings. MS Teams is what we use. I don't use the camera very often, but the calls will pause and drop and the people I work with have coined this as, "being Starlinked". Usually a few seconds and rarely does it take an actual redial to reconnect anymore. Just a dead period.
[+] [-] driverdan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robscallsign|4 years ago|reply
Even with the occasional dropouts Starlink is 10-100x better than any other option that we have here (the only options are LTE, or other satellites, like xplornet).
Even though we're only a few minutes drive from a municipality of 160,000 people and on a major highway, there, is no wired connection, and doesn't really seem likely that a wired connection will ever happen. Since moving here 7 years ago the pricing/data rates for the LTE data packages available have doubled in price. Literally doubled.
With Covid we had two adults working from home, and two kids home schooling, on a slow LTE connection with a total bandwidth of 100GB up/down. Even things like windows updates required planning and rationing of the internet.
The state of connectivity in Canada is so abysmal. At this point I hope Starlink matures enough to add a voice service.
[+] [-] verytrivial|4 years ago|reply
This adds some color perhaps to the argument that this is for underserviced regions -- they don't mean third-world or impoverished even though it sounds like that, at least when I heard people defending Starlink.
[+] [-] kalefranz|4 years ago|reply
https://satellitemap.space/
[+] [-] skellington|4 years ago|reply
Starlink has like 1700 of the planned 42,000 satellites in orbit now. Of course there are going to be temporarily blips in service plus the random longer dropouts during system upgrades.
Even with the current issues, the service is revolutionary in the remote areas that it's intended to service. Why Geerling thinks it's appropriate to compare beta starlink to his home cable/fiber service is beyond me. It's totally fair to review the current state of starlink, but to then conclude that "I don't love it" because it's not as good as his cable service is just plain dumb.
Why did you even begin the review with the expectation that it could be better than your land service in it's current beta form? You're not even supposed to be on the starlink service if you have great landline bandwidth and starlink should block you from their service as you're stealing bandwidth from people who don't have access to high speed internet.
One person even said "I hope they can figure out why it drops occasionally" as if some of the smartest people on the earth don't know exactly why it drops out. It drops because the satellite mesh network is only 4% complete!
[+] [-] nexuist|4 years ago|reply
The point is for the reader to figure out if they should try Starlink right now (if eligible) or if they should wait for some of these issues to be resolved.
To put it another way: would you complain that reviewers were judging Google Glass unfairly, because Google had grandiose plans for it in the future (that ultimately never happened)? Or would you recognize that Google made the decision to sell Google Glass in its current form, and thus accepted that it would be judged against its competitors?
[+] [-] tsimionescu|4 years ago|reply
I'm not sure if anyone believes that 42k number. They are launching ~60 satellites at a time - that would mean ~700 launches. There is no way that will be economical for the relative handful of people (500k? 1-2M?) who could realistically be interested in this.
Not to mention, the lifespan of these satellites in orbit is tiny, just a few years. They would have to be constantly launching new satellites to keep up.
The current state is probably more or less the best Starlink will ever offer - as more people will join the network, coming closer to Musk's 500k number, bandwidth will significantly diminish, even if the number of satellites is maybe doubled.
And if federal funds dry up, I expect the whole venture will quickly go bankrupt, or remain alive with a handful of satellites and a huge price spike.
[+] [-] clvx|4 years ago|reply
I think Starlink is useful in many areas and industries, but 5G home internet is reliable for many cases at least in the US. Starlink will do great in the South hemisphere where providers struggle even in metropolitan areas. I see that as a huge win for many as long as the prices go down as the current prices could be a barrier for not so wealthy countries.
[+] [-] jgrodziski|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yardstick|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Siecje|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] XCSme|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orzig|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joelm|4 years ago|reply
As a former wireless ISP architect/engineer, it's wonderful to see the leadership that Starlink is providing in LEO satellite connectivity (due to the low latency compared to geostationary). I hope the "block the sky with satellites" visual/astronomy concerns won't play out as an actual issue, because this seems like a great platform to address connectivity needs in harder-to-reach areas.
[+] [-] bluepanda928752|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] linsomniac|4 years ago|reply
Not sure if they have that fully implemented yet, but might be interesting looking at the path and latency traffic to .au or Asia or Africa takes on Starlink vs cable. A couple factors may come into play: "as the crow flies" and light speed in vacuum vs glass.
I know Evi Nemeth (RIP) talking on the CAIDA project showed some nice graphs of the "speed of light cone" re: latencies vs. geography. See about halfway down on this: https://web.archive.org/web/20160103034640/http://www.isoc.o...
[+] [-] peter_d_sherman|4 years ago|reply
You know, if there's ever a Zombie Apocalypse -- and Starlink for whatever reason, becomes unavailable...
Of course, we hope it never happens... but it seems like two or more repurposed Dishies -- would make a great Internet bridge (or wireless mesh segment) over long line-of-sight distances -- on the ground...
Also, multiple dishies in space, at different distances from the Earth, acting as repeaters -- might make a great future way to get Internet (and other space-related communications) to the Moon or Mars or beyond...
[+] [-] soheil|4 years ago|reply
Not sure why he threw in outsourced there, but ok. I know this could be as simple as using the right library for your video chat app, but at a low level how is something like this achieved? If I establish a tcp connection with a handshake and everything and my internet connection drops or IP is changed the tcp connection gets terminated. Other than using udp is there a way to keep the tcp connection going when the IP address changes without having to establish a new connection, which takes non-trivial amount of time?
[+] [-] mdesq|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blakesterz|4 years ago|reply